Fall 2019 Newsletter
Changing the Face of Knowledge IPRH | Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities
Table of contents Land Acknowledgement Director’s Letter
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IPRH Fellows, 2019–20
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Training in Digital Methods for Humanists
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Research Clusters, 2019–20
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Annual Theme 2020–21: The Global and Its Worlds
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Mellon Emerging Areas in the Humanities
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Humanities Without Walls
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Upcoming Events Calendar of Events
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PYGMALION Lit
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A Year of Creative Writers 2020
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Application Deadlines
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The Year in Review
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Public Humanities The Odyssey Project
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Education Justice Project
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National Humanities Advocacy Day
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IPRH Staff & Advisory Committees
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Giving to IPRH
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The Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities acknowledges that the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is situated on the lands of the Peoria, Kaskaskia, Piankashaw, Wea, Miami, Mascoutin, Odawa, Sauk, Mesquaki, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, Ojibwe, and Chickasaw Nations. These lands were the traditional territory of these Native Nations prior to their forced removal and continue to carry their stories and struggles for survival and identity.
Cover, clockwise from top: Tyehimba Jess, Gregg Mitman, Anna Deavere Smith, Sasha Velour, Luis Urrea, Michelle Zauner.
DIRECTOR’S LETTER
Last spring, during Undergraduate Research Week, students from the Odyssey Project were presenting their research in the Levis Faculty Center. The Music Room was full of poster boards that showcased a variety of projects, from art history to philosophy to literature. As I went around and listened to each student explain their work, I was impressed and inspired as I always am—by what they had accomplished and by the unsolicited admiration and gratitude they felt for the Odyssey instructors who had helped them with the work at hand. But I was suddenly struck by something equally astonishing. Thanks to two different poster projects at different ends of the room—one on Ida B. Wells Barnett and one on Toni Morrison—I realized something I had never had occasion to think about. These two powerful African American women share the date 1931: that’s the year Wells died and it’s the year Morrison was born. The research that our Odyssey students did helped me to appreciate this random but miraculous fact: There has been a kind of uncanny continuum in the universe of social justice for just short of a hundred years thanks to the way the stars aligned to shape the lives of two exemplary African American pioneers, radicals, heroines—and, of course, humanists in every possible sense of the term. I could hardly sleep that night for thinking about what that harmonic convergence means, the energy it brings to our work and the object lessons it holds about where and how new knowledge happens. After four years of directing IPRH, I continue to be amazed at what research in the humanities at Illinois can do to break open the universe and change the way we see time, politics, history, self, community and the struggle for a livable future for all. This past year is no exception. Under the auspices of our theme for 2018–19, Race Work, we sponsored a range of interdisciplinary programming designed to backlight the labor involved in keeping racial systems in place and challenging their material and discursive power as well. We had speakers on race and the classics and race and contemporary European politics. We heard the Black Chorus, under the direction of Professor Ollie Watts Davis, sing gloriously about the lessons of African American history for the present. And we watched the ceiling rise in Levis as they did so, such was the magical, kinetic energy in the room. We hosted a panel on the race work of war machines and an interactive Performance/Talk on dance and its role in shaping the multiracial creative economy. Our IPRH Fellows’ seminar fairly crackled with the intellectual energy of faculty and graduate students whose research on race work in subjects as diverse as masquerade, “American” rice, Viking imagery and the Chicago housing market shaped and reshaped our understanding of the question. And in yet another uncanny coincidence, Brazil expert Tianna Paschel spoke to a riveted crowd about race politics in Latin America the same week as Jair Bolsonaro’s election. Beyond our annual theme, IPRH continues to be a beehive of humanities research energy and activity. Our Andrew W. Mellon 2
IPRH 2019 NEWSLETTER
Foundation-funded Environmental Humanities initiative, led by Professor Bob Morrissey, has brought scholars, artists and public intellectuals to campus, and the intergenerational research group he has led has added new voices to environmental studies on campus (see page 9). Our Humanities and Arts in the Age of Big Data conference in October was a resounding success and helped draw faculty and students from all over campus into conversations about how and why we should engage big tech questions holistically as well as critically. IPRH’s Research Clusters and reading groups continue to thrive. Thanks to the efforts of Rana Hogarth, Justine Murison and Stephanie Hilger, the Medical Humanities Cluster won an award from President Tim Killeen’s system-wide Arts and Humanities Initiative, which will allow them to develop stronger links with the Carle-Illinois College of Medicine. The academic year 2018–19 was a big one for such wins. The Mellon Foundation awarded $650,000 in funding to the Odyssey Project over the next five years, support that has already enabled us to enhance our support for this important program, which offers courses in core humanities subjects to incomeeligible adult learners in Champaign-Urbana and provides them opportunities to develop skills and display their knowledge as they did at Undergraduate Research Week (see right). The year ahead looks just as inviting. We’ll be kicking things off with an August retreat focused on models of undergraduate research in the humanities in collaboration with the Office of Undergraduate Research. Our program roster includes a September Inside Scoop with Urbana native and RuPaul’s Drag Race victor Sasha Velour; an October showing of And Then They Came for Us, a film about Japanese internment in conjunction with Asian American Studies; and a November conversation on antisemitism with Jewish Culture & Society visiting speaker Mark Roseman. Thanks to another award from President Killeen’s Arts and Humanities Initiative, IPRH will be hosting a year-long series featuring the work of some of the most engaging of today’s creative writers and artists, in collaboration with Professor Janice Harrington and the Creative Writing Program at Illinois, across the whole of 2020. These include playwright and actress Anna Deavere Smith (in conjunction with Krannert Center for the Performing Arts and the Center for Advanced Study); Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tyehimba Jess; novelist/journalist/critic Roxane Gay; and many more (see page 15). We are beyond excited about this showcase of authors who will share their current work and their reflections on the creative process with campus and community audiences alike. A propos, we’ve been working on ways to extend our public humanities efforts and to strengthen our relationships with a variety of people who share our conviction about the key role of humanists’ and artists’ contributions in generating all kinds of new knowledge. We screened a film, Mississippi Masala, at The Art Theater in downtown Champaign last February, followed by a public discussion
A New Chapter for the Odyssey Project at Illinois
with our 2018–19 IPRH Fellow Professor Rini Mehta. For the second year in a row IPRH sent delegates—Jon Ebel, Religion, and Renée Trilling, English—to Capitol Hill for National Humanities Advocacy Day in March, where they met with staff of Illinois representatives and returned with lots of insights and ideas about how to be proactive around issues of local and national concern (see page 19). And we are very pleased to announce a new partnership with Seth Fein and the Pygmalion Festival. Keep your eyes peeled for IPRH-sponsored speakers in and around Urbana in late September—we are looking forward to seeing you there, and at many of our other events in the coming year. You will want to mark your calendars for our 4th annual December Work-In, led by the faculty in the IPRH Community Healing & Resistance Through Storytelling (C-HeARTS) Research Cluster (watch our website and calendar for details on this and all our programming). For a full listing of the upcoming year’s events, see page 12. Last but not least, 2020 is an exciting prospect because we will be in the process of applying for official Institute status at the university. Though we have effectively functioned as an Institute since the move to the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research in 2015, we now seek codification as part of the campus’ strategic planning for the university. With our official Institute status will come a new name: We are working on that! Come to the third of three Town Hall meetings in Levis on September 5th to hear more and offer your feedback on the new name possibilities. As is occasionally the case, IPRH is “themeless” this year. Our 2019–20 Fellows will be pursuing a dazzling range of research projects in our bi-monthly seminar, which is typically the highlight of my intellectual life as director. In 2020–21 our annual theme will be “The Global and Its Worlds,” a signal of our boundless and inclusive critical vision and our commitment to thinking capaciously about the many terrains humanists work on and think with. Tony Pomonis, Director of Development at the Foundation, and I have covered a lot of ground ourselves this past year, meeting Illinois alums from Chicago to California. It’s been truly energizing to get to know supporters of the humanities with Illinois connections. If you are interested in meeting up, please let us know; we’d welcome the chance to connect with you if you don’t live in Champaign-Urbana. As for me, I’d love to welcome you to IPRH and introduce you personally to all we are doing to energize lovers of and advocates for the humanities, wherever they may be. All the best,
IPRH has received a $650,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the Odyssey Project. The grant will be used to enhance our ongoing efforts to bring foundational humanities knowledge and learning to nontraditional adult students and to highlight the critical role that study in the humanities plays in preparing students for the worlds of opportunity that await them. In 2000, Illinois Humanities (the state humanities council) began the Odyssey Project in Chicago as a Bard Clemente Course in the Humanities. In 2006, IPRH, in partnership with Illinois Humanities, brought the Odyssey Project to Champaign-Urbana, to offer local income-eligible adults the opportunity to pursue higher education that might not otherwise be accessible to them. Now, thanks to the generosity of The Mellon Foundation, the support of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and many campus partners, the Odyssey Project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign embarks on a new chapter, to more fully introduce Odyssey students to the University of Illinois experience, both inside and outside the classroom. This fall, for the first time, Odyssey Project courses launch as official Urbana campus courses, with tuition for those courses waived by the College of LAS. Students who complete the coursework will receive transferrable University of Illinois credit (4 hours per course, with two non-degree courses offered). The classes meet on campus in Ikenberry Commons, where dinner is provided. In addition to staffing and assessment support for the program, the Mellon grant sponsors a Public Humanities Fellowship for a doctoral student in the humanities and undergraduate internships to offer learning support to Odyssey students. The grant also provides for co-curricular enhancements, including an artist or creative writer in residence with the Odyssey Project students each semester. For more about Odyssey Project activities, see page 18. “We are thrilled that The Mellon Foundation is supporting the Odyssey Project,” said Feng Sheng Hu, the Harry E. Preble Dean of the College of LAS. “We in the College of LAS are firm believers in the power of the humanities to deepen understanding and transform lives for the better, and IPRH’s efforts to offer humanities courses to non-traditional students are extremely meaningful. We are proud to partner with them in this endeavor.” Please join IPRH in welcoming this fall’s inaugural class of University of Illinois Odyssey Project students.
Antoinette Burton Director
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
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Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities Fellows, 2019–20 IPRH Faculty Fellows Claudia Brosseder
Andrew Gaedtke
“Redefining Andean Religion: Andean Self-Christianization in the Colonial Norte Chico Region of Peru (Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries)”
“Writing Brains: Disability, Neuroculture, and Personhood”
Ghassan Moussawi
Ramón SotoCrespo
Dustin Tahmahkera
“Hemispheric Trash: Literary Circulation, Decapitalized Fiction, and the White Trash Menace”
“Becoming Sound: Sonic Quests of Healing in Indian Country”
History
Gender & Women’s Studies and Sociology “Disruptive Situations: Fractal Orientalism and Queer Strategies in Beirut”
English
English
Eduardo Ledesma
Spanish & Portuguese “Blind Cinema: Visually Impaired Filmmakers and Technologies of Sight”
American Indian Studies
Nikki Usher Journalism
“The Where of News”
IPRH-Ragdale Residential Creative Fellowship Deke Weaver
Theater and New Media During his time at Ragdale, Prof. Weaver will be working on the next performance in his life-long project, The Unreliable Bestiary—a performance for each letter of the alphabet, each letter represented by an endangered animal or habitat. To date Prof. Weaver and his collaborators have presented MONKEY, ELEPHANT, WOLF, and BEAR. TIGER, the fifth production, will open in the fall of 2019.
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IPRH 2019 NEWSLETTER
IPRH Graduate Student Fellows Paul Michael Leonardo Atienza Anthropology
“The Promise of Intimacy: Gay Filipino Men on Mobile Digital Media in Manila and Los Angeles”
Amir Habibullah Landscape Architecture
“Islamic Gardens and Cultural Identity in a Globalized World”
Katie Bruner
Morgan L. Green
“Seeing Systems: A Rhetorical History of Vision at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1931– 1969”
“This Feeling of Being Together With Your Own: Competing Indigeneities in Late 20th Century Philadelphia”
Helen Makhdoumian
Diana Sacilowski
History
Communication
Slavic Languages & Literatures
English
“A Map of this Place: Resurgence and Remembering Removal in Armenian, Palestinian, and American Indian/First Nations Literatures”
“Strategies of Silence: Representations of Jewish Poles in Polish Literature since the 1980s”
Peter Thompson History
“Grasping for the Mask: German Visions of Chemical Modernity, 1915– 1938”
New Horizons Summer Faculty Research Fellowship Tamara Chaplin History
“Desiring Women: Female Same-Sex Intimacy and the French Public Sphere, 1930–2013”
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Fellow in Public Humanities Meghann Walk Education Policy, Organization & Leadership
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Training in Digital Methods for Humanists Training in Digital Methods for Humanists is our commitment to research and teaching in the Digital Humanities funded by the Investment for Growth Program and supported by the Offices of the Provost and Vice Chancellor for Research. By investing in our faculty, we provide Fellows with the training, technology and support needed to lead campus initiatives in digital transformation, data and design. This past 2018–19 academic year, Faculty Fellows took campus courses and developed expertise in new and emerging digital methods at the forefront of the humanities, arts, and humanistic social sciences. This included data analysis and visualization; digital storytelling; GIS mapping, sound composition, digital music production and much more. In addition, Fellows participated in monthly workshops and activities designed to generate interdisciplinary scholarly exchange and envision how training in digital methods might change up their research and teaching. During the summer, Fellows expanded their field of knowledge by attending workshops and institutes around the world. This included the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI); workshops hosted by the Story Center; and a one-on-on apprenticeship with a renowned digital sound expert. In addition to the success of our Fellows, TDMH more than tripled our applicant pool for the second award cycle. We also strengthened our relationships with campus partners such as the Scholarly Commons, Center for Advanced Study, Research Data Services, and Research IT. In the year ahead, we look forward to building on our program’s success, as we welcome our newest cohort of Fellows (see below) and serving our campus and intellectual community. To learn more about this faculty development initiative, please visit go.illinois.edu/TDMH or attend our Fall Information Session on Wednesday, September 18, 2019, starting at noon in the Levis Center IPRH Lecture Hall, Fourth Floor.
Training in Digital Methods for Humanists Faculty Fellows, 2019–20 José B. Capino
Clare H. Crowston
José Capino will learn to use and develop digital tools for scholars and teachers of film studies. Apart from sharing these tools with graduate students in his field, Dr. Capino will use an ensemble of textual and visual data processing methods to enrich his current research projects on 20th century US colonial documentaries and contemporary independent cinema in the Philippines.
During her year as a TDMH fellow, Clare Crowston will learn about statistical concepts and methods as well as computational techniques that will allow her to successfully complete a study of apprentices and apprenticeship in France from the 17th through the 19th centuries. Dr. Crowston will also use this training to create new courses in the History department to help graduate and undergraduate students pursue historical research with a digital toolkit and to participate in campus data science curricular initiatives.
Lori Newcomb
Gabriel Solis
Lori Newcomb will be using digital methods to analyze and map the extraordinary reading experiences of a seventeenthcentury Englishwoman Frances Wolfreston, to demonstrate how book history’s stories from the archives can be visualized in the undergraduate classroom and shared with a wider public.
Gabriel Solis will be pursuing research on the whiteness of data sets and metadata for music AI and on its implications for music information retrieval (MIR) research. In doing so Dr. Solis plans to work on standards for producing more racially and culturally diverse data sets and metadata informed by more diverse knowledge about music.
English
English
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IPRH 2019 NEWSLETTER
History
Music
Research Clusters, 2019–20 The “Animal Turn”
Medical Humanities
Jane Desmond, Anthropology Jamie Jones, English
Andrew Gaedtke, English Stephanie Hilger, Germanic Languages & Literatures Co-sponsored by the Carle Illinois College of Medicine and the Presidential Initiative to Celebrate the Impact of the Arts and the Humanities
Community Healing and Resistance through Storytelling (C-HeARTS) Collaborative Carla D. Hunter, Psychology Ruby Mendenhall, Sociology / African American Studies / Carle Illinois College of Medicine Nkechinyelum Chioneso, Psychology, Florida A&M University Shardé Smith, Human Development & Family Studies Helen Neville, Educational Psychology / African American Studies Robyn L. Gobin, Kinesiology & Community Health
Cross-Cultural Understandings of Power Harassment in Higher Education: Awareness and Actions SHAO Dan, East Asian Languages & Cultures Colleen Murphy, Philosophy / Law
Fashion, Style, & Aesthetics
Transformative Learning Through Zine Making Sarah Christensen, University Library Leon Liebenberg, Mechanical Science & Engineering
Understanding Movement Style and Social Interactions Through Participatory Performance: Development of an Interactive Performance Concept for Research on Style Preferences Amy LaViers, Mechanical Science & Engineering John Toenjes, Dance / Informatics Institute—I3
For a sample of upcoming events hosted by our research clusters, see page 14.
Courtney Becks, University Library Susan Becker, Art + Design Mimi Thi Nguyen, Gender & Women’s Studies / Asian American Studies
Annual Theme 2020–21: The Global and Its Worlds IPRH is pleased to announce that its theme for 2020–21 will be The Global and Its Worlds. The global is practically a ubiquitous referent now. It’s used as a descriptive term, as a perspectival mode, as a scalar standard, as a valorization technique and, of course, as an indicator of the condition of the present. But what is the plurality of worlds which constitute the global? What kinds of world-making do events, communities, legal regimes, performative modes, memory work, languages, regions, mediascapes, imaginative practices, and ordinary people produce? Who is for the global, who is against the global, with what consequences and under what conditions? How do the meanings of the global change when we approach it from perspectives outside of the United States? To pose the global in the context of multiple worlds is to acknowledge its power but also to suggest that it is not totalizing or universal—or that if and when it is, it operates in tense and tender relationship with forces both from and beyond its ambit.
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
We seek faculty and graduate fellows in and allied with humanities disciplines whose research critically engages both the global as on object of inquiry and worlds and world-making as dynamic processes across time, space and place. IPRH is pleased to partner with the Illinois Global Institute in shaping the call for IPRH Fellows. The IPRH seminar will be open to affiliates of these centers and programs who want to attend on a first come, first served basis. IPRH welcomes applications from all disciplines and departments with an interest in humanities and humanities-inflected research. IPRH 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 https://www.iprh.illinois.edu/fellowships/campus. Applications are due December 6, 2019.
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Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship Program Emerging Areas in the Humanities
Douglas Jones Pre-Doctoral Fellow
In 2015, 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 predoctoral fellowships, as well as undergraduate internships, to form three robust inter-generational research groups—in Bio-Humanities, Environmental Humanities and Legal Humanities—which will run consecutively until 2022. These groups will model multi-disciplinary collaborations and will develop new curricular opportunities for undergraduates on campus.
History
“The Cult of the Yankee Mining Engineer: Engineering Nature, Race, and Labor in the US, Canada, and South Africa, 1886–1922”
Jessica Landau Pre-Doctoral Fellow Art History
Andrew W. Mellon Environmental Humanities Research Group, 2019–20 IPRH is pleased to introduce the new members of the Mellon Environmental Humanities Research Group. These newly appointed pre-doctoral fellows and undergraduate interns will join Mellon Faculty Fellow and research group director Robert Morrissey (History) and Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellows, Leah Aronowsky (PhD, History of Science, Harvard University, 2018) and Pollyanna Rhee (PhD, Architecture, Columbia University, 2018). Led by Professor Morrissey, the fellows and interns will pursue their own Environmental Humanities-related research projects and participate in all activities of the Mellon Environmental Humanities Research Group.
“‘Critical Habitat’: Picturing Conservation, Extinction, and the American Animal in the Long Twentieth Century”
Undergraduate Interns Alaina Bottens, Natural Resources & Environmental Sciences / Gender & Women’s Studies Sarah Gediman, History / Earth, Society & Environmental Sustainability Amanda Watson, English / Political Science
Andrew W. Mellon Legal Humanities Research Group Legal Humanities draws from multiple methodologies, including those dealing with cultural representation, history, and sociological perspectives, to examine how the law shapes the social world in which it is embedded. Legal Humanities understands the law as reflecting and influencing societal values, aspirations, anxieties, and notions of justice. Professor Paik will spend next academic year laying the groundwork for the launch of the Mellon Legal Humanities Research group in fall 2020, including participating in the selection of the first cohort of external post-doctoral fellows and internal predoctoral fellows and undergraduate interns affiliated with the group. Applications for the Mellon Legal Humanities PostDoctoral Fellowships are due October 21, 2019. For more information, visit: go.illinois.edu/postdoc. Information about pre-doctoral fellowships and undergraduate internships will be at iprh.illinois.edu/ fellowships/mellon when it becomes available.
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IPRH 2019 NEWSLETTER
A. Naomi Paik Faculty Fellow
Asian American Studies
Environmental Humanities at Illinois The Mellon Environmental Humanities Research Group launched this past academic year, under the direction of Faculty Fellow Bob Morrissey, and worked to advance key goals: public programming, interdisciplinary collaboration, individual research, undergraduate research, curriculum, and community-building. In addition to leading weekly research group seminar meetings, Professor Morrissey constituted a campus Environmental Humanities Working Group, which met monthly to strategize with the research group about the environmental humanities on campus, and to dialogue with invited guests. Among its many pursuits, the group conducted a collective study around the theme of “Flatland,” and prepared and authored materials for an online publication titled, “Flatland: New Directions in Environmental Humanities,” which is currently under development. Please stay tuned for this forthcoming publication, slated to debut this fall. The group also ventured off campus, conducting a field trip to view Alexis Rockman’s Great Lakes Cycle art exhibit at the Chicago Cultural Center, and to see an installation by Emmanuel Pratt, director of the Sweet Water Foundation at the SMART museum of Art at University of Chicago. The outing included visits to local prairie sites: Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, a prairie reconstruction maintained by the U.S. Forest service at the site of a former WWII arsenal, and Loda Prairie, a tiny never-plowed prairie in East Central Illinois. A full slate of events was offered, including public lectures by Jenny Price and Joni Adamson in the fall, and Ben Johnson in the spring. Lowell Duckert and Keith Woodhouse also visited and met with the group and campus stakeholders to discuss environmental humanities research and professional development issues in the field. The group hosted a public screening of the documentary Awake: A Dream from Standing Rock, and director Myron Dewey participated in a Q&A after the screening, as well as met with the research and working groups during his visit. The year of programming concluded with an Environmental Humanities Undergraduate Research Symposium: “Deconstructing and Reshaping Untold Narratives,” organized by the group’s outgoing interns, Juan Martin Luna Nunez, Clara Pokorny, and April Wendling, who presented their own research projects and dialogued with other student presenters, as part of Undergraduate Research Week in April. As for the fellows’ own work in the environmental humanities field, both outgoing Pre-Doctoral Fellows Samantha Good and Alexandra Paterson defended their dissertations at the close of the academic year. Dr. Pollyanna Rhee secured a tenure-track job with the Department of Landscape Architecture on our campus (slated to begin fall 2020), and Dr. Leah Aronowsky won the Rachel Carson Award from the American Society for Environmental History for best dissertation as well as received the 2019 Ronald Rainger Award for best early career work on the history of the earth and environmental sciences from the History of Science Society. Please join IPRH in congratulating our Mellon Environmental Humanities Fellows on their many impressive achievements. Growing out of the group’s curriculum-development goals, four courses will be offered this 2019–20 academic year: Professor Morrissey will be teaching “Wilderness in American Culture” and “American Environmental History”; Dr. Aronowsky will offer “Politics of Nature”; and Dr. Rhee will offer “American Wastelands.” IPRH is pleased to collaborate with the Campus Honors Program and the Department of History to make these Environmental Humanities courses available to U of I undergraduates. 1
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10 1. Lunch with guest Lowell Duckert 2. Faculty Fellow Bob Morrissey with Jamie Jones 3. Jenny Price 4. Joni Adamson 5. Research Group with Joni Adamson 6. Benjamin H. Johnson 7. Bob Morrissey with Myron Dewey 8. Student panelists at the Environmental Humanities Undergraduate Research Symposium 9. Mellon Intern Clara Pokorny 10. Research Group fall trip to Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
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As Humanities Without Walls (HWW) enters its fifth year, its experiments in collaborative research and graduate training continue to grow in influence and impact throughout the Midwest and beyond. In late September 2018, Dr. Antoinette Burton and I spoke about the evolving nature of graduate education in the humanities with graduate students, faculty, and administrators at the Humanities Without Walls Career Diversity Symposium at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The following week I discussed the value of a humanities education with undergraduate students and administrators at an HWW-inspired workshop at Huntington University in Huntington, Indiana, at the invitation of Visiting Assistant Professor Dr. Matthew Schownir (Purdue, HWW 2015 Fellow). We worked with the Chicago Humanities Festival to host panels on graduate career diversity at the annual meetings of both the AHA and the MLA, which took place concurrently in Chicago in January 2019; in what might be a historical first, HWW was influential in allowing MLA attendees access to AHA events and vice-versa, building on our mission of encouraging a culture of collaboration in the humanities. In February 2019, Dr. Burton participated in a “Career Diversity for Humanities PhDs” workshop at Indiana University Bloomington, in conversation with three HWW Fellows from IUB: Doug Peach (HWW Fellow 2016), Kristin Otto (HWW Fellow 2017), and Jennie Williams (HWW Fellow 2018); she also engaged with AHA Director James Grossman on a career diversity panel closer to home, here at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, in March. Looking ahead, a panel on “The Humanities Without Walls Fellowship: A Career Diversity Laboratory for Humanities PhD Students” including myself and several HWW Fellows is scheduled for the 134th Annual AHA meeting in New York City, January 2020. Humanities Without Walls has also recognized its increasing role as a clearinghouse for information and best practices involving career diversity in doctoral humanities education, and is taking a more intentional approach to collecting longitudinal data and disseminating the information and knowledge we synthesize from this data. In the last academic year, we have seen our influence in this area in multiple forms and have received an expanding volume of queries about interesting lessons we’ve learned and would be willing to share. These queries have involved the creation of similar, regional consortia; the challenges and promise of inter-disciplinary and inter-institutional collaborations; graduate career diversity and questions of how to “co-credentialize” doctoral students as an integral part of their educations. We have also taken on the challenge of pushing the lessons we have learned back into the academy with the intention of reaching deans, presidents, and provosts and working with them to reform policies and practices to better serve the needs of their increasingly diverse student populations. To this end, we’ve created a HWW brochure that is available on the HWW website at go.illinois.edu/HWWbrochure. We have also built a two-day Faculty Institute into this summer’s career diversity
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IPRH 2019 NEWSLETTER
workshop in Chicago, which reverses the roles of the students and the teachers, so that university administrators may learn from their doctoral students about the realities on the ground. We are proud to report that our Fellows continue to find meaningful and fulfilling careers both within and without the academy. At least three of our Fellows have accepted tenure-track positions at Midwestern universities, while others have discerned that the PhD was not for them and have gone on to careers as admissions counselors, program officers for private foundations, and high school teachers. Our Fellows have founded non-profits, have subsequently received fellowships from the AHA and the ACLS, and most importantly have established a community in which they can openly and safely share their concerns and thoughts about the changing nature of graduate education and research in the humanities. We are equally proud to highlight a few of the research projects we have sponsored over the last five years. MSU’s Professor of French Safoi Babana-Hampton took on new roles as a documentary film writer, director, and producer to create collaboratively two documentary films on the experience of Hmong immigrants in France and the American Midwest, Hmong Memory at the Crossroads and Growing Up Hmong at the Crossroads. Both films have been featured in multiple film festivals around the world and have won several awards. The Field to Media project (senior PI, Dr. Mark Pedelty, University of Minnesota) seeks to change the cultural framing around issues of noise pollution and climate change through the power of music, and to this end has already released three potent, beautiful, and highly listenable music videos which may be accessed via the HWW website. The Freshwater Lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago, led by senior PI Rachel Havrelock and involving multiple collaborators, is an example of an HWW-funded project that has crossed not only disciplinary and institutional boundaries, but also the boundaries between the Global Midwest and Changing Climate research challenges. We encourage you to visit our website, humanitieswithoutwalls.illinois.edu, to learn more about our Fellows and our research projects. Jason Mierek Director of Operations Humanities Without Walls
Margaret “Maggie” Nettesheim Hoffmann, PhD candidate in history at Marquette University, recently joined the Humanities Without Walls consortium as the On-Site Project Director for the 2019 Career Diversity Summer Workshop. In this role she has taken charge of the workshop structure and content, modifying the robust template inherited from the Chicago Humanities Festival in line with feedback from 119 Fellows and the increasingly apparent need to return the message(s) of career diversity into the academy and beyond.
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
Dr. Andreea Micu served as the 2019 OnSite Project Coordinator for HWW’s Career Diversity Summer Workshop. Dr. Micu has provided invaluable support on all the myriad logistical details that go into putting together a three-week workshop for 30 attendees and around 80 speakers. She holds a PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, and beginning the fall of 2019, she will be a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University.
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UPCOMING EVENTS AUGUST
23 Retreat Undergraduate Research in the Humanities: Challenges and Possibilities Keynote by Ellen McClure, Engaged Humanities Initiative, UIC Co-sponsored by the Illinois Office of Undergraduate Research.
29 Info Session Humanities Expo for Undergraduates Sponsored by the Humanities Professional Resources Center, College of LAS.
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Info Session
Undergraduate Inside Scoop
Environmental Humanities Film ScreenING and Discussion
Training in Digital Methods for Humanists
19 Education Justice Project Lecture Fleet Maull Author Co-sponsored by the Education Justice Project. Supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
26 Reading IPRH at PYGMALION: Michelle Zauner Musician and Author
SEPTEMBER
5 Town Hall Advancing IPRH to Institute Status
13 Undergraduate Inside Scoop Sasha Velour Gender-fluid drag queen and visual artist
Part of PYGMALION Lit, September 26–28; Cosponsored by the Kirkland Fund and the Department of English.
A discussion with undergraduates about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Co-sponsored by the Department of Asian American Studies.
dir. Abby Ginzberg and Ken Schneider, 2017 Followed by a discussion with Satsuki Ina, community activist, writer, and filmmaker. Co-sponsored by the Department of Asian American Studies.
Supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
NOVEMBER
13 Jewish Culture & Society Rosenthal Lecture Mark Roseman History, Indiana University Bloomington Made possible by the generosity of the Lorelei Rosenthal and Family Endowment Fund.
Part of PYGMALION Lit, September 26–28; Cosponsored by the Kirkland Fund and the Department of English.
History, Cornell University
Screening of The Land Beneath Our Feet. Supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
And Then They Came for Us
Creative Writing, Ohio University
Aaron Sachs
History, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Film Screening
IPRH at PYGMALION: J. Allyn Rosser + Mark Halliday
Environmental Humanities Lecture
Gregg Mitman
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Reading
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IPRH 2019 NEWSLETTER
Community activist, writer, and filmmaker
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OCTOBER
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Satsuki Ina
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16 Performance/Talk Women in Music With Christine Pallon, Olivia Tasch, and Carrie Chandler founding members of Girls Rock! Champaign-Urbana.
“Anti-Semitism Today: A Critical Dialogue” With Peter Fritzsche (History), and Mark Roseman (History, Indiana University Bloomington). Moderated by Harriet Murav (Slavic Languages & Literatures and Comparative & World Literature). Co-sponsored by Program in Jewish Culture & Society.
For full event information, please visit iprh.illinois.edu.
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Environmental Humanities Lecture
Environmental Humanities Lecture
International Women’s Day Celebration
Undergraduate Inside Scoop
Paul Sutter
Kate Brown
Tyehimba Jess
History, University of Colorado Boulder
Science, Technology, and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Co-hosted by the Women & Gender in Global Perspectives Program.
Supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Co-sponsored by Krannert Art Museum. Supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
DECEMBER
10–11 Authors Exchange Reading Luis Urrea and Meagan Cass
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English, University of Illinois at Chicago and University of Illinois Springfield
2019 Work-In
IPRH Research Cluster
Part of A Year of Creative Writers at Illinois 2020; Cosponsored by the Creative Writing Program, Department of English.
FEBRUARY
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Community Healing and Resistance Through Storytelling (C-HeARTS)
19 Undergraduate Inside Scoop Anna Deavere Smith Actor and Playwright
19 Culture Talk Anna Deavere Smith Actor and Playwright Part of A Year of Creative Writers at Illinois 2020. Cosponsored by Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, Center for Advanced Study, and the College of Fine and Applied Arts.
MARCH
Performance/Talk
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Forum “Race, Place and the Politics of Census 2020” With Julie A. Dowling (Latino/a Studies); G. Cristina Mora (Sociology, University of California Berkeley); Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz (Sociology and Latino/a Studies, Northwestern University); Anita Banerji (Director, Democracy Initiative for Forefront); Griselda Vega Samuel (Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund [MALDEF]).
5–6 Conference Environmental Humanities Symposium: “Experimental Environments” Supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
Singer/Songwriter, Elsinore; Owner, Perennial Sound Studio.
APRIL
7 Reading Tyehimba Jess Poet and Professor of English, College of Staten Island Part of A Year of Creative Writers at Illinois 2020. Cosponsored by the Creative Writing Program, Department of English, and the Champaign Public Library.
Part of A Year of Creative Writers at Illinois 2020. Cosponsored by the Creative Writing Program, Department of English and the Bruce D. Nesbitt African American Cultural Center.
9 Reading Tyehimba Jess: An Evening with Olio Poet and Professor of English, College of Staten Island Part of A Year of Creative Writers at Illinois 2020. Cosponsored by the Creative Writing Program, Department of English.
27 Odyssey Project Student Presentations Part of Undergraduate Research Week. Supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
MAY
1 Environmental Humanities Undergraduate Research Symposium Part of Undergraduate Research Week. Supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
7 IPRH Prizes for Research Ceremony and Reception
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Research Cluster Events Michelle Zauner September 26, 7:30 pm Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, Stage 5
A sample of some upcoming events planned by the IPRH Research Clusters
Understanding Movement Style and Social Interactions Through Participatory Performance Research Cluster Student/ Faculty Mixer September 24, 2019, 4pm
J. Allyn Rosser + Mark Halliday
September 28, 4 pm Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, Stage 5 Presented in partnership with the Kirkland Fund and the Department of English. All readings are FREE + ALL AGES
MEL 1208
Interested in style, interaction, dance, robots, and participatory performance? Come to our student/faculty mixer in the RAD Lab September 24 at 4pm in Mechanical Engineering Lab (MEL) 1208. For more information email jtoenjes@illinois.edu or alaviers@illinois.edu.
Medical Humanities Upcoming events planned by the Medical Humanities Research Cluster, with support from the Carle Illinois College of Medicine and the Presidential Initiative to Celebrate the Impact of the Arts and the Humanities
September 12, 2019 Rebecca Garden
IPRH is pleased to continue our relationship with PYGMALION this year through support of these events. Known throughout the indie music world for her solo project, Japanese Breakfast, Michelle Zauner will read from her upcoming memoir, Crying in H-Mart, a story about searching for identity in a hybrid culture, to be published by Knopf. A short-form version has appeared in The New Yorker. J. Allyn Rosser is a contemporary American poet and the author of four poetry collections, including Mimi’s Trapeze (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014) and Foiled Again (Ivan R. Dee, 2007), winner of the New Criterion Poetry Prize. Rosser is a professor of English at Ohio University, where she also served for eight years as the editor of New Ohio Review. Mark Halliday is a poet, professor, and critic. He is author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Losers Dream On (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Thresherphobe (University of Chicago Press, 2013) and Keep This Forever (Tupelo Press, 2008). His honors include serving as the 1994 poet in residence at The Frost Place, inclusion in several annual editions of The Best American Poetry series and the Pushcart Prize anthologies, receiving a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship, and winning the 2001 Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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IPRH 2019 NEWSLETTER
John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science; Associate Professor of Public Health and Preventive Medicine; Executive Director, Consortium for Culture and Medicine, SUNY Upstate
October 31, 2019 Londa Schiebinger Professor of History of Science, Director, Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering and Environment Project, Stanford University
February 21, 2020 Jeffrey Bishop Tenet Endowed Chair in Health Care Ethics; Professor of Philosophy, Professor of Health Care Ethics; Professor of Theology, Albert Gnaegi Center for Health Care Ethics, Saint Louis University
A Year of Creative Writers at Illinois 2020
Spring 2020 Featured Writers
Creative writers are the lifeblood of any social and cultural moment. They work in many genres; they are seers and sirens; they chronicle, they future-trip, they enchant, and they trouble. Read and cherished by people from all walks of life, they are an unsung public good. In these times, when the written word proliferates in a variety of forms, the writer’s craft needs champions like never before. Join us for a year of conversations with and about creative writers up and down the state of Illinois, supported by IPRH, the Creative Writing Program and the Presidential Initiative to Celebrate the Impact of the Arts and the Humanities. Tell your students and bring your neighbors to a reading or public event to hear a variety of voices, some you may know and some you will want to know. They are sure to be energizing and inspiring—and to remind us of why we need to think of the creative writers among us as touchstones for the times.
Anna Deavere Smith
Tyehimba Jess
Luis Urrea
Meagan Cass
Upcoming Year of Creative Writers Events February 19 Anna Deavere Smith March 10–11 Luis Urrea and Meagan Cass April 7–9 Tyehimba Jess, Poet in Residence September 11–12
Cris Mazza and Christina Pugh
October 4–8
Dave Eggers, Writer in Residence
October 13–14
Daniel Borzutzky and Christopher Grimes
November 13–14
A Festival of Writers
Featuring Roxane Gay, Tracy K. Smith, and more.
IPRH Application Deadlines, 2019–2020 August 23
NEH Summer Stipends
September 27 David F. Prindable Internship October 14
IPRH-Ragdale Residential Creative Fellowship
January 10
Mellon Pre-Doctoral Fellowships in Legal Humanities
February 3
Mellon Public Humanities Fellowship
March 2
Mellon Undergraduate Internships in Legal Humanities
October 15 Training in Digital Methods for Humanists Fellowships
March 9
Prizes for Research in the Humanities
December 6
April 10
IPRH Research Clusters
IPRH Campus Fellowships
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
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The Year in Review From the music and insights shared at our opening Performance/Talk by the University of Illinois Black Chorus to a panel discussion about the lived and racially-targeted consequences of war machines, our speakers this year engaged a deep range of the questions raised by our annual theme, “Race Work.” We were fortunate to host some of the leading researchers currently considering the place of data from a humanistic, interdisciplinary set of approaches, during the Humanities and Arts in the Age of Big Data Conference, and co-sponsored the opening keynote for conferences organized by the Medieval Studies Program and the Department of Classics. Our 3rd Annual Work-In, led by the members of I-CAUSE (Illinois Coalition Assisting Undocumented Students’ Education), trained 50 faculty and staff members about the work needed to be allies and advocates for undocumented/DACAmented students on our campus. The Environmental Humanities Research Group organized a number of events, including a screening of the documentary Awake, A Dream from Standing Rock with filmmaker Myron Dewey (see page 9). We also welcomed poet and 2016 MacArthur Fellow, Claudia Rankine, for a much-anticipated reading, and brought our year to a close with the annual Prizes for Research in the Humanities ceremony and reception. 1
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1–2. Lecture by Esra Özyürek 3. Dr. Ollie Watts Davis & the U of I Black Chorus Performance/Talk 4. Tianna Paschel 5. Peggy McCracken 6. Rini Bhattacharya Mehta at The Art Theater 7. Dr. Roberta M. Johnson & President Tim Killeen, Antony Augoustakis, Emma Dench & Antoinette Burton 8. Audience members at “Race Work in the Classics” keynote 9–10. Performance/Talk with Onye Ozuzu 11. Toby Beauchamp, Denise Loyd, & Colleen Murphy, International Women’s Day 12. Odyssey Project Student Presentations 13–15. Claudia Rankine Reading 16–17. IPRH Research Prize Graduate Student Winner Marcelo Kuyumjian and Undergraduate Honorable Mention Brittany Lundberg with Antoinette Burton
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IPRH 2019 NEWSLETTER
Humanities and Arts in the Age of Big Data October 4–5, 2018 One of the final events of the University of Illinois’ Sesquicentenary celebrations, the Humanities and Arts in the Age of Big Data Conference brought together scholars from across North America for two days of robust conversations to consider what happens when the collection and generation of data is approached foremost as social and cultural phenomenon, and to work from the assumption that the humanities are key to expanding questions, redefining priorities and revealing responsibilities at this moment in the history of technological innovation.
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1. Lisa Nakamura & Trevor Muñoz 2. Catherine D’Ignazio/kanarinka 3. Erik Loyer 4. Matthew Jones & Safiya Noble 5. Welcome by Provost Andreas Cangellaris 6. Thursday Opening Plenary 7. Lisa Yun Lee 8. Trevor Muñoz, Lisa Nakamura, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Antoinette & Lisa Yun Lee 9. Friday panel session audience 10. Richard So 11. Virginia Eubanks 12. Opening Plenary panel 13. Antoinette Burton 14. Opening Plenary audience members 15. Safiya Noble 16. Liz Losh 17. Donna Cox
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
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The Odyssey Project
2018–19 Odyssey Project students and staff at graduation.
In 2018–19, community partner Urbana Adult Education Center (UAEC) once again hosted the Odyssey Project class meetings. In the fall, students ventured to the Common Ground Food Co-Op to attend a pizza-making program on food and memory, led by the Co-Op’s Outreach Coordinator, Sarah Buckman. The evening’s theme harmonized with oral history and literary units the students were undertaking. Other highlights of the year included students’ attendance at a performance of Blue Manual’s No Blue Memories—the Life of Gwendolyn Brooks at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts in November and an on-campus IPRH poetry reading by Claudia Rankine in April (Poetry Month). For the third consecutive year, the students presented posters as part of Undergraduate Research Week on campus in April. Students and staff concluded the year by traveling to Chicago in May for a joint graduation with the Chicagoarea Odyssey Project cohorts, hosted by Illinois Humanities, at the National Museum of Mexican Art. The commencement speaker was Dr. Juana Goergen, Associate Professor of Spanish at DePaul, celebrated author of several collections of poetry, and instructor in the Chicago Odyssey Project’s Spanish Program. Maritrini Gomez was the student speaker representing the Champaign-Urbana cohort, and her moving remarks included the reading of a poem, “This Is Happiness,” jointly composed by the Odyssey students in an activity responding to Willa Cather’s My Ántonia. As the Odyssey Project enters this exciting new chapter in its history (see earlier, page 3), IPRH wishes to thank the Urbana Adult Education Center (UAEC) for housing the program since 2014. We are grateful for this long and fruitful partnership, and we look forward to maintaining recruiting ties with the Center, even as the Odyssey classes move back on campus. Special thanks go to UAEC Director Schawna Scherer, and her staff, including Edwin Vega, for their role in supporting the Odyssey Project and welcoming our students and instructors into their midst. Dedicated instructors are the lifeblood of the Odyssey Project, and IPRH is most grateful to Jennifer Burns, Shelley Weinberg, Valerie O’Brien, and Meghann Walk for their teaching in 2018–19, as well as to Lara Pur and Donté Winslow, who served as undergraduate
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IPRH 2019 NEWSLETTER
student-support interns. It is, however, a bittersweet task to bid adieu two individuals who played a particularly invaluable role running the Odyssey Project last year, without whom the new day dawning for Odyssey would not be possible: Dr. Jennifer Burns gamely and gracefully took on the administrative task of running the program in addition to her robust teaching duties, opening new co-curricular vistas and helping IPRH to reshape the courses as U of I courses. For her indefatigable efforts we owe an enormous debt. Dr. Burns has departed the prairies of Illinois for Boston College, and along with our undying thanks, we send well wishes to her and her family in their new endeavors. Bennett Stewart, who first served two years as an intern with the Odyssey Project, while majoring in history at Illinois (class of 2018), was IPRH’s Assistant Coordinator for Odyssey this past year. Her tireless efforts and clear vision and initiative in the arenas of recruiting and student support have laid a strong foundation that we look to build on in the years ahead. The community ties she has forged will continue to aid Odyssey, long into the future. For all her work we are immensely grateful. In May, Bennett began a new position as Organizer-in-training for SEIU International, working for their higher-education campaign in Chicago. She will be sorely missed, but we take comfort in knowing that this inspiring young alumna will make an indelible mark wherever she goes. Congratulations and godspeed, Bennett! Last but not least, IPRH wishes to recognize the instructors who will be teaching for the Odyssey Project this 2019–20 year: Professor Shelley Weinberg (Philosophy), Valerie O’Brien (Literature), and Meghann Walk (Critical Thinking and Writing tutorial) return again this year, and Professors Jorge Lucero (Art History) and Kathryn Oberdeck (US History) newly join the instructional team, the first to deliver the new suite of collaboratively taught Illinois courses. IPRH is delighted to host Painter Kim Curtis (fall) and writer Audrey Petty (spring) as the inaugural Mellon Artists in Residence with Odyssey students this academic year. Also with Mellon support, Lara Pur (English major) returns as an intern, and Khiren Johnson (Urban and Regional Planning major) joins her. Meghann Walk will also be the inaugural Mellon Public Humanities Fellow, and Valerie O’Brien will be the new Odyssey Project Advisor and Student Experience Coordinator, marshalling the team’s efforts to promote student success. IPRH’s newly hired Assistant Director for Education and Outreach Dr. Alaina Pincus (see page 20 for staff information) will have oversight of the program, assisting IPRH in growing and sustaining it as a resource for the Champaign-Urbana community. To learn more about the Odyssey Project—and how you can contribute to its future—visit http://www.iprh.illinois.edu/ community/odyssey.html.
Education Justice Project This year marked the 10th anniversary of the Education Justice Project (EJP) offering a collegein-prison program at Danville Correctional Center in Central Illinois. Over those years, EJP has conferred University of Illinois credit to over 200 incarcerated scholars, several of whom have continued their education upon release. Three have earned Master’s degrees! In 2009, EJP consisted of for-credit classes, tutoring sessions, and guest lectures. It now hosts twelve different programs at the prison, including an award-winning ESL initiative that involves EJP training our incarcerated students to serve as peer English as a Second Language instructors to men in the general population, business workshops, and a computer lab (EJP students work as lab support).
EJP Community Librarian Holly Clingan and Michael Tafolla, following their testimonies, July 8, 2019.
One aspect of EJP’s work that has expanded significantly since early years relates to advocacy and public education. In 2019, EJP members for the first time were invited to testify before members of the Illinois House of Representatives, on two separate occasions, helping to educate them and the public about the value of providing quality education to individuals behind bars and the need for protection of that enterprise. During one hearing, EJP Alumnus Michael Tafolla (released 2018) said, in part, “… it took me a bit to get used to the way EJP engaged us. I had never had an outsider view me as other than an ‘inmate.’ But they viewed me as a student and human being. This changed the way that I thought and the way that I felt. It helped to normalize me and prepare me properly for the world I was about to face. Thanks to that exposure, I am able to be out here in this society as a contributing productive citizen.”
National Humanities Advocacy Day In early March 2019, nearly two hundred humanities professionals from across the country gathered in Washington, D.C. to advocate for humanities funding. This national effort, organized by the National Humanities Alliance (NHA) and supported by IPRH, began with a full day of training in how to lobby members of Congress and culminated in a day of meetings on Capitol Hill with representatives, senators, and their staff members. Professors Renée Trilling (English) and Jonathan Ebel (Religion) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, joined colleagues and students from across the state, some with significant lobbying experience, others with none at all.
Renée Trilling (left) and Jon Ebel (second from the left) with the IL delegation.
The goal of each meeting with a member of Congress or her/his staff was to convince the member to support increased funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities, Title VI / Fulbright-Hays, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. To do so, the delegation spent hours researching the impact that NEH and other humanities programs have in the lives of Illinois constituents, whether they are students at community colleges and universities; patrons of local historical societies, museums, and libraries; or veterans working to describe their experience of war and reintegration. Between the two of them, Professors Ebel and Trilling met with Representative Rodney Davis (R, IL-13) and Representative Sean Casten (D, IL-6), and with staff members representing Senator Dick Durbin, Representative Adam Kinzinger (R, IL-16), and Representative Cheri Bustos (D, IL-17). As a result of Humanities Advocacy Day, an unprecedented number of Congressional representatives signed on to support increased humanities funding. And on June 25, 2019, the House passed an appropriations bill that included increases of $12.5 million dollars for the NEH, $24 million for Title VI / Fulbright-Hays, and $15 million for the Institute of Museum and Library Services. These are substantially larger increases than these vital programs and institutions have received in recent years, reversing a nearly decade-long trend of cuts. This was the second year of IPRH support for Humanities Advocacy Day. Faculty and students who are interested in learning more about this successful lobbying effort and how to get involved should contact IPRH at iprh@illinois.edu.
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
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IPRH Staff & Advisory Committees
Welcome to IPRH
IPRH 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 Alaina Pincus
Elizabeth Tsukahara
Valerie O’Brien
Alaina Pincus is the Assistant Director for Education and Outreach, responsible for ensuring IPRH educational and outreach program objectives are achieved. Alaina Pincus earned her BA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Arizona and completed her MA and PhD in 18th-century British literature, with an emphasis in Jewish Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies, at the University of Illinois. There, she also developed and edited the public scholarship community ABOPublic: Interactive Forum for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830 (2014–2017) in affiliation with the ABO, the official journal of the Aphra Behn Society. While working with IPRH, she maintains an active scholarly interest in the field of 18th-century studies. Prior to joining IPRH, Dr. Pincus served in the Office of the Provost from 2016–2019 as the Project Manager for the Grand Challenge Learning Initiative, an interdisciplinary and experiential general education program. Concurrently, she also served as the Project Manager for the General Education Assembly on Learning Outcomes, which seeks to develop student learning outcomes for Illinois’ general education curriculum. Elizabeth Tsukahara joined the IPRH staff as Communications Coordinator in August 2018. She holds a BA in English from Wellesley College and has studied creative nonfiction writing at The University of Iowa. Valerie O’Brien joined IPRH as Odyssey Project Advisor and Student Experience Coordinator in 2019, after having taught with the Odyssey Project in 2018. She earned BAs in English and Creative Writing and an MA in English from the University of Illinois, where she is currently completing her PhD in English literature. Her research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction and autobiography, and she has published on literary representations of neurodiversity. Valerie has taught classes in literature, composition, and gender and women’s studies at the University of Illinois and received the 2018 Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. She currently teaches English at the University of Illinois Laboratory High School, as well as collaboratively teaching HUM 111 for the Odyssey Project.
Jennifer Hood, Client Relations and Special Projects Coordinator jahood@illinois.edu, 217-300-3595 Jason B.P. Mierek, Humanities Without Walls Director of Operations hww-manager@illinois.edu, 217-300-3711 Carolyn Randolph, Training in Digital Methods for Humanists Project Manager crandol2@illinois.edu, 217-300-7643 Elizabeth Tsukahara, Communications Coordinator etsukaha@illinois.edu, 217-300-0675 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 Valerie O’Brien, Odyssey Project Advisor and Student Experience Coordinator odysseyproject@illinois.edu, 217-300-3888
Education Justice Project Rebecca Ginsburg, Director info@educationjustice.net
IPRH Advisory Committee James R. Brennan, History Jane Desmond, Anthropology / Gender & Women’s Studies Daniel Gilbert, Labor & Employment Relations / History John Tofik Karam, Spanish & Portuguese Kathryn La Barre, Information Sciences Colleen Murphy, Law / Philosophy (Illinois Global Institute representative) Valleri Robinson, Theatre Valeria Sobol, Slavic Languages & Literatures Andrea Stevens, English
External Advisory Committee Emary C. Aronson Ann Merritt David Prindable Ruth Watkins 20
IPRH 2019 NEWSLETTER
We are grateful to our donors, whose generous gifts help make our activities possible. Thank you for your investment in IPRH.
Giving to IPRH As the campus humanities center, IPRH is central to the way the world of knowledge is changing— thanks to the culture of innovation that makes Illinois a preeminent public research university. At IPRH, our ambition is to model how and why the work of the humanities—in all its breadth and depth—is critical to imagining just, productive and innovative futures for all. Support for our work guarantees that humanities research, teaching, learning and public engagement are at the core of what we call on as we face the challenges of today and tomorrow.
Our overarching goal is to create a $15 million endowment for IPRH. There are many ways you can help IPRH 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 • Named award for faculty or student achievement • Named scholarly residencies
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
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
Donations can be made by contacting the IPRH Director at iprh@illinois.edu or (217) 244-3344, or online through the IPRH website at iprh.illinois.edu/ giving.html. You can also donate by contacting our Advancement Officer Tony Pomonis, Director of Development at the University of Illinois Foundation (English ’02), at (217) 300-3470 or apomonis@ uif.uillinois.edu. Tony has worked on behalf of IPRH since 2015, and in that time, he has generated over a million dollars of gift commitments. As a successful entrepreneur and product of the humanities at Illinois, Tony is living proof that critical thinking skills and adaptability are vital to professional success. He travels the country year-round spreading the humanities gospel. Feel free to reach out to him—he may be in your neighborhood soon! Many companies will match or even double or triple your gift. Simply request and complete the Matching Gift Form from your company’s Human Resources Office, then mail it along with your gift check. See if your company has a matching gift program at http://www.uif. uillinois.edu/matching.
David F. Prindable Undergraduate Intern Thanks to the generosity of IPRH External Advisory Committee member David F. Prindable, IPRH benefits from the energy and talents of an undergraduate intern each year. We would like to thank this year’s Prindable intern Ellie Hinton, for her outstanding work this year. As a dedicated advocate for the humanities, Ellie assisted with our undergraduate outreach efforts and helped to focus our approach to event publicity. She graduated this spring with a major in Gender & Women’s Studies, and minors in Global Labor Studies and History. We wish her every success in her future endeavors. 21
IPRH | Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities
Established in 1997, the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign promotes interdisciplinary study in the humanities, arts, and social sciences. IPRH serves as a major hub for humanities activity on campus. We coordinate and host lectures, symposia, and panel discussions on a wide variety of topics, and we provide awards that recognize excellence in humanities research to faculty and students. We bring distinguished scholars from around the world to campus, and we support Illinois faculty and graduate student research through Fellowships and a bi-monthly seminar. IPRH helps to cultivate collaborative faculty-driven initiatives through its Research Clusters; hosts multi-million dollar external foundation grants; and supports faculty and graduate student reading groups.
T (217)244.3344
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
F (217)333.9617
Levis Faculty Center, Suite 400
E-mail iprh@illinois.edu
919 West Illinois Street
Website iprh.illinois.edu
Urbana, Illinois 61801