Programs & Projects
Reading Groups: 2009-10
The following Reading Groups will meet regularly throughout the year and frequently organize public events on topics of interest to a broad range of disciplines. Descriptions of the groups can be found on the IPRH website. Please contact the Reading Group organizers (listed below) directly for more information about the groups and their activities.
African Cinemas Reading Group
The African Cinemas reading group will hold monthly screenings/discussions of classic and current African cinema and relevant theory and criticism. Geographical/linguistic focus is open and will be determined by participants’ interests. Graduate students and faculty pursuing research on African film, video and other screen media are invited to present works-in-progress.
Contact: Mahir Saul (m-saul@illinois.edu) and Maggie Flinn (mflinn@illinois.edu)
Centers and Margins in East Asian History and Culture
We seek to understand East Asian cultures as they formed over time through interaction between various centers and margins. We want to unpack the changing meanings of the terms “center” and “margin” in East Asia over space and time, as the meanings point to different things if you speak of them in terms of the myriad geographic, cultural or political subject positions within East Asia. The group reads both important recent work, and group members’ own projects.
Contact: Jing Jing Chang (jjchang1@illinois.edu) and Yoonjeong Shim (yshim@illinois.edu)
Community Literacy and Service Learning Research
This group will form in fall 2009 to consider contemporary conceptions of service and citizenship and their connection to the Champaign-Urbana community. Over the year, the group will (a) discuss theory and case studies of community literacy and service learning; (b) research the local network of community organizations and resources; and (c) generate public texts to disseminate research and forge sustainable service relationships.
Contact: Martha Althea Webber (mwebber2@illinois.edu)
Comparative Politics Workshop
The CPW is a forum for the presentation of on-going cross-national and/or cross-cultural research that poses academically interesting and relevant questions about political phenomena. It is not limited in terms of subject or methodology. Presentations are informal, papers are circulated before the meeting and all are encouraged to actively participate in the discussion. Schedule of meetings can be found at: https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/cheibub/www/comparative_politics_workshop.html
Contact: José Antonio Cheibub (cheibub@illinois.edu)
Critical Technologies of Race
This is an inter- and transdisciplinary group designed to draw connections between texts in critical theory and critical race studies. It is an important time to re-imagine the circulation of racial epistemologies and politics; conversations would be designed to facilitate the re-thinking and re-framing of critical race studies via classic and contemporary readings in critical theory.
Contact: Fiona Ngô (ngo@illinois.edu)
Designmatters
Designmatters is a campus-wide lecture series organized by the School of Art and Design and sponsored by the Provost’s Office, and the Deans of the Colleges of Engineering and Fine and Applied Arts. The program explores the synergistic relationships between design, engineering, technology, and business in the creation of innovative, successful products, services, and experiences. Speakers herald from academic, the media, engineering, technology, business, and the design professions. We aim to stimulate conversations about how we literally and figuratively shape our future. A complete schedule of events can be found at http://designmatters.art.illinois.edu.
Contact: David Weightman (diw@illinois.edu)
Digital Literacies
Organized around the theme of digital literacies, this reading group invites colleagues to engage in an interdisciplinary conversation on how digital media have been taken up in fields such as writing studies, art and design, informatics, communication, and rhetorical studies, among them. With digital literacies, we do not signal only competence in the skills necessary to operate a computer. Instead we argue that the ability to read, compose, and communicate electronically has become essential to literate activity. Our website is:http://www.cws.illinois.edu/IPRHDigitalLiteracies/index.htm
Contact: Gail Hawisher (hawisher@illinois.edu), Patrick Berry (pberry2@illinois.edu), and Amber Buck (abuck2@illinois.edu)
Drugs, Culture, and Society
This group will continue to foster discussions about the multitude of narratives found woven into the realities of illegal drugs via literature in a variety of disciplines and genres. Readings will engage particular dominant and subaltern narratives that have emerged during the last 150 years, which taken collectively answer the question: how did we get here? While answering this question, we intend to work towards investigating alternative narratives that can be used to construct different approaches to public discourse regarding drug use.
Contact: Daniel Larson (dmlarson@illinois.edu)
Dynamics of Language Variation and Change
Using a speaker-oriented perspective of language change (cf. Weinreich/Labov/Herzog 1968; Croft 2000; Auer/Hinskens/Kerswill 2005), the reading group will be discussing and analyzing language use in specific communities of practice and social networks. By going back to the foundational sociological origins of these concepts (Wenger 1989; Justensen 2004; Fuse 2009), the objective is to reexamine the sociolinguistic and language contact literature on language variation, and change. These weekly meetings will focus mainly on Romance languages.
Contacts: Anna Maria Escobar (aescobar@illinois.edu) and Zsuzsanna Fagyal (zsfagyal@illinois.edu)
East Asian Language Pedagogy
East Asian Language Pedagogy reading group is a bi-weekly meeting among those graduate students and faculty who are interested in second language acquisition and pedagogy. Our goals are to expand our knowledge of East Asian language learning/acquisition and pedagogy, and to become familiar with important professional resources so that we, as language teachers, learn to become an informed, purposeful decision maker in the second/foreign language classroom.
Contact: Misumi Sadler (sadlerm@illinois.edu) and Jeeyoung Ahn Ha
(j-ahn3@illinois.edu)
Eastern Europe
This group is concerned with exploring thematically-diverse approaches to Eastern Europe. In our monthly meetings, we discuss a combination of new publications, recent articles, colleagues' works-in-progress, and cultural products. Because diverse fields - such as history, anthropology, political science, and literature - offer a variety of different methodological treatments of problems in current scholarship dealing with Eastern Europe, our group strives to be inter-disciplinary and intellectually progressive. We are happy to welcome new members into our discussions.
Contact: Jovana Babovic (babovic1@illinois.edu) and Keith Hitchins (khitchin@illinois.edu)
Experimental Pragmatics
Experimental pragmatics is a new and growing field at the intersection of semantics, pragmatics and psycholinguistics which adapts psycholinguistic methodology to test the predictions of competing theoretical analyses of meaning. Building on the strengths of several units (Linguistics, Psychology, SLCL foreign literature departments, Beckman Institute), we aim to familiarize participants with the latest developments in the field of experimental pragmatics through discussions of the latest published research and invited talks by experts in the field.
Contact: Marina Terkourafi (mt217@illinois.edu) and Tania Ionin (tionin@illinois.edu)
Geographies of Risk
In preparation for the conference on "Geographies of Risk" that the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese is organizing for fall 2010, this reading group will explore the significance of the humanities in producing knowledge about risk. The meetings will be structured around specific thematic clusters, such as Risk and the Realms of the Literary, Biopolitics of Risk, Economies of Risk, The Geopolitics of Risk, and Visual Culture and Risk.
Contact: Javier Irigoyen-García (irigoyen@illinois.edu) and Eleonora Stoppino (stoppino@illinois.edu)
Korea Workshop
The 2009-2010 Korea Workshop sessions will be devoted to Governance and Korean Society. We hope to investigate a variety of legal, regulative, and other official prescriptions in the contexts of literature, history, religion, and social practice in Korean society. We envision that this theme will serve as an important impetus for enhancing interdisciplinary dialogues on topics including: legal codes and their effect in local or national spheres; literary or cinematic representations of legal issues; tensions between local practice and national policy; and imperial prescriptions in colonial zones.
Contact: Nancy Abelmann (nabelman@illinois.edu) and Jungwon Kim (kimjw@illinois.edu)
Language and Social Interaction
This group holds weekly data sessions on the following topics: repair, turn-taking, sequence organization, learner and teacher talk, grammar and interaction, etc. For each meeting, one group member provides the data, i.e., an audio/video recording and transcript. This format provides us with an opportunity to a) analyze data from various languages, b) share in each other’s research, c) present difficult data samples to a friendly audience for feedback, and d) to hone our analytical skills.
Contact: Andrea Golato (golato@illinois.edu)
Late Antiquity After Hours and Underground (LAAHUG)
LAAHUG has been in existence for a few years. Students and faculty in the seminar meet 3-4 times each term to share work-in-progress or to discuss a specific topic. Occasionally papers are given by colleagues from other institutions. This interdisciplinary group concentrates on the "long" late antiquity," (2nd- 8th C. CE). The emphasis has been Mediterranean, topics wide-ranging. We welcome classicists, archaeologists, historians, early medievalists, scholars of religion –anyone with an interest in this period.
Contact: Danuta Shanzer (shanzer@illinois.edu) and Ralph Mathisen (ralphwm@illinois.edu)
Medicine/Science
This interdisciplinary reading group focuses on the historical and cultural analysis of human health, medicine, and science. We read history, cultural studies, sociology, and anthropology and, from time to time, view videos as well. Topics have included AIDS, Japanese-American physicians, thalidomide, condoms, disabilities, and end-of-life care. The core group comes from History, the Institute of Communications Research, and the Medical Scholars Program. We welcome those with related interests in other disciplines.
Contact: Michelle Kleehammer (kleehmmr@illinois.edu) and Leslie J. Reagan (lreagan@illinois.edu)
Oral History
The practice of oral history transcends any one discipline and the academy itself. For the third year of this reading group, we propose framing our readings and discussions with the following questions in mind: What is the evolving practice of oral history?How is oral history conceived as a genre by its interdisciplinary practitioners, and how does it compare with other kinds of narrative and documentation, such as testimonio, memoir, personal narrative and family legend? How do we preserve oral history? What issues does archiving raise for the practice of oral history and associated ephemera? Will access change in the digital age?
Contact: Susan Davis (sgdavis@illinois.edu) and Christine D’Arpa (cdarpa2@illinois.edu)
Politics, Ethics, and the New Formalisms
The British Modernities reading group discusses recent scholarship, workshops group members' original work, and organizes an annual mini-conference. Our 2009-2010 topic, “Politics, Ethics, and the New Formalisms,” explores a recent critical trend in cultural and literary studies. We will begin by defining “form” and “formalism,” and the different uses of these terms across disciplinary boundaries. We will also study the degree to which a “return” to formalism implies a corresponding political and/or ethical judgment.
Contact: Carrie Dickison (cdickis2@illinois.edu) and Katherine Skwarczek (skwarcze@illinois.edu)
Queer Studies: Sexualities, Races, Nations
This reading group will consider current interdisciplinary queer studies scholarship on sexualities, races, and nations. We are especially interested in exploring: the national and cultural specificity of existing formations of queer critique and theories of racialization; transnational queer approaches; and the extent to which analyses of race and sexuality do or do not translate easily or innocently across historical periods or national contexts. Open to all graduate students and faculty.
Contact: Richard T. Rodríguez (rtrodrig@illinois.edu)
Rhetorical Studies
The Rhetorical Studies Reading Group engages in focused studies of key topics, scholars, and surveys of the most recent scholarship in rhetorical studies. Typically meeting once every three weeks during the academic year, gatherings alternate between discussion of recent scholarship and visits with important scholars. With respect to the former, the group has taken up topics ranging from 16th-century style manuals to “rhetorical agency” to Lacanian theory. With respect to the latter, the Rhetorical Studies Reading Group has hosted scholars from Communication, English, Classics, and Media Studies. Our theme for the 2009-2010 academic year will be the critical stance--how do critics position themselves in the current academic, social, and political environment? As rhetorical studies is an inherently interdisciplinary field of research, we welcome any and all who are interested in the study of critics and their contexts.
Contact: John Murphy (jmmurphy@illinois.edu)
Research Libraries: An enduring value?
This group will examine the diverse and evolving ways that the value of research libraries has been assigned and measured. Our guiding questions will be: What has been the historical mission of the research library? How have these libraries been shaped by their user communities and social and political forces? What is their responsibility to society? How have various groups designated and assessed the success of these libraries? How have contemporary trends and pressures changed the role of the research library?What remains valued about this unique institution? Readings will come from a wide range of fields including history, public economics, and library and information science.
Contact: M. Kathleen Kern (katkern@illinois.edu) and Linda Smith (lcsmith@illiois.edu)
Trans-East Asian Cinema
The Trans-East Asian Cinema Reading Group focuses on the interactions among cinemas of China, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Hollywood. We will screen films, and discuss issues such as trans-regional co-productions, and the impact of China’s marketization on East Asian national cinema. We seek answers to the following questions: To what extent has the imagination of a unitary East Asian market influenced the style, aesthetics, and visual concepts of East Asian filmmakers? How is trans-East Asian cinema related to trans-Pacific and transnational cinema? What is the relationship between regionalism and transnationalism?
Contact: I-In Chiang (ichiang2@illinois.edu) and Mei-Hsuan Chiang (mchiang3@illinois.edu)
Youth, Literature, and Culture
This interdisciplinary group brings together faculty and doctoral students who share a scholarly interest in children’s and young adult literature and media. We represent various disciplines (including Education, English, History, Library and Information Science) and institutions (U of I, ISU, EIU, and others) and meet monthly to discuss research on young people, texts, and cultural contexts. We also participate in the annual GSLIS Research Showcase, and host the Gryphon Lecture, an annual lecture
featuring a leading scholar of youth literature.
Contact: Christine Jenkins (cajenkin@illinois.edu)