News

Defining Literary Postmodernism for the Twenty-First Century, by Complit alumni Matthias Stephan '15,  has been published by Palgrave MacMillan. You can read a preview of the book here: https://www.palgrave.com/de/book/9783030156923.

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has named seven new Faculty Fellows for the 2019-2020 academic school year. The NCSA Faculty Fellowship is a competitive program for faculty and researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign which provides seed funding for new collaborations that include NCSA staff as integral contributors to the project.

Prof. Waïl Hassan is serving as President of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA). 

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 2020 meeting taking place in Chicago, Illinois, March 19-22. 

Prof. Rini Mehta has been awarded $150,000.00 in support of her project, “Global Film History from the Edges: Engineering a Comparative Public Humanities,” as part of the Presidential Initiative to Celebrate the Impact of the Arts and Humanities!

Prof. Mehta's proposal was selected from among 53 proposals across the three UI campuses and will make a significant impact on how we do film history across the globe.

A story about our students (Alex, with Nadia Hoppe and Serenity Orengo)

Movie fans and scholars alike will soon be able to visualize an entangled network of Indian film stars, the history of Indian cinema, and the trajectory of Bollywood as it shot towards mainstream fame with an interface professor Rini Mehta is developing through a fellowship with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

Eric Calderwood has been selected as a Conrad Humanities Scholar in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences for 2018-2023.

Read more about how Rini Mehta develops interactive tools to better understand a rising industry.

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. 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.