2024-04-13 - Lila was selected by the Center for African Studies as a FLAS Fellow to continue advanced study of Bamanankan/Julakan, summer 2024 and academic year 2024-25.    Additional accomplishments: At the beginning of this year Lila was invited to participate and present in the workshop “Tensions globales et dynamiques de création en Afrique de l’Ouest...

2024-03-18 - Toby Beauchamp (Associate Professor, Gender and Women's Studies) and Mimi Thi Nguyen (Associate Professor, Gender and Women's Studies), along with Aren Aizura (Associate Professor in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota), received a three-year, $30,000 grant from the Big Ten Academic Alliance to build trans studies across the Big Ten schools. This grant will...

2024-03-11 - Brett Ashley Kaplan has been appointed as the Nannerl O. Keohane Visiting Distinguished Professor at Duke University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Professor Kaplan, an innovative scholar in memory studies, holds appointments in Comparative Literature, French, Jewish Studies Program, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. The goals of this professorship are to...

2024-03-06 - The Unit for Criticism congratulates this year's recipients of the 2024 Conrad Humanities Scholars Award, John Levi Barnard (Comparative and World Literature, English) and Maryam Kashani (Gender and Women's Studies, Asian American Studies), who are both affiliated with the Unit. Barnard and Kashani have been appointed Conrad Humanities Scholars alongside John Gallagher (English) and Natalie Lira...

2024-02-05 - Kei Kato (PhD student, Geography) and Taisuke L. Wakabayashi (PhD student, Landscape Architecture) have been awarded 2024 Nicholson Fellowship to attend School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University.  In an intensive six-week course of study, participants work with a faculty of distinguished scholars in one of four six-week seminars. Each faculty...

2024-01-10 - David Wilson has been appointed as a lifetime American Association of Geographers Fellow for his meaningful contributions to the discipline of geography. Professor Wilson, with appointments in geography, urban planning, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has been an innovative theorist of global north cities and their rust belt urban environments for...

2023-12-21 -   Helga Varden’s Sex,Love, and Gender (Oxford University Press 2020) was awarded the prestigious North American Kant...

Unit Affiliated Graduate student Adrian Wong has been awarded a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) Fellowships. "He will travel to the greater Santiago Metropolitan Region to study the development of digital infrastructure in Chile amid the context of social and environmental inequality and Chile-China relations. The fellowship will provide him with the means to live in...

"New Philadelphia was the first known town planned and legally registered by an African American before the Civil War. Frank McWorter, a formerly enslaved man from Kentucky, founded the town in 1836 and bought his freedom and the freedom of 15 family members. The rural community situated near the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers flourished at first, but later declined when the railroad bypassed...

Tim Ingold is a renowned anthropologist whose work has examined the relationship between the material and the social in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, art, and architecture. A phenomenologist, Ingold sees humans as beings that move through and sense a world that is itself also moving. In recent work, he has sought to replace traditional models of genetic and cultural transmission of...

Kaja Silverman (University of Pennsylvania Sachs Professor of Art History) has been an important theorist of visuality for the past four decades. In 2011 she was given the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award by the Mellon Foundation in recognition of her outstanding contributions to scholarship. Her Subject of Semiotics (1983) became an immediate classic for its brilliant yet succinct...

Dr. Geraldine Heng delivered the Krouse Family Visiting Scholar in Judaism and Western Culture Lecture, titled "Race Before the Modern Era: 'Presentism,' 'Intersectionality,' and the Politics of Keywords." Professor Heng's visit was co-sponsored by the Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory, the Program in Jewish Culture & Society, and the Program in Medieval Studies.  Geraldine...

A book manuscript workshop was held for Karen Flynn’s Black Pacific: The African Diaspora in East Asia. The book is an interdisciplinary ethnographic examination of the mobility of English as Foreign Language (EFL) teachers of African descent from Canada, the United States, Britain and the English-speaking Caribbean who have chosen to travel to East Asia. Drawing on theoretical analyses...

Graduate student Unit affiliate Debayudh Chatterjee attended a recent screening of Suman Mukhopadhyay's latest film Nazarband (Captive/2020). Interestingly, the film's screenplay was co-written by Unit affiliated Faculty Anustup Basu (English). To read Deb's fascinating review, visit the...

Roderick Ferguson (Yale), Mishuana Goeman (UCLA), Viet Thanh Nguyen (USC), and Alfonso Gonzales Toribio (UCR) reflect on racism and anti-racist politics today.