New Interseminars Courses Announced

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Co-Taught Cross-Disciplinary Courses to be Offered in Spring 2027  

The Humanities Research Institute is pleased to share what is ahead for Interseminars, a Mellon Foundation-funded effort that has supported collaborative, interdisciplinary graduate education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign since 2019. Through three successive thematic cohorts of faculty and students over the course of six years, Interseminars has generated opportunities for experimental inquiry across the humanities and arts and has showcased the results of this work on campus and beyond.

Building on that foundation, the fourth iteration of Interseminars enters a new phase in 2026, focused on developing long-term sustainability for experiments in collaborative graduate teaching. Rather than the extended research fellowship model of earlier rounds, this phase supports faculty pairs in the co-design and co-teaching of graduate seminars to be offered in the 2026–27 academic year. Participating instructors will receive administrative support and programming funds to enrich their courses with guest speakers, public events, and pedagogical exploration.

Last fall HRI issued a call for proposals for co-teaching grants. We are thrilled to announce that the faculty co-instructors and their seminars are:

  • Deepasri Baul (History) and Mania Taher (Art & Design) – Living Between Worlds: Gender, Migration, and the City: a critical examination of gendered mobility and urban life in South Asia and its diasporas, foregrounding women’s everyday negotiations of space, power, and freedom.
  • Daniel Nabil Maroun (French & Italian) and Nic Flores (Latina/Latino Studies) – Remembering and Reimagining HIV/AIDS in Contemporary Times: a transnational exploration of HIV/AIDS as a biomedical and social phenomenon, examining how histories of medicine, activism, policy, and cultural production shape lived experience and collective memory.
  • Jennifer Monson (Dance) and Magdalena Novoa (Urban & Regional Planning) – The City through the Body: an exploration of the city through embodied, experimental methods, combining choreography, spatial practice, and community-engaged research to confront urban inequality and historical erasure.

Over the coming semesters, these teams will participate in planning meetings and individual consultations to refine their syllabi and pedagogical approaches, with courses offered in spring 2027. We look forward to sharing updates as these collaborations develop and contribute to the project of experimenting with vibrant, cross-disciplinary graduate education at Illinois.