General Events

In a follow up to the September 15th Facilitating Dialogue around Objects of Hate, this program examines how visual artists create works that interrogate, reimagine, or repurpose objects and imagery associated with hate.

These informal, roughly 90-minute sessions build on the main Ethos of Care workshops, giving graduate students room further develop and elaborate dialogue takeaways from main Ethos of Care sessions.

Lunch talk "Sexual Harassment and the Geography of Service Work in the US" will offer hybrid format with in-person in room 306 Coble Hall and via Zoom. Lunch provided with registration. This presentation, which is pulled from the opening chapter of working manuscript, Hands Off: A History of Fighting Back against Sexual Harassment in the American Workplace.

Friday Forum & Conversation Café: Acts of Radical Love: A Conversation with an Artist in Rebellion October 2 | 12pm-1pm | University YMCA, 1001 S Wright St, Champaign

CSGGE Lunch Series, "Gender Equity in an Inequitable Era" will host Shaimaa Khanam, Graduate Student in the Department of Communication. Her talk, "Audiences interpretations of gender problems based on Netflix show, Adolescence”, will take place on October 8th at 12pm in person at 306 Coble Hall and virtually. Lunch provided for in-person attendees.

This is a panel discussion with artists and scholars on Everett’s "Erasure." Each panelist will provide a different window into what’s beyond Erasure or what reading Erasure inspires (broadly conceived).

Join us for a conversation with current and former students who have taken active roles in community-engaged research and leadership. Three students/alums will be joined by their faculty mentors. Presented by the Center for the Study of Global Gender Equity and the Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute, this session will be facilitated by Dr. Kevin Tan (Social Work).

Join us to celebrate the new books of three history PhD alumni.

Dr. Tingting Zhang, School of Labor and Employment Relations gives lunch talk, "Pushed out and Boxed In: Gendered Silence and Exit Orientation in China's Tech Industry" on Thursday, October 15th. She argues that silence in such environment is not a uniform response to constrained institutional conditions, but it shaped by the gendered social positions workers occupy.

Professor Ángel Garcia (English/Creative Writing) will read from his latest collection, Indifferent Cities.

Professor Austin Strange is an Associate Professor at the University of Hong Kong. He will be presenting his paper titled "Is Soft Power a Zero-Sum Competition?" where he dives into the economic relations between the United States and China. Join us in David Kinley Hall Room 404 to learn more about his findings.

Friday Forum & Conversation Café: LGBTQ Advocacy: Past & Present October 16 | 12pm - 1pm | University YMCA, 1001 S Wright St, Champaign

Dr. Maria Hadjipolycarpou, Teaching Assistant Professor, Department of Classics and Director of Modern Greek Studies will give lunch talk, "Class, Gender, and Secularization in Costas Montis’ Afentis Batistas and the Other Things" on Thursday, October 22nd.

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).

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.

CSGGE Lunch Series, "Gender Equity in an Inequitable Era" will host Yeaseul Hur is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Labor and Employment Relations at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her talk, "When Women Are Ideal Workers: The Gendered Impact of Overwork on Wages and Promotion”, will take place on October 29th at 12pm in person at 306 Coble Hall and virtual.

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.

Friday Forum & Conversation Café: Fighting Oligarchy and Fascism in the 21st Century October 30 | 12pm - 1pm | University YMCA, 1001 S Wright St, Champaign

Join us for a lecture by George A. Miller Visiting Scholar Youssouf Sangaré. His talk examines the case of Chérif Ousmane Madani Haïdara and the Ançar Dine movement in Mali as a window into the dynamics of contemporary African Islam.

Despite demographic and urban decline in post-Roman Europe, the need to assemble groups of people remained strong: gatherings enabled the exchange information, attracting large numbers was a proof of legitimacy, and rulers envisioned themselves as heirs to crowd-filled ancient Rome. How can the history of the crowd a inform us about the early medieval world?

Bruce J. Tromberg, the director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering at the National Institutes of Health, will give the Beckman-Brown Lecture on Interdisciplinary Science at 3 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 4, in the auditorium of the Beckman Institute.

Translators who translate from their “first” language and into their acquired tongue have been marginalized. This talk aims to build on the work of Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour, Adrian Wanner, and others in looking at several Polish and Polish-American poets for whom literary multilingualism and translation are two sides of the same coin.

Join exhibition artists and curators of Ink Shower: Contemporary Taiwanese Artists Reimagine Tradition to gain an understanding of historical ink painting traditions and artmaking today in Taiwan.

This event will highlight the collaborative project involving Emblematica (U of I), a digital library of emblem books, and Compositor (U of Birmingham), a database of printers’ ornaments. Dr. Hazel Wilkinson hypothesizes that “emblem-literacy” caused historical readers to engage with ornamented books in ways previously unaccounted-for in scholarship.

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

Jonna Perrillo, education historian and professor of English education at the University of Texas at El Paso, will deliver the 2027 Gryphon Lecture hosted by the Center for Children's Books in the School of Information Sciences. She will present "School Book Lists and the Civic Education of U.S. Teens: from 1950 to Texas."