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Kasey Evans, Kelly Wisecup and Marcela A. Fuentes have been named the 2021 recipients of The Alumnae of Northwestern University’s Award for Curriculum Innovation.
They will develop new curricula aimed at reframing British and American literature through a transatlantic lens and also exploring how performance artworks were created and consumed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Award recipients
Incorporating anti-racist practices in the study of British and American literature
Kasey Evans and Kelly Wisecup, both associate professors of English in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, along with Harrison Graves and Nina Moon, graduate students in English, will create modules that expand the content of survey courses in British and American literary traditions in order to challenge traditional conceptions of early American studies.
They will reframe courses in British and American literature around transatlantic connections between Great Britain, North America, the Caribbean, and Africa, the diasporic experiences of Black and Indigenous people who traveled the Atlantic, and the writings of Black and Indigenous people.
Wisecup is a scholar of Native American literatures and early American literatures and is currently completing “Assembled Relations: Compilation, Collection, and Native American Writing,” on early Native American literatures and their relations to colonial collections and archives.
Evans specializes in Renaissance literature. Her current project, “Renaissance Resurrections: Making the Dead Speak in Reformation Texts,” considers how grief and mourning are translated into new literary forms following the Protestant Reformation.
Graves is working on a dissertation that looks at the carceral continuum of Black life as represented through 20th-century and 21st-century African American narratives and memoirs. Moon is working on a dissertation about representations of race and gender in women's transatlantic travel narratives from the 18th and early 19th centuries.
Archiving and making digital performances in the era of virality
Marcela A. Fuentes, associate professor of Performance Studies in the School of Communication, will design a course that engages students in project-based, experiential learning opportunities to research, document, exhibit and draw from performance artworks developed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The course aims to foster students’ critical thinking about history as process, media as lively matter and human communication as an expressive, transformative endeavor.
Students will explore paradigmatic works using digitally mediated environments and digital humanities research in order to analyze and catalogue performance examples from the COVID-19 era.
Fuentes’s research focuses on tactical media and performance in contemporary protests and activisms. Her teaching interests include tactical media, social art tactics, digital performance, the digital humanities and feminist and queer performance.
The Alumnae of Northwestern University is an all-volunteer organization of women that raises funds for a wide range of projects to benefit the University and also shares the University's academic resources with the community through its Continuing Education program.
Founded in 1916, The Alumnae has given more than $9 million to the University in the form of grants, fellowships, scholarships and an endowed professorship. It also has provided funds for special university projects and summer internships.
