- [On January 5, 2010, Interim President Stanley Ikenberry announced a four-day furlough for eligible academic professionals and faculty as a “short-term measure to conserve cash” during Spring 2010. The Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory has commissioned...
- Dear Colleagues,I hope this email finds you warm and dry on a snowy January day in Champaign-Urbana (or wherever you are as you read these words). With furloughs recently announced for a wide swath of Illinois employees, and budgetary crises continuing at local, national, and global levels, I write in the hopes...
- Written by Chantal Nadeau (Gender & Women's Studies)What is the relationship between queer and the future? Between queer and its future? How do we define queer in relation to a future that would be outside of the matrix of heteronormativity and a certain vision/rendition of reproducibility? Or is it that queer always happens in an impalpable, unmarked present, yet one that clearly makes it a...
- On Monday, November 16, the Unit for Criticism held the last of its Fall 2009 Author’s Roundtables on the first day of a historic strike for the University of Illinois and beyond. When we asked various student and faculty affiliates if they thought we should cancel the event, one student, John Claborn, replied that he thought that “the project of critical theory should continue unabated in the...
- Written by Okla Elliott (Comparative and World Literature)The Graduate Employee Organization strike so filled the air Monday night that the event began with an update from a representative, Michael Verderame, from the English department. Two of the panelists addressed the issue—Zsuzsa Gille dedicating her comments to the GEO...
- Vernacular Capitalists: A Response to Ritu BirlaWritten by Matt Hart (English)Author’s Note: The day after I delivered these remarks, the Graduate Employees Organization, IFT/AFT Local 6300, AFL-CIO (GEO), suspended strike action pending ratification of a new contract with the University of Illinois. In a major victory for academic labor, the GEO won concessions on all four of its key issues:...
- Written by Zsuzsa Gille (Sociology)Stages of Capital is an excellent book that I read from cover to cover. I learned so much from it and will no doubt refer to it a lot in my work on postsocialism. I am dedicating this response to my graduate students in two ways: a) I will make most of my comments about capitalism which so pervades our workplace and b) I will make an effort to help them...
- Respondent James H. Warren (History, Illinois) talks with Ritu Birla (History, Toronto).Written by James H. Warren (History)Several years ago in a social theory seminar, my colleagues and I were assigned Douglass C. North’s 1990 book Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge UP, 1990). Economic history, we...
- (These comments, slightly edited, were delivered in the public comment section of the University of Illinois Board of Trustees meeting, November 12, 2009, in Springfield). My name is Michael Verderame. I’m a Ph.D. candidate in English at the Urbana-Champaign campus. I’m also a graduate employee, working as assistant director of the professional writing program and a research assistant, and I’ve...
- The GEO’s last two rallies before the strike will be this Thursday at locations in Springfield and the Urbana campus. The first rally will be the Board of Trustees meeting in Springfield. The Board of Trustees ultimately signs off on the GEO contract, and they have new members (since the clout scandal resignations) who may be swayed to put...
- Written by Frank Donoghue (Professor of English at Ohio State University)Since you’ve had a chance to look at a couple of chapters from my book, The Last Professors, I thought I’d offer you the book’s backstory, and then connect that story to some more recent thoughts I’ve had about the present and future of academic labor. It’s fair to say that I would be a contented professor of eighteenth-...
- Written by John Claborn (English)Monday night’s (Oct. 26) author’s roundtable and lively discussion with Frank Donoghue proved sometimes bleak and less often hopeful, but consistently provocative. Donoghue began his talk by recounting two formative moments that set a professor of eighteenth-century British literature on the path...
