Institute for the Humanities, UIC

Stop by the Institute TOMORROW between 3pm and 5pm to help us honor and celebrate all of the wonderful work done this year by the thriving community of faculty, students, and staff engaged in humanities research at UIC! We'll also honor the accomplishments of our past and current Faculty Fellows and Resident Graduate Scholars, as well as our Working Groups, and we'll welcome the 2024-2025 Faculty Fellows!

A moving and poetic conversation took place at the Institute today moderated by UIC's Raffi Magarik, Paul Zolbrod (emeritus, Allegheny College), Edgar Garcia (UChicago), and Tim Harrison (UChicago), who discussed what happens when the Diné Bahane', the Popol Vuh, and Paradise Lost are read together.

Come by the Institute to help us honor all of the important work done this year by the thriving community of faculty, students, and staff- including but not limited to our Working Groups- engaged in humanities research at UIC!
We'll also celebrate the accomplishments of our past and current Faculty Fellows and Resident Graduate Scholars and welcome the 2024-2025 Faculty Fellows.

What happens, what emerges, what is created when the Navajo creation story, the Mayan creation story, and Milton's Paradise Lost are read side by side? University of Chicago professors Edgar Garcia and Tim Harrison will be joined by Paul Zolbrod for a conversation moderated by UIC's Raffi Magarik that considers these questions and invites the audience to compare specific passages from the three works.

Register below by April 14.

https://huminst.uic.edu/events/creations-paradise-lost-the-popol-vuh-and-the-dine-bahane-in-dialogue/

Stop by the Institute on April 23 between 3pm and 5pm to help us honor and celebrate all of the wonderful work done this year by the thriving community of faculty, students, and staff engaged in humanities research at UIC! We'll also honor the accomplishments of our past and current Faculty Fellows and Resident Graduate Scholars, as well as our Working Groups, and we'll welcome the 2024-2025 Faculty Fellows!

Join us at the Institute on April 10 from 5p-7p to discuss Thục Linh Nguyễn Vũ and their role as a German Kennedy Memorial Fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University and a postdoctoral fellow at the Research Center for the History of Transformations at the University of Vienna.

She is a cultural historian of socialism. Her work has been published in Cahiers du Monde Russe, East European Politics and Society, and other academic and non- scholarly outlets.

The event is co-sponsored by the Stefan and Lucy Hejna Family Chair in the History of Poland.

In “The Contested Academy and Proliferating Modernities: The Art of Nation Building in Nepal,” Dipti Sherchan examines contestations between artist-subjects and the nation-state over competing imaginaries of what it means to be modern that proliferate over time. Join us at the Institute on Tuesday April 2, 2024 from 2p-4p!

The Anthropocene Lab invites you to a bee workshop!

March 27th @ 5pm
UIC Greenhouse, 1020 S. Union Ave.

Co-sponsored by the UIC Office of Sustainability, The UIC Greenhouse, The UIC Art Garden, and The UIC Art Department.

Join us at the Institute for the Humanities on March 29 @ 10am - Bangladesh’s democratic journey began in 1990 at the height of the ‘Third Wave of Democracy’ around the world. But in the past fifteen years, the country has quietly transformed into an autocracy - Professor Ali Riaz examines the pathway of the autocratization process in the past decade and analyzes the events related to the election held on 7 January 2024.

How have aid agencies been coopted into the US "war on terror"? A strong turnout of faculty and students to hear Lisa Bhungalia discuss her book Elastic Empire: Refashioning War through Aid in Palestine in an event sponsored by the Global Middle East Studies working group.

Lisa Bhungalia is Assistant Professor of Geography at Kent State University researching late-modern war, law, and empire. Her first book, Elastic Empire: Refashioning War through Aid in Palestine is what will be the topic of discussion at the Institute on 3/25 at 12p-1:30p!

This talk will chronicle the cultural, personal, and educational contacts between Poland and Vietnam by examining how these interactions developed over the course of the second half of the twentieth century—after decolonization, amid the Second Indochina War and against the backdrop of global socialism.

Join us today at the Institute from 2p-3:30p for the Asian Americans & Affirmative Action Lecture Series - hosted by the Global Asian Studies Program.

A talk on Diva Worship: Trans Femininity and Gay Life by Dr. Eva Pensis on 3/14 here at the Institute!
Scan the QR Code to register

Our Resident Graduate Research Scholar Seminar Series continues with a discussion on how to make Modern Art under Monarchy. Join us at the Institute on April 2, 2024 at 2pm!

Yesterday, Institute Faculty Fellow Elise Archias spoke beautifully and forcefully about how the art of the painter Joan Mitchell and the sculptor Melvin Edwards resisted the system-oriented abstraction favored and enabled by the emergence of the professional managerial class (PMC) in the 1950s and 60s, arguing for a vision of art as a space for negotiation, dialogue, and the acknowledgement and embrace of materiality and embodiment.

TOMORROW
Join us at the Institute at 4pm !

RSVP required-limited seats available. Email Katelyn Patton, [email protected], to RSVP by March 1. This program is an introductory budget-friendly workshop to research and learn about the world of mushrooms. We will focus on how to inoculate mushroom spores with the head mycologist of Windy City Mushrooms, Matthew Lopez, and learn about basic physiology, growth cycle, and at-home growing techniques for oyster, lion’s mane, and shiitake cultivation. Serena JV Elston, a Chicago-based artist, will talk about her work with mushrooms. All supplies provided. Family friendly!

Co-sponsored by UIC Anthropocene Lab, Art Department, UIC Greenhouse, Office of Sustainability, and Institute for the Humanities.

Join us next week on March 7th for Elise Archias’s Faculty Fellow Lecture. Elise Archias’s research and classes center around art since 1945 including performance art and dance, asking questions about the relationship between abstract ideals, physical materials, and human needs in 20th- and 21st-century life and aesthetics.

Feb. 28 at the Institute! "This lecture will discuss how the historically contingent and contested meanings of the polemical rhetoric of disinformation have been circulating and mutating from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day in Anglophone, German and Russophone cultural contexts."

A stellar lineup of scholars gathered yesterday at the Institute to compare comparativisms in a variety of disciplines and consider the implications for the discipline of art history. Topics addressed included the history of comparativism, the nature of untranslatability, and the relationship between comparativism and indigeneity.

Is poetry a passion of yours? Are you someone that stands with Palestine?
This event at Taft Hall may be just the one for you! Yahya Ashour is a Palestinian poet and author and is well known for his two books in Arabic.

This event is co-sponsored by the UIC Arab American Cultural Center, Institute for the Humanities, Classics and Mediterranean Studies Department, the Social Justice Institute.

See you on the 22nd!

The SEENEXT Working Group is hosting an event at the Institute on Tuesday 2/13 to discuss the rise of right-wing populism and how it has become a subject of a small research industry. Come and join the SEENEXT Working Group at 5p to see why folks are falling in love with it.

Clare S. Kim is Assistant Professor of History and Global Asian Studies at UIC. Her research examines the relationship of twentieth- and twenty-first-century mathematical and computational sciences to the formation and representation of national, professional, and racialized identities in the United States, as well as how these identities, in turn, shape the dynamics of knowledge exchange.

Join us at the Institute on February 19, 2024 for, "an informal discussion, cross-disciplinary workshop that emerges from a group project to develop an alternative history of world art and considers how different disciplines in the humanities and social sciences are thinking about comparativism."

Register here for this hybrid event, "Provocations for a Different Art History in a Cross-Disciplinary Context: Comparing Comparativisms"!

https://huminst.uic.edu/events/provocations-for-a-different-art-history/ -here

Last night, Faculty Fellow Mario LaMothe guided us through Haitian dance, exploring the relationship between embodiment, trauma, creativity, agency, collaboration, and Vodou in his talk "Yanvalou for Haiti: An Affective Ethnography of Ayikodans' Cry Haiti Mother."

We had a great turnout for our first-ever Undergraduate Humanities Research Open House! Students were able to meet with representatives from the Philosophy and English Clubs, LAS Career Services, the Office of Undergraduate Research, LASURI, the Asian American Student Academic Program, the Native American Support Program, various faculty mentors and especially each other as they explored our space and learned about research opportunities across disciplines and campus.

SEENEXT has an event that features Jan Kubik whom is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Political Science at Rutgers University and Professor of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London (UCL). Join the SEENEXT Reading Group February 13, 2024 at 5:00 PM - 7:30 PM for a riveting discussion

We're getting ready for our very first Undergrad Open House!
Are you an undergraduate researcher in the humanities/social sciences/interdisciplinary programs? Come by the Institute for the Humanities on January 31 between 12PM and 2PM to talk about successes and setbacks, share what works (and what doesn't) for you, or just join us to see the space and have a bite to eat. EVERYONE is welcome!

Join us on Zoom on February 2, 2024 for a thrilling conversation about how this collective has focused on deconstructing the processes of internal and external colonization in Nepali history. Register here:

https://uic.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIlduqtrjkiG9NEA7gz5I1OnR5NJjiVO5Og #/registration