NICHOLAS D. CHABRAJA CENTER FOR HISTORICAL STUDIES

Elzbieta Foeller-Pituch is a literary historian whose current research focuses on the reception of classical mythology and the classical tradition in American culture, a topic that stems from her work during an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship at Harvard University. Active in the Classical Receptions Workshop at NU and its Classicizing Chicago Project, she has written on Athena as a cultural icon in the United States (in American Women and Classical Myths, ed. Gregory Staley, Baylor UP, 2009) and on the role of Rome in Henry James's early fiction. Her most recent published work is an introduction to the great Polish speculative writer Stanislaw Lem in Being Poland: A History of Polish Literature and Culture, ed. by Tamara Trojanowska et al. (University of Toronto Press, 2018). In addition to her administrative work, she teaches literature classes in the MALit program of Northwestern's School of Professional Studies and seminars at the Newberry Library.

Elzbieta is proud to have helped establish two scholarly centers at Northwestern University—the Center for the Humanities (now the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities) and the Center for Historical Studies (now the Chabraja Center). She is the recipient of the 2011-2012 Clarence Ver Steeg Award for supporting and mentoring graduate students and the 2018 Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Community Excellence Award.