The Office of the Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion was incorrectly identified as a co-sponsor for a campus lecture titled “Unfinished Business: Zionism as Racism and Racial Discrimination.” As worded, this title does not invite participation and engagement with all members of our community and does not represent the values of our university.
Academic freedom and freedom of expression are bedrock principles of this institution and are necessary for the exploration of controversial, divisive or uncomfortable issues – even those that are in opposition to this university’s clearly stated positions and values.
Any future lectures in this series will make it clear that these are not sponsored by our office nor do the viewpoints expressed represent the university.
I am sorry for any additional discomfort or distress some may have felt when it appeared that it was sponsored or endorsed by the office that is charged with helping us turn the aspiration of belonging and inclusion into a universal practice.
Sincerely,
Sean C. Garrick Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
The Illinois Distinguished Postdoctoral Research Associates: Upper left to right: Bronte Charette, Stewart M. Coles, and Kimberly C. Ransom. Lower left to right: Kayla Nguyen, Gonzalo Campillo-Alvarado, and Víctor H. Cervantes.
The Illinois Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship Symposium will highlight the diverse research achievements of this year’s fellows. The symposium will celebrate their accomplishments and features presentations of their path-breaking research.
The symposium will include short presentations from the postdoctoral research associates. It will take place at 614 E. Daniel St. on the third floor on April 19 at 10 a.m until 12:30 p.m. Box lunches and refreshments will be provided. Metered street parking is available. To learn more and register to attend by April 11, please visit go.illinois.edu/DRIVEsymposium.
The presentations will showcase the ingenuity and discovery of the associates, said Jamelle Sharpe, Chair of the Diversity Realized at Illinois through Visioning Excellence (DRIVE) Committee.
“This is an incredibly impressive group of emerging scholars working in a variety of academic disciplines,” Sharpe said. “What they share during the Symposium reflects their individual ingenuity as well as the breadth of intellectual discovery that defines the U of I community.”
The postdoctoral research associates are individuals from underrepresented groups in all fields of study and women in STEM who demonstrate significant academic potential. Promising candidates for campus faculty positions may be nominated for the Illinois Distinguished Postdoctoral and Visiting Scholar Program.
“Our postdocs have been incredibly successful in securing tenure-stream faculty positions, especially here at Illinois,” Sharpe said.
They have also developed invaluable networks of mentors and colleagues that will continue to nourish their careers long after completing the program, Sharpe said, but they are not the only beneficiaries.
“Diverse faculties have been shown to improve student learning, departmental climate, and scholarly productivity,” Sharpe said. “And for almost a decade, the DRIVE postdoc has significantly contributed to the campus’ diversification efforts. It shows Illinois’ commitment to excellence, and it’s something every member of our community can be proud of.”
Gonzalo Campillo-Alvarado is working in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. He received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from The University of Iowa. His current research in the group of Professor Ying Diao focuses on the understanding of dynamic properties in single crystals of organic semiconductors aiming to design the next-generation multifunctional electronics. His talk is titled “Crystal Chemistry of Flexible Electronics.”
Bronte Charette is part of the Department of Chemistry. Her Ph.D. is in Chemistry from the University of California, Irvine. Her current research in the group of Prof. Lisa Olshansky focuses on synthesizing switchable transition metal complexes and measuring the thermodynamic and kinetic parameters dictating their reactivities for renewable energy conversion strategies. Her talk is titled “Conformationally Dynamic Copper Complexes for Solar Fuel Technologies.”
Víctor H. Cervantes is part of the Department of Psychology. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematical and Computational Cognitive Science from Purdue University. His research focuses on the mathematical development of a probabilistic theory of contextuality, and mathematics and statistics applications to psychological modeling and educational assessment. His talk is titled “Models of Unforced Choice.”
Stewart M. Coles is part of the Department of Communication. His Ph.D. is in Communications and Media from the University of Michigan. His research examines how people develop their understanding of social issues related to identity. More specifically, he studies the way media depictions of social issues and marginalized groups evoke prejudice and stereotypes, shape and activate identity, and influence public opinion and political behavior. His talk is titled “Evaluating the Political Relevance of Media Content: Conceptualization and Consequences.”
Kayla Nguyen is part of the Department of Material Sciences and Engineering. Her Ph.D. is in Chemistry and Chemical Biology from Cornell University. Kayla now focuses her time developing new electron microscopy techniques with an emphasis on imaging the smallest unit of magnetism – the electron spin. Although she is first a scientist, Kayla is extremely passionate about building more pathways for girls and young women in the STEM fields. Her talk is titled “New Direct Electron Imaging Techniques for Quantum Materials.”
Kimberly C. Ransom is part of the Department of Education Policy, Organization & Leadership. She received her Ph.D. in Educational Studies from the University of Michigan. Her research examines the oral histories and material objects of Black children who once attended segregated schools in the Deep South during the Jim Crow Era (1940-1969). As a public scholar and artist, Kimberly also uses her historical research to create public exhibits related to African American childhood in and around schools. Her talk is titled “Pieces of Me: Insider/Outsider Status in History of Education Research.”
The Illinois Distinguished Postdoctoral and Visiting Scholar Program is administered by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, the Office for Access & Equity, and the Diversity Realized at Illinois through Visioning Excellence (DRIVE) recruitment and retention committee.
If you will need disability-related accommodations in order to participate, please email Holly Clingan at access@illinois.edu. Early requests are strongly encouraged to allow sufficient time to meet your access needs.
Updated April 7, 2022 – For unforeseen circumstances, the Natalie Diaz poetry reading scheduled for tonight is canceled. If it becomes possible to reschedule the event, we will share additional information when it is available.
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Pulitzer-Prize Winning Poet Natalie Diaz will be sharing her work during a virtual event with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign community.
The poetry reading will be virtual and is free and open to students, faculty, staff, and the public at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 7.
Diaz received the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In March 2020, Diaz’s second book Postcolonial Love Poem was published by Graywolf Press. Her first poetry collection is titled When My Brother Was an Aztec and was published by Copper Canyon Press.
Diaz is Mojave and is an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. She received the Princeton Holmes National Poetry Prize and served as a 2018 MacArthur Fellow, a Lannan Literary Fellow, and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow.
The event is sponsored by the Humanities Research Institute and the Program in American Indian Studies. It is co-sponsored by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion.
To request disability-related accommodations for this event, please email Lydia Allen at allen7@illinois.edu. Early requests are strongly encouraged to allow sufficient time to meet your access needs.
More information about the speaker
Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe.
She is a member of the Board of Trustees for the United States Artists, where she is an alumna of the Ford Fellowship. Diaz is Director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and is the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University.
As part of the 2021-2022 Symptoms of Crisis lecture series, Professor Lerone A. Martin will speak on his groundbreaking new history of the Federal Bureau of Investigations called “The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism.” The event is sponsored by the Humanities Research Institute and cosponsored by the Department of Religion.
The “Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover” is a groundbreaking new history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Martin, an award-winning historian, presents the never told story of how J. Edgar Hoover’s partnership with white evangelicals and Catholics led to the political rise of white Christian nationalism. The book features newly declassified never-seen FBI documents obtained through a years long Freedom of Information Act Lawsuit.
Martin is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies and the Martin Luther King, Jr., Centennial Chair and Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University
The lecture is March 9 at 7:30 p.m. at the Levis Faculty Center Third Floor located at 919 W. Illinois St., Urbana, IL 61801. The event is free and open to the public. For more information, please visit hri.illinois.edu.
Symptoms of Crisis events are a series of speakers that align with the Humanities Research Institute’s 2021–22 fellowship theme. This theme was born out of humanist sensibilities about underlying conditions and the urgency of examining them whenever and wherever they appear. Many aspects of our programming in 2021-2022 tracked the work that humanists are doing to grapple with critical questions of short and long duration – and to challenge conventional notions of crisis itself in the process. See the upcoming speakers here.
To request disability-related accommodations for this event, contact info-hri@illinois.edu.
Women & Gender in Global Perspectives and the Humanities Research Institute present the International Women’s Day event “12 Women Who Changed the World: Untold Stories.” Associate Vice Chancellor for Native Affairs Jacki Thompson Rand is a featured speaker at the event along with 11 other presenters.
This annual event brings together faculty, staff, students, and community members to recognize people who have made a difference in academia. Each speaker will have five minutes to tell the story of a woman in their discipline who changed the field in important ways.
Other Speakers include:
Andreas C. Cangellaris, Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Provost
Carol Ammons, Illinois State Representative
James Anderson, College of Education
Ana Barros, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Dawn Blackman, Randolph St. Community Garden
Latrelle Bright, Department of Theatre
Enoma Egiebor, UIUC Student Body President
Kat Fuenty, Asian American Studies
Patty Jones, Beckman Institute
C. Kemal Nance, Department of Dance, African American Studies Department
Angharad N. Valdivia, Department of Latina/Latino Studies
The event is March 8 from 3:30 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. at the Levis Faculty Center on the third floor located on 919 W. Illinois St., Urbana, IL 61801.
The event is free and open to the public in person or by live stream, which can be accessed here. It is co-sponsored by the Women’s Resources Center and the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies.
Accommodations are available for students, faculty and staff who are participating in an extended religious fast and are concerned about their ability to produce a saliva sample. Individuals can request to receive a COVID-19 nasal swab test instead.
Students, faculty and staff should call the McKinley Health Center at 217-244-5661 and state that they are requesting the nasal swab test because they are fasting as a religious observance. For other accommodations regarding testing, please contact the ADA Division of the Office for Access & Equity at 217-333-0885. Full testing guidelines are available on the COVID-19 website.
Other resources are available for those who are observing extended fasts for religious reasons. For more information about religious observances, please view the calendar on our website.
Late last night University Housing staff observed that someone had used a marker to draw a swastika on a wall inside a bathroom of a residence hall. A resident adviser immediately reported this incident to the University of Illinois Police Department and University Housing staff responded to address and cover it. Facilities & Services is on site today to remove the image. Information about this incident has been received through the university’s bias reporting process. Officers gave the resident adviser contact information for University Police social workers to provide to any residents who felt threatened.
As Chancellor Jones stated in his massmail to the campus community on Sunday night, anti-Semitism of any kind is offensive, unacceptable, and antithetical to our university values of inclusion and tolerance. All acts of hate and dehumanization creates cracks in what holds us together as a community, and as a community we must speak out against them and do all that we can to prevent these offensive acts from happening again.
If you observe incidents of bias or intolerance, or behavior that negatively affects your sense of belonging and inclusion on campus or that of others – including anti-Semitism, hate, or other forms of bias – please submit a report at go.illinois.edu/CampusBelonging. Members of the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Campus Belonging Resources staff will follow up individually when requested to provide resources and response.
The 2022 annual celebration of the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. features several events focused on the theme “The time is always right to do what is right.”
This year’s celebration will begin with the MLK Advocacy for Justice Celebration, Sunday, January 16 at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts and will feature a keynote by Dr. Derek Barber King, Sr., nephew of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Other events throughout the month include the Unity Breakfast at The Vineyard Church on Monday, January 17; a presentation on food insecurity and child care in Champaign County on Thursday, January 20; and a virtual poverty simulation sponsored by the University of Illinois School of Social Work on Friday, January 28.
Continuing the ministry of his late father and uncle, Dr. Derek Barber King, Sr. facilitates workshops and seminars related to the subject of creating social change utilizing nonviolent strategies and tactics. A fulltime Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Martin University for 19 years, Dr. King was ordained as a minister at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, and facilitates workshops and seminars related to the subject of creating social change utilizing non violent strategies and tactics, continuing the ministry of his late father A. D. King, Sr. and uncle Martin Luther King, Jr.
Each year the Annual County-wide Celebration commemorates Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by bringing together community members from Champaign County to celebrate the mission, teachings, and legacy of Dr. King. The MLK Advocacy for Justice Celebration is sponsored by the MLK Advocacy for Justice Committee, Inc. in partnership with the MLK Countywide Committee and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The celebration is free and open to the public. Proof of COVID vaccination required to enter the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. For details, please see the Krannert Center COVID-19 Safety Protocols page.
To request disability-related accommodations for this event, please contact the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at access@illinois.edu. Early requests are strongly encouraged to allow sufficient time for meeting your access needs.
Friday, December 3, 2021 11 a.m. – 2:30 p.m. 614 East Daniel Street, Third Floor Champaign
Please join us for an open house to celebrate the opening of our new offices at 614 East Daniel Street. We will showcase our ongoing and upcoming projects as well as our new location.
Light refreshments will be provided, with remarks from Chancellor Robert Jones and Vice Chancellor Sean Garrick at 12 p.m.
If you require an accommodation to participate in this event, including disability-related parking requests, please email Alina Jelks at access@illinois.edu. Please note early requests are strongly encouraged to allow sufficient time for meeting your access needs.
Four University of Illinois faculty and staff members will be recognized for their exceptional dedication to diversity, equity and inclusion as the 2021 recipients of the Larine Y. Cowan Make a Difference Awards.
The Larine Y. Cowan Awards are presented annually to University of Illinois faculty and staff by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in four categories: Advocacy for LGBTQ Affairs, Excellence in Access & Accommodations, Leadership in Diversity, and Teaching and Mentoring in Diversity.
This year’s recipients include:
Leslie K. Morrow, Director of the LGBT Resource Center in the Office of Inclusion & Intercultural Relations, for her deep influence as a scholar-advocate for social change that positively impacts the lives of LGBTQ students and professionals on our campus and nationally.
JJ Pionke, Assistant Professor and the Applied Health Sciences Librarian in the University Library, for his investment and dedication to make the Library a more accessible and welcoming place for functionally diverse people.
Shardé McNeil Smith, Associate Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies, for her persistent and courageous leadership to create departmental change that promotes racial justice and antiracist research culture.
Avital Livny, Assistant Professor of Political Science, for her tireless and innovative efforts to provide transformative research experiences and mentorship that have reshaped representational structures with her department.
Named in honor of the past Assistant Chancellor and Director of what is now the Office for Access & Equity, these annual awards reflect the commitment to human rights advocacy and diversity that defined the leadership of Larine Y. Cowan for nearly 20 years at Illinois.
This year’s award recipients will be honored at the 36th Annual Celebration of Diversity on Friday, November 12, 2021 at the I Hotel and Conference Center.
