Toby Beauchamp

Toby Beauchamp is Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies and affiliate faculty in the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His first book, Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and U.S. Surveillance Practices (Duke University Press, 2019) examines the problem of visibility in trans politics, arguing that the scrutinizing of gender nonconformity is motivated less by explicit transgender identities than by the perceived threat that gender nonconformity poses to the U.S. racial and security state. His current book project, Trans Studies for Grim Times, considers the relationship between trans politics and authoritarianism. His writing appears in journals including GLQ, Feminist Formations, Radical History Review, and Surveillance & Society, as well as several edited book collections. 

Prof. Beauchamp was named a Helen Corley Petit Scholar for 2019-2020, an award supporting scholarship and teaching for early-career faculty in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, and a Conrad Humanities Scholar for 2020-2025, which recognizes outstanding associate professors in the College. He also received a 2021-2022 LAS Dean's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. During academic years 2019-2021, he was a Resident Associate at the Center for Advanced Study at Illinois, where he co-directed the CAS event series on the theme of Abolition. When not at work, he most enjoys spending time outdoors, and is an avid long-distance hiker.

I was born and grew up in the US, but I spent the better part of 25 years after college, living and working in southern Africa. I lived in Zimbabwe and South Africa, where I discovered the "gravitational pull" of African history.

I have a joint appointment at UIUC in History and Gender/Women's Studies. Since August 2017, I have been the Director of the Center for African Studies at UIUC.

Chantal Nadeau is Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Criticism and Interpretative Theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her scholarship centers on ways that sexuality is bound up with the legal, political, and visual (de)formations of the postcolonial. Author of Fur Nation: From The Beaver to Brigitte Bardot (Routledge 2001), her research on cinema, popular culture, and legal queer cultures has appeared in journals such as GLQ, Multitudes, Screen, and Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies. Always driven by geographical locations, she co-edited a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies: “Queering the Middle: Sexual Diasporas, Race, and a Queer Midwest” (2014). Her second monograph Queer Courage argues that the language of courage marks the arrival of a new paradigm for LGBTQ subjects, one that signals a legal and political shift from outlawness (pride) to citizenship (courage). Nadeau is at work on two new research projects that explore narratives of bodily integrity and sexual borders in films and visual arts.

Emma Velez (she/they) is a Chicanx Okie, decolonial feminist, philosopher, educator and storyteller. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois. Dr. Velez is interested in the role that our social imaginaries play both in shaping and reimagining our ethical commitments, geopolitical responses to racialized and gendered colonial violence, as well as the politics of knowledge production. Centering the philosophical genealogies and lived experiences of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities, their scholarship is rooted in storytelling and speculative theorizing and bridges conversations in philosophy, ethnic studies, and feminist theory. She is currently working on a book project titled, Orienting Historias for a Decolonial Latinx Feminism.

Blair Ebony Smith (artist alter ego, lovenloops) is a practicing artist-scholar and lover. As a sample-based sound artist, DJ and homegirl with Black girl celebratory collective/band, Saving Our Lives, Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT) We Levitate, Blair deepened her love for Black sound, music and making space for Black girlhood celebration with Black girls. Her art and scholarship explore themes of memory, loops, home, collectivity, everlasting love and sound/listening. Smith is the author of solo, co-written, co-edited works in Wish to Live: Hip Hop Feminist Pedagogy Reader, An Outkast Reader:  Essays on Race, Gender and the Postmodern South, American Quarterly, Visual Arts Research and Experiments in Art Research: How Do We Live Questions Through Art? She teaches classes focused on Black girlhood, Black femme, queer and feminist art, music, sound, pedagogy, play, and listening. 

She is working on a multi-modal digital book project titled Love and Loops: Memory, Time, Sound & Black Girlhood. Recent exhibitions and curations include the Krannert Art Museum (Illinois) and the Luminary (St. Louis). She has performed as a DJ and sound artist with her bandmates across the nation at various institutions, and solo at Richmond Independent Radio, Institute of Contemporary Art VCU, Diggin in the Crates at Virginia Tech, and Slo’ Mo’ Queer Dance Party in Chicago, Illinois and more. Since 2014, She has composed sample-based sound art, beats, and loops under her alter ego, lovenloops released tracks on SoundCloud and Bandcamp, making music with lovers, friends, and homegirls.  She released her first project, Don’t Ever Forget It (2016) with Roman Norfleet’s independent label Soulvember Records (circa 2016-2018) based in Los Angeles, CA. Blair is currently an Assistant Professor of Art Education and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. 

I am a sociologist, working at the intersections of gender, religion, and race. More specifically, my research has centered on LGBTQ+ Muslims; Islamic feminisms; anti-Muslim racism and xenophobia in the U.S. I earned a PhD in Sociology (emphasis in religion and gender), and immediately thereafter, worked as a community college instructor in Chicago for a year before starting as an Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse and later as a tenured Associate Professor in 2015.

Since 2009, I received funding from over 20 grants to research LGBTQ+ inclusive formations of Muslim community in Canada and China; document feminist organizing in the West Bank and Nepal; invite a host of international speakers to campus; start film festivals; and teach Social Justice Theory to BIPOC teen girls in New York City. I have been invited to speak at a wide range of universities, both nationally and internationally, and have presented at nearly 50 scholarly conferences, including the American Sociological Association, the National Women's Studies Association, and several regional sociology meetings. In addition to serving on the Governing Council of the National Women's Studies Association, I have published articles, book chapters, and reviews in outlets such as, the Journal of International Women's Studies, Praeger Press, Brill, SUNY Press, McFarland and Co., Sociology of Religion: A Quarterly Review, American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, and Feminist Collections.