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Important Dates
Thanksgiving Break: November 22-November 30
Last Day of Instruction: Wednesday, Dec. 10
Final Exams: Friday, Dec. 10 – Thursday, Dec. 18
Deadline to add a full-semester course for spring – Monday, Feb. 2
Resource of the Week: Study Rooms
It’s break time now, but once you return, it will be time to lock-in for finals. The University Library offers many different types of study spaces based on your needs and preferences. This is your library. Find a space that works for you!
Look through the Study Space Directory to browse all study spaces throughout all library locations across campus.
Once you have found a study room(s) you’d like to use, don’t forget to Reserve Your Study Room! Reservations for study rooms are required. Get ahead of the game and reserve your study room to come back to after break – it will get busy!

Message from OUR
The Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR) is conducting its triennial survey about undergraduate research experiences on our campus. By responding to the survey, you can help us (OUR) understand more fully the impact research has – or has not – on your undergraduate educational experience so far, as well as help us target resources and support where needed. Even if you’ve yet to do research, we value your input!
So, check your inbox from an email from Karen Rodriguez’G (rodrigzg@illinois), the Director of OUR, and help us enrich and strengthen the experience of undergraduate researchers at the University of Illinois. And, did we mention you’ll be entered for a prize?!?!
The survey will close on December 5 at 11:59 pm and shouldn’t take you more than 10-15 minutes. Thanks for your support!
Interesting English Courses to Take in Spring 2026!
ENGL 221: Speculative Futures – Black Speculative Futures
Counts as a Difference & Diaspora course and RIGS or Literature & Science topics course

ENGL 121: Introduction to Comics
Counts as a Media Cultures topics course and/or a general department elective
Introduction to graphic narratives—comic books, comic strips, graphic novels, manga, webcomics, and so on—from a diverse panoply of cultural, formal, and historical traditions.
ENGL 261: Topics in Literature and Culture – Culture, Society, and the Twenty-first Century American Novel
Counts as a Contemporary period course and/or general ENGL elective
Among the many virtues that novels have enjoyed is their investigating the conditions of their times. Novels can always be about all manners of people—past, present, and future—but ever since the nineteenth century, many novelists have committed their art as being more focused on the public life rather than the personal one. Society writ large is the subject, and that can encompass all matters of current history, economics, politics, war, religion, race—immediate circumstances that tell us more broadly about our presiding conditions. This class explores how the most contemporary novels do so by restricting our study to several very recent works of fiction to pursue the question of what kind of society we are living in, what makes it so, and how can we understand ourselves in relation to the larger forces going on seemingly everywhere about us. Because it’s an 8-week course, the reading list cannot be exhaustive, but, taken together, the books may provide a such a framework. You may have heard of some of these writers, while others will be new to you, but critics have hailed all of the novels as offering especially vivid, challenging, and estimable portraits of the way we live now.

CW 208: Creative Writing Nonfiction Workshop
Counts as a workshop course or department elective
In CW 208, we’ll borrow techniques from poetry and fiction to generate new nonfiction. We’ll consider what it means to create a good-faith images of the world and explore personal essay, memoir, and literary journalism, all while asking what it even means to strive toward a “capital-T” Truth (if such a thing even exists!). In addition our own creative writing, this class will have us reading craft essays, published “pros,” samples from all genres, and research deep into our own niche interests.

Kevin T. Early Memorial Scholarship Winner!
Each year, this scholarship is awarded to an outstanding first-year poet in honor of the late student poet, Kevin T. Early. The Creative Writing Program is proud to have worked with Kevin’s family to offer this scholarship for over 20 years now.
We are pleased to announce the winner of this year’s Kevin T. Early Memorial Scholarship is Rowan Homan! Congratulations, Rowan!
AWP Intro Journal Award Nominees!
We are pleased to announce the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s nominees for this year:
Fiction
Derek Sturvist, “Jeremy the Bear”
Poetry
Isabella Escamilla, “Uncle in Prison as Unforced Error”
Andrea Giugni, “Miss Venezuela, I Inherit”
Tyler Moore, “Sentiment”
Nonfiction
Tyler Moore, “Leave Speed”
Please help us congratulate our nominees and wish them luck as their work is passed along to the AWP judges themselves! If you’re curious about how the process works, AWP has more info here. Thanks again to all that submitted. We were impressed with all of the work that came in and I really wish we could pass along more. The judges for this prize change every year, so please be sure to submit again next time!
Proud to Be First-Gen Series: Self-Care Before Finals Week
Wednesday, December 3, 2025
6-8 PM @ FGSI Office
(Turner Student Services Building, 4th Floor – 610 E John St., Champaign, IL 61820)
Join us for a self-care event before finals week! The FGSI will provide snacks and winter-themed art activities and have a chance to meet other first-gen students! Open to all students.

LAS Online Winter Courses

Do you want to knock out a Gen Ed? Or need to pick up a few more credit hours to stay on track for graduation? LAS Online has a great lineup of fully online winter courses! The winter session is open to all undergraduate students to enroll in only 1 class. All classes are delivered completely online.
Check out the list of LAS online winter courses HERE!
Creative Writing Study Abroad Exchange with University of East Anglia, England

Internship Opportunities
LAS Career Services has let us know about some internship opportunities that may be of particular interest to our majors. Check them out!
- Respawn Entertainment: Narrative Design Internship
- Blizzard: Narrative Design Internship
- Insomniac Games: Project Management Internship
- Nintendo: Copy Writer Internship
- Syngenta: Seeds Communications Paid Internship
Interesting Gen Ed Courses to Consider for Spring 2026
DTX 180: Exercising Empathy
Social & Behavioral Sciences Gen Ed
This course emphasizes the role empathy plays in our daily lives and problem-solving processes. Students explore six core values of empathy—collaboration, open-mindedness, empiricism, human factors, context, and reflection—to better understand how compassion shapes meaningful design and decision-making.
PS 229: Doing Politics Research
Social & Behavioral Sciences and Quantitative Reasoning II Gen Ed
Taught by Professor Avital Livny, this course is an introduction to the research process in political science, covering key topics in research methods applied to the study of politics. It improves students’ understanding of research discussed in other political and social science courses while preparing students interested in conducting their own research. It meets late in the afternoon on Mondays and Wednesday with discussion sections on Fridays.
PS 248: Comparative Politics in Rich Democracies
Western/Comparative Cultures and Social & Behavioral Sciences Gen Ed
This companion to the comparative politics of developing nations, is an introduction to the comparative politics of advanced industrialized (“rich”) democratic countries. The course focuses on identifying and explaining differences among and across these countries and how they compare to other countries around the world, especially in terms of state capacity, representativeness, belonging, and inequality. To explain these differences, the course considers several factors including culture as well as both electoral and economic institutions. The course is a Western and a Social Sciences general education course.
FR 165: French in US Minority Cultures
US Minority Culture Gen Ed
How has French been spoken and lived in African American, Native American, and Cajun communities in the Midwest and South? Introduction to the sociolinguistic and cultural history of French as a heritage language in African-American, Native American, and Cajun American communities from early colonial to late modern times. It focuses on the lived experiences and lasting heritage of contact and segregation between colonizers, farmers, refugees, and free and enslaved populations in the American Midwest and South. It features readings, music, heritage sites, and discussions of prejudice and discrimination, language shift and language loss, and the linguistic outcomes of slavery and settler colonialism.
FR 240: Constructing African and Caribbean Identity
Non-Western Cultures and Humanities & the Arts Gen Ed
Compare African and Caribbean identities in stories and cinema. Introduces students to cultural pluralism by comparing and contrasting African and Caribbean identities, as they are represented in literature and film. No French required – taught in English.




Be a Part of iSuceed!
iSucceed is an academic accountability group with The Jeffries Center Advising g& Mentoring Program. It is for scholars to work together to build community, support one another’s academic development and understand how and why to engage in academic spaces. Students in iSucceed gain a strong network of peer and staff support each week, helping them stay motivated, connected, and focused on their goals.
iSuceed Meeting Details:
When: Every Monday from 3:300-5:30pm
Where: BNAACC Multipurpose Room

Don’t Forget About These Opportunities and Resources!
Submit Your Work for Publication

ILSURJ stands as a beacon of the diverse and dynamic undergraduate research landscape on our campus. Our mission is to bridge connections between undergraduate and graduate students, faculty from various disciplines, and the wider public. Through our annual publications, available in versatile electronic formats, we strive to spotlight the exceptional research achievements of our talented undergraduate community. Our peer-edited, faculty-reviewed, open-access approach sets the stage for sharing these endeavors and advancing the journey toward professional research. Our collaborations with prestigious University of Illinois partners like the University Library, the Office of Undergraduate Research, and our esteemed Faculty Advisory Board further solidify our commitment to excellence. It’s important to emphasize that contributing to ILSURJ does not preclude you from submitting your work to other journals – we encourage multidimensional research engagement.
Deadline for submission is Nov. 30. Submit your work for consideration here.
MUSE: An Undergraduate Humanities+ Conference
The Illinois Wesleyan Center for the Humanities invites students at other institutions to join us for MUSE: An Undergraduate Humanities+ Conference.
We cordially invite undergraduates to present on topics in the humanities at our day-long conference here at Illinois Wesleyan University on Saturday, February 7, 2026. We share our definition of the humanities with the National Endowment for the Humanities, but we also welcome presentations on creative writing, theater history, art history, music history, and the history of science. In addition to sessions of student presentations throughout the day, the conference will feature a keynote address from Professor Steve Mentz and panels of professionals addressing topics of interest to students in the humanities.
Each session will contain three presentations. Each presenter will have twenty minutes to speak, and there will be fifteen minutes for a combined Q&A at the end of each session.
To participate in the conference, please submit an abstract to humanities@iwu.edu by 11:59 pm on Saturday, November 29, 2025. Abstracts should be approximately 150-200 words long. An abstract for a scholarly presentation should make clear the critical conversation the paper engages and summarize the paper’s thesis and main points. An abstract for a presentation of creative writing should describe the work mainly in terms of its genre and aesthetics / stylistic features. (There should be very little plot summary.)
Along with your abstract, please include your name, email address, phone number, current address, year in school, working title for your presentation, and any audio/visual needs you may have. You will be notified of your abstract’s final status by Wednesday, December 10, 2025. You will then be asked to confirm your attendance, and we will send along further details.
For more information, please email questions to humanities@iwu.edu. We look forward to learning about your ideas and creative work.
Library Research Consultations

How to Connect with LAS Career Services
- Mondays- 1-3 pm 105 Greg Hall (short chats)
- Tuesdays- 10-3 pm LAS Hub (Lincoln Hall) with peer mentors
- Wednesdays- 10-3 pm LAS Hub (Lincoln Hall) with peer mentors
- Thursdays- 10-3 pm LAS Hub (Lincoln Hall) with peer mentors
- Thursdays- 1-3 pm 105 Greg Hall (short chats)
- Handshake Appointments (in-person or virtual) are 30 minutes during available staff times. We have an energetic team to help you. Reach out to connect. Having trouble? Reach out to us at las-careerservices@illinois.edu.
Montage – Call for Submissions!

Montage publishes art and literary work by undergraduate students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Submissions are now open! For more information and to submit your work, please visit: https://www.montageartsjournal.com/submit
Sharing News
As a reminder, if you have an award, a publication, or some other triumph to report please send news to engl-news@illinois.edu so the social media interns can celebrate you and your accomplishment. Also, if you are a member of a student group affiliated with the English department and you would like an upcoming event posted on our undergraduate calendar (now available at the bottom of the advising page) please send that info to the same address. Thanks!
Free Little Library

Check out the ESA Free Little Library outside EB 200. We have a rotating stock of donated books (thanks to all our anonymous donors) and you’re always welcome to stop by and pick something up. If you want to leave a book as well of course you can, but it’s not expected. If you feel like it, you can sign the sheet on the top shelf and tell us what you picked and why!
WRC Fall Hours
























