Campus Humanities Calendar
Monday, October 27, 2025
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5:00 - 7:30 pmLincoln Hall 3057The HRI Social Movements Reading Group will hold two sessions on higher ed labor organizing with the Campus Faculty Association on Mon Oct 27 & Mon Nov 3, 5:30-7 PM (central time) at Lincoln Hall 3057 (use one of the entrances on Wright Street). We will read excerpts from Jane McAlevey’s No Shortcuts for the first session. Light refreshments provided. You can find more in
Tuesday, October 28, 2025
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5:00 - 6:30 pmAlice Campbell Hall
Ayelet Tsabari’s National Jewish Book Award winning, novel, Songs for the Brokenhearted, traces the story of the history of Yemeni Israelis through a fictional family. Tsabari visited UIUC in 2019, and was interviewed for Ninth Letter.
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5:15 - 6:45 pmLevis Faculty Center, Room 210
Wednesday, October 29, 2025
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3:00 - 4:00 pmMain Library Room 321
The International and Area Studies Library, Literatures and Languages Library, Ricker Library of Architecture and Art, Music and Performing Arts Library, and History, Philosophy, and Newspaper Library invite you to our "International Studies and Humanities Meet and Greet" on Wednesday, October 29, from 3:00 to 4:00 PM, in Main Library Room 321.
Thursday, October 30, 2025
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5:30 - 7:00 pmSiebel Center for Design, Classroom 1002
How might service and volunteer work reinforce structures of inequity? Join We CU and OVCDEI on Thursday, October 30, at 5:30 PM for a workshop on centering equity and humility in service learning. This training will help you develop strategies to promote equity in your own service work, critically examine biases, and center the voices of the communities you are serving.
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6:30 - 9:00 pmSpurlock Museum 600 S. Gregory Street, Urbana
Join us for a spectacular evening of African and other world language(s) poetry
Friday, October 31, 2025
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12:00 - 1:30 pmNatural History Building 2049
Are you a first-gen student interested in grad school but unsure where to start? Our group of panelists from the Department of Geography & GIScience will answer your questions and share their experiences.
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1:30[Hybrid] Coble Hall 306 & Zoom
Please join us for a hybrid event with Baiheng Qian, a PhD Candidate in Classical Chinese Literature at Sun Yat-sen University (Guangzhou, China). Her talk examines women's ci poetry and cultural transformation in the mid-to-late Ming dynasty (1522-1644), a period shaped by tensions between hedonistic indulgence and moral rigor.
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3:00 pmLevis Faculty Center, Rm 210
In 1978, the tropical city-state of Singapore received three polar bears, starting a dynasty of polar bears that ended in 2018. Within the lifespan of these tropical polar bears, the planet has undergone rapid and exponential growth in economies...
Saturday, November 1, 2025
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4:00 - 5:00 pmThe Literary: 122 N Neil St, Champaign, IL 61820
November 1, 2025 4-5pm - A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley: Spurlock Museum is proud to partner with The Literary to present this new community program. Free books will be provided to the first 13 people that sign up for participation. Stop by the museum anytime during open hours to sign up and pick up your free book.
Monday, November 3, 2025
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4:00 pmIllini Union, Room 210This talk appreciates the importance of Garveyism and the Midwest for understanding the contours, genealogies, and complexities of twentieth-century Black transnational resistance and for imagining that another world is possible in this moment of global crisis.
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5:30 - 7:00 pmLincoln Hall 3057
The HRI Social Movements Reading Group will hold two sessions on higher ed labor organizing with the Campus Faculty Association on Mon Oct 27 & Mon Nov 3, 5:30-7 PM (central time) at Lincoln Hall 3057 (use one of the entrances on Wright Street).
Tuesday, November 4, 2025
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5:15 pmLevis Faculty Center 210
Stephen M. Best (English, University of California, Berkeley) will deliver a lecture, titled "The Limits of Racial Critique" as part of the Fall 2025 Modern Critical Theory Lecture Series. Please check the MCT website for the latest location updates. The Box folder of readings for each lecture is available here.
Wednesday, November 5, 2025
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4:00 pmllini Union Bookstore 2nd floor Author's Corner 809 S Wright St, Champaign, IL 61820
In Civilizing Contention, Rana B. Khoury asserts that to understand civilian and refugee activism in war, we must regard the international actors and organizations that enter the scene to help.
Thursday, November 6, 2025
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4:00 - 5:00 pmEnglish 109
Anna Hunt (Professor of German) “Quick! Somebody Get Me A Doctor of German Philosophy,” HGMS workshop, English 109, 4 pm-5 pm.
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4:30 pmSpurlock Museum
This talk will trace the journeys of the artists and activists who converged at Memorial Stadium in September 1985 to make the inaugural Farm Aid concert a landmark event in the history of popular music.
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5:00 pmLucy Ellis Lounge (1080 LCLB)
Prof. Ryan Low (University of North Dakota) ~~ In fourteenth-century Provence, the volume of written contracts increased from thousands each year to million, involving even the region's most remote rural communities and serving the interests of marginalized actors, including women, peasants, and religious minorities.
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6:00 - 7:30 pmKrannert Art Museum, 500 E. Peabody Dr., Champaign
SPEAK stands for Song, Poetry, Art, and Knowledge. It is an open-mic public performance space at Krannert Art Museum curated by local artist, Shaya Robinson, featuring guest performers and welcoming all to the mic.
Friday, November 7, 2025
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12:00 pmMax L. Rowe Auditorium, College of Law, 504 E. Pennsylvania Avenue, Champaign, IL 61820
Drawing on original data from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project, a landmark long-term study, “Debt’s Grip” uses the words of bankruptcy filers themselves to shed light on their financial battles, making a powerful case for the U.S. to confront the structural inequities that cause so many to struggle. Join us for a panel discussion featuring bankruptcy experts and commentary
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1:30 - 3:00 pm
Please join us for a virtual event with Dr. Se-Mi Oh, a cultural historian of modern and contemporary Korea teaching at the University of Michigan. Her work investigates how history interacts with space in cities, through interdisciplinary approaches to history, visual/media studies, urban humanities, and art and architecture.
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3:00 - 5:00 pmGregory Hall 321
Join us for a lecture from Tempest Henning, an associate professor at Fisk University. She will offer a conception of Black feminist logic (BFL) that is not simply a variant of feminist logic. Rather, it is founded on distinct systems rooted in African logical traditions and manifested via the linguistic structures of African American English (AAE).
Saturday, November 8, 2025
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11:00 am - 12:00 pmKrannert Art Museum, 500 E. Peabody Dr., Champaign
Join us for Pause + Play held in conjunction with Krannert Art Museum’s Rest Lab 8: Greenspace exhibition. Kids (ages 4–8) will dive into playful, drop-off art activities, while their caregivers get a guided tour exploring the museum's galleries and artworks on view.
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2:00 - 4:00 pmKrannert Art Museum, 500 E. Peabody Dr., Champaign
Join us to celebrate Rest Lab 8: Greenspace (on view through Jan 31), with curators Kamila Glowacki and Ishita Dharap. The reception will feature live music, cupcakes, and a chance to explore all of Rest Lab’s offerings including sensory tools and a response wall.
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5:00 - 7:00 pmChanning Murray Foundation
The Annual Tagore Festival commemorates the Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore's visit to the UIUC campus in 1912 when he delivered a series of lectures at the Channing Murray Chapel. For the 2025 celebration, there will be a keynote lecture by Professor Michele Louro on “India's Anticolonial Struggle from Swadeshi to Independence".
Sunday, November 9, 2025
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3:00 pmChapel of St. John the Divine, Champaign
This concert by Urbana's newest period instrument ensemble directed by Professor Emerita Charlotte Mattax Moersch, celebrates the elegance and grandeur of the French Baroque, with works by Leclair, Couperin, and Rameau.
Tuesday, November 11, 2025
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11:30 am - 12:30 pm908 W. Nevada St, Urbana, IL 61801
Join us as we honor Veterans Day with keynote speaker Major General (Ret.) James H. Mukoyama, Jr., a University of Illinois alumnus, decorated combat Veteran, a proud Illinois alumnus and trailblazing U.S. Army leader.
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5:00 pmKnight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S Gregory St. Urbana
AsiaLENS presents a free screening of Echoes of Home followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Mirshad Ghalip. This documentary explores the Uyghur American Cup, the largest event for Uyghur diaspora communities in North America. In the tournament, soccer becomes a medium to foster community, maintain language, and help younger members of the diaspora connect with their heritage.
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5:15 - 6:45 pmLevis Faculty Center, Room 210
Wednesday, November 12, 2025
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3:00 - 5:00 pmMain Library, Room 346
Gillen D’Arcy Wood will present his new book about the Victorian-era voyage of the HMS Challenger. From 1872-1876, its naturalists explored the oceans, encountering never-before-seen marvels of marine life. They had no way of knowing that the incredible undersea aquarium they were documenting was on the verge of catastrophic change.
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5:30 pmCampus Instructional Facility (CIF) 4039
Dr. Angie Bonilla will examine how humanitarian and artistic media transform migrant life into spectacles of empathy and control. Through films, photographs, and installations, she traces how Latinx visual practices expose the racial politics of visibility and imagine endurance and solidarity beyond cages, beyond crisis.
Thursday, November 13, 2025
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12:00 - 1:30 pmLevis Faculty Center, Rm 208
In this new research project, Prof. Handman (Anthropology, UT Austin) explores the different ways that AI is transforming our ideas about language and humanness by seeing how people are imagining some kind of AI-enabled interspecies communication.
Friday, November 14, 2025
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1:30 - 3:00 pm[Hybrid] 306 Coble Hall & Zoom
Please join us for a hybrid CEAPS Brown bag with two PhD student Conference Travel Grant recipients. Jiwon Oh (Institute of Communications Research) will be presenting her talk “Navigating Gendered Anthropomorphism in AI Ethics: The Case of Lee Luda in South Korea.”
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2:30 - 4:00 pmCU Community Fab Lab
Yiddish literature is deeply connected to the print technologies that made it possible, especially letterpress and block printing. Join us for a presentation on the historical Yiddish press and a hands-on workshop at our campus print shop. Come print a postcard and poster using authentic Yiddish type and historical printing presses! Registration is required.
Saturday, November 15, 2025
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7:30 pmThe Venue CU
Featuring an all-star ensemble made up of beloved Yiddish vocalists Lorin Sklamberg and Sasha Lurje, plus five leading string players from the klezmer scene, this project blends techniques and soundscapes from klezmer music, Yiddish theatre, folk song, cantorial repertoire, and classical music in a program that is equal parts storytelling...
Sunday, November 16, 2025
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10:00 am - 6:00 pmActivities & Recreation Center (ARC), Multipurpose Room 7
Celebrate the festival’s grand finale with a kugel cook-off and taste-off! Featuring a performance by our local Papashoy Klezmer Band and guest judges Gioconda Guerra Perez (UIUC Interim Vice Chancellor of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion), Deb Feinen (Mayor of Champaign), and Deshawn Williams (Mayor of Urbana)...
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1:30 - 3:30 pmThe Activities and Recreation Center (ARC), Multipurpose Room 4
This lecture series features short talks on a variety of subjects related to Yiddish, featuring UIUC's Anastasiia Strakhova on immigration, YIVO Chicago's Ben Schacht on Chicago's garment workers, the University of Michigan's Emma Lerman on children's literature illustrations, local musician Frances Harris on Klezmer today...
Monday, November 17, 2025
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6:00 - 8:00 pmThe Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St. Urbana
Women have largely been written out of the ancient world. Dealing with the silences of the archive requires new and innovative tools, and in this talk, Dr. Emily Hauser surveys the many different approaches she has taken across her fiction and non-fiction writing to recover women.
Tuesday, November 18, 2025
Wednesday, November 19, 2025
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12:00 pmRoom 212 / Center for Children's Books, 501 E. Daniel St., School of Information Sciences
Dr. Patricia Kennon (Maynooth University), the general editor of The International Journal of Young Adult Literature, will be giving a brief lecture on Asexuality in Contemporary YA Literature at the Center for Children's Books. Come learn!