News

Please join me once more in congratulating Prof. Mehta on her newest award: along with 19 other faculty members from all three U of I System universities, Prof. Mehta was elected for the inaugural 2019-20 cohort of Public Voices Fellowship, sponsored by the University of Illinois System. This year-long program provides an opportunity to work with professional journalists to help craft research and expertise in ways that can contribute to public conversations of our age.

Estibalitz Ezkerra Vegas has been appointed as Lecturer in Basque literature and language at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Stephanie Hilger and Justine Murison (and the Medical Humanities Research Cluster) were awarded $100,000 for "The Art of Medicine: A Public Square on Health and Medicine for the Illinois System" from the Presidential Initiative to Celebrate the Impact of the Arts and Humanities.

Prof. Eric Calderwood, of the University of Illinois, Urbana, is receiving honorable mention for “Franco’s Hajj: Moroccan Pilgrims, Spanish Fascism, and the Unexpected Journeys of Modern Arabic Literature,” which appeared in the October 2017 issue of PMLA. 

Six professors from the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences have been named Conrad Humanities Scholars. They are taking advantage of the new designation to pursue a variety of projects, from studying second language acquisition and black girlhood to researching immigration politics.

The Conrad Humanities Scholar awards are funded by a gift from the late Arlys Conrad, whose estate gift shared by the College of LAS and the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences is intended to assist and retain promising mid-career faculty.

As cinema industries around the globe adjusted to the introduction of synch-sound technology, the Soviet Union was also shifting culturally, politically, and ideologically from the heterogeneous film industry of the 1920s to the centralized industry of the 1930s, and from the avant-garde to Socialist Realism. In The Voice of Technology: Soviet Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1928–1935, Lilya Kaganovsky explores the history, practice, technology, ideology, aesthetics, and politics of the transition to sound within the context of larger issues in Soviet media history. Industrialization and centralization of the cinema industry greatly altered the way movies in the Soviet Union were made, while the introduction of sound radically influenced the way these movies were received. Kaganovsky argues that the coming of sound changed the Soviet cinema industry by making audible, for the first time, the voice of State power, directly addressing the Soviet viewer. By exploring numerous examples of films from this transitional period, Kaganovsky demonstrates the importance of the new technology of sound in producing and imposing the "Soviet Voice."

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.

Rebecca Whalen was awarded the Comparative and World Literature Award for Excellence as a senior student.

Professor Rini Bhattacharya Mehta has been awarded a fellowship by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications for a project titled "Indian Cinema in Context: Interactive Film History Archive and Tools."

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

An article, "Bridging the gap between medicine and literature" about Stephanie Hilger’s new book “New Directions in Literature and Medicine Studies” is featured on the college homepage.