Creative Inquiry in the Humanities,
a Conversation
Date: Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Time: 5:00 p.m.
Location: Honors Commons Lounge, Room 2034
Lincoln Hall, second floor (up SW Stairwell, turn left, pass through double doors, room on right)
About this event:
Curious about the work your humanities professors do outside the classroom? Come get the inside scoop from some of the U of I’s most dynamic professors in a relaxed and informal setting. Join us for a conversation and learn about the thrilling discoveries that fuel creative inquiry and work in humanities research. This session offers an opportunity for all interested undergraduates, no matter their majors, to share in the excitement of the great breadth of research performed daily on our campus. Pizza and, of course, ice cream (scoops!) will be served.
About the speakers:
Jane Desmond has worked professionally as a modern dancer, a choreographer, a humanities professor, a social science professor, on a Hollywood film, and on a PBS documentary in Senegal. She has spoken, published, or conducted research in East Asia, South Asia, Eastern and Southern Africa, Latin America, and throughout Eastern, Western, and Central Europe. She has written and edited several academic books, in the areas of tourism studies, performance studies, and animal studies, and co-founded the International Forum for U.S. Studies, a center for the transnational Study of the U.S. She holds degrees from Brown, Sarah Lawrence, and Yale, and has served on the faculties of Cornell, Duke, the University of Iowa, and since 2007 has been a professor in the Anthropology and Gender and Women’s Studies departments at UIUC.
Jonathan Ebel is an associate professor in the Department of Religion specializing in the religious history of the United States. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2004 and has been teaching at the University of Illinois since August of 2006. Professor Ebel is the author of Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Solider in the Great War (Princeton, 2010) and the co-editor of From Jeremiad to Jihad: Religion, Violence, and America (California, 2012). He is currently working on two books. One focuses on the place of soldiers and war in American civil religion; the other is a religious history of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl migration.
Tara McGovern is a senior in Sociocultural and Linguistic Anthropology with minors in Spanish and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. A recipient of the Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship (FLAS), she is entering her third year of studying Quechua, a native Andean language. She has conducted ethnographic research in El Salvador and Ecuador, as well as Maya archaeology in Belize. She has worked at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, and currently at the Spurlock Museum on campus. This past summer, she was the Web Content Intern at the Chicago Humanities Festival, and completed the manuscript of her first novel.