Bio

(Photo by AP Pettinelli)

Dr. Maria Dikcis is an American Council of Learned Societies Leading Edge Fellow. She is also currently an Editor and Researcher for the metaLAB (at) Harvard’s AI Pedagogy Project. Previously, she was a College Fellow in the Department of English at Harvard University and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Chicago’s Pozen Family Center for Human Rights, where she co-directed a Justice, Policy, and Culture Think Tank with the Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project.

Maria holds a PhD in English with a Graduate Certificate in Critical Theory from Northwestern University. Her research and teaching interests include twentieth and twenty-first century American literature, critical race and ethnic studies, poetry and poetics, digital media, and humanities-based approaches to artificial intelligence and data science. Her writing can be found in ASAP/Journal, Public Books, The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics Since 1900, and elsewhere, and she served on the editorial staff of the literary journals Chicago Review and RHINO Poetry.

Maria’s dissertation, Ink, Wave, Signal, Code: Multiethnic American Poetry’s Media Ecologies After 1965, received the Northwestern English Department’s Jean H. Hagstrum Prize for Best Dissertation of the year. In recognition of her research, Maria was also awarded the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Humanities Without Walls Predoctoral Fellowship, the American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellowship, and the National Endowment for the Humanities grant for the inaugural Institute on Born-Digital Scholarly Publishing hosted by Brown University.

Beyond the college campus, Maria has taught for public-facing initiatives that serve under-resourced communities, including the Northwestern Prison Education Program (where she was the Director of a partnership with Cook County Jail) and the Odyssey Project—a free, college-credit humanities program for low-income adults with limited access to higher education. Before graduate school, she worked at various cultural institutions including the Newberry Library and the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture. She lives in Chicago with her partner, AP.

Maria’s full CV can be found here.