Campus Humanities Calendar

November 1, 2025 4-5pm - A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley: 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. Stop by the museum anytime during open hours to sign up and pick up your free book.

This talk appreciates the importance of Garveyism and the Midwest for understanding the contours, genealogies, and complexities of twentieth-century Black transnational resistance and for imagining that another world is possible in this moment of global crisis.

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).

Stephen M. Best (English, University of California, Berkeley) will deliver a lecture, titled "The Limits of Racial Critique" 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.

In Civilizing Contention, Rana B. Khoury asserts that to understand civilian and refugee activism in war, we must regard the international actors and organizations that enter the scene to help.

Anna Hunt (Professor of German) “Quick! Somebody Get Me A Doctor of German Philosophy,” HGMS workshop, English 109, 4 pm-5 pm.

This talk will trace the journeys of the artists and activists who converged at Memorial Stadium in September 1985 to make the inaugural Farm Aid concert a landmark event in the history of popular music.

Prof. Ryan Low (University of North Dakota) ~~ In fourteenth-century Provence, the volume of written contracts increased from thousands each year to million, involving even the region's most remote rural communities and serving the interests of marginalized actors, including women, peasants, and religious minorities.

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.

Drawing on original data from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project, a landmark long-term study, “Debt’s Grip” uses the words of bankruptcy filers themselves to shed light on their financial battles, making a powerful case for the U.S. to confront the structural inequities that cause so many to struggle. Join us for a panel discussion featuring bankruptcy experts and commentary

Please join us for a virtual event with Dr. Se-Mi Oh, a cultural historian of modern and contemporary Korea teaching at the University of Michigan. Her work investigates how history interacts with space in cities, through interdisciplinary approaches to history, visual/media studies, urban humanities, and art and architecture.

Join us for a lecture from Tempest Henning, an associate professor at Fisk University. She will offer a conception of Black feminist logic (BFL) that is not simply a variant of feminist logic. Rather, it is founded on distinct systems rooted in African logical traditions and manifested via the linguistic structures of African American English (AAE).

Join us for Pause + Play held in conjunction with Krannert Art Museum’s Rest Lab 8: Greenspace exhibition. Kids (ages 4–8) will dive into playful, drop-off art activities, while their caregivers get a guided tour exploring the museum's galleries and artworks on view.

Join us to celebrate Rest Lab 8: Greenspace (on view through Jan 31), with curators Kamila Glowacki and Ishita Dharap. The reception will feature live music, cupcakes, and a chance to explore all of Rest Lab’s offerings including sensory tools and a response wall.

The Annual Tagore Festival commemorates the Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore's visit to the UIUC campus in 1912 when he delivered a series of lectures at the Channing Murray Chapel. For the 2025 celebration, there will be a keynote lecture by Professor Michele Louro on “India's Anticolonial Struggle from Swadeshi to Independence".

This concert by Urbana's newest period instrument ensemble directed by Professor Emerita Charlotte Mattax Moersch, celebrates the elegance and grandeur of the French Baroque, with works by Leclair, Couperin, and Rameau.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.”

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.

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...

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)...

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...

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.

Following the wars in Vietnam, over two million people fled the country, with nearly half dying in flight. Vietnamerica follows Master Nguyen Hoa as he returns to former refugee camps in Southeast Asia after three decades abroad to search for the graves of his wife and two children.

John Levi Barnard (English, UIUC) and Pollyanna Rhee (Landscape Architecture, UIUC) will deliver lectures on the topic of Environmental Humanities as the conclusion of the Fall 2025 Modern Critical Theory Lecture Series. Please check the MCT website for the latest location updates.

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!

Join the European Union Center for the next installment in its brown-bag series: "Europe and the World Today." This event is cosponsored by the Departments of Philosophy and Political Science, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory.

The Department of Dance will present full of woe & far to go, an evening of new dances by emerging student choreographers. The concert will include works created by MFA students Paula De Oliveria E Sousa and Sophia Vangelatos as well as BFA students Jayla Anderson, Gabriella Quaresima, and Anna Brady.

Discover how to transform your research into a compelling story that communicates the significance of your work, connects with diverse audiences, and strengthens grant proposals and publications. Speakers from STEM and the Humanities will demonstrate approaches to crafting engaging, persuasive research narratives.

Join us for a Talk & Tour with Curator Maureen Warren. Gain insights about 100+ extraordinary prints—including artwork by Rembrandt, Goya, and Dürer—on display as part of Imagination, Faith, and Design: Art and Agency in European Prints, 1475–1800 (on view through February 28).

Join us for Artventures—an interactive afternoon designed for children (ages 5+) with their families and caregivers. Enjoy stories inspired by artworks on view, playful gallery exploration that connects the stories to the art, and artmaking led by guest artists.