Ver Steeg Fellowship

Claudia Haase

Associate Professor of Human Development and Social Policy, School of Education and Social Policy

Claudia Haase is the preeminent scholar examining the role of emotions in intimate relationships. By studying emotions in real time, using facial coding, physiological monitoring and other research methods, she has opened the burgeoning field of affective science, where she is renowned for her work examining the relationship between emotions and marital conflict, health, aging, mental illness, parent/child conflicts and more.

Over the last two years Haase has published 20 articles in leading peer-reviewed journals and five book chapters. In addition, she is a co-investigator on a National Institute on Aging grant to examine “Emotion, Aging and Decision-Making.” In addition to leading the Life Span Development Lab, she is co-founder of the Chicago Consortium on Healthy Aging with Joe Mikels, funded by the Russell and Josephine Kott Memorial Charitable Trust, and a core faculty member in Northwestern’s Center for Culture, Brain, Biology and Learning. In 2023, she was one of the key organizers of Connections, a PhD preparation and community-building program for people who are marginalized in higher education.

She is associate editor for three journals and on the editorial board of the International Journal of Behavioral Development, the International Journal of Psychology, and Psychology and Aging.

Rebecca Zorach

Mary Jane Crowe Professor in Art and Art History, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Rebecca Zorach is the Mary Jane Crowe Professor in Art and Art History. Her research focuses on early modern European art (15th-17th century), contemporary activist art and art of the 1960s and 1970s. Zorach has maintained a prolific publication record, including four published monographs, an additional two in progress and 12 books for which she was editor or co-editor. Her most recent book, “Temporary Monuments: Art, Land, and America’s Racial Enterprise” (University of Chicago Press, 2023), discusses why statues and sculptures matter in a historical context and how they become political flashpoints.

She has contributed 43 articles and book chapters to her field and has influenced public discourse through her nearly 60 published short essays, interviews, reviews and encyclopedia entries as well as 10 exhibitions in Chicago – including one through the historic South Side Community Art Center, of which she has been a board member for more than 10 years. The winner of numerous awards, she has also been a visiting faculty member at Villa I Tatti (The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies) and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and a visiting scholar at the University of Bologna and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz.