Institute for the Humanities, UIC

Tomorrow is the last day to register (go.uic.edu/carcerallib) for our symposium on Carceral Liberalism In An Age of Fascism! Here's a sneak peak of what to expect:

9:30-11:00: Radical arts and encounters with carceral liberalism
11:30-1:15: Chicago under occupation
1:30-2:45: Envisioning alternative futures
3:00-5:00: Screening of The Encampments

Join UIC faculty in conversation with Dylan Rodriguez, Rod Ferguson, Lisa Bhungalia, Antonio Gutierrez, Rey Wences, Martine Caverl, Damon Williams, Joey Mogul, Rev. David Black, and more. Featuring art from the Just Seeds Collective, No New Prisons campaign, and Mary Hazboun.

Lunch will be provided.

We have an exciting lineup for our March 10 symposium on Carceral Liberalism in an Age of Fascism, including a special screening of The Encampments, a documentary film about the student movement to cut university ties to the war on Gaza.

🔗 Register here: linktr.ee/uic_ifth! If you already registered for the symposium, you do not have to register for the screening.

Join the UIC Institute for the Humanities, the Social Justice Initiative, the Arab American Cultural Center, and Global Middle East Studies for a free film screening tracing mobilizations that spread to hundreds of campuses across the U.S., where students organized encampments to make their voices heard.

Join us for Dr. Justin Quang Nguyên Phan's faculty fellow lecture this Thursday at the Institute!

Thi Bui’s widely acclaimed graphic novel, The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir, follows her family’s lives as people who were made refugees in the wake of the Vietnam War, tracing memories and histories that thread back and well after the events of that war. This talk analyzes Bui’s novel as a form of refugee knowledge production that de-romanticizes multiple sites of diasporic gathering, whether the home, the family, refuge, or nation. Bui’s artistic decisions provide a generative way to craft Vietnamese refugee narratives anew—what Phan calls an aesthetics of embodied nonalignment—by re/aligning themselves with a diasporic, anti-imperial vision for self-determination, liberation, and freedom.

As an interdisciplinary scholar, Dr. Phan’s current book project demonstrates how Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic art unsettle dominant Cold War, colonial, and postcolonial nationalist depictions of Vietnam in order to advance a diasporic genealogy of nonalignment.

As the world confronts fascism, authoritarianism, imperialism, and genocide, the UIC Institute for the Humanities is bringing together scholars, organizers, and artists to address the limitations of liberal responses. Join us on March 10 for day-long programming to answer the questions: can liberal cities and institutions protect vulnerable communities from repression? What can be done to push beyond carceral liberalism and center the humanity of the most vulnerable?

Register before March 4 here: go.uic.edu/carcerallib

Join us tomorrow for a fascinating lecture by our Faculty Fellow Kaitlin Forcier. This talk offers a media theory of streaming platforms through an examination of Amazon Prime. Professor Forcier will explore how the platform intertwines circulation, absorption, and moving images, transforming Raymond Williams' concept of "televisual flow" into a new, endless structure for media consumption.

Kaitlin Clifton Forcier is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at UIC. An interdisciplinary media theorist, she researches and teaches on the visual culture of the digital age. Her first book project, “The Infinite Aesthetic,” analyzes iteration and endlessness in digital media and art, from the 1960s to today, as it intersects with the expansionist logics of new modes of capitalism. Her research has appeared in The Journal for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies, Afterimage, and Media-N. She received her PhD in Film & Media from UC Berkeley.

For accessibility requests, please contact [email protected].

Join us October 5 for a talk by the phenomenal Verónica Gago, one of the most prominent feminists of our time. A reception will follow. Pre-registration by September 26 is highly encouraged. Register at https://huminst.uic.edu/events/authoritarianism-of-financial-freedom/.

How does debt shape society? This talk will look at the case of Argentina, where household debt has been deployed and moralized to create the conditions for far-right authoritarianism. By looking at how debt, and particularly the concept of "indebtedness to live" has consolidated the precarity of labor, Dr. Gago will also demonstrate how the stabilization of debt as a model of social reproduction has contributed to state antifeminism.

Co-sponsored by the UIC Departments of Anthropology, Latin American and Latino Studies, and Gender and Women’s Studies.

Join the Institute for the Humanities and the SEENEXT Working Group on May 5th for an exciting Book Talk on the Collected Volume: "Polish Jewish Culture Beyond the Capital: Centering the Periphery," ed. Goldberg & Sinkoff

The book is the winner of the 2024 Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America (PIASA)'s Anna M. Cienciala Award for Best-Edited Multi-Authored Scholarly Volume. It is a path-breaking exploration of the diversity and vitality of urban Jewish identity and culture in Polish lands from the second half of the nineteenth century to the outbreak of the Second World War (1899–1939). In this multidisciplinary essay collection, a cohort of international scholars provides an integrated history of the arts and humanities in Poland by illuminating the complex roles Jews in urban centers other than Warsaw played in the creation of Polish and Polish Jewish culture.

Presentation by the Collection’s Editors:

Halina Goldberg is a professor of musicology and director of Robert F. Byrnes Russian and East European Institute in the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University–Bloomington. She is the author of Music in Chopin’s Warsaw, editor of a special issue of the Musical Quarterly devoted to Jewish culture and music, and director of the digital project Jewish Life in Interwar Łódź.

Nancy Sinkoff is a professor of Jewish studies and history and academic director of the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life, at Rutgers University–New Brunswick in New Jersey. She is the author of From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History and Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands.
📅 Monday May 5th, 2025 from 5-7pm
📍Institute for the Humanities, Behavioral Sciences Building, 1007 W. Harrison St., Ste 153
🎤 Professors Halina Goldberg & Nancy Sinkoff

Join us on Wednesday April 23rd from 4 to 6pm for our next FIRE Faculty Fellow Lecture with Dr. Sultan Tepe from Political Science! 🔥

Tepe’s talk, "Regulating Morality: State Censorship Under Authoritarian Regimes,” will engage with the crucial topic of censorship and its role in the dynamics of power and control, marginalization, and resistance by minority groups such as LGBTQ+ individuals. ✊💙❤️

📅 Wednesday April 23rd, 2025 from 4 to 6pm
📍Institute for the Humanities, Behavioral Sciences Building, 1007 W. Harrison St., Ste 153
🎤Dr. Sultan Tepe, Political Science. Dr. Tepe’s research spans a range of topics, including populism, authoritarianism, state-imposed urban renewal projects, and gentrification.

🔗For more details check-out the full event page at https://huminst.uic.edu/events/faculty-fellow-lecture-series-tepe/

Please join us at the Institute for the Humanities for our spring reception, an opportunity to come together as a community of scholars, researchers, students, and friends of the humanities. We'll celebrate the accomplishments of our past and current Faculty Fellows and Resident Graduate Scholars, recognize the ongoing work of our Working Groups, and welcome the 2025-2026 Faculty Fellows. We'll also announce what's on the horizon for next year. All are welcome! Feel free to stop by, even for a few moments. 🔥❤️💙

Join The Institute for the Humanities and the SEENEXT Working Group on Friday April 18th and Saturday April 19th for the Annual Workshop on Russian and Eurasian Modernism! This year's theme is SCALE...

The Workshop aims to explore how modernist culture registered the shock of the newly acquired extension and magnification of human sense perception along the infinitely small and infinitely large vectors and how it responded to these radical reconfigurations of scale.

Speakers:
Dima Arzyutov (Ohio State University)
Gabrielle Cornish (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Giulia Dossi (St. Olaf)
Hannah Gadbois (UIC)
Colleen McQuillen (University of Southern California)
Matthew Kendall (UIC)
Katarzyna Machrowicz-Wolny (UIC)
Michal Markowski (UIC)
Ekaterina Petrenko (UIC)
Cate Reilly (Duke University)
Philip Tuxbury-Gleissner (Ohio State University)
Julia Vaingurt (UIC)

Friday, April 18th, 10:00 am-6:00 pm -
Institute for the Humanities, BSB Ste. 153
1007 W. Harrison St., Chicago IL, 60607

Saturday, April 19th, 10:00 am-2:00 pm -
University Hall, Room 1501, 601 S Morgan St., Chicago IL, 60607

For more information check out the event page: https://huminst.uic.edu/events/annual-workshop-on-russian-and-eurasian-modernisms-scale/

Please join us this Thursday for our next exciting Faculty Fellow Lecture! Professor Kareem Rabie from Anthropology who will be giving an introduction to his ongoing research and new writing on contemporary human and economic geographies in, and in-between, the West Bank and China. Beginning with a focus on small commodity exchange between Palestinians in Yiwu and in the West Bank, it attempts to understand changing forms of community and national identification among Palestinians, the impact that mechanisms governing free trade have on them, and what flows of commodity and capital have to do with the occupation. It combines ethnographic field work in Palestine and China with historical accounts of Palestinian state building after the Oslo Accords and labor patterns among port workers under the British Mandate. It ends by scaling up towards an account of general forms of connection and disconnection as matters of culture, politics, production, and possibility.

Kareem Rabie is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois Chicago. His first book, Palestine is Throwing a Party and the Whole World is Invited: Capital and State Building in the West Bank was published by Duke University Press in 2021. It focuses on privatization, urban development, and the state-building project in the West Bank. Prior to joining the faculty at UIC, he was an assistant professor at American University in Washington, DC; Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago; and Marie Curie Fellow/Senior Researcher at The University of Oxford.

📅 Thursday April 10th, 4:00-5:30pmpm
📍Institute for the Humanities, Behavioral Sciences Building, 1007 W. Harrison St., Ste. 153
🎤 Faculty Fellow Kareem Rabie