Campus Humanities Calendar

In "THE LIFECYCLE OF WRITING SUBJECTS: On Generative AI and the Future of Writing," Lauren M.E. Goodlad (Distinguished Professor at Rutgers) introduces generative AI in light of its concentrated political economy, long history of anthropomorphized machine “intelligence,”

Memes, Monsters, and the Digital Grotesque, this talk theorizes memes through the politics of monstrosity and the grotesque, showing how digital infrastructures privilege rapid, affective forms of expression that operate as a language of the unspeakable.

Curious to explore the relationship between people, places, institutions? Join us for a gentle introduction to network analysis! This workshop will introduce key concepts, explore common tools used to create networks, and consider examples in research across the humanities.

SPEAK stands for Song, Poetry, Art, and Knowledge. It is an open-mic public performance space at Krannert Art Museum curated by local artist, Shaya Robinson, featuring guest performers and welcoming all to the mic. *Parking nearby is free after 5 pm and on weekends.*

Researchers will share work in progress from "The Virality of Racial Terror in U.S. Newspapers, 1863-1921," a Mellon-sponsored project. VRT uses digital humanities methods to trace the circulation of reports about anti-Black violence in US newspapers in the late 19th & early 20th centuries.

Please join us for an event in the Timbuktu Talks series with Aly Drame, a professor of history at Dominican University. His lecture will call attention to the need to better reframe the rise and development of Islam in the wider Senegambia, considering the role played by the Mandinka Muslim settlements in the Middle Casamance in this process through intermarriage...

Ismael M. Montana (Northern Illinois University) will give a lecture titled "Ahmad b. al-Qāḍī al-Timbuktāwī: Pilgrimage, Intellectual Exchange, and Condemnation of the Enslaved Religion of the Blacks of Tunis.

The Flatlands Dance Film Festival supports and showcases Dance Cinema, merging filmmaking and dance. This year's selected films thoughtfully challenge monolithic viewpoints and honor the richness of diverse identities and cultures, shedding light on the complexity often overlooked by society.

Join us for a hybrid CEAPS Brown Bag talk titled “Tales of Asian Boys’ Love: Translanguaging and Transmediality of Romance in Selected Japanese, Thai, and Filipino Series” with Cheeno Marlo M. Sayuno (Postdoctoral Research Associate in the School of Information Sciences and Associate Professor at University of the Philippines Los Baños).

Join us for a screening of Kahlil Joseph's feature debut—a mix of archival footage, narrative, and Black intellectual thought spanning voices like W. E. B. Du Bois, Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, and artistic luminaries like Arthur Jafa and Garrett Bradley.

A lecture in the Forum on Human Flourishing in a Digital Age series featuring Brett Robinson(University of Notre Dame). Drawing on thinkers such as Wendell Berry, Paul Kingsnorth, and James Carey—as well as emerging experiments in digital fasting and community-building.

Attend a screening of the newly-released documentary film, Against the Current at Spurlock Museum on Wednesday, February 11, 2026 from 5:30-7:30 p.m. In the film Kyla, a high school senior and community organizer in Chicago, journeys across the state of Illinois in search of ways that Black people have resisted oppression across time.

Join the Center for Children's Books for an engaging discussion on book challenges in Illinois schools. Leah Gregory (Illinois Heartland Library System) and Vicki Pietrus (Niles West High School) will discuss how Illinois school libraries have been impacted by the rise of book challenges and bans, including the climate in the state.

The OVCRI – Humanities, Arts, and Related Fields is hosting this session on the National Endowment for the Humanities and its programs, including the Fellowship (anticipated deadline is April 8, 2026). We will provide guidance for navigating recent changes at the agency and have time for conversation and Q& A. Please RSVP to Kelley Frazier (kdfrazie@illinois.edu) for the Z

Join the WRC on Friday, February 13 at 12 noon at the University YMCA for the annual Verdell Frazier Young Symposium Distinguished Speaker event in conjunction with the Friday Forum/Conversation Cafe series, featuring reproductive justice activist, abortion storyteller, and writer, Renee Bracey Sherman. For more information: go.illinois.edu/reneebraceysherman

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?

Northwestern University philosopher Sandford Goldberg explores how we might modify or expand Stalnaker’s Common Ground framework to capture the normative dimension of inquiry and conversation. Goldberg suggests that we should make room for normative expectations both within common ground and about common ground, with far-reaching implications for epistemology.

Join in the fun as Urbana’s newest period instrument ensemble, directed by internationally renowned harpsichordist Charlotte Mattax Moersch explores the musical puzzles in Bach’s great masterpiece, The Musical Offering, along other gems of the Baroque.

Join in the fun as Urbana's newest period instrument ensemble, directed by internationally renowned harpsichordist Charlotte Mattax Moersch explores the musical puzzles in Bach's great masterpiece, The Musical Offering, along other gems of the Baroque.

Wagner's talk, “'As Usual You Have Produced Yet Another Installment Worthy of Archiving': The Persistence of Obsolescence in Queer Information & Media Technologies," uses archival object case studies to call attention to how data exists within the objects of queer history...

Happy Black History Month, Campus Community! As we observe 100 years of formal celebrations of Black history, the Department of African American Studies is hosting its Spring 2026 Colloquium Series. The series starts on Wednesday, February 18, 2026, from 12pm to 1:30pm, with a talk by Dr. Alisa Hardy (Dept. of Communication). All talks are in-person only.

This is the spring semester installment of the Latina/Latino Studies Speaker Series with Dr. Marla A. Ramírez, assistant professor of History and Chicanx/e & Latinx/e Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Ramírez will discuss her recent book Banished Citizens: A History of the Mexican American Women Who Endured Repatriation (Harvard University Press, 2025)

Spurlock Museum is proud to partner with The Literary to present this new community program. Free books will be provided to the first 13 people that sign up for participation: February 18, 2026 6:30-7:30pm - An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

STUDENTS: Connect with industry professionals and current interns in the arts and culture! Learn about the career possibilities connected with arts and culture. Talk to working professionals in museums, cultural outreach, performing arts, arts administration, public media, and related fields.

A reading by Callie Siskel made possible by the Robert J. and Katherin Carr visiting author series. Callie Siskel is the author of Two Minds, forthcoming from W. W. Norton, and Arctic Revival, selected by Elizabeth Alexander for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship.

On February 19, Carlos Alberto Torres, Distinguished Professor at UCLA and former director of UCLA's Latin American Center, will give a lecture celebrating the extraordinary humanitarian career of Paulo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in which he analyzed the analogous relationship of colonizer and colonized to that of teacher and student.

This presentation examines the entangled histories of Indigenous land dispossession, the founding of the land-grant university system, and epistemicide in settler colonial institutions. This talk draws a direct line between the violent expropriation of Indigenous territories to the erasure of Indigenous peoples on campuses and in American institutions at large.

Join us for a special evening at Krannert Art Museum in partnership with Uniting Pride Center of Champaign County. This event celebrates queer art and artists with a mix of engaging experiences, including live music, guided tours, hands-on artmaking, artist demonstrations, and hors d’oeuvres. Free and open to everyone. We look forward to welcoming you!

Poetry reading by Jenny L. Davis, citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and Associate Professor of Anthropology and American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, where she is the director of the American Indian Studies Program. Dr. Davis will read selected poems from her new book, Extant. All are welcome!

Please join us for the University Archives' monthly Women in Science Lecture Series, Feb 20, from 12 -1 pm. Bethany Anderson, Dr. Mary Ton, and Kristen Wilson will discuss making domestic science archival materials accessible and using AI to help with OCR and Named Entity Recognition. Hear how this data will then be used to share women scientists’ stories.

Our partners in Peru will speak about current research on Andean cultural heritage and the ongoing collaborations with Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) and Krannert Art Museum on the Fragmented Histories: Andean Art Before 1600 exhibition project. Presented in person and via Zoom. En español e inglés.

Join us for this special guided tour: Percussion instruments, especially drums, have been an almost ubiquitous part of the human experience, from war snares to the heart of a powwow to street buckets and a modern trap kit.

Join us for a guided tour exploring our university’s connection to the artifacts at the Spurlock Museum. See how the ancient and not so ancient world appears across campus in unexpected ways. We’ll discuss the land’s origins, the Alma Mater’s ties to Ancient Greece, cultural houses’ contributions, the Illinois Ambulance Unit in WWI, and more.

Enjoy live music in the galleries and a reception to celebrate Imagination, Faith, and Desire: Early European Prints from 1475–1800 (on view through Feb 28). The evening will include brief remarks by Curator of European and American Art Maureen Warren. Harpsichordist Charlotte Mattax Moersch and the Urbana Baroque ensemble will perform on period instruments.

Deep dive into the digitized Domestic Science/Home Economics archival collections. In this edit-a-thon, we'll be transcribing documents, identifying people, and translating information into Wikidata. Each session will have an introduction before working with the documents, and we'll be circulating guides ahead of the session. Drop in anytime.

Deep dive into the digitized Domestic Science/Home Economics archival collections. In this edit-a-thon, we'll be transcribing documents, identifying people, and translating information into Wikidata. Each session will have an introduction before working with the documents, and we'll be circulating guides ahead of the session.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, a group of Yiddish-speaking educators, authors, and cultural leaders undertook a bold project: creating a corpus of nearly one thousand books and several periodicals, which flourished in conjunction with the secular Yiddish school systems that spanned the globe in the 1920s and 30s.

While the second law of thermodynamics states that entropy increases over time, in some systems entropy decreases in parts of the system while increasing in others. A zebra resists or exploits the second law by shunting extra entropy into its environment. Philosopher Heather Demarest (University of Colorado, Boulder)

Dr. Elias Petrou will explore the evolution and transmission of the Greek book from East to West, beginning with an overview of the Byzantine educational system, the preservation and transmission of classical Greek knowledge through manuscripts, and how this inherited book culture was transformed through the new technology of print.

Erin Brock Carlson’s research centers the relationships between place, technology, and power, focusing on how communities work together to address complex public problems through communication and community organizing. She uses community-based and participatory approaches in her research.

Chicago-based artist Oscar Joyo will discuss his vivid and colorful public murals, underscoring the purpose of art and understanding the power of art to create narratives and tell stories about the history of place, the significance of the present, and the hopes for the future. He will also share details of his local engagement with students from Stratton Elementary School

Join us for our HYBRID Brown Bag talk titled “Zhou Zuoren at Tiger Bridge” with Professor Jingling Chen from the East Asian Languages & Cultures Department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Sneakers or “kicks” hold iconic status in hip hop culture. From shell-toe Adidas to crisp Nike Air Force 1, the right pair signals style, status, and influence. Design, color, and assemble a paper replica of kicks that define hip hop in the U.S. and beyond.