• 2023-12-07 - In a joint ceremony held earlier this fall, the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences celebrated the investitures of Tim Dean as James M. Benson Professor in English and Robert Dale Parker as Frank Hodgins Chair in American Literature.
  • 2023-10-13 - Professor Janice Harrington hopes that book on pioneering Black botanist inspires young readers to overcome obstacles and pay attention to the world around them.
  • 2023-08-18 - The whaling industry helped drive industrialization in the 19th century, with whale oil used to light lamps and lubricate machinery. Even after petroleum replaced whale oil as an energy source in the U.S., whaling continued to be part of our cultural imagination and helped develop the idea of an energy industry, said University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign ...
  • 2023-07-12 - There are things we’ve trained to do, and then there are the things we change for. Professor John Levi Barnard describes how his scholarship and teaching add perspective to current crises.
  • 2023-06-14 - The College of Liberal Arts & Sciences awarded Corey van Landingham, Andrea Stevens, and Justine Murison of the Department of English with named scholar positions.   The College of LAS announced 26 appointments recognizing professors for their contributions to education and research at the University of Illinois.  Van Landingham was named a Lincoln Excellence for Assistant...
  • 2023-06-07 - Jonathan Phalen, who graduated in May with degrees in English and secondary education, has accepted a Fulbright/America for Bulgaria Foundation English teaching assistant award. The program aims to improve the quality of English education in Bulgaria by placing U.S. students in public high schools across 25 Bulgarian cities. The 10-month grant will support Phalen and other recipients while they...
  • 2023-04-14 - The Office of the Provost announced that professor Janice Harrington and senior lecturer Michael Hurley were among those honored for excellence and innovation in teaching undergraduate students.
  • English professor Justine Murison researches and teaches 19th century American literature. She’s fascinated by what she calls "the meeting place of the material and the immaterial: the boundaries between, for instance, psychological emotion and physiological response, spiritual striving and bodily care, and imaginative reading and social consequences." “My method is interdisciplinary,...
  • Susan Koshy is the guest editor with Christopher Cannon of the latest issue of PMLA (137.5) on “Monolingualism and Its Discontents.” The introduction offers an incisive recontextualization of monolingualism as a "a category assumed more than it is named and named more than it is examined." Featuring essays by Taoufik Ben Amor, Eric Calderwood, Susan Choi, Rey Chow, Sarah Dowling, Juliet Fleming,...
  • The HMS Challenger began a four-year voyage 150 years ago to explore the deep sea and the creatures that lived in it. The scientists aboard the ship discovered thousands of new species and recorded massive amounts of data about the oceans. The treasure trove of information they gathered is now available online in the first comprehensive database of the Challenger findings. A new ...
  • From Anustup Basu, Hindutva as Political Monotheism (Duke, 2020)  Basu offers a genealogical study of right-wing Hindu nationalism, demonstrating how a modernization project subsumed a vast array of polytheistic, pantheistic, and henotheistic...
  • Susan Koshy (Asian American Studies/English), has been named Faculty Fellow (Humanities, Arts, and Related Fields) in the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation (OVCRI) and the Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute (IHSI). The Fellows Program supports faculty members interested in developing innovative research initiatives of humanists, artists, and interpretive social...
  • Each year LAS selects up to seven recipients across the entire college. Mrs. Helen Corley Petit, a deceased alumna of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, provided an endowment for the development of the scholarship and teaching of early career faculty members in the College.   ...
  • The Graduate Awards Committee is pleased to announced the winners of the program's 2019-2020 Peer Essay Prizes. First prize went to Meg Cole for her essay “The Trauma of Compulsory Heterosexuality: Pregnancy and Reproduction in Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure.” Cole was lauded for her combination of convincing readings and historical contextualization,...
  • The Graduate Awards Committee is pleased to announced the winners of the program's 2018-2019 Peer Essay Prize. First Prize went to Coral Lumbley for her essay, “The ‘Dark Welsh’: Color, Race, and Alterity in Medieval Britain.” Coral's essay, as one committee member described it, takes up the important and vexed question of “how race is key to alterity in...