Adam Syvertsen
Instructor
Adam Syvertsen earned his Ph.D. in English from Northwestern in 2024, where he also served as a Visiting Assistant Professor of English before joining the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities as a postdoctoral fellow in 2025. His teaching brings narratology, critical theory, and the history of political economy to bear on representations of labor since the late eighteenth century, encouraging his Field Studies in Humanities students to investigate how narrative, social, and economic forms that emerged in the long nineteenth century continue to shape our working lives. When not at Northwestern, Adam is an instructor for the Illinois Humanities adult education program, Odyssey Project/Proyecto Odisea. On weekends, he can often be found watching samurai films at the Music Box Theatre, or sitting in a coffee shop pretending to understand what aufheben means.
Selected Publication:
“‘I’ll wait no longer’: Emigration, Speculation, and Utopia in Martin R. Delany’s Blake.” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Vol. 12, No. 1. Spring 2024. pp. 503-530.