Campus Humanities Calendar

Visiting professor Helle Strandgaard Jensen (Aarhus University) will give a brown bag lecture on the transnational history of Sesame Street. Come and learn with the Center for Children's Books!

Join us for the three days of academic discussions and cultural events at the biennial Dmytro Shtohryn International Ukrainian Studies Conference. The conference brings together Ukrainian Studies scholars and researchers across a broad spectrum of disciplines to explore the theme of Continuities and Ruptures in Ukrainian Culture and Society.

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.

On October 3, the Geography Graduate Student Association (GGSA) and the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science (GGIS) will host Dr. Rebecca Lave (Indiana University) to deliver a talk titled Critical interdisciplinarity: Our depth perception improves when we combine biophysical and social lenses. This event will be hybrid.

2nd annual Lux Veritatis Lecture with Prof. Xin Wen (Princeton) ~~ The Central Asian kingdom of Turfan clothed the bodies of the dead with used papers which reveal that an extraordinary number of travelers from all over Eurasia converged there.

Hands-on art activities for children ages 3+ and their caregivers! Throughout the galleries, enjoy art activities, family tours, and demonstrations on Saturday from 10:30 am until 12:30 pm celebrating the reinstallation of Fragmented Histories: Andean Art Before 1600.

Join us on Saturday, October 4, 2025, when we’ll be highlighting the best of the humanities on our campus, including academic departments, student groups, research, resources, and alumni stories.

Brand new books at heavily discounted prices! Including: young adult, graphic novels, middle grade, and picture books. Proceeds will go to support the Center for Children's Books and the Bulletin. The sale will run from Sunday, Oct 5th - Tuesday, Oct 7th, at various times.

Drawing on her recent book, The Heartland (an NPR best book of the year), Professor Kristin Hoganson challenges perceptions of the rural Midwest as quintessentially local prior to World War I. Her starting point is Champaign County, but the stories she has uncovered are surprisingly global in scope.

François Proulx (French & Italian, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) will deliver lecture on Post-structuralism as part of the Fall 2025 Modern Critical Theory Lecture Series. Please check the MCT website for the latest location updates.

EJP accepts applications every fall from individuals interested in working with our college-in-prison program at Danville Correctional Center, on our reentry and deportation guides, and with our policy and research team. We seek tutors, workshop instructors, and more for part-time, uncompensated roles in our vibrant learning community at the prison.

In this CAS/MillerComm talk, Professor Reyes Mason will discuss examples of climate injustice in the U.S. and abroad, then suggest ways to multi-solve the climate crisis with other societal problems, discuss strategies for action including collaborating across sectors and silos and offer touchstones of hope and joy.

Join Spurlock Museum staff as we explore erotica in our collection. Take a guided tour of some of our galleries, get a closer look at some of our artifacts, and enjoy some cupcakes. Audience: University Students/Adults

In adjacent male and female prisons, inmates communicate by "pecking" messages by hand. New prisoner Julian forges an alliance with the hot-tempered Manaury and learns to become a "woodpecker." Complications arise when Yanelly, Manaury's girlfriend, becomes more interested in communicating with Julian.

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is excited to invite you to our premiere Beyond Borders: Global Collaborations for Mental Health Research and Services Conference on October 9 and 10, 2025 in Champaign, Illinois. Coinciding with World Mental Health Day, our theme is: From local to global, encouraging creative solutions to transcultural mental health challenges.

Please join us for the University Archives' monthly Women in Science Lecture Series, Oct 9, from 12 -1 pm. Dr. Karen Terio, Professor and Interim Assistant Director of the Veterinary Diagnostic Lab and Chief of the Zoological Pathology Program, will present “Wildlife Pathology: Dead animals tell tales”

In honor of LGBTQ+ History month, come by Spurlock for guided explorations of some of our exhibits and collections that document LGBTQ+ histories and cultures. Drop in any time between 4:00 and 6:00. Free admission. Everyone is welcome.

You are invited to enter a playful, restorative greenspace inside the museum. Soft artificial turf covers the gallery floor, inviting visitors to slow down and stretch out. By creating a visual and tactile interruption in typical museum spaces, Rest Lab 8: Greenspace, provides a calm, grounding atmosphere for people to gather.

In September 1985, almost 80,000 fans packed Memorial Stadium on the UIUC campus to hear the first Farm Aid concert. Over 50 musical acts came together to raise awareness of the economic crisis facing American family farms. Our exhibit curator will offer a guided look at the exhibit commemorating Farm Aid's 40th anniversary. Free admission. No registration required.

Angelica Waner, assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese argues that Zapotec literary magazines published in Mexico City and Oaxaca across the 20th century can be read as sites of autonomy for Isthmus Zapotec intellectuals.

Sofía Zaragocín (Geography & GIS, UIUC) will deliver a lecture on Feminism (Latin America/Latinx Feminist Geographies) as part of the Fall 2025 Modern Critical Theory Lecture Series. Please check the MCT website for the latest location updates.

Media scholars John D. Peters (Yale) and Ben Peters (UTulsa) will reflect on the digital media sometimes called artificial intelligence. They will share insights from ongoing research projects, including Ben’s research on the Soviet prehistory of AI. Among his working points: AI today is Soviet and ChatGPT hallucinates because of Stalin’s homophobic purges.

Join us for a lecture in the Illinois Forum on Human Flourishing in a Digital Age Speaker Series with John Durham Peters, the María Rosa Menocal Professor of English and Professor of Film and Media Studies at Yale University.

The Center for Writing Studies is happy to host Dr. Toby Beauchamp! He will be giving a lecture titled "Embracing Trans Regret under Authoritarianism." Please join us on Thursday, October 16th!

The Center for Writing Studies will be hosting Dr. Toby Beauchamp for a brownbag talk! Dr. Beauchamp will be giving a lecture titled "Embracing Trans Regret under Authoritarianism." Please join us this week on Thursday, October 16!

An award-winning film, SHTTL (Ukraine, 2022), portrays the lives of people in a small Ukrainian Jewish town (shtetl) at the Polish border, 24 hours before the Nazi invasion. It is a touching story of a filmmaker who returns from Kyiv to his native shtetl to marry the love of his life and disrupts the balance of the entire town.

Nadine Naber (Gender and Women’s Studies, Global Asian Studies, University of Illinois Chicago) will present the lecture “Radical Mothering as Prison Abolition Pedagogy in Chicago” as part of the Story & Place event series.

This symposium will explore artistic production, practices, and the agency of printed media before 1750 as they intersect with themes of sexuality and gender. Keynote speaker will be Dr.

Japan House's Fall Open House features artists Seiran Chiba, Masaji Hashimoto, Shinya Terasawa, and Hirohisa Saito to present on Fukushima traditional arts and crafts. Japanese tea ceremonies will be offered at 11am, 12pm, 1pm, and 2pm. At 3pm, the artists will be giving a free presentation about their work.

Come experience immersive sound as you view artworks at Krannert Art Museum! Members of Improvisers Exchange Ensemble will create soundscapes within the museum through site-specific solo performance and collective improvisation in reflection and response to artwork on display. Museum visitors are invited to experience viewing the art in these sonic locations.

Join us for a free screening of the film "Black Box Diaries" followed by an in person Q&A with the filmmaker Shiori Itô. This is first AsiaLENS film of the school year hosted by CEAPS and we hope to see you there on Oct 20, 2025 (4:00-6:30 pm).

Community-Engaged Research Insights for Graduate Students: Graduate students interested in community-engaged research are invited to join a lunch and panel discussion with like-minded peers on Oct. 21, noon - 1:30 p.m. The panel of experts from Illinois and a local community organization will discuss their experience conducting community-engaged research projects.

This event is FREE. Black Box Diaries traces Itō’s courageous investigation of her own sexual assault, an improbable attempt to prosecute a high-profile offender that became a landmark case in Japan. Itô reveals the black boxes and blind spots in Japan’s judicial and social systems.

The Rural Midwest in the 1980s and After by Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, a Distinguished Professor of History at Iowa State University, where she has taught since 2000.

Each year, the Office of Civic Life coordinates the Thanksgiving Meal Drive to support the Big Give with HeartStrong Food Pantry. We are collecting items for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner that will support our goal of feeding 1000 families. Your donations are welcomed thru Friday, November 14, 2025.

Join this collaborative session with HRI and the Writers Workshop for tips and guidance on preparing your HRI Graduate Fellowship application.

Join us for a lecture in our postdoctoral colloquium series featuring Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Associate Dr. Saraí Blanco Martinez. Her talk "Radical Healing Processes of Latinx Immigrant-Origin Young People" will share about her most recent youth participatory action research collaboration, which used photovoice and plática methodologies.

During the 1930s in Sweden, indigenous Sami children were systematically removed from their parents. Reindeer-herding teenager Elle-Marja is one of these children, sent to a boarding school where indigenous students are taught Swedish language and customs and made ‘acceptable’ to white society. Elle-Marja is torn between assimilating and her burgeoning sense of self.

Scheide Librarian Emeritus (Princeton) Paul S. Needham will discuss the history and production of the Catholicon, and present his findings that it was printed not from movable type, as previously thought, but instead from two-line castings — a discovery that continues to incite vigorous discussion in the field.

Fredrik Jonsson (History, U of Chicago) proposes a fundamentally new interpretation of Britain's fossil energy economy between the first and second industrial revolutions 1750-1914.

Lecture by Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Associate Professor of History, University of Chicago. Professor Jonsson will discuss his work on some of the historical dimensions of the climate crisis.

Join John Doe, co-founder of the legendary band X, for a conversation about the band’s appearance at the inaugural Farm Aid concert in Champaign in 1985. Our conversation with John Doe will be a chance to reflect on the inaugural Farm Aid concert ...

The HRI Social Movements Reading Group will hold two sessions on higher ed labor organizing with the Campus Faculty Association on Mon Oct 27 & Mon Nov 3, 5:30-7 PM (central time) at Lincoln Hall 3057 (use one of the entrances on Wright Street). We will read excerpts from Jane McAlevey’s No Shortcuts for the first session. Light refreshments provided. You can find more in

Ayelet Tsabari’s National Jewish Book Award winning, novel, Songs for the Brokenhearted, traces the story of the history of Yemeni Israelis through a fictional family. Tsabari visited UIUC in 2019, and was interviewed for Ninth Letter.

The International and Area Studies Library, Literatures and Languages Library, Ricker Library of Architecture and Art, Music and Performing Arts Library, and History, Philosophy, and Newspaper Library invite you to our "International Studies and Humanities Meet and Greet" on Wednesday, October 29, from 3:00 to 4:00 PM, in Main Library Room 321.

How might service and volunteer work reinforce structures of inequity? Join We CU and OVCDEI on Thursday, October 30, at 5:30 PM for a workshop on centering equity and humility in service learning. This training will help you develop strategies to promote equity in your own service work, critically examine biases, and center the voices of the communities you are serving.

Join us for a spectacular evening of African and other world language(s) poetry

Are you a first-gen student interested in grad school but unsure where to start? Our group of panelists from the Department of Geography & GIScience will answer your questions and share their experiences.

Please join us for a hybrid event with Baiheng Qian, a PhD Candidate in Classical Chinese Literature at Sun Yat-sen University (Guangzhou, China). Her talk examines women's ci poetry and cultural transformation in the mid-to-late Ming dynasty (1522-1644), a period shaped by tensions between hedonistic indulgence and moral rigor.

In 1978, the tropical city-state of Singapore received three polar bears, starting a dynasty of polar bears that ended in 2018. Within the lifespan of these tropical polar bears, the planet has undergone rapid and exponential growth in economies...