Bio

(📷 AP Pettinelli)

Dr. Maria Dikcis is an American Council of Learned Societies Leading Edge Fellow at City Bureau, a Pulitzer Prize-winning civic media and journalism lab. Previously, she was a College Fellow in the Department of English at Harvard University and a Researcher for the metaLAB (at) Harvard, where she supported the development of the AI Pedagogy Project. Prior to that she was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Chicago, where she served as a Mass Incarceration and Policing Fellow at the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights and co-directed a Justice, Policy, and Culture Think Tank with the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education 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, and The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics Since 1900, among other venues, and she served on the editorial staff of Chicago Review and RHINO Poetry.

In recognition of her research, Maria has received the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Humanities Without Walls Predoctoral Fellowship, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant for the inaugural Institute on Born-Digital Scholarly Publishing hosted by Brown University, and the Northwestern English Department’s Jean H. Hagstrum Prize for Best Dissertation.

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.

Maria was born and raised in Chicago, where she lives with her partner AP.