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The Fred S. Bailey Fellowship for Community Leadership, Service, and Activism supports University of Illinois Urbana campus graduate and professional students who have shown passion, creativity, innovation, and commitment through community organizing, activism, and/or service in one or more of the following areas: social justice, environment, global engagement and/or interfaith cooperation. 

Through state-backed Catholicism, monolingualism, militarism, and dictatorship, Spain’s fascists earned their reputation for intolerance. It may therefore come as a surprise that 80,000 Moroccans fought at General Franco’s side in the 1930s. What brought these strange bedfellows together, Eric Calderwood argues, was a highly effective propaganda weapon: the legacy of medieval Muslim Iberia, known as al-Andalus. This legacy served to justify Spain’s colonization of Morocco and also to define the Moroccan national culture that supplanted colonial rule.

Writers of many political stripes have celebrated convivencia, the fabled “coexistence” of Christians, Muslims, and Jews in medieval Iberia. According to this widely-held view, modern Spain and Morocco are joined through their shared Andalusi past. Colonial al-Andalus traces this supposedly timeless narrative to the mid-1800s, when Spanish politicians and intellectuals first used it to press for Morocco’s colonization. Franco later harnessed convivencia to the benefit of Spain’s colonial program in Morocco. This shift precipitated an eloquent historical irony. As Moroccans embraced the Spanish insistence on Morocco’s Andalusi heritage, a Spanish idea about Morocco gradually became a Moroccan idea about Morocco.

Drawing on a rich archive of Spanish, Arabic, French, and Catalan sources—including literature, historiography, journalism, political speeches, schoolbooks, tourist brochures, and visual arts—Calderwood reconstructs the varied political career of convivencia and al-Andalus, showing how shared pasts become raw material for divergent contemporary ideologies, including Spanish fascism and Moroccan nationalism. Colonial al-Andalus exposes the limits of simplistic oppositions between European and Arab, Christian and Muslim, that shape current debates about European colonialism.

Ethan Madarieta has been awarded the Gendell and Shiner Fellowship for the Fall Semester of 2019-20.

Prof. Robert Rushing has received both the campus-level Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award and the LAS Dean's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

 Professor Rini Mehta has been awarded the 2018-2019 IPRH Faculty Fellowship for her project "Mens Hierarchicus: Race’s Intellectual Labor and the Global Right."

I am thrilled to report that Professor Stephanie Hilger has been awarded the CAS Fellowship for 2018-2019 for her project, "Liminal Bodies: Hermaphrodites in the Eighteenth Century." 

Learn more about CAS Fellows

Everyone please join me in congratulating our new full professors Lilya Kaganovsky, Robert Rushing and Robert Tierney!

Eric Calderwood has been awarded a Criticism and Interpretive Theory Junior Research Fellowship for 2017-18.

Prof. Waïl Hassan has been elected Second Vice President of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA). He will serve in that capacity for the first of a three-year term on the Executive Committee (2017-18). In the second year (2018-19) he will become Vice President, then President in the third year (2019-20). After that, Prof. Hassan will become a member of the Honorary Committee as a past president.

The ACLA was founded in 1960 and is the largest professional association representing the discipline in North America, although its membership of over 2,000 includes many who travel to its annual conference from Asia, Africa, Europe, and South America. The ACLA also holds occasional conferences abroad, with the 2017 meeting taking place in Utrecht, the Netherlands, in July. 

Matthew Nelson was awarded the SLCL Dissertation completion fellowship for 2016-2017 for his dissertation, "Translingual Nostalgias in Modern Sanskrit and Indian Poetry in English" 

Hapsatou Wane has accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of Languages, Literature and Philosophy at Armstrong University.