Meet Our Faculty!
Our Faculty helps plan events, establish connections with Chapinos, and lead and advice Chexec. Hover over each faculties position title to learn more about how they help Chapin!
Meaghan Fritz
Faculty Chair
The Faculty Chair provides leadership for Chapin and the executive board during executive meetings, advices members on exec with their responsibilities, and helps Chapin by planning and promoting Chapin events or by connecting Chapinos to outside resources or other Fellows.
Meaghan Fritz received her PhD in English in 2018 from Northwestern University, where she specialized in nineteenth-century American women’s literature. She teaches College Seminars, First-Year Writing Seminars, Practical Rhetoric, and Writing and Speaking in Business in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Her teaching helps students cultivate a diverse array of communication and writing skills across genres and experiences. In addition to teaching writing seminars, Fritz is interested in the collaborative work done between peers in university writing centers, having tutored in writing centers at all stages of her secondary education career.
Sean Ebels-Duggan
Associate Chair
The Associate Faculty Chair assists the Faculty Chair, advises the executive board, while also promoting Chapin wellness and togetherness through special events and programs for Chapinos throughout the year.
Sean Ebels-Duggan is a lecturer in philosophy. He specializes in logic and philosophy of mathematics, but likes to think about and discuss topics about which he knows little or nothing. In addition to courses in logic of all kinds, he has taught (or is teaching) courses on religious experience, morality, cultural devastation, philosophy of race, moral psychology, the Zen challenge to modern (Western) philosophy of mind, being resigned to one's fate (even if that fate is unjust execution), female philosophers of mind in early modern Europe, Ghanaian concepts of personhood, and Confucianism. Instead of watching television he wonders what it would be like to be a Welsh rebel fighting for Owain Glyndwr in the 14th century.
Tochukwu Eze
Assistant Chair
The Assistant Chair is a graduate student who helps advise Chexec and performs other administrative and coordinating duties with Residential and Academic Engagement, while also fostering relationships between residents and other faculty and fellows.
Tochukwu Eze is a Ph.D. Candidate of the Department of Computer Science at Northwestern University. His interest is in the area of Artificial Intelligence and Human-Computer Interaction. He is interested in using machine learning algorithms to investigate how students engage with Collaboration Learning Analytic systems in other to engender good learning outcomes in a collaborative setting. Before coming to Northwestern for his Ph.D. program, he was a faculty member at Nnamdi Azikiwe University as a Lecturer II where he taught several computer science courses. Also, he doubled as the University ICT officer and developed, and maintained most of the University's in-house software for students and staff management. He received his B.Sc and M.Sc in Computer Science both from Nnamdi Azikiwe University.
Meet Our Fellows!
A Fellow is a faculty member of Northwestern that is affiliated with a residential college. All of our Fellows hail from different disciplines and departments, allowing students of any major or interest to make a connection. Featured below are faculty that volunteer their time to participate in the Chapin community and host events like Firesides and Fellows Lunches. Having access to Fellows is a unique feature of the Residential College system that provides students with the opportunity to build closer relationships with professors and mentors outside of classrooms and lectures.
Elzbieta Foeller-Pituch
Assistant Director, Center for Historical Studies
Elzbieta Foeller-Pituch has been involved with Chapin for years and loves its traditions, especially Frivolous Readings. She used to be the faculty advisor to HELICON, NU’s premier undergraduate literary and arts journal, which was first established at Chapin. Elzbieta is a literary historian whose current research focuses on the reception of classical mythology and antiquity in American culture. She is the Assistant Director of the Nicholas D. Chabraja Center for Historical Studies, which she helped establish. Other interests include detective fiction, on the subject of which she leads literary seminars at the Newberry Library in Chicago.
Erik Gernand
Associate Professor of Instruction, Department of Radio/TV/Film
Erik Gernand is a playwright and filmmaker whose award-winning short films have screened at more than 100 film festivals around the world, including SXSW, Mix Milan (Italy), Cinequest, and Outfest LGBT Film Festival, as well as being broadcast on IFC, PBS, and the Logo Channel, and distributed by First Run Features and Strand Releasing. His plays have been in development and production across the country. Erik is a senior lecturer in RTVF and is a recipient of a Galbut Outstanding Faculty Award and a Charles Deering McCormick Lectureship.
Mel Keiser
Business Coordinator, Department of Art History
Mell Keiser is the business coordinator of the art history and classics department at Northwestern. She is a multidisciplinary artist whose conceptually driven work explores the social and psychological impact of treating herself as a stratified series of distinct selves rather than a single person in fluid development. Her work is exhibited at Wedge Projects, Filter Space, Martha Schneider Gallery, Segal Design Institute at Northwestern University, and THE SUB-MISSION. She recently published “Mel as Hyperobject” in Performance Philosophy and co-leads an artist writing group with Matthew Goulish.
Elizabeth McCabe
Assistant Professor of Instruction, Chicago Field Studies
Liz McCabe is a Lecturer in Chicago Field Studies, as well as Lead Instructor in the program, where she has taught a range of courses quarterly since 2009. Currently she teaches Field Studies in Humanities—on the cultural history of office work and representations of white-collar labor—and Field Studies in Civic Engagement, a course that explores civic life through the lenses of Chicago history, political theory, social justice, and non-profit work. She’s also a big fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer!
Jason Kelly Roberts
Associate Director, Office of Fellowships
Jason Kelly Roberts is the Associate Director for Outreach and Communications and Faculty Affiliate for the Department of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern. He also served as the associate chair for Chapin from 2018 to 2022 and founded the Chapin Cinema Club. In 2017, Jason received the T. William Heyck Award for his contributions to Chapin. Jason is also an assistant director at Northwestern's Office of Fellowships, where he works primarily with first- and second-year students, and with applicants for awards in the United States. In summer 2016, he co-organized the first-ever Midwest Fellowships Advising Symposium, which considered the topic of inclusive advising practices. Jason received his PhD in screen cultures from Northwestern. When he isn’t at school, Jason is either watching a movie, reading college football blogs, forcing himself to exercise, or hanging out with his wife, Elizabeth.
Ingrid Zeller
Professor of Instruction, Department of German
Ingrid Zeller is a distinguished senior lecturer in the German department. Her teaching and research interests include the engagement with film, cities, architecture, and music in the context of language acquisition. She teaches German courses on all levels, including Berlin: Faces of the Metropolis, Intensive German through Musical Journeys in Vienna, Chicago and Architecture: German Influences on the Skyline, and a freshman seminar entitled Music, Magic, and the Mysteries of Language. She also directs the German Department Writing Center. She loves traveling, going on excursions, cinema, exploring good restaurants, animals, and all kinds of music