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.

2024–25 Reading Groups

Beyond Scientific Taxonomies

This reading group explores systems for ways of knowing, studying, and communicating about animals and their environments that expand, reject, and/or reconsider the taken-for-granted white, western scientific taxonomies and the contexts from which they emerge. By centering Indigenous, non-western, and other so-called “folk” taxonomies and their methodologies in and across the arts, humanities, and social sciences we invite participants to critically reflect on the operationalization of more-than-human worlds in our research and scholarship.

Caribbean Modernities

This group engages philosophies and histories of modernity in the Caribbean. This group will work through Sidney Mintz’s proposition that “Caribbean peoples were the first modernized peoples in the world” (Scott 2004). Some authors we read together might be David Scott, Sylvia Wynter, and Aimé Césaire. Reading across genres, we'll reflect on the legacies of transatlantic slavery, and how they have fundamentally shaped the region, which has fundamentally changed the rest of the world.

Diversity in Youth Literature Study Group

This group invites professors and graduate students 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 twice a month to read and discuss scholarship, hear from speakers, and share our own research with one another.

Generative AI Futures

The aim is to build and sustain a community at the intersection of arts, humanities, and technology with a focus on speculative fiction, science fiction, and generative artificial intelligence. Monthly gatherings will be organic discussions from the participants; an initial reading list includes works by Isaac Asimov, Dan Simmons, and Kim Stanley Robinson. Generative AI Futures Reading Group website

Krannert Center Healing Spaces

The Healing Spaces Reading Group focuses on strengthening girls' community at Centennial High School. Writings of hip hop, abolitionist Bettina L. Love and Monique Morris form the foundation for consideration of the experience of black girls. Shawn A. Ginwright, The Four Pivots. Monica W. Morris, Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools and Sing a Rhythm, Dance a Blues: Education for the Liberation of Black and Brown Girls.

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. More information can be found at https://go.illinois.edu/MigrationEurope.

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: Reading group website

Reading Spengler's Decline of the West

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

Spengler was a conservative German philosopher of history, and while scholars typically have viewed Spengler's work critically, it nevertheless enjoyed enormous popular success in the 1920s. Since then, its influence and readership has waned, even as many of its concerns remain perennial: political decay, the consequences of culture war, the meaning of history, the seductions of tyranny. We will read Spengler's text, as well as occasionally looking at parallels drawn from other philosophies of history.