Dr. Sean Latham, Director
Sean Latham is the Pauline McFarlin Walter Professor of English at The University of Tulsa where he serves as the founding director of the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities and the Institute for Bob Dylan Studies. He is an internationally recognized expert in the field of modern literature and culture and has written or edited ten books, including Am I a Snob? (Cornell 2003), The Art of Scandal (Oxford 2009), the Little Review Ulysses (Yale 2015), and The World of Bob Dylan (Cambridge 2021).
Dr. Nicole Bauer, Associate Director
Nicole Bauer is Assistant Professor of European History at the University of Tulsa, and she was a fellow with the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities in 2021-22. She specializes in cultural history and early modern France. She is also working on a book on contemplative traditions and how they can help academics build resilience and thrive.
Alex Isaak, Special Projects Coordinator
Alex Isaak is a two-time Emmy Award Winning journalist with more than six years of producing experience. Before shifting her focus to nonprofits and the humanities, she worked at KOTV – News On 6 as the 5 PM newscast producer and produced special live coverage for big breaking news events, including a two-hour digital livestream during the 2022 Midterm Elections. Her work has received state-wide recognition, as she was recently named a finalist for the 2023 Great Plains Journalism Award. She is also the co-creator and producer for the Talk Film Society podcast, Dream Little Deeper, a critical retrospective of the Walt Disney Animation Studios.
Alex graduated from the University of Tulsa in 2019 with degrees in Media Studies and Creative Writing and was awarded the Dr. Robert Doolittle Top Media Studies Senior. She is also a graduate from TU’s Honors College.
Nathan Blue, Graduate Assistant
Nathan Caleb Blue splits his time between the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities and the Bob Dylan Institute. He is a doctoral student in English and Creative Writing who has worked in the Bob Dylan Archive® studying fan letters sent to Dylan in 1966. For his MA capstone project, he applied the tools and methodologies of the digital humanities to analyze metadata gathered anonymously from these fan letters. By utilizing the resources of the Institute and its proximity to the Bob Dylan Center, Blue investigates and reports on the ways in which a burgeoning, young mass fandom circulated in 1966–in teen fan magazines, fan clubs, record stores, schools, and beyond. His interests span across the long twentieth century, with a particular focus in literary modernism and concepts of celebrity in periodicals and new media.
Danika Bryant, Graduate Assistant
Danika is an English Language and Literature PhD student, having received a BA in English from Hannibal LaGrange University, and an MA in English Language and Literature from TU. Their primary research interest is that of queer theory with a focus on homosociality and the space for transgender identities within it. Current projects include a paper on Deborah Sampson, as well as the transgression of gender binaries & boundaries at Miller Brothers 101 Ranch in the late 19th and early 20th century. They are also a 2023-2024 Cultures of the Americas Fellow at Helmerich Center for American Research