Instructors

Tal Arbel is a cultural historian of science and medicine. Her primary research interests include the history of behavioral science and health, the sociology of expertise, and the politics of mental measurement. Her new book project, A Scientific Childhood, revisits the lives of children who served as subjects of observation and experiment from the 1880s to the 1950s, and whose childhood experiences had shaped the central tenets of developmental psychology, as well as our ideas about normality. She holds a PhD in History of Science from Harvard University.

Jordan Bimm is a historian of science, technology, and medicine focused on the human and biological aspects of space exploration. His forthcoming book, Anticipating the Astronaut, examines the surprising history of pre-NASA space medicine test-subjects contributing to early visions of an ideal spacefaring body, including push-button soldiers, high-altitude Indigenous people, mountaineers, women pilots, and animals. His current project, Putting Mars in a Jar, recovers the forgotten military origin of astrobiology—the study of potential extraterrestrial life—through a history of U.S. Air Force life-on-Mars simulations in the 1950s. He holds a PhD in Science & Technology Studies (STS) from York University in Toronto, and was most recently a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University.

He holds a Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Fellowship at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C. The prestigious fellowship provides the opportunity to work with NASM's curators and collections to further his project about the military origin of astrobiology, the search for life in the cosmos, and Mars environmental simulators called "Mars Jars."

Brad Bolman is a historian of science, medicine, and technology focused on the history of capitalism and inquiries into nonhuman life. His first book project, The Dog Years, explores how the beagle became the de facto and de jure breed of experimental dog in disciplines as far afield as radiobiology, pharmacology, periodontology, inhalation toxicology, and Alzheimer’s research.

His second project, The Decomposition Book, explores the global history of mycological science, analyzing shifting experimental and field practices as well as industrially sponsored research as scientists attempted to make sense of the strange universe of fungi. In 2021, he received a PhD from the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. He has four peer reviewed journal articles and two book chapters published or forthcoming as well as several articles or chapters under review and a number of popular publications.

Margot Browning is Associate Director of the Franke Institute for the Humanities and Lecturer in the College at the University of Chicago. As a graduate student, she studied and trained with Prof. Joseph Williams to teach the UC College course “Academic and Professional Writing.” Co-teaching in this writing course, with other savvy instructors, provided her with invaluable expert guidance for writing her Ph.D. dissertation in History – and for everything she's written since, especially foundation proposals and reports. Writing well is a continuously fascinating puzzle in how people think and communicate successfully. In Browning's undergraduate courses (such as “Mindfulness: Experience and Media”), she introduces students to these pragmatic principles for writing in her feedback to their papers. Overall, she believes that when we write with attention to how people read, we can also comprehend better what other people write – even in different or unfamiliar fields.

Iris Clever is a historian of science, medicine, and technology whose research explores why and how science measures what it measures. Much of her work is concerned with the quantification of bodies, the human experience of measurement practices, and the role bodies and technologies play in defining the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity in science. Her current book project, The Afterlives of Skulls, reveals how and why biometrics emerged in the 19th and 20th century as an innovative tool to shed new light on human variation while it continued to perpetuate old racial prejudices in algorithms, instruments, and human data. Iris teaches widely in history of science and medicine, cultural history, Science and Technology Studies, race, and gender. She holds a PhD in History from UCLA and a BA and MA in History from Utrecht University.

Mr. Gibbons holds a PhD from the University of Chicago Department of Music. His works have been performed at the Rockefeller Music Competition and by the Minnesota Chamber Symphony. He received the 2005 Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies Excellence in Teaching Award for the Humanities, Arts, and Sciences.

Sharon Kennedy-Nolle holds a PhD in nineteenth-century American literature and an MFA from the Writers’ Workshop, University of Iowa. She also holds MAs from Johns Hopkins University and NYU. Her book, Writing Reconstruction: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the Postwar South, was the 2015 selection for the Gender and American Culture Series of UNC Press. In addition to scholarly publications, her chapbook, Black Wick: Selected Elegies, was chosen as the 2020 Editor’s Pick by Variant Literature Press. Kennedy-Nolle was winner of the New Ohio Review’s 2021 poetry contest and a 2021 finalist for the Black Lawrence Press’s St. Lawrence Book Award.

Jennifer A. Lind holds a masters degree from the John Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS)  in international relations and U.S. foreign policy. She subsequently worked for the U.S. State Department and the U. S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in Washington, D.C., former Yugoslavia and several Sub Saharan African countries. She has recently completed her UChicago Graham School Master of Liberal Arts degree, focusing on U.S. foreign policy and international relations course design. Her current civic leadership in the Chicago area utilizes various community education projects.

Douglas Post is a Founding Member of the Victory Gardens Playwrights Ensemble. His plays and musicals have been produced in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Canada, England, Wales, Germany, Austria, Russia, China, and South Africa. He has received the L. Arnold Weissberger Playwriting Award, the Midwestern Playwrights Festival Award, the Cunningham Commission Award, the Blue Ink Playwriting Award, and three Playwriting Fellowship Awards from the Illinois Arts Council, and has been nominated for three Jeff Awards and an Emmy Award.

Sheryl E. Reiss received her Ph.D. from Princeton University and is a Scholar-in-Residence at the Newberry Library in Chicago; she has taught for the Graham School since 2019. Dr. Reiss is a specialist in Italian Renaissance art and architecture with particular interest in the history of patronage. She is also interested in women and gender; archaism in early modern art; exchange between Italy and Northern Europe; and funerary art. She has published widely on Italian art and art patronage of the early sixteenth century, focusing particularly on the patronage of members of the Medici family, and on Raphael and Michelangelo. Dr. Reiss has previously taught at Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, Cornell University, the University of California, Riverside, the University of Southern California, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Renaissance Society of America, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, and the Newberry Library. Dr. Reiss has co-edited two books: Beyond Isabella: Secular Women Patrons of Art in Renaissance Italy (2001, with David G. Wilkins) and The Pontificate of Clement VII: History, Politics, Culture(2005, with Kenneth Gouwens). She is currently preparing a book titled The Making of a Medici Maecenas: Giulio de’ Medici (Pope Clement VII) as Patron of Art and is the co-editor of an in-progress collection of essays titled Reconsidering Raphael.

Adam Rose, one of the Graham School’s most senior instructors with 30 years’ teaching experience, has helped generations of adult learners become successful close readers of classic texts. His courses are widely known for their unique combination of rigor and humor, as well as their consistent focus on the primary goal: comprehension of the texts at hand.

Takashi Shallow is a teaching artist whose experiments intersect visual art with technology and performance. In addition to globally exhibited interdisciplinary work, his ongoing projects include the operation of Gesamt (a record label), collaborations with Percent (a collective of mixed-race artists) and "Insider Art" (a critical inquiry into the epistemology of aesthetics with literary theorist Andrew Dorkin). Dazed Digital includes Shallow in the article '10 of the best Chicago artists right now', and he has received fellowships and residencies at institutions like the Arts Club of Chicago and the Cliff Dwellers. He is a lecturer at the University of Chicago where he teaches art and music classes.

Myla Skinner is Founder and Managing Partner of Quarter Five, LLC. Quarter Five works with organizations and businesses as they navigate complex and consequential change, including opportunities around strategy, leadership transitions, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Myla also provides executive and leadership coaching and development. Prior to starting Quarter Five in 2020, Myla sat in multiple leadership positions in nonprofits across the city of Chicago, including Cara Chicago, University of Chicago, and OneGoal. In these organizations, Myla focused her efforts on workforce and economic development, and strategy. Myla holds her MBA from Loyola University Chicago.

Brian Smith has a bachelor's degree in anthropology and archaeology from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville and has excavated in India, Thailand, and Egypt where he worked with the joint University of Pennsylvania/Yale/Institute of Fine Arts, New York. Brian received a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from the University of Memphis in ancient Egyptian Art and Archaeology, and concluded at the University of Chicago in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the Oriental Institute with a Master’s degree in Egyptology.

He teaches courses in ancient Nilotic cultures, Near Eastern Civilizations, and ancient social history at the Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies. He is also currently teaching “The Art and Archaeology of Ancient Nubia” at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California through virtual platforms.

His interests are in socio-economic interpretations of material culture (particularly ceramics), art historical styles (painting, sculpture, architecture), and religious ideology as reflected in the behavioral systems observed in the archaeological record. Along with his husband, he also has two cats, Tigris and Euphrates.

Judith Swanson holds a UChicago PhD from the Department of Political Science and a Masters degree in the History of Political Thought from The London School of Economics and Political Science. She is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Boston University. Although her main publications have been on Aristotle (e.g. her book, The Public and the Private in Aristotle's Political Philosophy), she teaches the history of political philosophy, from Plato through the 20th century, and integrates into her classes contemporary authors, issues, and events.

A native of Istanbul, Turkey, Esra Tasdelen received her BA degree in Social and Political Sciences at Sabanci University and her MA degree in Middle Eastern Studies in 2005 and her PhD degree in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations in 2014, both at the University of Chicago. Her teaching focuses on the history, languages, literatures and cinema of the Middle East and North Africa, as well as translation theory.