Dr. Maria Dikcis is a College Fellow in Media in the Department of English at Harvard University. During the 2023-24 academic year, she is also a Researcher for the metaLAB (at) Harvard, where she is supporting the development of the AI Pedagogy Project. Previously, Dr. Dikcis was an American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Fellow at the University of Chicago, where she served as a Postdoctoral Researcher and Mass Incarceration & Policing Fellow at the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights.
She holds a PhD in English and a Graduate Certificate in Critical Theory from Northwestern University. Her research and teaching interests include 20th- and 21st-century American literature, critical race and ethnic studies, poetry and poetics, digital humanities, artificial intelligence, data science, and critical prison studies.
Dr. Dikcis is currently working on a book project titled Ink, Wave, Signal, Code: Multiethnic American Poetry's Media Ecologies After 1965. Her scholarlship has been published in ASAP/Journal, Chicago Review, Public Books, and The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics Since 1900.
She is the recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Humanities Without Walls Predoctoral Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant for the Institute on Born-Digital Scholarly Publishing hosted by Brown University Library, and the Northwestern University English Department’s Jean H. Hagstrum Prize for Best Dissertation.
Beyond the college campus, Dr. Dikcis has taught courses for public-facing initiatives that serve under-resourced communities, including the Northwestern Prison Education Program (where she was the Director of an educational partnership with Cook County Jail) and the Odyssey Project—a free, college-credit humanities program for low-income adults with limited access to higher education.