Ghenwa Hayek, Associate Professor of Modern Arabic Language, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Literatures
Professor Hayek is a scholar of modern Arabic literature from the late nineteenth century to the present. She works on the entangled relationships between literary and cultural production, space and place, and identity formation in the modern Arab Middle East, with a specific focus on Lebanon. She is interested in using the formal techniques of literary scholarship to nuance and complicate our understandings of the processes through which these dynamic cultures understand, represent, and position themselves in the world. She works with students with an interest in a wide array of topics across literary and cultural studies, and have advised undergraduate and graduate theses on a broad range of subjects from modern Iraqi fiction, to political and social issues in contemporary Lebanon, to comics, and Palestinian literature. I am enthusiastic to work with students interested in literary studies of the modern Middle East; in film; in cultural studies; in literature and the urban, and in comparative literature. To read her full bio, visit: https://nelc.uchicago.edu/faculty/hayek
Josephine McDonagh, Professor of English, Department of English Language and Literatures
Professor McDonagh's research and teaching focus on nineteenth-century British literature, colonialism, and the politics of literary expression. She is interested in the intersections between literature and other disciplines in the nineteenth century, notably political economy, the law, and history, and is also interested in cultures of print in both local and global contexts, and the circulation of people, ideas, and things. Her work ranges across a wide range of writers and print forms, and has tackled a number of themes: the organisation of knowledge at different historical moments and contexts, biopolitics, violence, family politics, modernity, space, population, and mobility. She has published monographs on Thomas De Quincey, George Eliot and on ideas about child murder in eighteenth and nineteenth-century British culture. Her current work is on migration and nineteenth-century British literature and she is writing a book entitled ‘Literature in a Time of Migration’ which explores the ways in which literature both responded to, and helped to shape, a transcontinental migratory culture during a time of mass emigration from Britain to settler colonies. To read her full bio, visit: https://english.uchicago.edu/people/josephine-mcdonagh
Demetra Kasimis, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science
Professor Kasimis is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Her research and teaching include democratic theory and the history of political thought especially in classical Athens; membership politics and migration; post-war continental political theory; and feminist theory. She is a graduate of Columbia University, where she majored in philosophy and concentrated in Hellenic Studies before receiving her PhD in political science from Northwestern University. At Chicago, she is an associated faculty member of the Department of Classics, a member of the affiliated faculty and board of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, and a fellow of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT). Kasimis is an associate editor of POLIS: The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought, for which she oversees submissions on the political aspects of Greek literature. To read her full bio, visit: https://political-science.uchicago.edu/directory/demetra-kasimis
College Summer Institute Graduate Student Mentor:
Matthew Johnson is the Graduate Student Assistant for Research and a PhD candidate in the Department of Germanic Studies. He has taught language and literature courses in the College and served as the Graduate Assistant in the Vienna Study Abroad Program. He has also served as a Teaching Consultant with the Chicago Center for Teaching and as a member of the student advisory board of the Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies. In this latter role, he helped to initiate and organize the Undergraduate Colloquium in Jewish Studies. Matthew’s research has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the IFK Vienna, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the Posen Society of Fellows, the Yiddish Book Center, and the German Literature Archive in Marbach.
College Summer Institute Leadership:
Christopher J. Wild is Professor of Germanic Studies, Theater and Performance Studies, and Collegiate Master of the Humanities in the College; he is also Associated Faculty in the Divinity School and Deputy Dean of the Humanities Division. Professor Wild is the author of Theater der Keuschheit - Keuschheit des Theaters. Zu einer Geschichte der (Anti-)Theatralität von Gryphius bis Kleist (Rombach: Freiburg, 2003), which traces the profound historical transformation of theatricality that takes place in German theater from the Baroque to Classicism. His current projects examine the ways in which theology and religion inform developments that are generally considered genuinely modern. Most immediately, he is working on a book that asks the seemingly simple question why Descartes’ founding text of modern philosophy was titled Meditations on First Philosophy in order to take its generic affiliation seriously.
Dr. Nichole J. Fazio, is Associate Dean of Students and Executive Director of the College Center for Research and Fellowships (CCRF). She completed her doctorate in the History of Art at the University of Oxford, where she was a postgraduate fellow at Trinity College and supported by an Oxford Overseas Research Award fellowship (ORSAS/Clarendon Bursary). Her current book, Julia Margaret Cameron: a poetry of photography (Bodleian Library Publishing, Oxford, 2021), celebrates the expansive collection of Cameron photographs held at the Bodleian Library and across the University. Additional teaching and research interests include 19th-century women photographers, the treatment of the poetic sublime in photography, and, more broadly, visual and material culture in Britain from the Pre-Raphaelites to the early Symbolists.
Tracy Nyerges is the Assistant Director of Undergraduate Research for the College Center for Research and Fellowships (CCRF). She has administered student advising, academic affairs, special programming, and research activities at multiple higher education institutions, including the University of Missouri, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Vermont, and Northwestern University. Tracy also served as the Assistant Director for the Undergraduate Research Program (URP) at the University of Washington (UW) where she managed new and growing summer STEM and Arts & Humanities undergraduate research programs and promoted research opportunities, scholarship, and fellowships in all disciplines for over eight years. While at UW, she helped to run one of the largest Undergraduate Research Symposiums in the country and received the 2013 UW Undergraduate Academic Affairs Award for Excellence for her dedication to students. Tracy earned an MSW from UW and applies her social work skills and education to effectively support and advise College students while facilitating high-impact undergraduate research opportunities.