Chinua Achebe, the renowned novelist, poet, and author of the novel, ‘Things Fall Apart‘ has passed on at the age of 82 on March 22nd at a hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.

Premium Times reports that Professor Achebe had been suffering from an undisclosed ailment for some time.

He was the author of some highly influential books including Arrow of God, No Longer at Ease, Anthills of the Savannah, and A Man of the People and received several international awards for his works. His latest book, ‘There Was a Country‘, was an autobiography on his experiences and views of the civil war.

Until his death, he was the David and Mariana Fisher Professor of Literature at Brown University.

For books at the Literatures and Languages Library by Chinua Achebe click here, and for books about Chinua Achebe click here.

Two hundred and eleven years ago today, French poet, novelist, and dramatist Victor Hugo was born. Known today as one of the most important French Romantic writers, Hugo was a significant contributor to the early development of the Romantic period. Although most well-known in France for his poetry, Hugo’s novels, particularly Les Miserables and Notre-Dame de Paris (known as The Hunchback of Notre Dame in English), continue to be internationally known and studied. Scholars divide Hugo’s work into three periods: the first consists of lyrical works, such as odes and other romantic poetry; the second addresses political concerns and social conditions, as is exemplified in Les Miserables; and the third and final period of Hugo’s career focuses on mysticism and poetic vision as the basis for his poetic work. In addition to writing poetry and novels, Hugo became deeply involved in politics at a time when France was experiencing political turmoil. Hugo’s liberal, anti-Napoleonic views led to his exile for a brief time, although upon his return he served on the French National Assembly and Senate. Hugo’s death was nationally mourned; he was viewed as both an important literary figure as well as a political leader instrumental in shaping a democratic republic in France.

Visit the Literatures and Languages Library to discover books by and about Victor Hugo.

“The Future of Authorship” Panel (Brown Bag Lunch)

Date: February 22, 2013

Time: 12:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.

Location: IPRH, Humanities Lecture Hall

About the event:

This panel will examine recently developed forms of scholarly communication, focusing on the ways scholars now create knowledge and communicate their findings to a range of audiences using innovative digital platforms and tools for conducting research, writing, and publishing. The aim of this panel is to explore the intellectual advances afforded by new modes of authorship, peer review, and publishing. Please join us for a panel discussion featuring the following speakers:

Nicholas Mirzoeff (Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU)

Kevin Hamilton (Art + Design; IPRH Coordinator of Digital Scholarly Communication)

Eduardo Ledesma (Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese)

Jodee Stanley (Editor, Ninth Letter)

Please bring your lunch. Cookies and beverages will be provided.

About the UIUC speakers:

Kevin Hamilton is an Associate Professor in the School of Art and Design, where he has served in the New Media and Painting Programs since 2002. He also holds appointments in the Department of Media and Cinema Studies, the Center for Arms Control, Disarmament and International Security, and is co-Director of the Center for People and Infrastructures at the Coordinated Science Laboratory. Kevin’s primary research lies in historical and theoretical work on the history of interface representations in mediated violence, with a special emphasis on government-produced films related to nuclear weapons development. Kevin’s work as an educator is focused on integration of practice-based and theoretical approaches to understanding technological mediation. This work includes the direction of “Learning to See Systems,” a new interdisciplinary graduate study track that will begin in Fall of 2013. Kevin Hamilton will serve as the Coordinator of Digital Scholarly Communication to direct the IPRH’s future involvement as a Scalar institutional partner, which will begin in Fall of 2013.

Eduardo Ledesma is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he teaches Luso-Hispanic literature, film and new media. He received his PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard University (2012) and holds advanced degrees in both structural engineering and Hispanic literature. His research focuses on avant-garde and experimental forms across different media. Currently he is working on several projects dealing with the confluence of experimental film, poetry and digital media.

Jodee Stanley is the editor of Ninth Letter, the award-winning literary/arts journal published by UIUC’s MFA in Creative Writing Program in collaboration with the School of Art + Design. Jodee supervises the graduate literary publishing practicum and also teaches editing at the undergraduate level. She has worked in literary publishing for twenty years and has been a speaker and panelist at various conferences and festivals. In 2009, she was awarded an Academic Professional Award from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UIUC, and she received a 2007 Faculty Fellowship from the University of Illinois Academy for Entrepreneurial Leadership. Her fiction, essays, and book reviews have appeared in several publications including Crab Orchard Review, Mississippi Review, Hobart, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. She is currently co-editing an anthology of Midwest Gothic fiction.

Date: February 27, 2013
Time: 7:30 p.m.
Location: IPRH, Humanities Lecture Hall

This event is free and open to the public.

This event features members of the U of I Creative Writing faculty reading from their soon-to-be-published works. Professor LeAnne Howe will be reading from “An American Indian in Japan,” a creative non-fiction story about her travels throughout Japan during the 1993 International Year of Indigenous People. The story is forthcoming in Choctalking on Other Realities, New and Selected Stories, Aunt Lute Books, 2013. Professor Audrey Petty will be reading from High Rise Stories, forthcoming in McSweeney’s Voice of Witness book series (summer 2013), for which she interviewed former residents of the Chicago housing projects Cabrini-Green and Robert Taylor Homes, among others, for their firsthand accounts of Chicago public housing. Each author will read a selection, chosen for its particular significance to the author and her primary creative intention(s). After the authors have finished reading, Professor Robert Ramirez will lead a discussion of the role of memory and memoir in the humanities more broadly, and we will open the floor for discussion with the audience.

Interested in the digital humanities? Take the “Introduction to TEI” workshop at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science and learn about one of the most important elements of digital humanities research, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) markup language. Spend a weekend learning the fundamentals of using XML for research, teaching, electronic publishing, and management of digital text collections. This hands-on workshop will be taught by Julia Flanders and Syd Bauman, experts from Brown University. Over the course of two and a half days, participants will learn how to work with XML technologies to develop digital representations of texts using the TEI standard. The workshop will take place in the LIS building on the UIUC campus, beginning Friday, February 22 and ending Sunday, February 24, 2013.