Current Reading Groups

  1. Fellowships & Research Support
  2. Reading Groups
  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.

2025–26 Reading Groups

Diversity in Youth Literature Study 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.

Introducing Hans Blumenberg: History, Myth, and Science

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

Philosopher and historian Hans Blumenberg (1920-1996) remains an unjustly marginalized figure in the history of Western ideas. This is despite his astonishing range of argumentation, which treats perennial themes at length, including the constitutive function of metaphors in culture, the secular nature of modernity, and the psychopolitics of foundational myths. We will read some short selections, then decide to focus on either The Genesis of the Copernican World (1975) or Work on Myth (1979).

Migration, Language, and Culture in Europe

This reading group focuses on recent migration to and within Europe and its consequences for language and culture. We examine the latest scholarship on the ways in which people of diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds interact in European cities and explore the social challenges and opportunities that are found in multilingual and multicultural environments. The reading group is intended to be interdisciplinary, and participants from any field are welcome. Migration, Language, and Culture in Europe website 

Modern Jewish Thought

This reading group explores several 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.

Organize & Analyze: Social Movements Reading Group

This reading group focuses on global working-class social movements. We discuss a range of theoretical and empirical texts on historical and contemporary social movements alongside their cultural expressions via short stories, plays, and poems. We hope our readings and discussions will inform our intellectual development, political education, and praxis. Please RSVP to be added to the mailing list to receive the syllabus and readings.

Visions of Abolitionisms

This group explores histories, theories and practices of abolition and restorative/transformative justice. From the abolition of chattel slavery to the social and political ferment in the long summer of 2020, abolition has not only been a horizon of liberatory possibility, but a pragmatic strategy for social change. Abolitionisms of prisons, borders, and the family among others will be discussed with an emphasis on accountability and sustainability in activist and organizing spaces.