Instructors

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.

A scholar of nineteenth-century literature, Anastasia Klimchynskaya works primarily on science fiction and the broader intersections of science, literature, and the cultural imagination. A former postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago’s Institute on the Formation of Knowledge, she currently teaches in the School of Communication at Loyola University Chicago in addition to publishing and presenting widely on science fiction and the history of science. She has previously taught “Man and Machine” at the Graham School.  

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.

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.