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Aishi Bhattacharya
Aishi Bhattacharya is a PhD student in the Department of Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on South Asian literature and culture,...
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Alunood Aldhawi
Alunood is a PhD student in Philosophy. Her research interests lie in practical philosophy, particularly at its intersections with political, moral, and social philosophy. She focuses on questions of...
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Former Unit Director Susan Koshy Leads "At Risk U" Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Academic Freedom
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/...
Message regarding hate speech on campus
We are deeply troubled by the recent circulation of an image that appears to glorify violence and to frame federal agents as executioners rather than officers bound by law.
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Nicholson Fellowship 2026 Awarded to Namita Gupta and Adil Zahoor
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...
Rethinking Agency, Freedom, and the Anthropocene in the Environmental Humanities: A Dialogue
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On November 18, 2025, Pollyanna Rhee (Landscape Architecture, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) and John Levi Barnard (English, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) engaged in a dialogue on “Environmental Humanities” as part of the Modern Critical Theory (MCT) lecture series.Their dialogue responded to a culture that often treats environmental knowledge as abundant yet environmental action as elusive. Over the evening, the two speakers explored related yet distinct trajectories: Rhee examined the intellectual challenges the Anthropocene brings to historical study, while...
Technocracy Conference
March 5 & 6, 2026
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Siqi Tong
Siqi Tong is a PhD student in Musicology. Her research spans musical exchanges between China and the West in the 20th and 21st centuries, the modernization of Chinese traditional music, Chinese...
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