2026-02-19 - Former Director of the Unit for Criticism, Susan Koshy, is leading a faculty team that has been awarded a Mellon Sawyer Seminar grant to study the challenges to academic freedom and democracy in US universities today. The co-organizers of the Sawyer Seminar are Rosalyn LaPier (History/...
2026-02-06 - Namita Gupta and Adil Zahoor have been awarded 2026 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...
2025-04-17 - Waïl S. Hassan (Professor, Comparative & World Literature and English) was elected Second Vice President of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in December 2024. His term began in January 2025 and will continue through January 2026. Following the MLA’s leadership succession, Professor Hassan...
2025-02-18 - Umair Rasheed (PhD candidate, Sociology) and Alex Kaiser (PhD student, Sociology) have been awarded 2025 Nicholson Fellowship to attend School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University. In an intensive six-week course of study, participants work...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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,...- 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...