Emerging Scholars Program Faculty Viewbook

NAME: Sarah J. Bartolome, PhD

TITLE: Associate Professor, Music Education 

SCHOOL(S): Bienen School of Music

DEPARTMENT(S): Music Studies

WEB PAGE: https://sites.northwestern.edu/cseme/

AREAS OF FOCUS:

My current research is focused in two large areas: Music and Health and Trauma-Informed Music Education. I employ primarily qualitative research methods in answering questions in each of these areas, adopting ethnography, narrative, and case study designs as appropriate. I also lead an interdisciplinary research group, the Music for Childhood Wellbeing Initiative, which brings together scholars in music education, medicine, vocal pedagogy and breathwork, psychology, and biological engineering to examine how singing and breathwork impact children.

POTENTIAL SUMMER 2025 PROJECTS:   

Music for Childhood Well-Being Initiative: I am the Co-lead of an interdisciplinary team that is investigating the use of group singing and breathwork to support the health and well-being of children. This initiative is international in scope, drawing together scholars in the US (Chicago and Miami), England, Mexico, and China. Previous Emerging Scholars have been engaged in various aspects of this project including data collection with child participants, data processing and archiving, literature review, and data analysis. This work will continue into Summer 2025 and beyond. We are also currently developing an adaptation of the intervention to be used in an early childhood community services program in New York City and some of that collaborative work will be ongoing next summer.

Singing for Health among Pediatric Single-Ventricle Patients: Over the 2023-2024 academic year,  I collaborated with a team of pediatric cardiac specialists at Lurie Children’s Hospital to adapt our singing and breathwork intervention for children born with a single-ventricle heart condition. The Fontan Choir Project launched in September of 2025, serving 15 single ventricle patients aged 8-16. It is likely that we will be working through data processing and analysis in the summer of 2025 and working toward scaling up the materials and intervention for implementation at single ventricle heart clinics across the country.

NAME: Joshua Chambers-Letson

TITLE: Chair, Department of Performance Studies; Professor of Performance Studies and Asian American Studies

SCHOOL(S): School of Communication/Weinberg

DEPARTMENT(S): Performance Studies and Asian American Studies

AREAS OF FOCUS: performance theory; queer of color critique, contemporary art and performance

POTENTIAL SUMMER 2025 PROJECTS: 

“Perpetual Motion, Going Nowhere: Automation, Empire, and a Racist Mouse”

I am beginning a new research project interested in what may be theatre’s dominant form in the twenty-first century: immersive, mass spectacle. Where the theatre industry in the US, and elsewhere, is navigating collapsing business models (rising production prices, contracting ticket sales, and diminishing subscriber bases), certain forms of mass spectacle with a highly theatrical structure are thriving. Take the example of  Disney and Universal’s global array of theme parks and cruises, which explode theatrical experience out of the proscenium and into sprawling, proliferating worlds: a planet from Star Wars, Frozen’s Arendelle, Belle’s Village and the Beast’s Castle from Beauty and the Beast, the world of Zootopia, or Harry Potter’s Diaigon Alley, Hogwarts, or the Ministry of Magic—all in places like Orlando, Osaka, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Shanghai, and Anaheim. In addition to being wildly expensive theatrical production, they are also money-making juggernauts.

During summer of 2025 I’ll be undertaking research for a section of a new project on these kinds of mass spectacles focusing on the theatricalization of racial empire in Disney Parks (with a particular emphasis on Tokyo Disneyland). The turn to Tokyo Disney tracks the way a highly racialized and explicitly racist, ahistorical fantasy of US American Empire is translated into a Japanese context, effecting two powerful forms of Japanese and US American imperial amnesia by translating both countries divergent and overlapping stories of conquest, dispossession, and racial subjection into a circuitous, repetitive world of zany adventure, whimsical frontiers, and wildly sublimated racism (including a ride based on minstrel performance). Tokyo Disney serves as a prime spot for considering how two countries that have yet to reconcile with their own histories of imperialism, colonialism, and racial capitalism use theatricality to sublimate those histories, just as it gives us an opportunity to interrogate Disney’s use of theatricality and imperial nostalgia to perfect a society of theatrical control in which spectators turn themselves over to domination and automation by the park experience. The research may involve several elements such constructing and reviewing a bibliography of the scholarly literature on the topic including scholarly research on theme parks, Disney, stadium spectacles, and Beyoncé, as well as trade publications and reportage on the history of these brand, and scholarly literature in performance studies, postcolonial theory, Marxist theory, Black Studies, Asian American Studies, and queer of color critique. It may also involve the review and analysis of Disney products; aiding in interviews; transcription; aiding to design the research schedule; archival research; and site visits.

NAME: Elise De Los Santos

TITLE: Lecturer

SCHOOL(S): Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications

DEPARTMENT(S): Journalism

WEB PAGE:  https://www.medill.northwestern.edu/directory/faculty/elise-de-los-santos.html

AREAS OF FOCUS: Language, style, copy editing, fact-checking, diversity in media, ethics in newsrooms, millennials and media, newspapers, social media

POTENTIAL SUMMER 2025 PROJECTS:  Editing and publishing of students’ news stories, compilation and comparison of journalistic style guides

NAME: Pam Daniels

TITLE: Clinical Professor

SCHOOL(S): McCormick School of Engineering 

DEPARTMENT(S): Segal Design Institute

WEB PAGE: https://design.northwestern.edu/people/profiles/daniels-pam.html

AREAS OF FOCUS: innovation and lateral thinking, developing agency through making, improving human experience through design

POTENTIAL SUMMER 2025 PROJECTS:   large scale public art installations, working on a book about the many facets of design (working title is Design is Respect), other projects TBD

NAME: Mesmin Destin, Ph.D. (he/him)

TITLE: Associate Professor

SCHOOL(S): WCAS and SESP

DEPARTMENT(S): Psychology and Human Development and Social Policy

WEB PAGE: https://www.ipr.northwestern.edu/who-we-are/faculty-experts/destin.html

RESEARCH FOCUS:

In my lab, we study the experiences of students who face marginalization in educational settings. We often use experiments to design and test how particular programs or supports can affect the way that students see themselves, how motivated they feel to pursue their goals, their academic outcomes, and their health and well-being.

POTENTIAL SUMMER 2025 PROJECTS: 

This summer, we will be working on multiple projects with middle school, high school, and college partnerships. This may include work focused on supporting K-12 teachers and college faculty to build stronger relationships with students. This may also include work related to a community of student support at a university focused on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.

NAME: Alyssa D Garcia, PhD

TITLE: Assistant Professor of Instruction and WCAS Advisor

SCHOOL(S): Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences 

DEPARTMENT(S): Gender & Sexuality Studies Program

AREAS OF FOCUS:

Dr. Alyssa Garcia is a first generation Dominican-Cuban Latina, born and raised in New York City. She received her BA in Cross-Cultural Psychology from Brown University and earned her PhD in Anthropology from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.  Dr. Garcia is a Weinberg College Adviser and Assistant Professor of Instruction in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Prior to her arrival to NU she taught at Pennsylvania State University and DePaul University. Her teaching and research interests include Latin American & Caribbean Studies, Ethnic-Latina/o Studies, Intersectionality, Critical Race Theory, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Feminist Ethnography, African Diaspora Studies, and Applied Anthropology. 

POTENTIAL SUMMER 2025 PROJECTS: 

Dr. Garcia’s manuscript project examines the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in Cuba through an analysis of discourses of sex-work and the body. “Moral Discourses, Regulated Bodies: Sex, the State, and Subjectivity in Cuba,” is a historically grounded ethnography that traces chronologically the public supervision and state regulation of black female bodies in Cuba.  She will be expanding this project to focus on the experiences and representations of AfroCuban women in transportation practices, testimonios, hip hop, and film.

NAME: Michelle N. Huang

TITLE: Assistant Professor of English and Asian American Studies

SCHOOL(S): WCAS

DEPARTMENT(S): English, Asian American Studies

WEB PAGE:  https://english.northwestern.edu/people/faculty/huang-michelle.html

AREAS OF FOCUS: My broad areas of research are contemporary Asian American literature, feminist science studies, and the environmental humanities. My first book, Racial Beings: Asian American New Materialisms at the Human Limit (under contract with Duke University Press), examines contemporary Asian American literature that experiments with scientific concepts in form and content to trouble lay understandings of race as an intrinsic trait of an individual human.

POTENTIAL SUMMER 2025 PROJECTS:  My second book project examines the intersections of race and biomedicine in contemporary Asian American literature. A portion of the project, on the tension between precision medicine and environmental racism, has been published in American Literature. In summer 2025, I will be working on a new chapter on kbeauty, cosmeceuticals and beauty horror novels.