New HRI Research Clusters include iSchool faculty

Two projects led by iSchool faculty members have been selected as Humanities Research Institute (HRI) Research Clusters for 2022-2023. Formerly known as the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, HRI fosters interdisciplinary study in the humanities, arts, and social sciences at the University of Illinois. HRI Research Clusters enable faculty and graduate students to "develop questions or subjects of inquiry that require or would be enhanced by collaborative work." Projects selected as clusters receive grants of $2,500 to support their activities.

Assistant Professor Zoe LeBlanc, Associate Professor Ryan Cordell, and John Randolph, associate professor in the Department of History, were awarded a Research Cluster for their project, "The Social Lives of Digitized Culture." The cluster will explore how humanists across the UIUC campus are grappling with digitized culture, whether they are creating and curating these materials or using them as data for their research or new experimental pedagogies. According to the researchers, the goal of the cluster is "to move away from seeing digitized culture as something to be consumed, towards understanding it as a complex phenomenon at the intersection of social, scholarly, technological, institutional and other processes."

Assistant Professor Karen Wickett, Associate Professor Sarah Park Dahlen, and Assistant Professor Melissa Ocepek will collaborate with Lila Sharif, assistant professor in the Department of Asian American Studies, and iSchool PhD student Chris Wiley on the cluster, "Writing from the Intersections." The goal of this research cluster is to bring scholars who work in research areas that "intertwine questions of race, culture, politics, gender and identity" to campus in a series of events focused on the practice and experience of writing from the intersection of social categories.

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

iSchool researchers to present at NeurIPS

iSchool faculty, staff, and students will present their research at the 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023), which will be held from December 10-16 in New Orleans, Louisiana. NeurIPS is one of the most prestigious and competitive international conferences in machine learning and computational neuroscience.

Petrella defends dissertation

Doctoral candidate Julia Burns Petrella successfully defended her dissertation, "Educating Pre-Service School Librarians about Race, Racism, and Whiteness," on December 4.

Julia Burns Petrella

Guo defends dissertation

Doctoral candidate Qiuyan Guo successfully defended her dissertation, "Exploring Chinese Celebrity Fans’ Online Information Behaviors and Understandings of Their Practices," on December 6.

Qiuyan Guo

Tilley featured in comic book

Associate Professor Carol Tilley had an unexpected citation in her favorite medium—comic books! Dav Pilkey, author and illustrator of a number of bestselling and award-winning children’s books, including the popular Captain Underpants series, depicts Tilley's research on psychiatrist Fredric Wertham in his newest comic, Cat Kid Comic Club Influencers.

Dav Pilkey's comic depicting Carol Tilley

iSchool researchers present at 4S 2023

iSchool faculty, staff, and students presented their research at the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) annual conference, which was held from November 8-11 in Honolulu, Hawaii. The society is an international, nonprofit association that fosters interdisciplinary scholarship in social studies of science, technology, and medicine.