Campus Humanities Calendar

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Tuesday, November 11, 2025

  • Join Us: 2025 Veterans Day Celebration

    11:30 am - 12:30 pm
    908 W. Nevada St, Urbana, IL 61801

    Join us as we honor Veterans Day with keynote speaker Major General (Ret.) James H. Mukoyama, Jr., a University of Illinois alumnus, decorated combat Veteran, a proud Illinois alumnus and trailblazing U.S. Army leader.

  • AsiaLENS | "Echoes of Home" Free Screening + Filmmaker Q+A

    5:00 pm
    Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S Gregory St. Urbana

    AsiaLENS presents a free screening of Echoes of Home followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Mirshad Ghalip. This documentary explores the Uyghur American Cup, the largest event for Uyghur diaspora communities in North America. In the tournament, soccer becomes a medium to foster community, maintain language, and help younger members of the diaspora connect with their heritage.

  • MCT25 Postcolonial Theory - Julian Go

    5:15 pm
    Levis Faculty Center 210

    Julian Go (Sociology, University of Chicago) will deliver a lecture on Postcolonial Theory as part of the Fall 2025 Modern Critical Theory Lecture Series. Please check the MCT website for the latest location updates. The Box folder of readings for each lecture is available here. For more information, including the password to access the readings, please contact the Unit.

  • Modern Critical Theory Lecture Series | “Postcolonial Theory” with Speaker Julian Go

    5:15 - 6:45 pm
    Levis Faculty Center, Room 210

Wednesday, November 12, 2025

  • The Wake of HMS Challenger: a Story of Our Ocean's Decline

    3:00 - 5:00 pm
    Main Library, Room 346

    Gillen D’Arcy Wood will present his new book about the Victorian-era voyage of the HMS Challenger. From 1872-1876, its naturalists explored the oceans, encountering never-before-seen marvels of marine life. They had no way of knowing that the incredible undersea aquarium they were documenting was on the verge of catastrophic change.

  • Migrant Figures and the Racial Politics of Visibility

    5:30 pm
    Campus Instructional Facility (CIF) 4039

    Dr. Angie Bonilla will examine how humanitarian and artistic media transform migrant life into spectacles of empathy and control. Through films, photographs, and installations, she traces how Latinx visual practices expose the racial politics of visibility and imagine endurance and solidarity beyond cages, beyond crisis.

Thursday, November 13, 2025

  • Courtney Handman | AI and the Race for Interspecies Communication

    12:00 - 1:30 pm
    Levis Faculty Center, Rm 208

    In this new research project, Prof. Handman (Anthropology, UT Austin) explores the different ways that AI is transforming our ideas about language and humanness by seeing how people are imagining some kind of AI-enabled interspecies communication.

  • Women in Science Lecture Series: Vivian Cheng

    12:00 - 1:00 pm
    University Archives Main Library Room 146

    Please join us for the University Archives' monthly Women in Science Lecture Series, Nov. 13, from 12 -1 pm. School of Integrative Biology graduate student Vivian Cheng will discuss her research using genetics, ancient DNA, and historical archives to understand the effects of climate change and colonialism on narwhals.

Friday, November 14, 2025

  • Critical Disciplinarity Collective

    10:30 am - 12:00 pm
    TBD

    The Critical Disciplinarity Collective convenes faculty of all ranks to reflect on disciplinarity – how it shapes our research + teaching, how we shape-shift to succeed in our disciplines, + how we might reshape our disciplines to be more welcoming to scholars + scholarship underrepresented in the academy. Lunch provided. Contact us to get involved!: azlans2@illinois.edu

  • Faculty Preview at Krannert Art Museum

    1:00 - 3:00 pm
    Krannert Art Museum, 500 E. Peabody Dr., Champaign

    Join us for a preview designed especially for faculty and instructors. View the latest exhibitions and discover how the museum can support and enrich your teaching, research, and community engagement. Meet museum staff, tour the galleries, and learn about curricular partnerships, custom class visits, programming opportunities, and ways to collaborate across disciplines.

  • CEAPS Brown Bag Conference Travel Grant recipients Jiwon Oh + Darren Chuang

    1:30 - 3:00 pm
    [Hybrid] 306 Coble Hall & Zoom

    Please join us for a hybrid CEAPS Brown bag with two PhD student Conference Travel Grant recipients. Jiwon Oh (Institute of Communications Research) will be presenting her talk “Navigating Gendered Anthropomorphism in AI Ethics: The Case of Lee Luda in South Korea.”

  • Midwest Yiddishfest - Yiddish "Block Party"

    2:30 - 4:00 pm
    CU Community Fab Lab

    Yiddish literature is deeply connected to the print technologies that made it possible, especially letterpress and block printing. Join us for a presentation on the historical Yiddish press and a hands-on workshop at our campus print shop. Come print a postcard and poster using authentic Yiddish type and historical printing presses! Registration is required.

Saturday, November 15, 2025

  • Midwest Yiddishfest - Golden Thread Ensemble “Songs for Social Change”

    7:30 pm
    The Venue CU

    Featuring an all-star ensemble made up of beloved Yiddish vocalists Lorin Sklamberg and Sasha Lurje, plus five leading string players from the klezmer scene, this project blends techniques and soundscapes from klezmer music, Yiddish theatre, folk song, cantorial repertoire, and classical music in a program that is equal parts storytelling...

Sunday, November 16, 2025

  • Midwest Yiddishfest - Kugel and Klezmer Finale Event

    10:00 am - 6:00 pm
    Activities & Recreation Center (ARC), Multipurpose Room 7

    Celebrate the festival’s grand finale with a kugel cook-off and taste-off! Featuring a performance by our local Papashoy Klezmer Band and guest judges Gioconda Guerra Perez (UIUC Interim Vice Chancellor of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion), Deb Feinen (Mayor of Champaign), and Deshawn Williams (Mayor of Urbana)...

  • Midwest Yiddishfest - Lightning Lectures on Yiddish History & Culture

    1:30 - 3:30 pm
    The Activities and Recreation Center (ARC), Multipurpose Room 4

    This lecture series features short talks on a variety of subjects related to Yiddish, featuring UIUC's Anastasiia Strakhova on immigration, YIVO Chicago's Ben Schacht on Chicago's garment workers, the University of Michigan's Emma Lerman on children's literature illustrations, local musician Frances Harris on Klezmer today...

Monday, November 17, 2025

  • Finding the Female Voice in the Ancient World

    6:00 - 8:00 pm
    The Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St. Urbana

    Women have largely been written out of the ancient world. Dealing with the silences of the archive requires new and innovative tools, and in this talk, Dr. Emily Hauser surveys the many different approaches she has taken across her fiction and non-fiction writing to recover women.

Tuesday, November 18, 2025

Wednesday, November 19, 2025

  • Asexuality in Contemporary Young Adult Literature

    12:00 pm
    Room 212 / Center for Children's Books, 501 E. Daniel St., School of Information Sciences

    Dr. Patricia Kennon (Maynooth University), the general editor of The International Journal of Young Adult Literature, will be giving a brief lecture on Asexuality in Contemporary YA Literature at the Center for Children's Books. Come learn!

Friday, December 5, 2025

Thursday, December 11, 2025

  • Reading Day Relaxation in the RBML

    3:00 - 5:00 pm
    Main Library, Room 346

    Come and celebrate the semester’s end with hot apple cider, sweet and salty treats, and some of our favorite winter-themed materials from the RBML vault. Make a button, relax with a coloring sheet, and leave with a live-printed linocut card! This event is part of the library's Reading Day De-Stress Fest; it is open to the public and refreshments will be served.

Tuesday, January 27, 2026

  • Holocaust Remembrance Day screening of Lee

    7:00 pm
    G58 LCLB- Film Classroom

    Lee Miller was an incredible photographer who was present at the liberation of some concentration camps. Trigger warning: some parts of this film display graphic images of survivors and victims of the Holocaust. 7 pm Holocaust Remembrance Day screening of Lee. Location TBD.

Wednesday, January 28, 2026

  • Summer Bridge Program Info Session

    12:00 - 1:30 pm

    The Humanities Without Walls Summer Bridge program supports PhD students in the humanities at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in exploring new career paths while making an impact in our community. Join us at this info session for more information about this opportunity!

Thursday, January 29, 2026

  • Another Place: Storymaking the Entangled Prairie

    5:00 - 7:00 pm
    Krannert Art Museum

    Eleven faculty members from the School of Art & Design will be featured in the upcoming exhibition, Another Place: Storymaking the Entangled Prairie. The exhibition considers how people make and define place through stories, and how stories carry out a kind of labor, maintaining narratives about the places we live—and about us.

Thursday, February 12, 2026

  • Multi-Species Justice Symposium: Paradigms, Practices, Possibilities
    Recurring

    All Day
    Levis Faculty Center, Room 210

    How does recognizing the fundamental entanglements of humans and the more-than-human world impact notions of "justice"? Drawing on perceptions from diverse communities, disciplines, and social, political, and historical contexts, this symposium will provide a space for us to grapple with the question: What might a more just world or worlds look like in the 21st century?

Friday, February 13, 2026

  • Multi-Species Justice Symposium: Paradigms, Practices, Possibilities
    Recurring

    All Day
    Levis Faculty Center, Room 210

    How does recognizing the fundamental entanglements of humans and the more-than-human world impact notions of "justice"? Drawing on perceptions from diverse communities, disciplines, and social, political, and historical contexts, this symposium will provide a space for us to grapple with the question: What might a more just world or worlds look like in the 21st century?

Thursday, February 19, 2026

Thursday, February 26, 2026

Wednesday, March 4, 2026

Friday, March 6, 2026

Monday, March 9, 2026

Friday, March 27, 2026

Monday, March 30, 2026

Friday, April 3, 2026

Wednesday, April 15, 2026

  • Inside Scoop | Rita Dove

    12:00 pm
    BNAACC U.S. Poet Laureate (1993–95); Creative Writing, University of Virginia Cohosted with the Bruce D. Nesbitt African American Cultural Center.

    U.S. Poet Laureate (1993–95); Creative Writing, University of Virginia Cohosted with the Bruce D. Nesbitt African American Cultural Center.

  • Rita Dove headshot

    Public Reading | Rita Dove

    7:30 pm
    Alice Campbell Alumni Center

    Rita Dove served as US Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995. Winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in poetry and the 2023 honorary National Book Award, she also received the 1996 National Humanities Medal from President Clinton and the 2011 National Medal of Arts from President Obama.

Monday, April 20, 2026

Thursday, April 23, 2026

Thursday, May 7, 2026