Campus Humanities Calendar

Don't miss the final week of Stitching Ecologies: Urbana-Champaign Satellite Crochet Coral Reef. On view through October 24. *Parking nearby is free on weekends.*

Interested in conducting research abroad? This workshop introduces the fundamentals of writing a successful fellowship proposal for international research. Learn how to identify funding opportunities, communicate the significance of your overseas research, and craft persuasive application materials that stand out in competitive review processes. Lunch at 12pm w/registrati

Dr. Tyson E. Lewis, Professor Art Education in the College of Visual Arts and Design at the University of North Texas, will present a workshop, “Experimenting with Drift.” In this workshop, Dr. Lewis will give a brief presentation and performance of the idea of perceptual, linguistic, and conceptual drift from his book.

Join us for Poetry for Unfinished Revolutions, hosted by Dr. Misha Frazier! Participants will engage in improvised poetry writing inspired by the exhibit, with all poems added to the exhibit’s zine. The evening continues with a revolutionary-themed open mic at 7:00 p.m. Share an original poem or a piece by another writer.

CSGGE Lunch talk with Dr. Maria Hadjipolycarpou, Dept of Classics and Director of Modern Greek Studies, "Class, Gender, and Secularization in Costas Montis’ Afentis Batistas and the Other Things". Her talk will delve into unexplored areas and performs an intersectional analysis of gender, class, and religion, challenging stereotypical ideologies around these issues.

Join the College of Media's Ebert Center for the annual Roger Ebert Lecture. Allyson Nadia Field, professor and chair of the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago, will focus on her book Acts of Love: Black Performance and the Kiss That Changed Film History (2026).

Join Seattle-based therapist and former Champaign-Urbana resident Diana Oskov as she discusses her book, Generational Resilience: Breaking Generational Cycles, based largely on her experiences as a Bulgarian immigrant in the US. The talk will be followed by a Q&A and book signing.

Dr. Tyson E. Lewis, Professor Art Education in the College of Visual Arts and Design at the University of North Texas, will present a lecture, “Research-Creation and the Alchemical Studio: An Experiment in Studious Drift."

Please join us for the Game Studies and Design October Town Hall. This month's guest speaker is Amber Holkenbrink, Principal Experience Designer on Apex Legends at Respawn Entertainment. She has worked in the game industry for over 16 years and has contributed to the art, animation, and design of more than 30 titles, including Call of Duty: Warzone.

In this CAS/MillerComm presentation, GAM Visiting Scholar Professor Sangaré (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales - INALCO) treats Islam in France as a case study in the state management of minority religion in a secular republic. Hosted by the Department of History.

Join us for a professional development presentation from a visiting literary agent! Rayhané Sanders will give a glimpse at the nuts and bolts of publishing, working in publishing, query letters, and other aspects of the literary trade. This will include some do's and don'ts and plenty of time for questions and answers.

Celebrate Bulgarian culture with an evening of live music, dance, and community! Enjoy a performance by Chicago’s Bulgarica Dance Ensemble (Artistic Director Petur Iliev) and experience traditional folk rhythms. Light refreshments will be served. The event marks the first year of the Bulgarian Studies Initiative at Illinois. All are welcome!

This 45-minute tour explores femininity, masculinity, love, and desire as the people of the ancient mediterranean would have understood them, highlighting the blurry lines drawn in art, worship, commerce, athletics, and hygiene." Drop in every Saturday for a tour given by our student gallery guides! Topics vary weekly. Free admission and all ages welcome.

Join the WRC on Monday, October 26 at 12 noon to explore University Illinois students' rights and resources regarding sexual misconduct. Learn more about what happens after an incident is reported, from supportive measures to the investigative process to sanctioning. This event features a panel featuring staff from Title IX, OSCR, and the WRC. Lunch provided.

Following the election, this panel examines the results and their significance for Brazil's future. Speakers will analyze voting patterns, political shifts, and the potential impact of the election on governance, public policy, and democratic institutions.

Join the Education Justice Project for an author talk with Rebecca Neusteter, author of 911, What’s Your Emergency? She will discuss the 911 system, its impact on communities of color, and the challenges of relying on police as the default emergency response. Dinner and copies of the book will be provided. For questions or accessibility requests, email policy@educationjust

The techniques for making texts have changed across multiple media and historical contexts since antiquity, but a regular feature of the work of authors and scholars through all those changes is the reliance on helpers or amanuenses. Dr. Ann Blair (Harvard) will discuss the factors that have made them both invisible and occasionally visible, and the kind of work they did.

Please join the Unit for Criticism for a Modern Critical Theory lecture by Rob Rushing (European Languages & Transcultural Studies, UCLA) on Biopolitics.

The Center for Writing Studies will be hosting Dr. José A. de la Garza Valenzuela for a brownbag talk! Dr. de la Garza Valenzuela will be giving a lecture about his book, titled "Queer in a Legal Sense: Brown Citizenship and Other Lawful Fictions " Please join us on Wednesday, October 28!

Join the Department of Philosophy for a lecture in the Illinois Forum on Human Flourishing in a Digital Age Speaker Series with Raul Castro Fernandez. His talk, titled "What Should Data Ecosystems Be For?" explores data ecology, its effects, and how data ecosystems are designed.

Professor Gillen D'Arcy Wood (English and Earth Science & Environmental Change) will discuss his book, The Wake of HMS Challenger: How a Legendary Victorian Voyage Tells the Story of Our Oceans’ Decline.

Photographs documenting sixties-era struggles across Africa and the African diaspora reveal how individuals and communities entered political life by gathering in public squares to listen to state authorities, dissidents, and one another.

Please join us as we inaugurate the Spurlock’s new DCP projector with a colorfully spectacular screening of Dario Argento’s horror film Suspiria (Italy, 1977, English dub). An American ballet student (Jessica Harper) enrolls in a prestigious German dance academy as ancient supernatural forces impose their will on the students.

The School of Information Sciences Research Showcase shares human-centered, interdisciplinary research through keynotes, short presentations, and poster sessions. Topics range from AI and cybersecurity to cultural preservation and libraries. Keynote speakers include Eva Pomerantz, Director of the Social & Behavioral Science Institutey, and iSchool Professor Masooda Bashir.

Youssouf Sangaré (George A. Miller Visiting Scholar) will examine the case of Chérif Ousmane Madani Haïdara and the Ançar Dine movement in Mali as a window into the dynamics of contemporary African Islam.

A hands-on meet-up for Illinois instructors who want to build their own teaching tools with AI, open to humanities and arts faculty from complete beginners to experienced builders. Bring a laptop and a course you teach: helpers will be on hand for everything from installing AI tools to connecting them to Canvas to making a custom tool for your students. Free; please RSVP.

A lecture by Shane Bobrycki (University of Iowa). Early Medieval Europe (c. 500-1000) presents a unique chapter in crowd history, when logistical constraints on gatherings were comparatively high, thanks to post-Roman demographic and urban decline. How can the history of the crowd as a scarce resource inform medievalists, both of Europe and of other regions?

Professor Xiao Su presents innovative electrochemical approaches for addressing environmental challenges and improving water purification technologies. The lecture explores emerging research that advances sustainable solutions for water treatment and environmental remediation.

Please join the Unit for Criticism for a Modern Critical Theory lecture by Chi-Ming Yang (English, University of Pennsylvania) on Orientalism.

A lecture by Prof. Sergey Ivanov (Northwestern) -- “Edifying tales" are a type of fiction that arose in the 4th -10th centuries: many hundreds of narratives, some of which survive only in Georgian, Armenian, Syriac, Latin, and Slavonic translations—and which have never before been studied as a genre in its own right. What can they teach us today?

Taiwanese artist Yao Jui-Chung and critic Kao Chien-Hui engage in a conversation about Yao's practice within Taiwan's layered histories of migration, colonialism, martial law, and contested boundaries. A reception precedes the talk at 4:00 PM. Presented in tandem with Ink Shower: Contemporary Taiwanese Artists Reimagine Tradition at the Krannert Art Museum.

Join the WRC and Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Assault as we explore the laws and policies impacting sexual violence on college campuses. Explore your rights and options. Learn about proposed legislation intended to strengthen survivor's rights and how you can advocate for survivors! Advance registration is recommended. Register online at: https://go.illinois.edu/ica

Representatives from the HuMetricsHSS Humane Metrics Initiative will present on the values-based frameworks they’ve developed to guide all kinds of scholarly processes. The session will include time for audience questions.

Join us for a reading by Illinois Alumni, Chekwube Danladi, Chris Vanjonack, and Weston Morrow!

Professor Stefania Chiarelli explores representations of water, rivers, and aquatic environments in Brazilian literature. Drawing on examples from Brazilian prose, the lecture examines how aquatic imagery shapes narratives, cultural memory, and literary interpretations of place and identity.

The Lemann Center Grad Forum showcases research conducted by graduate students whose work engages with Brazil. Through presentations and discussion sessions, participants share emerging scholarship, exchange ideas across disciplines, and strengthen connections within the Brazilian studies community at Illinois.

Angela Calcaterra is an associate professor of American Indian Studies. Building upon deep-rooted theories of relationality and human-material interactions, Indigenous understandings of gun violence run much deeper than the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms.

Please join us for this community building event! We will share information about the new MS in Game Development, and showcase games we are building and playing right now. We will also hear from our guest speaker Jeremy Moncauskas, Senior Level Designer at WB Games.

Emblematica (Illinois) and Compositor (U. of Birmingham) are databases that use digital technologies to explore the early modern text-image interface. Join Dr. Hazel Wilkinson (Birmingham) to learn how historical readers used “emblem-literacy” to engage with ornamented books in ways previously unaccounted for in scholarship.

"Elizabeth Vartkessian works with criminal defense teams as a mitigation specialist. She isn't part of the Innocence Project; her clients are often legally guilty, and often of terrible crimes. Rather, her job is to spend hundreds of hours per case talking to the parents, siblings, teachers, and neighbors of a defendant, situating their crimes in context.

Please join the Unit for Criticism for a Modern Critical Theory lecture by Thomas Davis (English, Ohio State) on Environmental Humanities.

This Faculty-Graduate seminar, hosted by Prof. Melamed, will explore the idea that to truly and effectively call capital into question, we need approaches outside the liberal epistemologies that dominate Western and scholarly modes of understanding and analysis. Register now (required) to gain access to the texts.

Please join us for a talk by Prof. Melamed. The talk will argue that the repressive strategies used by Marc Rowan and others against Palestine on the UPenn campus serve to institute pro-power pedagogies at U.S. universities and beyond.

Join us as we highlight the incredible work of each of Humanities Without Walls' Reciprocity and Redistribution Grand Research Challenge projects in four virtual showcases over the 2026-27 academic year. During each event, 2-3 teams will present their projects and share a bit about the centrality of reciprocal and redistributive methods to their work.

Please join us for talks by recent CAS Associates. At 11am Kimberly Mack (English) draws from her critical memoir Brown Sugar Blues to consider the reasons and costs of Black women's erasure from rock, and at noon, Laura Hetrick (Art + Design) asks: What happens when neurodivergent people become the authors of their own stories?

Join us for our December Town Hall with special Guest Speaker Shad Bradbury, Animator with Pixar Animations Studios. Shad Bradbury has worked in animation for over 20 years at studios like Pixar, Sony, Tippet, and Rhythm and Hues. His credits include, "Elio", "Coco", "Finding Dory", "Inside Out", "Hotel Transylvania", and "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2".

The Fall 2026 Game Studies and Design Showcase is a day for student gamers to share their new games, designs, and game components. Join us for a day of play-testing and fun!

For the final Food For Thought presentation of the semester, we're pleased to offer an English double-header! At 11am, Tess McNulty considers the cultural history of viral content from an aesthetic perspective, and at noon, Alex Shakar reads from and discusses his forthcoming novel, Play the Void.

Justice in the Balance: Democracy, Rule of Law, and the European Court of Human Rights

Join us for a reading by author Carmen Maria Machado! Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House, the graphic novel The Low, Low Woods, and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties.

At the February Town Hall we will speak with VFX Artist Lisa Starc, Principal VFX Artist, at Monumental. Lisa Starc is a highly technical real time VFX artist with 20+ years of experience in the video game industry. She has worked as a VFX artist at Netflix Games, Boss Fight Entertainment, Amazon Games, and High Voltage Software.

Following an introduction to the book proposal and publishing process, this presentation and panel will also cover recent experiences by faculty and editors in this important component of humanistic scholarship. Co-organized by the Humanities Research Institute and OVCRI’s Office of Research Advising and Project Development.

With Roderick Wilson (East Asian Languages and Cultures and History) and Anna Jungeun Lee (East Asian Languages and Cultures)

More information is coming.

Patricia Owens Book Talk: Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men.

Please join us for a presentation and discussion with Mitch Cronin, Senior Tech Producer, Santa Monica Studio. Mitch Cronin is a Senior Producer and Release Manager with nearly 19 years of game development experience. He's worked on the development side as well as publishing. Over his long career he has worked on many AAA titles as well as indie titles.

March 25-26, more information is coming soon. Part of the Up Against Erasure event series.

Join us for a reading by author Brandon Hobson! Dr. Brandon Hobson is a 2022 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow. His novel, Where the Dead Sit Talking, was a finalist for the National Book Award.

More info is coming.

“Once Upon a Time in the Jazira: Archaeology and the Mass Graves of the Armenian Genocide”. Professor Lori Khatchadourian, Departments of Near Eastern Studies & Anthropology, Cornell University. Director, Cornell Institute of Archaeology & Material Studies.

The Spring 2027 Game Studies and Design Showcase is a day for student gamers to share their new games, designs, and game components. Join us for a day of play-testing and fun!

Gather with us in community to celebrate this year's HRI research prize recipients and to mark the close of another academic year!