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  • Woven Chronicle--Installation Art Image Reena Kallat
  • The Unit for Criticism is hosting a Welcome Reception on September 7, 2022.
  • beatriz milhazes installation in Sao Paolo
  • Mycelium Matrix painting-Greg Allen
  • Radical ColLabs Collage
  • Woven Chronicle--Installation Art Image Reena Kallat
    Working from the South of Theory
    Learn More
  • The Unit for Criticism is hosting a Welcome Reception on September 7, 2022.
    Usher in the new semester with the Unit!

    Check back here for details about our reception.

    Learn More
  • beatriz milhazes installation in Sao Paolo
    Modern Critical Theory Lecture Series

    a series of public lectures on the history of critical theory

    Learn More
  • Mycelium Matrix painting-Greg Allen
    Our faculty

    a mycelium matrix linking 10 colleges, 37 departments 

    Affiliated Faculty Members
  • Radical ColLabs Collage
    Radical ColLabs: Experiments in Theory and Interdisciplinarity
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  • abstract painting of face profiles
    GER 575

    Fascism: Its Aesthetics, Its Critics, Then and Now

    Professor: Anna Hunt Meets: Thursdays 3-4:50 PM in Davenport Hall (Room 215) On returning to Europe in 1948, Brecht observed that “The rapid decline of artistic methods under the Nazis seems to have taken place almost unnoticed. The damage done to theatre buildings is far more conspicuous than...
    Course Description for GER 575
  • glass hearts hanging in the window
    AIS 503

    Decolonial Love in Indigenous Literature and Theory

    Professor: Deena Rymhs Meets: Wednesdays, 2-3:50pm (in-person) Drawing on the writing of such authors as Leanne Simpson, annie ross, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Tommy Pico, Tanya Tagaq, Marie Clements, and Tanaya Winder, this seminar explores representations of "decolonial love" in Indigenous literary...
    Course Description for AIS 503
  • Art piece of woman looking into glass bowl of fish called "Stay Home" by Dominique Fung
    AAS 501

    Theories and Methods for Asian American Studies

    Professor: Maryam Kashani Meets: Tuesdays 10 AM - 12:20 PM in Davenport Hall (Room 215) Foundational gateway course for graduate study in Asian American Studies, examining the political, historical, epistemological, and cultural bases of the field through an intensive reading of canonical works...
    Course Description for AAS 501
  • people in an embrace
    GWS 550

    Feminist Theories & Methods

    Professor: Emma Velez Meets: Thursdays from 2:00-4:50 PM in Lincoln Hall (Room 1068) Feminist theory has two aims; the first is to critique existing knowledge practices, theoretical paradigms, and conceptual systems in a wide range of disciplines for embedded biases and exclusions of gender-...
    Course Description for GWS 550
  • soap bubble
    ENGL 500

    Introduction to Criticism and Research

    Professor: Robert Dale Parker Meets: Mondays and Wednesdays 1:00-2:15 PM in the English Building (Room 307) This course is a survey-introduction to the concepts and methods of recent critical theory. In short, it is a ticket to engaged fluency in the dialogues and opportunities of contemporary...
    Course Description for ENGL 500
  • street art woman
    GWS 575

    Transnational Feminisms

    Professor: Maryam Kashani Meets: Wednesdays 2-4:50 PM in Davenport Hall (Room 215) Study of the terms, methodologies and theoretical interventions of transnational feminist studies. Transnational is a term that calls attention to circuits of political, economic, and social phenomena across the...
    Course Description for GWS 575
  • eye with map
    LA 506

    Landscape and Vision

    Professor: D. Fairchild Ruggles Meets: TBA A study of the major 20th-century texts on vision, perception, and perspective as applied to architecture and landscape.
    Course Description for LA 506
  • film reel
    MACS 503

    Historiography of Cinema

    Professor: Julie Turnock Meets: Thursdays 1-4:50 pm in Gregory Hall (Room 336) While the title of this course is “Historiography of Cinema,” it is designed to help you research and incorporate issues of moving image culture more broadly into your research agendas. Cinema studies provides the...
    Course Description for MACS 503
  • looted Benin bronzes
    CWL 581

    Memory of Objects

    Professor: Brett Kaplan Meets: Mondays 3-4:50 pm (in person) How do material things carry memory? Evoke memory? How are objects of/and memory represented in literary texts? How do the objects of looted art—whether the Benin Bronzes, the Elgin Marbles, or the untold number of objects looted by the...
    Course Description for CWL 581
  • street art
    HIST 591

    History and Social Theory 

    Professor: Tamara Chaplin  Meets: Wednesdays 1:00-2:50 pm (in person) “Theory”—love it or hate it, social theory provides the epistemological framework through which historians, sociologists and other scholars in the humanistic and social science disciplines conceptualize our world.  But what is...
    Course Description for HIST 591
  • US Supreme Court
    SOC 596

    Law and Society

    Professor: Jose Atiles Meets: Thursdays 3:30-6:30pm (in person) This course discusses major issues and debates in the fields of law and society and socio-legal studies. This course covers the theory and practice of legal and political institutions in performing several major functions at the...
    Course Description for SOC 596
  • colorful tiles
    PS 521

    Philosophical Bases of Political Inquiry

    Professor: Sam Frost Meets: Wednesdays 1:00-3:20pm in David Kinley Hall, Room 404 This course examines a range of debates in the philosophy of social science as the latter pertains to the question of how to study politics. We will be particularly attentive to the entanglement of ideas about...
    Course Description for PS 521
  • UN
    LAW 657

    International Human Rights Law

    Professor: Francis A. Boyle Meets: Mondays & Tuesdays 3-4:15 pm (online) Based primarily on a series of contemporary “real world” problems, the course introduces the student to the established and developing legal rules and procedures governing the protection of international human rights....
    Course Description for LAW 657
  • Roderick Ferguson (Yale), Mishuana Goeman (UCLA), Viet Thanh Nguyen (USC), and Alfonso Gonzales Toribio (UCR)

    Featured Video: "Making It Plain: Articulating Our Racist Present"

    Roderick Ferguson (Yale), Mishuana Goeman (UCLA), Viet Thanh Nguyen (USC), and Alfonso Gonzales Toribio (UCR) reflect on racism and anti-racist politics today.
    Read full story Featured Video: "Making It Plain: Articulating Our Racist Present"
  • David Sepkoski (History) challenges Edward O. Wilson's legacy in The New York Review

    History Professors David Sepkoski (UIUC) and Mark Borello (Minnesota) recently co-wrote “Ideology as Biology” for The New York Review, in which they challenge the late...
    Read full story David Sepkoski (History) challenges Edward O. Wilson's legacy in The New York Review
  • Visualizing 21st Century Theory at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

    Using a survey of faculty specializations we conducted this spring, we have for the first time created a map of contemporary theory at UIUC. The results show that our 112 affiliates work in 10 colleges and 42 departments across campus. The top five theoretical subfields are race/gender/indigeneity...
    Read full story Visualizing 21st Century Theory at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
  • Michael Uhall

    Graduate Student Spotlight: Michael Uhall

    Michael Uhall is a recent Ph.D. graduate from the Political Science Department, where he studied with Samantha Frost and others. His research addresses a range of topics in political theory...
    Read full story Michael Uhall

More Department News

  • Professor D. Fairchild Ruggles receives international attention for Tree of Pearls (Oxford, 2020)
    Professor D. Fairchild Ruggles (Landscape Architecture) has received international attention for her recently published book, ...
    Read full story
  • Professor Brett Ashley Kaplan (Comp. & World Lit) interviews interdisciplinary writer-performer Deke Weaver
    Professor Brett Ashley Kaplan (Comp. & World Lit) interviews interdisciplinary performance artist Deke Weaver whose lifelong project has been the creation of a multimedia ...
    Read full story
  • Here Comes the Sun Ra: Spring Concert with the Arkestra
    We are very excited that the Sun Ra Arkestra, led by Marshall Allen, will perform for us as part of our Planetary Imaginaries conference! The concert is on March 25. 2022 at 7:30 pm at the Virginia Theatre. Tickets are free but required for entry. Check back here for updates as we prepare for this...
    Read full story
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Land Acknowledgement

Grandmother stands on a turtle in the water, looking at the moon

We acknowledge that we are on the homelands of the Peoria, Kaskaskia, Piankashaw, Wea, Miami, Mascoutin, Odawa, Sauk, Mesquaki, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, Ojibwe, and Chickasaw Nations. We honor these ancestral grounds as the traditional territory of these Native Nations prior to their forced removal. As members of a land-grant institution, we are obligated to know the histories of dispossession that have allowed the University of Illinois to grow. We must acknowledge and reflect on colonialism as an active crisis and address the role that this university has played in it. The centering of Native peoples is merely a start in committing to undoing the erasure of Native voices, histories, and futures. We have a responsibility to decolonize this institution and our communities, to raise consciousness about indigenous sovereignty, and to act in ways that bring about justice. 

Donate to the Native American House at the University of Illinois.

About the Artist: Waab-Shki-Makoons (Clayton Samuel King) is a multimedia artist living in Ontario, Canada. He is of Bodewadmi (Potawatomi) Anishinabek and Chi Mookomaan descent and is a member of Beausoleil First Nation, otherwise known as Chimnissing. Nookmis and the Water Beings is acrylic on canvas. 

 

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