Current Reading Groups

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  3. Current Reading Groups
  4. Current Reading Groups

The following faculty and graduate student reading groups meet regularly throughout the year and may organize public events on topics of interest to a broad range of disciplines. Please contact the reading group organizers directly for more information about the groups and their activities.

2026–27 Reading Groups

Textual Criticism and the Editing of Premodern Literature

What were literary texts before the age of print? How should we reproduce them in print (or digital) media today? This reading group examines how premodern literary artifacts have been edited, codified, and reimagined for scholarly purposes since the advent of print, with a particular focus on the theories of textual criticism and scholarly editing in modern times. The group will meet once a month to discuss critical takes on texts and question their answers.

Weird Cities

  • Michael Uhall, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (Civil and Environmental Engineering) and Indiana University East (Political Science)

Weird Cities explores the city as a site of estrangement in modern speculative fiction. Beginning with readings on spatial practice, heterotopia, and weird fiction, the group turns to China Miéville’s The City and the City (2009) and K. J. Bishop’s The Etched City (2003) before concluding with M. John Harrison’s Viriconium (1971-1985), a city that persists by refusing self-identity. Across six meetings, we ask how architecture, atmosphere, law, perception, and violence compose urban worlds.

Strangeways Idea Lab

  • Michael Uhall, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (Civil and Environmental Engineering) and Indiana University East (Political Science)

Strangeways Idea Lab is a multidisciplinary working group on technics and technology in a hypermediated, increasingly technical world. Through conceptual engineering and speculative inquiry, the Lab explores material and symbolic infrastructures, machines, media systems, digital objects, and software sovereignty. Rather than treating technology as a neutral tool-category, we examine concepts that help or hinder thought, politics, and action within changing sociotechnical environments. Readings include Marx, Simondon, Yuk Hui, Laura Tripaldi, Bogna Konior, and Benjamin Bratton. Strangeways Idea Lab website

Diversity in Youth Literature Reading Group

 This group invites the faculty, students, and staff to read and discuss both foundational and new scholarship on youth literature as they relate to “canon” formation and diversity. This is especially important as at present much of youth literature—especially diverse youth literature—is being challenged across the country. The group will meet once a month to read and discuss scholarship, hear from speakers, and share our own research with one another.

Modern Jewish Thought

This reading group explores foundational topics of modern Jewish thought, with a focus on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Considering texts of philosophy, ethics, cultural critique, and psychoanalysis, we will discuss issues of modernity faced by an assimilating Jewish community whose connection to the religious tradition was becoming increasingly attenuated. Authors to be read include Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, Emmanuel Levinas, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler.

Shadow Infrastructures: Technologies of Risk, Reproduction, and Repair

Shadow Infrastructures explores how infrastructures—media, legal, technological, environmental, archival, and aesthetic—organize the conditions under which worlds are made, governed, damaged, and repaired. Bringing together environmental humanities, history, architecture, STS, film and media studies, comparative literature, legal humanities, critical AI studies, and labor history, the group will discuss books, films, media works, archival artifacts, and works-in-progress on nuclear landscapes, platforms, built environments, labor, risk, violence, memory, and extractive systems.

History of Anthropology

This interdisciplinary group reads the history of anthropology through media technology, asking how successive technologies of inscription—writing, print, photography, film, computing, AI—shape both the archives of evidence and the architecture of interpretive authority through which the discipline pursues human self-knowledge. Convening anthropologists, archivists, historians, and media scholars, we meet monthly to discuss canonical and contemporary readings, host occasional guest speakers, and explore how "archival beings" are made and remade across eras.

Spanish Theory Reading Group

This group is a setting for graduate students to discuss contemporary issues in the theory and methodology of Spanish-language cultural studies. Each week, a presenter selects a relevant text and leads the group's conversation about it. Presenters contextualize the work historically and/or focus on the work's relevance to their own research. We cover both classic and recent theory. Discussion is carried out in Spanish.

Organize & Analyze: Social Movements Reading Group (Fall 2026 theme: Global Decolonial Marxist Thought)

This reading group focuses on global working-class social movements. For Fall 2026 our theme will be on decolonial writings, with a focus on works from the global Marxist tradition. This group hopes to find in these traditions new tools to confront the present moment, including multiple imperialist wars and rising fascism. The group will decide on its readings collectively, which could include works by Amilcar Cabral, Claudia Jones, Frantz Fanon, and Walter Rodney. RSVP