Michael Szalay delivers his morning keynote address on the advent of market segmentation in 1960s advertising.Leslie Reagan and Clarence Lang speaking, respectively. on women's reproductive experience and civil rights in the 1960s....

[The next in our "15 Ways" series on the condition of higher education offers a reflection on the choice between furloughs and voluntary pay reductions.]Written by Joseph Valente (English)On January 20, our Interim Chancellor, Robert Easter, sent us all a message: “we are pleased to be able to offer... to our faculty and...

[The next in our series on higher education, 15 Ways to Take Your Furlough/Voluntary Pay Cut, features the reflections of five members of the Graduate Employee’s Organization (GEO)]Written by Melinda Bernardo (Research Assistant and Ph.D. Student, Anthropology); Peter Odell Campbell (Teaching Assistant and Ph.D. Student,...

[The next in our series on the condition of higher education comes from outside the University of Illinois. Joseph Childers, a scholar of Victorian literature, is professor of...

To help set the mood for this month's symposium, MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s, the Unit for Criticism has created a slideshow inspired by music and images from the 1960s as well as from Mad Men.The event will take place on Friday 2/19, beginning at 9:30 am and will conclude with a 9pm Dance Party at V. Picasso in...

[Cary Nelson's contribution to the "15 Ways to Take Your Furlough/Voluntary Pay Cut" series on the condition of higher education is excerpted from the lecture he gave for the Unit for Criticism's January 25 colloquium, "Higher Education's Perfect Storm: What Can We Do?"]Written by Cary Nelson (English/President, AAUP)The...

Written by Dianne Harris (Director, Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities and Professor of Landscape Architecture, Architecture, Art History, and History)As an architectural historian, I am a humanist who studies the history of human interactions with the built environment. As such, I’ve spent a fair amount of time...

Detail from Leonardo's Codex Written by Sevinç Türkkan (Comparative Literature)When I first found out that translating literature is not considered academic work on many campuses across the USA, I was very surprised. Does that mean that in academic circles today, translation is considered merely as the...

The Brooklyn Bridge photographed in the 1950s[On January 25, 2010 the Unit hosted a lecture by Cary Nelson, “Higher Education’s Perfect Storm: What Can We Do?,” with responses by Douglas Beck (Physics) and Harriet Murav (Slavic/Comparative & World Lit). Below is an abridged version of Professor...

[On January 25 the Unit for Criticism hosted a colloquium, "Higher Education's Perfect Storm: What Can We Do?," featuring Cary Nelson, professor of English, president of the national AAUP, and author of the forthcoming book No University is...

"Red Dress in F Minor" by Midori Furze[On January 20, 2010, Interim Chancellor/Provost Robert Easter announced a new Voluntary Pay Reduction program as an alternative to the mandatory furlough program announced...

[Here is the second of the posts the Unit for Criticism has commissioned for its series, "15 Ways to Take Your Furlough," a discussion of the condition of higher...

[On January 5, 2010, Interim President Stanley Ikenberry announced a four-day furlough for eligible academic professionals and faculty as a “short-term measure to conserve cash” during Spring 2010. The Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory has commissioned...

Dear Colleagues,I hope this email finds you warm and dry on a snowy January day in Champaign-Urbana (or wherever you are as you read these words). With furloughs recently announced for a wide swath of Illinois employees, and budgetary crises continuing at local, national, and global levels, I write in the hopes...

Written by Chantal Nadeau (Gender & Women's Studies)What is the relationship between queer and the future? Between queer and its future? How do we define queer in relation to a future that would be outside of the matrix of heteronormativity and a certain vision/rendition of reproducibility? Or is it that queer always happens in an impalpable, unmarked present, yet one that clearly makes it a...