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N e w s l e t t e r
Introducing the Humanities Research Institute
The Global and Its Worlds
At the Humanities Research Institute we respectfully acknowledge that we are on the lands of the Peoria, Kaskaskia, Piankashaw, Wea, Miami, Mascoutin, Odawa, Sauk, Mesquaki, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, Ojibwe and Chickasaw Nations. These Nations were forcefully removed from their traditional territories and these lands continue to carry the stories of these Nations and their struggles for survival and identity. As part of a land-grant institution, we have a particular obligation to recognize the peoples of these lands and the histories of dispossession upon which the university rests. As humanists we also recognize that the past is not past, and that no field or arena of inquiry is exempt from the responsibility of addressing the legacies of settler colonialism and its contemporary manifestations, well beyond acknowledgments such as this. Thus, this statement is also a demonstration of our ongoing commitment to supporting the work of Indigenous scholars and communities so that we are together able to envision what poet Joy Harjo (Muskogee Creek/Cherokee) calls “a map to the next world.�
Table of contents
Director’s Letter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 IPRH Becomes the Humanities Research Institute. . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 HRI Fellows, 2020–21 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Training in Digital Methods for Humanists. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Research Clusters, 2020–21 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Annual Theme 2021–22: Symptoms of Crisis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Mellon Emerging Areas in the Humanities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Humanities Without Walls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Upcoming Events. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 A Year of Creative Writers 2020–21. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Application Deadlines. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 The Year in Review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 The Odyssey Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Education Justice Project. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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National Humanities Advocacy Day. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 HRI Staff & Advisory Committee. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Giving to HRI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
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DIRECTOR’S LETTER “ I speak of change not on the surface but in the depth— change in the sense of renewal.” - James Baldwin, 1962
One of the peculiarities of the past academic year is and will always be the way memory breaks before and after COVID-19— and the way that the murder of George Floyd reset what poet Adrienne Rich called North American time and with it, global time as well. Before those world-changing tears in the fabric of our times, IPRH was immersed in its annual rhythms and tempos. Our Fellows Seminar, themeless in this cycle, gathered some of the most exciting interdisciplinary humanities work on campus. From “writing brains” to blind cinema, from histories of vision to maps of place in multiple memory-scapes, from indigeneity in Philadelphia to digital media in Manila and Los Angeles—this is just a taste of the range and creativity of research projects that generated engagement and argument in the Seminar over the course of the year. Our Research Clusters bore witness to an equally impressive variety of creative initiatives. Two of these, Community Healing and Resistance through Storytelling (C-HeARTS) and Medical Humanities, were addressing the social, political, racial and affective aspects of the biomedical long before the 2020 pandemic threw these dimensions of health and well-being into such bold and devastating relief. Nor was undergraduate research far from our minds this past year. We began in August with a faculty/staff retreat, in collaboration with the Office of Undergraduate Research, designed to showcase models for humanities research and to explore how we should shape a future of undergraduate research that re-centers the importance of the humanities in 21st century undergraduate education at Illinois. A faculty working group ensued, which met valiantly through the spring and generated talking points and models we plan to socialize more broadly in the coming year. And thanks to the generosity of several donors, we had several undergraduate interns working in the office—one of whom, Issy Marquez, traveled to Washington, D.C. with a cohort of Illinois faculty for National Humanities Advocacy Day (see page 22). Our programming this past year was more collaborative than ever, starting with Urbana native and world-acclaimed drag queen Sasha Velour, who came to campus in September through the combined support of the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts (KCPA), the department of Theatre, the Center for Advanced Study and IPRH. In addition to debuting her new show, “Smoke and Mirrors,” at KCPA and speaking in various school settings in town, Sasha held over 50 undergraduates in rapt conversation during an Inside Scoop at Levis, coorganized with the LGBT Resource Center. There, students from Theatre and Music and English and beyond had the
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HRI 2020 NEWSLETTER
chance to hear her talk about growing up queer in East Central Illinois and about drag as methodology. Sasha was the first of three successive Inside Scoop lunches, the second with community activist, writer and filmmaker Satsuki Ina, whose visit and screening of And Then They Came for Us and talk in collaboration with Asian-American Studies brought the history of Japanese-American internment home, and into the same frame as contemporary immigration debates, in vivid and memorable ways. Last but not least, undergraduates were treated to an hour of conversation with Anna Deveare Smith in our February Inside Scoop. She held us spellbound through her frank and unflinching discussion of being an African American woman artist in these times, as she had the night before during her performance at KCPA and the evening after during a Culture Talk event with composer Julia Wolfe and the College of Fine and Applied Arts’ own Lisa Gaye Dixon. Through these and other spring events, momentum was gathering when the pandemic hit and Illinois effectively shut down in midMarch. Most disappointing was the ramp-up, already begun with Deveare Smith, to our Year of Creative Writers 2020, a showcase of brilliant Luis Urrea artists slated to come to campus across the whole calendar year. We were just able to hear a joint reading by Luis Urrea and Meagan Cass, our talented colleagues from University of Illinois Chicago and University of Illinois Springfield respectively, at the Urbana Free Library and the Illini Union Bookstore, before campus was peremptorily closed.
“ The reading corner in the bookstore was full to the brim with students, and Luis and Meagan were both luminous. It’s a memory of what seems like another life at this distance and it therefore burns especially bright.” Though we’ve had to reschedule most of our Year of Creative Writers events (see page 17), we are planning to carry on with several public readings this academic year, including a residency by Pulitzer-Prize winner Tyehimba Jess this coming April. Meanwhile, our collaboration with Professor Janice Harrington and the Creative Writing Program in this project, which is funded by the Presidential Initiative Celebrating the
Impact of the Arts and Humanities, continues to be a highlight in these dark times. As the pandemic bore down and we were lucky enough to be able to work from home during the last half of the spring semester, we kept focused on the very real human suffering brought on and exacerbated by COVID-19, generating a long list of local, national, regional and international organizations through which IPRH friends and colleagues could learn about and help those who needed it. We also kept our Odyssey students’ education going remotely, thanks to the hard work of our faculty and staff and the determination of the students themselves. Meanwhile, it’s not too much to say that humanists tend to study “underlying conditions” if not also co-morbidities, and that many among our Fellows and Research Cluster leaders past and present have had a lot to say across a range of social media about the importance of Race, Place and the Politics of history, literature, the medical Census panel humanities, critical race studies and more for understanding the current crises. The murder of George Floyd serves as an index for the killing of so many Black Americans before and after May 2020; his death will long be remembered as inaugurating one of the most convulsive moments in world history. The relationship between anti-Black racism in this country and public health is clearly no mere metaphor—as many of our Black colleagues and colleagues of color at Illinois have been researching, writing, teaching and agitating about for many years. The work of the humanities has been a fulcrum for both studying and acting on these issues. Yet humanists are not exempt from critique and humanism is not self-evidently anti-racist.
“ What’s called for is a new, newly vocational commitment to rethinking the humanities as an institutional practice dedicated to ending racism, and all forms of erasure and exclusion and violence, now.” If the future of anti-racism is here, the timing of change is unpredictable. As many of you know, in June the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) relaunched as the Humanities Research Institute (HRI). This was a process long in the planning, from approval by the Academic Senate and the Board of Trustees to official recognition by the Illinois Board of Higher Education. This new status brings us into line with other campus institutes—and would not have been possible without the support of the Offices of the Provost and the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation, to whom we are very grateful. For more on HRI and our advancement to institute status, see page 5. More good news followed in midsummer, when Humanities Without Walls—now a 16-partner consortium funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and headquartered at HRI—was renewed at $5 million for another five years (see page 13). This most recent Mellon grant
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
followed on our receipt of a grant, also from Mellon, for our Interseminars initiative in interdisciplinary graduate training awarded this past fall (see page 4). If the summer of 2020 is a sobering moment for such re-starts, it’s also an opportunity to recommit to first principles: to insist on the urgency and indispensability of a critical humanities framework —socially just and racially equitable by design—as the sine qua non of any and all projects aimed at shaping what is here and what is to come. Our programming this coming year is organized in part around our annual theme, The Global and its Worlds, in collaboration with the newly established Illinois Global Institute, with support from director Jerry Davila and Professor Colleen Murphy. This seems an uncannily opportune moment to scrutinize the global and to ask what it can, does and should mean now, and for whom. Our theme-related fall talks include one on the white settler colonial context of the pandemic in New Zealand by Tony Ballantyne and another by Arjun Appadurai on the markets for globalization. In a spirit of openness, even and especially in a pandemic, the Fellows Seminar will welcome participants beyond the Fellows themselves (via yearlong preregistration) for the first time in its twenty three-year history, albeit remotely on Zoom. We continue to work with campus and community partners—PYGMALION and WGGP again, and American Indian Studies—to sponsor programming that trains the energetic and critical eye of interdisciplinary humanities scholars on topics like COVID responses across the Gioconda Guerra Perez, International world and the work of the land Women’s Day Celebration acknowledgement statement. And while our Mellon-funded Environmental Humanities research group, led these last two years by Professor Bob Morrissey of History, has concluded, the impact of the programming they did and the campus-wide conversations they hosted lives on in Defining Environments, a publication of undergraduate research essays in environmental humanities, produced when an in-person symposium became an impossibility, and Flatland, an online publication of the 201819 group’s essays on that theme. (For more about the group’s work, see page 11.) As well, Bob and Pollyanna Rhee, who has been a Mellon Environmental Humanities Post-Doctoral Fellow and is now our colleague in Landscape Architecture, will be leading a Research Cluster that continues to focus on environmental issues in the humanities and related fields. This fall marks the start of a new two-year theme under the auspices of that same Mellon initiative, Emerging Areas in the Humanities: Legal Humanities. Led by Professor A. Naomi Paik, Legal Humanities recognizes law as both reflecting and actively influencing societal values, aspirations, anxieties, biases and notions of justice. Naomi has assembled a research team and will lead off with a virtual lecture featuring Dima Khalidi, founder and director of Palestine Legal and Cooperating Counsel with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), followed later in the semester by a screening and discussion with the filmmakers of The Infiltrators. Keep your eye peeled too for our “Out of Isolation” series, where we ask scholars to help us understand how the pandemic
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must be recontextualized in a variety of ways lest we see it as disconnected from human-designed, most often racially inequitable, conditions. We plan, too, to support emerging events organized by colleagues near and far that contribute to real, lasting change so that Illinois can be rebuilt more justly, once and for all. Who are we in solidarity with in 2020? And how can renewal be change, not on the surface but in the depth?
“ The questions we ask and the changes we aim for can and must be built on humanities research: the “R” of the new HRI.” Whether you are reading about us for the first time or have known about us for several decades, I hope you will consider supporting our work as we face the challenges to come. For more on how you can support HRI in the moment of its launch, see page 24. With many of our events planned as remote ones for the coming academic year, you have a chance to tune in to some of them via Zoom. As always, our calendar on pages 14-15 unfolds a more complete list of what 2020–21 has in store. If you haven’t seen our new website or signed up for our listserv, you can check it out at hri.illinois.edu. Join us as we head with
renewed determination and purpose into the unforeseeable future. I can’t end without acknowledging the amazing, talented and hardworking staff at HRI, who are the ones who keep everything running and allow HRI to serve humanities research, both out in front and behind the scenes, at Illinois. To Stephanie, Jason, Jenna, Alaina, Erin, Michelle and especially Nancy—thank you. While they have since moved on to new opportunities, I also want to acknowledge Carolyn Randolph and Jen Hood for their invaluable contributions to HRI’s success. Without you there is no surface or depth, let alone renewal. I hope that you and yours are safe and sound, and that we can meet in person before too long. All the best,
Antoinette Burton Professor of History Swanlund Endowed Chair Director, Humanities Research Institute
Interseminars Initiative to Launch in 2021 HRI was awarded a $2 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to fund the new Interseminars initiative, which is designed to build communities of inquiry among graduate students and faculty at Illinois around emerging research directions in the interdisciplinary humanities and arts. In the process, Interseminars will help to prepare graduate students to be adept at both navigating and actively shaping the kind of higher education landscapes and cultures they want to see in the 21st century. The initiative will also support interdisciplinary approaches to research and teaching with a diverse graduate student population at the forefront. The design for Interseminars is the result of a year of planning by faculty and graduate students who were influenced by elements of INTERSECT, an earlier pilot program funded by the Graduate College from 2012 to 2017. Although originally slated to begin in 2020, because of COVID-19 delays, the initiative will begin accepting applications in fall 2021.
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HRI 2020 NEWSLETTER
IPRH Advances to Institute Status as THE Humanities Research Institute “ Humanists are many things. We are teachers, we engage with a variety of audiences, and we are also researchers and scholars in the most imaginative and transformative ways.” - Antoinette Burton, HRI director
In a milestone moment for the humanities at the University of Illinois, the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) has officially advanced to institute status with a new name: The Humanities Research Institute (HRI). More than a year in the making, the change was made official by the Illinois Board of Higher Education in June. HRI’s roots run deep in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, where it was initially established as IPRH in 1997. The physical locations and administrative organization have changed over the decades, from the first office at Oregon St. to Pennsylvania Ave., and on to the current space at Levis Faculty Center (and now the virtual realm of Zoom and home offices during the pandemic). Five directors have shaped the institute’s trajectory over twenty-three years, including a shift to the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation in 2015, placing humanities research among U of I’s campus-level institutes. With a new name comes a renewed sense of purpose to build upon the world-class accomplishments of Illinois’ faculty and students, to push the boundaries of research in the humanities and to provide a forum for bold ideas not only on the Urbana
campus, but nationally and internationally as well. HRI is committed to supporting and helping to develop the humanities research ecosystem, with faculty and graduate fellowships at the heart of all we do. Over the life of the institute, HRI has funded more than 300 campus fellowships and more than 40 interdisciplinary research clusters. With the advancement to institute status, HRI has also received increased funding to expand graduate fellowship stipends and to allow for additional staffing and research initiatives. Shortly after the launch of HRI, the Humanities Without Walls (HWW) consortium was awarded a grant renewal from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to bolster its vital work in interinstitutional research and career diversity programming. As Vice Chancellor Susan Martinis stated, “The timing of this wonderful news, so soon after we announced the campuswide Humanities Research Institute at Illinois, underscores our belief that humanities scholarship is at the very heart of the 21st century public research university.”
Building bridges between communities: Over the last twenty-three years, HRI has hosted nearly 400 events, many of which are open to the public. Top: Juan Felipe Herrera, Claudia Rankine, Justin Copeland and Janice Harrington. Bottom: Audience at David Harvey’s 2012 lecture at Foellinger Auditorium.
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The Global and its Worlds HRI Faculty Fellows, 2020–21 Zsuzsa Gille Sociology
“The New Globals: Anthropocene and Capitalocene”
Carl Niekerk Germanic Languages and Literatures “Enlightenment Anthropology”
Makoto Harris Takao Music
“Of Mission and Music: Japanese Christianity and Its Reflection in Early Modern Europe”
Waïl S. Hassan
Gian Piero Persiani
Robert Tierney
“Arab Brazil: Literature, Culture, and Orientalism”
“Locating the Global: Vernacularization and Sino-Japanese Cultural Diglossia in Japan 900-1100 CE”
“Importing Democracy to East Asia”
Comparative and World Literature / English
Harriet Murav
Comparative and World Literature / Slavic Languages and Literatures “Archive of Violence: The Literature of Abandonment and the Russian Civil War (1917-1922)”
East Asian Languages and Cultures
East Asian Languages and Cultures / Comparative and World Literature
Ragdale Residential Creative Fellow Amy Hassinger
Creative Writing, English Is the search for joy in the face of global climate disruption and anthropogenic extinction pure privileged self-indulgence? Or might it also benefit the collective? Might it help move us, individually and communally, through environmental grief toward productive action? During her time at Ragdale, Amy Hassinger will be plumbing these questions as she works on her book-length lyric essay They Could Sing, which explores, via memoir, research-based inquiry, and lyrical meditation three main themes: jazz singing, climate apocalypse and the pursuit of joy.
Mellon Public Humanities Fellow Kelli McQueen Music
Kelli McQueen, who will serve in residence with the Odyssey Project, is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology and medieval studies. She holds a master’s degree in library and information science and a Master of Music from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her research interests include medieval poetry and song, the history of musical notation, and gendered organology. She enjoys playing viola, fiddle, finger-style guitar and other period string instruments like the lute and viola da gamba. She often performs with the Flatland Consort for the Central Illinois English Country Dancers.
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HRI Graduate Student Fellows, 2020–21 Olivia Hagedorn
Gonzalo Pinilla Gomez
“‘Call me African’: Black Women and Diasporic Cultural Feminism in Chicago, 1930-1980”
“Public Aesthetics and Collaborative Studio Practices in South America, 1960s-1970s”
Ji Hyea Hwang
Nubras Samayeen
History
Comparative and World Literature “Transcolonial Nationhood: Global Interplay in Irish and Korean National Theatre”
Elizabeth Matsushita History
“Disharmony of Empire: Race and the Making of Modern Musicology in Colonial North Africa”
Art History
Landscape Architecture
“‘An Architecture of the Land’—The National Assembly Building Complex in Dhaka, Bangladesh”
Anthropology
“Worldly Ecologies: Landscape, History, and Environmental Politics on Jeju Island”
Naomi Taub English
“Distant Proximities: Whiteness and Worldedness in Contemporary Jewish Literature”
Summer Faculty Research Fellows Jose Atiles Sociology
“Puerto Rico is Open for Business: Exceptionality, Financialization and Colonialism”
Carolyn Fornoff
Spanish and Portuguese “Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Culture in the Era of Climate Change”
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Jeongsu Shin
Honaida Ahyad
Linguistics / Translation Studies Translation of Manahil Sindi’s novel Nisf Estiwa (Half-Cooked), from Makkan into English
Craig Koslofsky History
“The Deep Surface: Skin in the Early Modern World, 14501750”
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Training in Digital Methods for Humanists Over the 2019–20 academic year, Training in Digital Methods for Humanists (TDMH) brought in its second cohort, continuing to serve as a bridge between humanists all over campus and the units providing methodological training in the digital domain. TDMH offers workshops and activities designed to generate interdisciplinary scholarly exchange as fellows develop proficiency in digital methods, leading to new research initiatives and teaching agendas in their home units. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, fellows in the 2019–20 cohort will delay travel activities until summer 2021. The third TDMH cohort (see below) was welcomed with a virtual orientation in May. Other new additions to the program include recent TDMH fellow Clare Crowston (History), who has returned as a member of the TDMH Working Group, and Eduardo Ledesma (Spanish & Portuguese) and Ned O’Gorman (Communication), who will serve as TDMH mentors. We are also excited that two postdoctoral fellows, Anna Torres-Cacoullos and Brooklyne Gipson, will be participating in TDMH activities as part of the American Council of Learned Societies/DRIVE fellowship program, hosted by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. We must also report the bittersweet news that TDMH Project Manager Carolyn Randolph has left HRI to begin a new role in the College of Fine and Applied Arts. We are grateful for her leadership and dedication, which certainly shaped TDMH into the successful program it has become. Judith Pintar (Information Sciences) has graciously agreed to lead TDMH in the coming academic year. She’ll be assisted by Saniya Ghanoui, a Ph.D. student in the department of History. To learn more about this initiative, visit go.illinois.edu/TDMH.
Training in Digital Methods for Humanists Faculty Fellows, 2020–21 Tamara Chaplin
John Randolph
Tamara Chaplin will be using the fellowship to acquire the screenwriting and film editing skills needed to write a documentary script and produce a fiveminute promotional reel based on the raw footage she shot while researching her forthcoming book (now under contract with University of Chicago Press).
Historians increasingly use digitized versions of historical records in their teaching and research. As a TDMH Fellow, John Randolph will be pursuing advanced training in digital archiving and publishing to help him build digital documentary editing into humanities courses at Illinois.
Josue David Cisneros
Dustin Tahmahkera
Josue David Cisneros’ project focuses on activist art in the immigrant justice movement, including visual images, stories and memes. In addition to analyzing this artivism, the project also aims to trace its spread, circulation, uptake and appropriation/remixing on social media.
As a TDMH Fellow, Dustin Tahmahkera will be training in digital music production and cross-genre sampling to construct an experimental research soundtrack—ranging from historical recordings of Native elders and homelands to traditional powwow songs and alternative folk music— for his manuscript and digital site “Becoming Sound” on aural approaches to cultural well-being.
Brooklyne Gipson
Anna Torres-Cacoullos
Brooklyne Gipson’s research focuses on the intersections of race and digital technology—especially the utility of social media and other digital tools in facilitating or inhibiting grassroots organization and civic engagement amongst traditionally marginalized groups.
Anna Torres-Cacoullos’ project seeks to capitalize on digital humanities methodologies in data visualization and data mining as innovative tools for an emerging digital film forensics. In the study of early cinema, this opens the way to reconfiguring moving image media by visualizing them in new ways.
History
Communication
Communication
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HRI 2020 NEWSLETTER
History
American Indian Studies
Spanish and Portuguese
Research Clusters 2020–21 AI & Society: Privacy, Ethics and (Dis)Information
Medical Humanities
Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, Library / Information Sciences Yang Wang, Information Sciences
Andrew Gaedtke, English Stephanie Hilger, Germanic Languages and Literatures Justine S. Murison, English Cosponsored by the Carle Illinois College of Medicine
Community Research Cooperative: Methodologies for Research Justice
Problems in Decolonizing Academia
Anita Say Chan, Information Sciences / Media Rachel Magee, Information Sciences Gilberto Rosas, Anthropology / Latina/o Studies Karen Rodriguez’G, Office of Undergraduate Research Adrian Wong, ICR
Faye Harrison, African American Studies / Anthropology Cameron McCarthy, EPOL / ICR Esther Ngumbi, Entomology / African American Studies Ken Salo, Urban and Regional Planning Krystal Smalls, Anthropology / Linguistics
Critical Practice in Text Data Minings
Because COVID-19 affected research activities in spring 2020, several 2019-20 research clusters teams will continue to be active this year. See our website for the most up-todate event information.
Spencer D.C. Keralis, Library
Environmental Humanities Robert Morrissey, History Pollyanna Rhee, Landscape Architecture
Annual Theme 2021–22: Symptoms of Crisis Symptoms are, most obviously, indicators of disease: recurrent evidence of the susceptibility of mind, body or spirit to break down—or at the very least, to a departure from “the norm.” But they are also signs of system failure, manifestations of structural instability, features of compromised organisms and omens of crisis at both the material and metaphorical level. As portents and clues, symptoms may be more or less welcome, more or less visible, more or less readable as signs of crisis depending on what and whom they threaten to reveal, and when. The symptom can be a warning but it can also be a trickster, diverting attention toward effects and away from underlying conditions and states of emergency both longstanding and in the process of becoming. At the very least, symptoms throw assumptions about what’s normal into chaotic relief, often at multiple scales. Reading for symptoms is, arguably, a characteristic feature of contemporary humanities thinking: a way of interpreting underlying suppositions and even repressed intentions, whether up close or from a distance. It has become a form of investigation and diagnosis, if not of prognostication as well. In some quarters of the humanities, reading for signs as a form of critique has reached its limit. As method, it has come itself to be seen as symptomatic of larger crises of modernity, postcolonialism and now, perhaps, post-globalism as well. Do we need new interpretive practices for reading symptoms? For assessing what counts as a symptom, for whom and under what conditions? For rethinking immunity? For engaging the temporalities of crisis? Or is the symptom a red herring, a distraction from other modes of seeing and interpreting and acting? HRI welcomes applications from all disciplines and departments with a research interest in humanities and humanitiesinflected scholarship. HRI is especially interested in fostering interdisciplinary work, both within the humanistic disciplines, and between the humanities and the arts. For terms and full eligibility and application guidelines, please visit go.illinois. edu/campusfellows. Applications are due December 4, 2020.
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EMERGING AREAS IN THE HUMANITIES In 2015, (then) IPRH received a grant of $2,050,000 from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the development of emerging areas in the humanities. The grant sponsors faculty, post-doctoral and pre-doctoral fellowships, as well as undergraduate internships, to form three robust, inter-generational research groups—in Bio-Humanities, Environmental Humanities and Legal Humanities—to run consecutively until 2022. These groups model multi-disciplinary collaborations and develop new curricular opportunities for undergraduates on campus. The final group, Legal Humanities, launches this fall 2020.
Andrew W. Mellon Legal Humanities Research Group HRI is pleased to introduce below the members of the newly constituted Mellon Legal Humanities Research Group, the final Mellon Emerging Areas research group, which commences this year. Please see the calendar of events on pages 14–15 for an exciting slate of Legal Humanities related programming. And do keep an eye out for the undergraduate Legal Humanities courses developed this year and slated to launch in fall 2021.
A. Naomi Paik
Sabeen Ahmed
Beverly Fok
Faculty Fellow
Post-Doctoral Fellow
Post-Doctoral Fellow
PhD, Philosophy, Vanderbilt University, 2020
PhD, Anthropology, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, 2020
Asian American Studies
Director of the Legal Humanities Research Group
“Against the Exception: A Juridical Genealogy of the Racial Order of Things”
Brenda Gisela Garcia
Silvia Escanilla Huerta
Pre-Doctoral Fellow
Pre-Doctoral Fellow
Anthropology
“NecroSecurity: Youth, Death and Life in the State of Right”
History
“A Fragmented Sovereignty. Indigenous People, War and Political Change in the Process of Independence in the Viceroyalty of Peru (1783–1828)”
Undergraduate Interns Buthaina Hattab, Political Science | Maria T. Martinez, English | Adem Osmani, Political Science
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HRI 2020 NEWSLETTER
“Chattel Land: A Labor Perspective”
Environmental Humanities at Illinois 2019–20 marked the final year of the Mellon Environmental Humanities Research Group, and under the leadership of director and faculty fellow Robert Morrissey (History), the collective undertook another engaging slate of events and activities. Among these were their vibrant contributions to the campus curriculum: Professor Morrissey and PostDoctoral Fellows Leah Aronowsky and Pollyanna Rhee taught environmental humanities courses they’d spent the year prior developing, and which were offered in collaboration with the Campus Honors Program. Professor Morrissey’s “Wilderness in American Culture,” and Dr. Aronowsky’s “The Politics of Nature,” ran in the fall. Dr. Rhee’s “American Wastelands” ran in the spring semester, wherein Professor Morrissey also adapted History 202: “American Environmental History” for online teaching, with support from the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning. Taking up the prior 2018–19 cohort’s exploration of the idea of “flatland” (whose related online publication you can now access at flatlandproject.web.illinois.edu), the 2019–20 research group styled itself as the “Flatland Lab of the Environmental Humanities” and launched an investigation of “experimental environments,” taking a critical lens to the laboratory model to think about its value for collaborative, interdisciplinary knowledge production in the environmental humanities. In the spirit of the environmental humanities’ own commitment to inhabiting a space of both critique and action, their conversations were oriented toward constructive interventions, and they invited speakers who offered perspectives on their own experimental approaches. The year brought a number of speakers, a collaborative event with Krannert Art Museum’s “Hot Spots” exhibition, and a symposium in March, “Experimental Environments” (see p. 19 for highlights). The symposium was one of the last few events on campus before the university went remote in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. As a result, the interns’ long-planned undergraduate research symposium was, regrettably, canceled. Instead, they demonstrated great fortitude and improvisational skills, and channeled their energies into a publication titled “Defining Environments: Critical Studies in the Natural World,” which features their research and five of their slated fellow presenters’ essays. Defining Environments went to press this summer, and you can view a digital copy at go.illinois.edu/EHBook. HRI congratulates interns Alaina Bottens, Sarah Gediman and Amanda Watson on producing an impressive showcase of undergraduate research in the environmental humanities. Surely this is just a taste of the many successes that lie in their future. Indeed, a bright future beckons for all the members of the research group: Dr. Aronowsky will take up a three-year appointment to the prestigious Society of Fellows at Columbia University this fall, and Dr. Rhee joins the U of I’s Department of Landscape Architecture as an Assistant Professor. Pre-Doctoral Fellow Jessica Landau defended her Ph.D. in Art History this summer and is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Art History and Museum Studies at the University of Pittsburgh this fall. Pre-doctoral fellow Douglas Jones continues his Ph.D. studies in History and has been awarded a Dibner Research Fellowship in the History of Science and Technology at The Huntington Library. HRI wishes the best to the departing fellows and interns as they embark on new ventures, and extends its thanks to Professor Morrissey for his invaluable leadership these past two years. The campus has the great benefit of his continued advocacy in this arena, when he and, now, Professor Rhee will keep the activities of the Environmental Humanities Working Group and its curricular ambitions—commenced under the auspices of the Mellon Emerging Areas grant—going, now as an HRI Research Cluster. Stay tuned for what the next chapter holds!
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Humanities Without Walls The last year has been an interesting one, filled with challenges and trials that will shape research and graduate education for the coming decade and beyond, in ways anticipated and otherwise. As Humanities Without Walls (HWW) enters this next decade, we anticipate facing these challenges with the collaborative methodologies we have developed and insights we have gained. Thanks to the ongoing generosity of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we recently received $5 million in funding that will support our efforts for another five years as we expand our experiments in graduate career development into virtual spaces and bring a heightened awareness of the scourge of anti-Black racism to all our myriad efforts. Reflecting on the last six years, it is clear that HWW’s efforts have always included an implicit awareness of these challenges and of the inequitable ways in which they are distributed across our society. Two-time HWW Grand Research Challenge PI Rachel Havrelock and her collaborator Kathleen Blackburn made this point in their February 25, 2020 essay in Belt Magazine: “Humans experience distinct forms of waste whose toxicity varies according to race and social class. The wealthier you are the less waste you confront, despite the fact that you likely generate more through higher levels of consumption.” Another HWW PI, Patrick Jagoda, was selected for a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Humanities in part because of his multidisciplinary research on histories of violence and futures of health on Chicago’s South Side. Our summer 2019 Pre-Doctoral Career Diversity Workshop has already had an impact on its participants, as several of them have gone on to tenure-track faculty positions, Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowships, and prestigious postdocs. Fortuitously we did not have a summer workshop scheduled for the summer of 2020, and so there were no emergency Zoom meetings to work out last-minute alternatives in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and its cancellation of the quotidian details of daily life we had heretofore taken for granted. HWW is presently rethinking every aspect of our workshops. Given that collaboration is at the heart of Humanities Without Walls, we plan to survey our fellows and research partners so that we can adapt our approaches as we move into “the new normal” of the third decade of the 21st century. With this spirit of collaboration in mind, it is timely to note that key elements in the next HWW Grand Research Challenge, and in the constitution of HWW itself moving forward, are the interrelated notions of “redistribution” and “reciprocity.” It is our intention that these powerful ideas will spur a host of innovations in collaborative humanities research, including more public-facing work, greater involvement of community partners, and increased funding of and collaboration with smaller, less well-resourced institutions of higher education. It is also our hope that these ideas will play whatever small part in constructing a more just and equitable society for all of us. We have also recognized that career development in graduate education is a domain that current faculty do not feel adequately prepared to address, given their own lack of expertise in the area, and so HWW plans to develop short, intensive workshops for faculty and staff in the humanities that will allow us to share the lessons we have learned, reveal unforeseen challenges and opportunities and provide space for long overdue conversations. As always, we encourage you to visit our website, humanitieswithoutwalls.illinois.edu, to learn more about our Fellows and our research projects.
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HRI 2020 NEWSLETTER
Mellon Grant Renews Consortium, Expands Membership In June, the University of Illinois was awarded a $5 million, five-year grant renewal from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for Humanities Without Walls. “The decision by the Mellon Foundation to award the renewal of the Humanities without Walls initiative represents the ultimate (left) Career Diversity Workshop 2019 vote of confidence in our Humanities (right) Andreea Micu, Antoinette Burton, Megan Stielstra, and Jason Mierek. Research Institute,” said Chancellor Robert J. Jones. “HRI has been the headquarters of this program since its beginning and we’re very proud to have it remain here. This is a powerful testament to the institute’s national impact and leadership in cross-institutional cooperation and innovative humanities research practices.” The five-year grant renewal includes the addition of Marquette University to the consortium and a number of initiatives guided by the core values of reciprocity and redistribution. “Embedding reciprocal structures and practices in diverse and inclusive intellectual projects is key to the longrange transformations of academic culture in the humanities to which HWW aspires,” said HRI director and HWW principal investigator Antoinette Burton. “This means modeling best practices of diversity and equity through collaboration and interdisciplinarity not just at scale, but by design—purpose-built to address contemporary challenges not only with knowledge, but with methods aimed at changing how we think about and do the work in the world for which humanists are urgently needed.” The renewed grant provides increased funding to research teams and supports the continuation of summer workshops for pre-doctoral humanities students that began in 2015. Since its inception, HWW has awarded 39 unique research grants to teams in the consortium and graduated more than 140 students from the annual career diversity workshop. While the newest research initiative will be themeless, the first two initiatives were themed as “The Global Midwest” and “The Work of the Humanities in a Changing Climate.” University of Illinois History Professor John Randolph is principal investigator on the climate-related team “The Classroom and the Future of the Historical Record,” which includes members from the University of NebraskaLincoln and Michigan State. Through this initiative, faculty and students are exploring the challenge of adapting the practice of history for the digital age. In addition to developing data science skills, participants are working on a program in digital documentary publishing called SourceLab. “Having humanists from multiple institutions share ideas and conduct related initiatives over a period of time makes it possible to think broadly about big problems,” said Randolph. “Rarely do individual departments or universities have the kind of resources it takes to seed that kind of work. Through HWW, it’s possible to chart out new directions by involving students in the exploring.” In addition to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Humanities Without Walls consortium includes 15 other institutions that belong to the Big Ten Academic Alliance—Indiana University, newest partner Marquette University, Michigan State University, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Penn State University, Purdue University, as well as the universities of Chicago, Illinois at Chicago, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska and Wisconsin-Madison—plus the University of Notre Dame. The consortium was initially funded in 2014 with a $3 million grant from the Mellon Foundation and was renewed in 2016 with an additional $4.2 million.
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2020–21 Calendar of Events
2020 27 Career Diversity Supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
“The Volatile Market for Globalization”
10 Out of Isolation
Cosponsored by the Illinois Global Institute.
Jenny Davis
Worlds
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Indicators Presentation
History, The University of Otago
Robert Townsend
“Beyond the Shadow of Empire? The state, mobility and difference in New Zealand’s COVID-19 response”
Director of the Humanities Indicators & Director of Washington Office, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
22 Out of Isolation
Cosponsored by HWW.
Series
“How Do We Survive, Resist, and Heal Oppressive Realities?” C-HeARTS Research Cluster Carla D. Hunter (Psychology) and Nkechinyelum Chioneso (Psychology, Florida A&M University).
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NOVEMBER
2 Global and Its
Tony Ballantyne
HRI 2020 NEWSLETTER
“Translational Humanities for Public Health”
Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University
9 Legal Humanities
Worlds
A Year of Creative Writers at Illinois; cosponsored by the Creative Writing Program, English.
English and Medical Humanities, Rice University
Arjun Appadurai
OCTOBER
17 Global and Its
Kirsten Ostherr
Humanities
Supported by the Presidential Initiative to Celebrate the Impact of the Arts and Humanities, the Medical Humanities Research Cluster and the good offices of Dr. Dan Shin, Class of 1991.
SEPTEMBER
Supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Daniel Borzutzky and Christopher Grimes Program for Writers, University of Illinois at Chicago
HWW Alumni Panel
Director, Palestine Legal & Cooperating Counsel, Center for Constitutional Rights
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Exchange
AUGUST
Dima Khalidi
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Daniel Borzutzky and Christopher Grimes Program for Writers, University of Illinois at Chicago A Year of Creative Writers at Illinois. Hosted by the Urbana Free Library.
Series
15 Legal Humanities The Infiltrators Directors Cristina Ibarra and Alex Rivera discuss their film. Links provided for prior asynchronous viewing of film.
22 Out of Isolation Rachel Havrelock English, University of Illinois at Chicago “Washing with No Water: Environmental Justice, Deregulation and Climate Change Amidst a Pandemic” Cosponsored by HWW.
Anthropology and American Indian Studies, Chancellor’s Fellow for Indigenous Research “Manifesting Pandemic Destiny: Parsing the Tense and Aspect of Settler Immunopolitics in Indian Country”
DECEMBER
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2020 WORK-IN
Jenny Davis Anthropology and American Indian Studies, Chancellor’s Fellow for Indigenous Research “So You Read the Land Acknowledgment Statement: Now What?” Pre-registration required. Cosponsored by Office of the Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion and AIS.
Please note that most HRI events will be held virtually this fall. For the most-up-to-date event and registration information, visit hri.illinois.edu.
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3 Legal Humanities Behrouz Boochani Kurdish-Iranian journalist, human rights defender, writer and film producer.
2021 FEBRUARY
3 Out of Isolation Jonathan Inda Latina/o Studies
Cris Mazza, Christina Pugh
4 Out of Isolation
Program for Writers, University of Illinois at Chicago
History, University of Illinois at Chicago
A Year of Creative Writers at Illinois; cosponsored by the Creative Writing Program, English.
“How to Have History in a Syndemic: Lessons from HIV/AIDS and COVID-19”
24 Legal Humanities
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Forced Migration Panel Shahram Khosravi (Anthropology, Stockholm University), Maurice Stierl (Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick) and Martina Tazzioli (Politics and International Relations, Goldsmiths University) Supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
“Infectious Detention: Migrants, Covid-19, and the Racial Politics of Health”
25 Global and Its
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Panelists include Howard Chiang (History, University of California, Davis), Việt Lê (Visual Studies, California College of the Arts), Gayatri Reddy (Anthropology, University of Illinois at Chicago), and Shilpa Menon and Themal Ellawala (graduate students, University of Illinois at Chicago).
Amna Akbar and Jackie Wang Dialogue Law, The Ohio State University; Culture and Media, The New School Supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
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MARCH
Worlds
Queering Global Asias
Its Worlds
Pivoting: International Graduate Research in the Humanities in the Time of COVID-19
Jennifer Brier
Women’s Day Celebration
Co-hosted by the Women & Gender in Global Perspectives Program.
26-27Conference Planetarity Organized by the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory.
APRIL
6-8 Reading Tyehimba Jess Residency English, College of Staten Island Part of A Year of Creative Writers at Illinois; cosponsored by the Creative Writing Program, Department of English.
11-13 The Global
and Its Worlds
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From Here Director Christina Antonakos-Wallace and two of the film’s subjects, Sonny and Tania, to discuss the documentary From Here. Cosponsored by IGI.
22 Legal Humanities Leti Volpp Law, University of California, Berkeley Supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
26 Odyssey Project Presentations
Part of Undergraduate Research Week. Supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
30 Legal Humanities Undergraduate Research Symposium Part of Undergraduate Research Week. Supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
MAY
6 Prizes for Research Ceremony & Reception
Next Year in the Caribbean Conference Organized and cosponsored by JCS.
Cosponsored by REEEC.
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2020 HRI looks forward to continuing our relationship with PYGMALION in 2020. We’re proud to be a sponsor of this year’s events, including comedian, director, producer, writer, and actress Ilana Glazer and award-winning NPR journalist Ari Shapiro. Details can be found at www.thisispygmalion.com. Ilana Glazer is a co-creator, writer, director, executive producer and star of the critically acclaimed show Broad City. Broad City was previously nominated by the Writers Guild of America for Best Comedy Series. Ilana voices little EB on the Netflix animated TV series Green Eggs & Ham—based on the popular Dr. Seuss story. She will be appearing virtually at PYGMALION on Thursday, September 24, presenting on her GENERATOR project. Ari Shapiro has been one of the hosts of All Things Considered, NPR’s award-winning afternoon newsmagazine, since 2015. During his first two years on the program, listenership to All Things Considered grew at an unprecedented rate, with more people tuning in during a typical quarter-hour than any other program on the radio. Shapiro has reported from above the Arctic Circle and aboard Air Force One. He has covered wars in Iraq, Ukraine, and Israel, and he has filed stories from dozens of countries and most of the 50 states. He will appear virtually at PYGMALION on Saturday, September 26.
Research Cluster Events A sample of some upcoming events planned by the HRI Research Clusters
Medical Humanities October 8, 2020 “Global Spread: COVID in the World” (Roundtable on Zoom) Professors Manuel Rota, Valeria Sobol, Bob Tierney, Rini Bhattachyra, Maimouna Barr, Jerry Davila, Linda Herrera, and Dan Shao will discuss COVID-19 in the context of various parts of the world.
March 10, 2021 Laura Salisbury Medicine and English Literature, University of Exeter
April 29, 2021 Sari Altschuler English, Associate Director of Northeastern Humanities Center, Northeastern University
The “Animal Turn” OCTOBER 27, 2020 “Empathy and Justice Beyond the Human” Online lecture and discussion with Lori Gruen, scholar in Animal Studies and Feminist Philosophy. Part of the CAS/ MillerComm Lecture Series.
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HRI 2020 NEWSLETTER
A Year of Creative Writers at Illinois We were fortunate to kick off the Year of Creative Writers (YOCW) series with Anna Deavere Smith in February and Luis Urrea and Meagan Cass in March, shortly before the pandemic forced all campus events to cease. While we are disappointed that YOCW has had to change course, we are working hard behind the scenes to reimagine the possibilities for the remainder of this much-anticipated series. See below for initial updated event information and be sure to check go.illinois.edu/YOCW for future YOCW news and updates. At a time when writers’ voices are more vital than ever, we encourage you to tune in to these events. Year of Creative Writers is supported by HRI, the Creative Writing Program and the Presidential Initiative to Celebrate the Impact of the Arts and the Humanities.
October 13–14, 2020 Daniel Borzutzky and Christopher Grimes
February 20–21, 2021 Cris Mazza and Christina Pugh
April 5–9, 2021 Tyehimba Jess
Tyehimba Jess
Daniel Borzutzky
Jericho Brown
Christopher Grimes
November 12–13, 2021 A Festival of Writers, featuring Roxane Gay, Jericho Brown, and Tracy K. Smith
Cris Mazza
Christina Pugh
Roxane Gay
Tracy K. Smith
HRI Application Deadlines, 2020–2021 August 21 NEH Summer Stipends
February 1 Mellon Public Humanities Fellowship
September 28
February 15 Summer Faculty Research Fellowships
Prindable Internship
From October 15 Supplemental Event Fund, Spring 2021 applications open
March 1 Mellon Undergraduate Internship in Legal Humanities
October 16 HRI-Ragdale Residential Creative Fellowship
March 5
October 31 Humanities Without Walls Career Diversity Workshop Application (call opens on August 31) December 4 January 15
Campus Fellowships Mellon Pre-Doctoral Fellowships in Legal Humanities
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
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Prizes for Research in the Humanities Research Clusters
HWW Grand Research Challenge April 15 Seed Grant From April 15 Supplemental Event Fund, Fall 2021 applications open May 31
Reading Group Submissions
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HRI Year in Review HRI’s year in events was a colorful and creative one, with vibrant discussion and performances touching on topics that included gender, immigration, race and more. We began the fall semester’s events with Urbana native and world-acclaimed drag queen Sasha Velour, who engaged with undergraduate students at an Inside Scoop and gave a dazzling performance at Krannert Center. We sponsored readings by musician and author Michelle Zauner and poets J. Allyn Rosser and Mark Halliday at the annual Pygmalion Festival. Community activist, writer and film-maker Satsuki Ina screened And Then They Came for Us and spoke about the history of Japanese American internment in the context of contemporary immigration debates. HRI co-sponsored the visit to campus of Mark Roseman, the Program in Jewish Culture and Society’s annual Rosenthal lecturer, and helped to organize a conversation between him and History’s Peter Fritzsche on antisemitism in historical perspective. We joined forces too with Professor Julie Dowling of Latina/o Studies, whose oversight of the federal advisory committee of the U.S. Census Bureau allowed us to curate a series of events in early March on race, place and the 2020 Census, including a forum on what the census meant for C-U. And in what has become an annual event, we co-organized an International Women’s Day Celebration with the Women and Gender in Global Perspectives Program, featuring the untold stories of twelve women who changed the world, including Professor May Berenbaum, head of and Swanlund Chair in Entomology at Illinois and winner of the 2014 National Medal of Science. We were delighted by performance/talks by musician Ryan Groff and the members of Girls Rock! Champaign-Urbana. In February, the inimitable Anna Deveare Smith kicked off our Year of Creative Writers series, followed by Luis Urrea and Meagan Cass, who captivated our audience in what would be one of the last events of the year. Through these photos, we look back fondly at the time we were able to spend with dear colleagues, friends and community members before the pandemic. 1
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1–2. Satsuki Ina and audience 3. Ryan Groff Performance/Talk 4. Champaign-Urbana Local Concerns for Census 2020 panel: Gabriel Lewis and Gloria Yen 5. Anti-Semitism: Historical Perspectives panel 6. J. Allyn Rosser at PYGMALION 7. Meagan Cass and audience members 8. Luis Urrea 9. Chancellor Robert J. Jones and Antoinette Burton at International Women’s Day celebration 10-11. Race, Place and the Politics of Census panel and audience 12. Sasha Velour at Inside Scoop 13. Women in Music Performance/Talk 14. International Women’s Day speakers 15. May Berenbaum, honored at International Women’s Day event
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HRI 2020 NEWSLETTER
Environmental Humanities The fall brought talks from Aaron Sachs (Cornell University) on comedy and climate change, and Paul Sutter (University of Colorado, Boulder), on the “ontological turn” in humanistic studies and his work on yellow fever in the Panama Canal. In addition, Gregg Mitman (University of Wisconsin-Madison) introduced a screening of his film, The Land Beneath Our Feet. He led a public discussion of filmmaking as an experimental mode of humanities knowledge production, as well as a creative mode of rethinking corporate and scientific archives “against the grain” for indigenous history. In the spring, the group hosted Kate Brown (MIT), for a talk on her new book, Manual For Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future, an event organized in collaboration with Krannert Art Museum’s “Hot Spots” exhibition. The year culminated in a March 5–6 symposium, “Experimental Environments,” featuring Max Liboiron, Nick Shapiro, Sarah Kanouse, Sara Pritchard, Sara Grossman, Evan Helper-Smith and Ayala Levin, alongside Fellows Pollyanna Rhee and Leah Aronowsky. Maria Whitehead kicked off the event with a lecture on nature photography, co-organized with the Department of English.
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1. Pollyanna Rhee 2. David Sepkoski and research group members Sarah Gediman and Jessica Landau. 3. Leah Aronowsky 4. Aaron Sachs 5. Evan Hepler-Smith 6. Audience at Aaron Sachs talk 7. Paul Sutter 8. Post-meeting conversation with Gregg Mitman. 9. Sarah J. Grossman 10. Foreground: David Hays and presenter Ayala Levin at the Experimental Environments Symposium 11. Kate Brown 12. Nick Shapiro 13. Maria Whiteman 14. Max Liboiron 15. Gregg Mitman and Bob Morrissey
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The Odyssey Project the majority of students who began the spring semester completed the program and graduated. Although the Odyssey Project could not hold an in-person commencement ceremony, we were able to celebrate our students in a graduation video that included congratulatory messages from Chancellor Robert Jones, Dean of LAS Feng Sheng Hu and planned commencement speaker, State Representative Carol Ammons. Perhaps more profoundly, the video included a group reading by students of a collaboratively written poem, “I come from.” The video was streamed live over Zoom for students and their families.
Odyssey students working on a sculpture project.
The Odyssey Project experienced exciting changes in 2019–2020, as a generous grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and support from the Office of the Provost, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and other UIUC partners enabled HRI to integrate the Odyssey Project more fully into our campus. This year’s cohort of students was the first to register for University of Illinois courses. Odyssey Project students may now earn up to eight U of I credits in the humanities by completing both semesters of Odyssey programming. In 2019–2020, HRI partnered with University Housing to host Odyssey classes at the Student Dining and Residential Programs Building. Over the course of the fall and spring, Odyssey students attended several performances at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts (KCPA), including its stunning rendition of August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean and a marquee CultureTalk by Anna Deveare Smith. Additionally, the students ventured off campus for several field trips. In October, students visited the studio of our fall Artist-in-Residence Kim Curtis, where they saw first-hand exhibits of Curtis’s work and discussed her artistic processes and practices. In the spring, they took part in a pizza-making class at the Common Ground Food Co-Op led by the Co-Op’s Outreach Coordinator, Sarah Buckman. Other highlights included the in-class sessions with Curtis, who led the students in a monument-making exercise related to themes in their Art History studies, and Audrey Petty, the spring writer in residence, who led students in discussions of her work, Highrise Stories, and guided them in thinking through their own personal narratives. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic curtailed a number of planned activities in the spring 2020 semester, including participation in the university’s Undergraduate Research Week. Where necessary, the Odyssey Project loaned out computer equipment to students and found inventive ways to fulfill its promise to provide dinner on class nights to all students enrolled in the spring Odyssey course. Even though the Odyssey community was impacted by the pandemic, the students remained its beating heart. Through their strong wills and commitment to supporting each other,
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HRI 2020 NEWSLETTER
Odyssey’s dedicated faculty and staff worked tirelessly with students to ensure they completed the course. HRI remains grateful for the efforts of Odyssey’s Advisor and Student Experience Coordinator Valerie O’Brien, who also taught the literature section, and subject-area instructors Shelley Weinberg (Philosophy), Jorge Lucero (Art History), and Kathy Oberdeck (US History), in addition to the Odyssey Teaching Assistant and Mellon Public Humanities Fellow, Meghann Walk and interns Lara Pur and Khiren Johnson. Valerie, Kathy, and Meghann deserve a special note of thanks for their quick adaptation to the new reality of remote instruction during the pandemic. HRI has made the difficult decision to offer Odyssey courses remotely for at least the fall 2020 semester, as the risk of spreading the virus to faculty, staff, students and their families is too great. This change will be temporary, as both students and faculty regularly report that Odyssey’s face-to-face instruction model is essential to student success. While we await a safe time to return to the physical classroom, however, HRI has committed to making the Odyssey Project accessible to its students. In the 2020–2021 academic year, HRI will loan tablets to students and will again commit to finding ways to provide students with meal options. Finally, HRI would like to welcome returning and new teaching staff. All of the subject-area faculty will return to teach in the Odyssey Project. Valerie O’Brien, who previously served as both an instructor and the Advisor and Student Experience Coordinator, will step back from her administrative role to take Students on a field trip to Kim up a new role at the University Curtis’s studio. Laboratory High School. We wish her well in this new post, and offer her our heartfelt thanks for the vital role she has played in supporting both students and instructors, and for helping to set the Odyssey Project on firm footing for the future through her hard work and dedication in this critical year of its new chapter at U of I. Also, HRI bids farewell to Meghann Walk, who served as the Critical Thinking and Writing TA for two years, as well as the inaugural Mellon Public Humanities Fellow. Meghann’s commitment to her students and to Odyssey’s mission have been unparalleled. We wish her every success in her future endeavors. HRI is excited to welcome Michelle Awad, M.A. student in
Engaging with the Mellon-funded artistin-residence.
Curriculum and Instruction, as the new Advisor and Student Experience Coordinator. Michelle is no stranger to the Odyssey Project, having served as an intern during her time as an undergraduate at Illinois. (For more about Michelle, see page 23.) Azlan Guttenberg Smith, an M.F.A. candidate in creative writing, will serve as the Critical Thinking and Writing TA. Kelli McQueen, PhD candidate in musicology and medieval studies, will join us as the Mellon Public Humanities Fellow. Also, thanks to Mellon support, the Odyssey Project welcomes new interns Isabella Marquez (English, Political Science and Latina/o Studies) and Olivia Fleming (Communication and Psychology). Finally, Justin Hendrix, Odyssey alumnus and a current student at Parkland College, will fill the newly developed role of Odyssey mentor. His work will support students as they navigate their path through the Odyssey Project. Assistant Director for Education and Outreach Dr. Alaina Pincus maintains oversight of the program, assisting HRI in growing and sustaining it as a resource for the ChampaignUrbana community. Together, we look forward to welcoming our new 2020–21 cohort of students, COVID-19, or no. To learn more about the Odyssey Project—and how you can contribute to its future—visit go.illinois.edu/odyssey.
Education Justice Project It will come as no surprise that this year has been a challenging one for the Education Justice Project (EJP), as it has been for so many of us. In early March, EJP suspended operations at the Danville Correctional Center (DCC), a medium-security prison where for the past eleven years the project has offered for-credit college courses and a myriad of programs to incarcerated men. The prison is only thirty-five miles from the University of Illinois campus, but to program coordinators and teachers the distance felt enormous as they were forced to cut off contact with their students.
EJP staff members delivered soap and hand sanitizer to prisons.
Thankfully, EJP’s members and staff quickly found ways to adjust. Bi-weekly newsletters sent into the prison have provided students with updates on their courses, as well as useful information about the coronavirus and keeping healthy. This enabled them to finish the semester, though it took many additional weeks. Though EJP’s annual spring convocation will not take place at the prison, a convocation newsletter will soon make its way into DCC to honor our students and their accomplishments this year. EJP has also expanded its statewide advocacy for incarcerated people, partnering with the Illinois Coalition for Higher Education in Prison to provide soap and hand sanitizer to prisons across Illinois. EJP’s Reentry Guide Initiative produced a special reentry guide for people being released during the pandemic and has distributed thousands to date. Though EJP has decided not to return to Danville for the fall semester, students will have the opportunity to take paper correspondence courses. The EJP also hopes to produce instructional videos that can be screened at the prison. As one EJP student recently wrote, the EJP and its members are built on perseverance and tenacity. “We’re used to new normals so one more will be more than welcome,” Michael Harrell wrote. “But as long as we’re capable we will persevere.”
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National Humanities Advocacy Day In early March 2020, (then) IPRH once again sponsored a delegation to the annual National Humanities Alliance Advocacy Day in Washington, D.C. This annual event gives humanists nationwide an opportunity to advocate for federal funding for the humanities as a part of the Congressional budget process. The NHA provides training, schedules appointments and develops talking points for meetings with congressional delegates. State delegations then descend on Capitol Hill to convince legislators to support funding for programs like the National Endowment for the Humanities, Title VI and Fulbright-Hayes, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. UIUC sent its largest delegation yet, with professors Jonathan Ebel (Religion), Craig Koslofsky (History), Eduardo Ledesma (Spanish and Portuguese) and Renée Trilling (English) joined by intern and LAS undergraduate Isabella Marquez. The mood in Washington was subdued this year, with the coronavirus crisis already looming. Crowds were noticeably smaller, and elbow bumps had replaced handshakes, but the value of these face-to-face meetings became increasingly clear. With government struggling to respond to an unfolding pandemic, advocates could point to real-world examples of public initiatives in education and preservation that illustrate how humanities funding can ameliorate the effects of cultural trauma. Preservation, in fact, was an important element of this year’s Advocacy Day. For the first time, delegates were asked to advocate for the National Archives. The Archives has seen its responsibilities grow exponentially with the advent of electronic communications, but its budget allocation has not kept pace and has in fact seen significant cuts over the past two years. Americans rely on the Archives for everything from family genealogies to service records to access veterans’ benefits to immigration, naturalization, and census records for proof of citizenship. This year’s advocacy experience was an important reminder that maintaining accessible archives is not just important for scholars, but for everyone, emphasizing the NHA’s theme of Humanities for All.
hrI interns
David F. Prindable Intern Issy Marquez
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HRI 2020 NEWSLETTER
Issy Marquez served as the David F. Prindable intern last year, assisting with undergraduate outreach and communications. Among her experiences, she was the first undergraduate from the University of Illinois to participate in National Humanities Advocacy Day in Washington, D.C. Issy, who is majoring in English, Political Science and Latina/Latino Studies, will continue to work at HRI in 2020–21 as an Odyssey Project intern.
HRI Intern Olivia Fleming
Olivia Fleming also worked at HRI assisting with communications and outreach, including production of the new Odyssey Project print booklet. A major in communication and social psychology, Olivia worked over the summer as a communication intern at the Cancer Center at Illinois and as a management trainee at Kickapoo State Park. In the fall, she will serve as an intern with HRI’s Odyssey Project and she hopes to continue her involvement with the Student Alumni Ambassadors and Positive Illini organizations.
Welcome to HRI
HRI Staff Antoinette Burton, Director aburton@illinois.edu, 217-244-3344 Nancy Castro, Deputy Director ncastro@illinois.edu, 217-244-7913 Alaina Pincus, Assistant Director for Education & Outreach apincus2@illinois.edu, 217-265-6330 Erin Ciciora, Senior Communications Manager elukehar@illinois.edu, 217-265-7580 Jason B.P. Mierek, Humanities Without Walls Director of Operations hww-manager@illinois.edu, 217-300-3711
Michelle Awad
Eric Ciciora
Michelle Awad, Odyssey Project Advisor and Student Experience Coordinator Michelle Awad initially joined the Odyssey Project as an intern while pursuing her undergraduate degree at the University of Illinois. Upon graduation, she was a program coordinator for the YWCA of the University of Illinois. Currently, she is also the student engagement program coordinator at the University YMCA where she advises student organizers and activists on campaigns like the global Climate Strike of 2019 and Write for Rights campaign by Amnesty International to free innocent political prisoners. Michelle’s bachelor’s degree is in Education Policy and Arabic Studies. She is currently a graduate student pursuing a master’s in Secondary Education and High School English Teaching License with a minor in College Teaching. She is dedicated to providing equitable opportunities for people to engage with the humanities in meaningful and impactful ways, believing deeply that, in the words of Audre Lorde: “Poetry is not a luxury.”
Stephanie Uebelhoer, Office Support Specialist suebelho@illinois.edu, 217-244-3344 Jenna Zieman, Business Operations and Grants Manager zieman@illinois.edu, 217-244-5013
The Odyssey Project Michelle Awad, Odyssey Project Advisor and Student Experience Coordinator odysseyproject@illinois.edu, 217-300-3888
Education Justice Project Rebecca Ginsburg, Director info@educationjustice.net
HRI Advisory Committee James R. Brennan, History
Erin Ciciora, Senior Communications Manager Erin Ciciora brings 20 years of experience in higher education, including roles in admissions, public affairs, and communications for campus housing and advancement. Most recently she served as associate director of advancement communications at the College of Fine and Applied Arts (FAA), where she developed and implemented communication strategies for alumni and donor audiences. She also served as the editor of FAA’s magazine Dimension.
Kathryn La Barre, Information Sciences Ruby Mendenhall, Sociology / African American Studies Ghassan Moussawi, Gender and Women’s Studies / Sociology Valleri Robinson, Theatre Gilberto Rosas, Anthropology / Latina/o Studies Valeria Sobol, Slavic Languages & Literatures Andrea Stevens, English
Prior to her work in FAA, she was a senior communication coordinator for University Housing on the Illinois campus for 11 years. During that time, she gained valuable experience in website content management, print and electronic publications, and coordination of departmental social media accounts. Erin holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Allegheny College and a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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Giving to HRI “The Humanities Research Institute is coming into being when the world needs the humanities more than ever.” — Antoinette Burton, HRI director
We are grateful to the many ways our donors and friends have shaped and supported a vibrant humanities research community on the Illinois campus. Our advancement to institute status renews our sense of purpose and urgency about the key role humanists play in imagining just, productive and innovative futures for all. A gift to HRI will help to sustain the work of brilliant scholars and ensure that we continue to offer life-changing programs, such as the Odyssey Project, as well as thought-provoking events and symposia.
Research Impact Christine Hedlin (Ph.D. 2018), an HRI graduate fellow in 2016– 2017, shares the transformative impact of her fellowship. “To be able to focus intently on the research that I was doing, the more intellectual side, was absolutely stimulating for my thinking. Often, especially in Research One institutions, departments can be cordoned off by themselves. So to have financial support, but also to combine that with a community of thinkers from different departments, meant I was able to push my thinking in ways that I otherwise wouldn’t have had the chance to do.”
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HRI 2020 NEWSLETTER
National Reach Issy Marquez (LAS), 20192020 David F. Prindable intern, traveled with faculty to Washington, D.C. in the spring to advocate on behalf of the National Endowment for the Humanities. “Because of IPRH I had the best experience of my undergrad career,” she said. The internship, established by donor David F. Prindable, supports communications and undergraduate outreach at the institute.
Odyssey student Rita Conerly with Artist-in-Residence Kim Curtis.
Our overarching goal: to create a $15 million endowment for HRI. There are many ways you can help HRI programming and humanities research, including the following: • Named annual lecture • Faculty or graduate student fellowship awards • Post-doctoral fellowship award in a designated area of the humanities
The Odyssey Project Fund Your support can help provide free humanities courses for income-eligible adults in a variety of ways: • Program endowment • Second year of courses • Endowed undergraduate internship • Mentoring and transition services • Spanish-language courses • Endowed graduate research fellowship
• Named award for faculty or student achievement • Named scholarly residencies
Join us as we push the boundaries of research in the humanities and work to contribute to meaningful, material change for the collective good. You can make a gift at hri.illinois.edu or by contacting Director of Development Tony Pomonis (English ’02) at (217) 300-3470 or apomonis@uif.uillinois.edu.
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The Humanities Research Institute (HRI) at the University of Illinois UrbanaChampaign fosters interdisciplinary study in the humanities, arts and social sciences. Established in 1997 as the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, HRI is a vibrant hub for humanities activity on campus. We coordinate and host lectures, symposia and panel discussions on a wide variety of topics, and we award prizes recognizing excellence in faculty and student humanities research. We convene distinguished scholars from around the world, and we support Illinois faculty and graduate student research through fellowships and a bimonthly seminar. HRI cultivates collaborative faculty-driven initiatives through its Research Clusters; hosts multi-milliondollar external foundation grants; and supports faculty and graduate student reading groups.
T (217)244.3344 F (217)333.9617 Email info-hri@illinois.edu Website hri.illinois.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Levis Faculty Center, Suite 400 919 West Illinois Street Urbana, Illinois 61801
