Antoinette Burton

Tamara Chaplin is Professor of Modern European History and Lynn M. Martin Professorial Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A historian of contemporary France with specializations in gender and sexuality, media history, and queer theory, Chaplin is affiliated with the Departments of Gender and Women’s Studies, French and Italian, Global Studies, the European Union Center, the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory and the initiative on Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. Her recent book, Becoming Lesbian: A Queer History of Modern France (University of Chicago Press, 2024), a landmark analysis of how a marginalized subculture used the modern media to transform public attitudes toward sexual desire, was completed with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Camargo Foundation, and UIUC’s Center for Advanced Study. Chaplin's first monograph Turning On the Mind: French Philosophers on Television (University of Chicago Press, 2007) examined the relationship between TV, high culture, and French national identity. Her scholarship has appeared in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, French Historical Studies, the Journal of the History of Ideas, and in edited collections in French and English on youth sexuality, May ’68, Michel Foucault, and second wave feminism. A governing member of the Western Society for French History and past board member of the American Historical Association’s Committee on LGBT History, Chaplin also serves on the Comité Scientifique for the Société Pour l’Histoire des Médias (Paris, France). She published a co-edited volume (with Jadwiga E. Pieper- Mooney), The Global Sixties: Conventions, Contests, and Countercultures (Routledge Press, 2017). 

Recipient of the highest teaching awards delivered at the University of Illinois—both the Provost's Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and the LAS Dean's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching—Dr. Chaplin teaches survey and special topics courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels on modern Europe, France, sexuality, human rights, history and social theory, World War I, media and popular culture. A former professional ballet dancer, trained actor and member of the Screen Actor’s Guild, Dr. Chaplin received her doctorate in Modern European History from Rutgers University and her BA from Concordia University (Montreal).

Jenny L. Davis is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and an Associate Professor of Anthropology and American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where she is the director of the American Indian Studies Program. Her research interests sit at the intersections of Indigenous language futurism (including language reclamation & revitalization); Queer Indigenous Studies; Speculative fiction and poetry; NAGPRA & repatriation; and Indigenous, anti-colonial, collaborative, and community-based methods.

Her research has been published in the Annual Review of Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Gender & Language, Language & Communication, Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals, the American Journal of Biological Anthropology, American Antiquity, Ethnobiology Letters, Human Genetics and Genomics Advances, and The Routledge Companion to Publicly Engaged Humanities Scholarship, among others. Her 2022 poetry collection, Trickster Academy, was published in the University of Arizona Press Sun Tracks Series, and her second, Extant, was published with Michigan State University Press in 2026. Her creative work has most recently been published in SAPIENS; Transmotion; Anomaly; Santa Ana River Review; Broadsided; North Dakota Quarterly; Yellow Medicine Review; As/Us; Raven Chronicles; American Indian Culture and Research Journal; Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism; and Arnoldia: the Nature of Trees and is forthcoming in Gathering in the Glittering Field: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Poetry. Her visual art has been exhibited at the University of Alabama Moundville Archaeological Museum; Washington State University; and the Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways. 

She is the recipient of two book prizes: the 2019 Beatrice Medicine Award from the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures for Talking Indian: Identity and Language Revitalization in the Chickasaw Renaissance (University of Arizona Press, 2018) and the 2014 Ruth Benedict Book Prize from the Association for Queer Anthropology and the American Anthropological Association for her co-edited volume Queer Excursions: Retheorizing Binaries in Language, Gender, and Sexuality (Oxford University Press, 2014). In 2021, she received the Dynamic Woman of the Year Award from the Chickasaw Nation, which is given annually for significant contributions to the Chickasaw Nation and its people through community engagement and work preserving its linguistic and cultural heritage.

In her administrative and service roles at UIUC, she has developed the Native American and Indigenous Language (NAIL) Lab and the Center for Indigenous Science, and works toward the repatriation, co-curation, and care of Indigenous collections (osteological, archaeological, ethnographic, and archival) in both the United States and international contexts. From 2019-2022 she served as the Chancellor's Fellow of Indigenous Research & Ethics. In that role, she worked to develop initiatives, including a campus-wide NAGPRA office and Tribal Liaison position, to ensure that the University is knowledgeable about and in compliance with U.S. and tribal government policies and protocols. From 2017-2019 she was the acting NAGPRA officer for the Department of Anthropology and the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at UIUC, and she has served as the co/chair of the campus NAGPRA Advisory Committee since its establishment in 2020. She has been an appointed member of the Commission for the Ethical Treatment of Human Remains (TCETHR) of the American Anthropological Association since 2023 (the final report can be found here). 

Jane Desmond is a Professor in Anthropology and Gender and Women's Studies, and Co-founder and current Director of the International Forum for U.S. Studies, a center for the Transnational Study of the United States.  She also holds appointments in the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, the Center for Global Studies,  and in the College of Veterinary Medicine. 

Her primary areas of interest focus of issues of embodiment, display, and social identity, as well as the transnational dimensions of U.S. Studies. Her areas of expertise include performance studies, critical theory, visual culture (including museum studies and tourism studies), the critical analysis of the U.S. in global perspectives, and, most recently, the political economy of human/animal relations. She has previously worked as a professional modern dancer and choreographer, and in film, video, and the academy.  She is the Founding Resident director of the international Summer Institute in Animal Studies at UIUC, and of the _Animal LIves_ Book Series at the University of Chicago Press.  In addition to academic publications, she has written for a number of public publications such as CNN.com, The Washington Post.com, and the Huffington Post, and her creative work has appeared on PBS and at numerous film festivals.

Cara Finnegan is a Professor in the Department of Communication. She holds affiliated appointments in the Center for Writing Studies, Gender and Women's Studies, and Art History. She was named a University Scholar in 2017.

Finnegan's research examines the role of photography as a tool for public life. Photographs are powerful forms of communication: they visualize social issues, make visible those who are often invisible, and foster or limit bonds of identification. Her book-length projects are best described as rhetorical histories of photography, in that she examines the production, composition, circulation, and reception of photographs at specific moments in U.S. history. Her most recent book is Photographic Presidents: Making History from Daguerreotype to Digital  (University of Illinois Press, 2021). 

Finnegan's ideas about photography and visual politics have been featured in a variety of publications in the fields of Communication and U.S. History, as well as in popular media outlets such as the New York Times, CBS, and Vox. 

Stephanie Hilger is a scholar of eighteenth-century literature and culture, with a focus on gender studies and medical humanities. She is Professor of German and Comparative Literature. In addition, she holds appointments in the European Union Center, French, and Gender and Women’s Studies. Since 2021, she has also been affiliated with the Department of Biomedical and Translational Sciences at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine.

Her current book project, Liminal Bodies: Hermaphrodites in the Eighteenth-Century, examines the eighteenth-century fascination with sexually ambiguous bodies, so-called hermaphrodites, and argues that they became the symbol of an era in which centuries-old ways of knowing were collapsing. Within three national contexts (British, French, and German), Liminal Bodies focuses on the genre of the case study, which gained in popularity during the eighteenth century by combining literary and scientific conventions. Liminal Bodies argues that, in the analysis of these case studies, sex/gender and (dis)ability need to be thought together, along with race and ethnicity, to understand the intersectional ways in which identity was constructed during the Enlightenment. For this project, Professor Hilger was awarded fellowships from the Program of Faculty Study in a Second Discipline, which allowed her to study embryology, the Humanities Research Institute, and the Center for Advanced Study.

Professor Hilger’s previous books also investigate the ways in which gender operated in eighteenth-century discourse. Gender and Genre: German Women Write the French Revolution (2014) examines German literary texts that depict and represent women as political agents during the French Revolution and thereby question the erosion of women’s rights. Her first book, Women Write Back: Strategies of Response and the Dynamics of European Literary Culture, 1790 1805 (2009) explores the ways in which late eighteenth and early nineteenth century women authors rewrote and responded to texts written earlier in the century by male intellectuals.

In addition to her monographs, Professor Hilger has (co-)edited three volumes in the medical humanities: Bodies and Transitions in the Health Humanities: Intelligible States of Corporeality (with Lisa DeTora, 2019); New Directions in Literature and Medicine Studies (2017); and The Early History of Embodied Cognition from 1740 to 1920 (with John McCarthy, Nicholas Saul, and Heather Sullivan, 2015).

In 2019, she was awarded a grant for “The Art of Medicine: A Public Square on Health and Medicine for the Illinois System” from the Presidential Initiative to Celebrate the Impact of the Arts and the Humanities at Illinois for curriculum development, research activities, and public outreach.

Her new projects include an edited collection on Medical Humanities in German Studies and a book about physician-writers in the eighteenth century.

In addition to several teaching awards from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Professor Hilger was recognized as the 2017 Medical Scholars Program Advisory Committee Outstanding Advisor of the Year.