Pictured (L to R): Top row: Susan Koshy, Jorge Lucero, Kevin Hamilton, Ned O’Gorman, David Sepkoski, Dave Beck, Rosalyn LaPier; Bottom row: Bethany Anderson, Jessica Ballard Lawrence, Jason Mazzone, Kate Clancy, Kathryn E. Holliday; Not Pictured: Eric Calderwood, Rob Kar, Emily Knox.
Principal Investigators
Susan Koshy (PhD, UCLA) is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work draws on the insights of literature, anthropology, legal studies, and history. Her work on race, ethnicity and diaspora is part of a larger theoretical interest in modernity, neocolonialism, and the processes of globalization. Her research is situated at the intersection of postcolonial studies, ethnic studies, and globalization theory, and interrogates the boundaries of these disciplinary formations. Her book, Sexual Naturalization (Stanford University Press, 2004) locates narratives of white-Asian miscegenation in the context of anti-miscegenation laws, Asian immigration to the US, and US expansionism in Asia. Her co-edited volumes include Colonial Racial Capitalism (Duke, 2022), Monolingualism and Its Discontents (PMLA, October 2022), and Transnational South Asians (Oxford, 2008). Her articles have appeared in PMLA, Post45, Yale Journal of Criticism, Transition, ALH, Boundary 2, Differences, Diaspora, Social Text, and in many anthologies. She received her B.A. and M.A. from Delhi University. She served as director of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory (2014-2022) and is currently Faculty Fellow at the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation (OVCRI) and the Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute (IHSI).
Rosalyn LaPier is an award winning Indigenous writer, environmental historian, and ethnobotanist. She works within Indigenous communities to revitalize traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and to strengthen public policy for Indigenous languages. She is a traditionally trained ethnobotanist. She learned ethnobotany & traditional ecological knowledge by apprenticing with her maternal grandmother Annie Mad Plume Wall & her aunt Theresa Still Smoking for more than 20 years. She has written two award winning books, two Blackfeet language lexicons, and dozens of articles and commentaries. Her writing has appeared in The Conversation, High Country News, The Montana Naturalist, Washington Post, & other places. She splits her time between living in the lands of the Peoria & Potawatomi peoples in Urbana, Illinois, the Salish in Missoula, Montana, and the Blackfeet reservation. She is an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe of Montana and Métis.
Jason Mazzone is the Albert E. Jenner, Jr. Professor of Law at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Director of the Illinois Program in Constitutional Theory, History, and Law. His primary field of research and teaching is constitutional law and history; in this he works principally on issues of constitutional structure and institutional design, with a particular focus on relationships between structural arrangements and individual rights. His groundbreaking work on the Constitution of the United States has appeared in dozens of prominent legal journals. He regularly advises, on a pro bono basis, litigants in cases before the Supreme Court of the United States and in other courts. A good part of Professor Mazzone’s research involves comparative issues in constitutional law. He has lectured around the world on this topic and he has advised new democracies during their processes of drafting and implementing their own constitutions. Unifying all of this work is a close attention to the role of culture in grounding and shaping formal constitutions, a topic Professor Mazzone first explored in his dissertation at Yale University. Professor Mazzone is currently at work on two books: one a global study of the future of constitutional rights; the other, a study of how the U.S. Constitution serves as both a unifying and dividing force in American society.
David Sepkoski is the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in History of Science at the University of Illinois. He specializes in transnational history of biological, environmental, and information sciences in cultural context. Sepkoski’s most recent book is Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the Value of Diversity (University of Chicago Press, 2020). He is also the author of Rereading the Fossil Record: The Growth of Paleobiology as an Evolutionary Discipline (Chicago, 2012) and Nominalism and Constructivism in Seventeenth-Century Natural Philosophy (Routledge, 2007), as well as several edited volumes and special journal issues. His current research focuses on the history of scientific and cultural debates about the biological basis for human nature and difference. In 2020-21 he held a Guggenheim Fellowship for his project “The Politics of Human Nature: Biological Determinism from Sociobiology to the Human Genome.” He also has research interests in the history of data and information, and in the cultural and techological history of electronic music.
Core Contributors
Bethany G. Anderson is the Natural and Applied Sciences Archivist and Assistant Professor in the University Archives. She is also a PhD candidate in the History of Science at the University of Illinois. Her research focuses on the history of anthropology, cybernetics, and women in science, as well as computational approaches to archives.
Jessica Ballard-Lawrence is an Assistant Professor and Archivist for Multicultural Collections and Services at the University of Illinois Archives. Her responsibilities include describing and arranging documents and artifacts, curating exhibits, programming events, supervising students, and engaging in collaborative projects at the campus, community, regional, and national levels. She also served as an advisory board member for Project STAND (Student Activism Now Documented).
Dave Beck is a Professor of History and American Indian Studies, and the author and co-author of several award-winning books on the history of federal American Indian policy and urban American Indian history, including The Struggle for Self-Determination and City Indian. His book, Unfair Labor? analyzes the labor and economic history of American Indian and Indigenous people who worked at and for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. His most recent book, Bribed with Our Own Money, examines federal use of coercion and bribery in an effort to eliminate the U.S. relationship with American Indian nations in the 1950s and 1960s.
Eric Calderwood is a Professor of Comparative & World Literature and directs the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (CSAMES). His research interests include Mediterranean studies, postcolonial studies, Arabic literature, and North African literature and film. His recent book, On Earth or in Poems: The Many Lives of al-Andalus (Harvard UP 2023) traces its role in music and in debates about Arab and Berber identities, Arab and Muslim feminisms, the politics of Palestine and Israel, and immigration and multiculturalism in Europe.
Kathryn B. H. Clancy is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois. She is a human reproductive ecologist who specializes in women’s health, endometrial function and evolutionary medicine.Her research and policy advocacy work focuses on sexual harassment in science and academia. She has provided Congressional testimony and co-authored a National Academies report on sexual harassment of women in STEM. Her numerous publications include Period: The Real Story of Menstruation (Princeton UP 2023), the co-edited volume Building Babies (Springer 2012) and more than forty articles and book chapters.
Kevin Hamilton is a Professor of New Media in the School of Art and Design. He is the Associate Vice Chancellor for Research & Innovation – Humanities, Arts & Related Fields and was the Dean of the College of Fine and Applied Arts (2018-2024). Research on the role of photography in nuclear weapons research culminated in his book with Ned O’Gorman, Lookout America! The Secret Hollywood Studio at the Heart of the Cold War (Dartmouth College Press, 2018). His work includes publications on interdisciplinary research methods, artwork on race and public memory, and examination of racial bias in algorithmic systems.
Kathryn E. Holliday is theRandall J. Biallas Professor of Historic Preservation and American Architectural History and a Professor of Landscape Architecture. An architecture and landscape historian with a strong commitment to community-engaged, place-based historic preservation, creating connections between the university, faculty, and students in the pursuit of projects that promote a fuller, more equitable narrative of American history is central to her work. She is particularly interested in the ways that buildings and landscapes intertwine stories of labor, technology, capital, gender, and race to shape the world around us.
Robin B. Kar is aProfessor of Law and Professor of Philosophy and is an internationally recognized scholar of contract law, philosophy of law, moral and legal philosophy, and the evolution of legal systems and complex social structure (including modern markets). He draws on methods that include not only traditional legal studies but also philosophy, psychology, evolutionary theory, game theory, economics, neuroscience, anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, and comparative cultural and legal studies. His many service commitments include chairing the UIUC Senate Executive Committee (2019-2022).
Emily Knox is a Professor in the School of Information Sciences, where she also serves as Interim Dean. Her research interests include information ethics and access, intellectual freedom, and censorship. Her book, Foundations of Intellectual Freedom (ALA Neal-Schuman), won the 2023 Eli M. Oboler Memorial Award for best published work in the area of intellectual freedom. She is chair of the board of the National Coalition Against Censorship and the editor of the Journal of Intellectual Freedom and Privacy.
Jorge Lucero is a Professor of Art Education and the Associate Dean for Research in the College of Fine and Applied Arts. He has performed, published, lectured, exhibited, and taught widely in the States and abroad.In 2023, he was named the National Art Education Association’s (NAEA) Higher Ed Educator of the Year. Lucero co-developed and co-led the Mellon-funded inaugural Interseminars Initiative project, “Imagining Otherwise: Speculation in the Americas” through the Humanities Research Institute.
Ned O’Gorman is a Professor of Rhetoric & Public Culture in the Department of Communication. He writes at the intersections of history, criticism, and political theory, with special emphasis on the rhetorical and ideological dimensions of the Cold War and their relations to and implications for American political culture. He is the author most recently of Politics for Everybody: Reading Hannah Arendt in Uncertain Times (2020, University of Chicago Press).
Graduate Students
Eva Kuras is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Comparative and World Literatures, and serves as Research Assistant on Critical University Studies for the project. She studies cross-cultural literary transmission across the Eurasian landmass and the Mediterranean Sea, using the methodologies of Postcolonial Medieval Studies, Mediterranean Studies, and Global Studies. She was the 2022–23 Mellon Pre-Doctoral Public Humanities Fellow.