Quirky and Curious

Each Kahn Institute fellow in the Hauntings project drew a card from the tarot deck—the Fool, the Sun, the Towers, the World, etc. Their task was to create a new design and description for the card, as seen through the lens of their own research and a year of discussions about Hauntings. Through long-term projects like this one, the Kahn Liberal Arts Institute acts as an incubator of rigorous intellectual exchange for the benefit of fellows’ scholarly pursuits, campus life, and beyond, and has been doing so since 1998.

Nikté Lopez-Aleshire ’26 drew the High Priestess card, which she found “incredibly fitting” given her art practice: “The High Priestess is rooted in ritual and intuition, and a large part of my art practice relies on instinct and intuition. I had been looking at rituals, my family’s Mayan spiritual practices, and ancient Mayan codices and reinterpreting them in my own practice through bookmaking, printmaking, papermaking, and creating my own languages through them. I took scraps from that project and collaged them together for the High Priestess card.”

“I never would have imagined making a tarot deck in a fellowship experience,” Lopez-Aleshire shared. “It was such a fun, unique idea of reflecting on our different projects—and ourselves—in a creative way.”

During each long-term Kahn project, faculty and student fellows meet weekly for a year to discuss a shared topic and their individual research projects. The 2025–26 long-term project Hauntings—organized by Alex Callender, associate professor of art, and Jennifer DeClue, associate professor of the Program for the Study of Women, Gender & Sexuality—focused on the variety of ways that the past makes itself known in the present across disciplines. The tarot deck project was one of many activities throughout the year, including field trips to Historic Northampton, the Quabbin Reservoir, and the former site of the Northampton State Hospital, and visits from special guests, including internationally renowned author Jesmyn Ward.

The project organizers proposed creating a tarot deck “to finish up collectively,” Callender explained, “with a project that would allow us to demonstrate collective writing and making through different modalities depending on who was authoring it.”

For their deck, Hauntings fellows created the 22 Major Arcana cards. Each of these cards features an archetypal figure and accompanying description that readers use in divination or fortune-telling. They worked on the visual in the Design Thinking Initiative space during a workshop with Chelsea Granger, illustrator of the Dirt Gems: Plant Oracle Deck and Guidebook. Granger’s introduction to tarot and oracle decks came at a time in her life when she was in deep grief and was looking for nonlinear ways to feel supported. She “found that there was a healing power in the ineffable mystery of tarot decks, a chance to connect with something beyond my rational and analytical brain.” During the Hauntings workshop, she shared her process of painting the cards, which involved “learning to listen to the feelings and emotions that came through when reading the description of each card, to lean into my intuition as to the symbols, sensations, and colors that I was led to paint.”

Following the visual workshop, the fellows collaboratively discussed the cards before writing their reinterpretation of their card's meaning, “with haunting in the forefront of our minds,” explains project organizer DeClue.

Fellows had different levels of experience with tarot, from having none to being frequent practitioners. For Lopez-Aleshire, “If I ever had any kind of question about my future, if I was questioning myself, my path, I would want a tarot reading. I would say I believe in tarot, but also, I wasn’t taking it too seriously. I thought it was a way to self-reflect. And I think it’s also a way to learn more about what you want from the future by thinking about questions you want answers to.”

For Laura Torraco AC ’26, the tarot deck captured the community of the fellows: “It’s very us. We are definitely quirky and curious. It was like nothing was off-limits in our conversations as far as what hauntings was. I really appreciated that we could feel safe enough to explore things that are not always centered in academic spaces.”

“As a collective art project, the deck perfectly captures the interdisciplinary and community nature of a Kahn project, while also being entirely specific to Hauntings,” explains Lauren Anderson, Kahn communications and project manager. “The tarot deck also fits into a history of creative collaborations capping a Kahn project, some of which included a new play on Galileo, a collaborative essay collection, a literary magazine, and a time capsule buried in the walls of the old Neilson Library.”

Hauntings fellow Rebecca Worsham, classical languages and literatures, “really enjoyed the breadth of topics and the organizers’ willingness to pull from all sorts of different places (tarot!) to think about hauntings.” She continued, “I would say it is the most intellectually exciting thing I’ve done since grad school, and it was great to be pushed to try new activities and engage with new topics in a meaningful way.”

For DeClue, organizing the project will leave a lasting impression. The fellows “had experiences together where we’re friends and also we’re still thinking about Hauntings together, and I think we’ll have that forever.”

If this story inspires you to get involved at the Kahn, there are several ways. Faculty can propose a short- or long-term project to Suleiman Mourad, Kahn director. Recruitment for the 2027–28 long-term project, Humor, will begin in the fall for faculty and in the spring for students. Stay tuned for more information on how to apply!