Staff News
Caitlin Burney
Caitlin Burney joined the Northwestern team (and the city of Chicago) just prior to the start of the 2024–25 academic year. She immediately jumped into a busy year of organizing department events and supporting undergraduate activities and initiatives. She is grateful to have been welcomed and integrated into the department. She has spent much of her free time getting acquainted with the Chicagoland area and enjoying the abundance of museums, forest preserves, and parks.
Mel Keiser
This Spring, Keiser was invited by Northwestern's Art Theory and Practice department to teach ART 210: Introduction to Drawing. For her class, Keiser secured a Weinberg Course Enhancement grant for the opportunity to rent a life-size replica of a T-rex skull from the Field Museum Harris Learning Collection for students to draw. With a shared interest in the skull, Professor Esener assisted Keiser in transporting the skull back and forth to the Field Museum, which was one of the highlights of Keiser's year (life?). While the T-rex skull was on campus, students in Professor Caroline Kent's ART 390 also painted from the skull and Keiser held a weekend open studio to provide additional Northwestern community members with an opportunity to draw the skull, including students, staff, and staff families. Later in the quarter, Keiser borrowed three taxidermy specimens from the Field (a fox, raccoon, and barn owl), to be used by her and Professor Kent's students at the end of the quarter. This summer, Keiser was artist-in-residence with the Field Museum Harris Learning Collection to paint a habitat background for one of their new taxidermy specimens.
Caroline Stevens
In January, Caroline rounded out her first year at Northwestern, which was punctuated with unexpected austerity measures and evolving graduate policies. Despite challenges, she managed graduate students’ funding and milestone queries, navigated a successful admissions cycle, and facilitated multiple rounds of course registration. Voluntary trainings on equitable mentorship and mental health first aid left her better equipped to continue supporting graduate students moving forward. She is grateful to have been nominated for the 2024–25 Meteor Award for Excellence in a New Position.
In March, Caroline had the pleasure of attending the Association of Writers & Writing Programs annual conference in LA. She has poems forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review and phenomena zine, and for the latter read her work at a zine release in Chicago in late July. Personal travel brought her to Ghent, Amsterdam, and Berlin, where she visited dozens of museums and dined outdoors at every possible chance.