Faculty Fellows

Jaira J. Harrington is an assistant professor of Black Studies. Her research and teaching focuses on the political activism of Latin American Black communities, diasporic Black feminism, and race, class and labor organizing among Brazilian domestic workers. She holds a doctorate in Political Science from the University of Chicago. Her research has been funded by the Ford Foundation, Fulbright, and American Academy of University Women.

Harrington has been published globally in journals including the Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies Journal, Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative Ethnic and Racial Studies, Revista Relicário Uberlândia, and the Journal of Political Science Education.

In 2020, Jaira was recognized with the International Studies Association Early Career and Community Engagement Award of the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section for her scholarly and transnational work with Black populations.

Jaira is completing her first book Inscribed and Erased: Domestic Workers’ Rights in Brazil with the Institute for the Humanities.

Lecture – Inscribed and Erased: Domestic Workers’ Rights in Brazil
Wednesday, October 9, 2024, 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM

Lynn M. Hudson is a professor of history and an affiliated faculty member of the Black Studies department. She is the author of The Making of ‘Mammy Pleasant’: A Black Entrepreneur in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), and West of Jim Crow: The Fight Against California’s Color Line (University of Illinois Press, 2020).

Lecture – Troubled Waters: Segregated Swimming in American Cities, 1914-1954
Thursday, November 7, 2024, 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM

Young Kim is Associate Professor and Head of Classics and Mediterranean Studies, with an additional appointment in History. He is a historian of the ancient Mediterranean world broadly, with specific teaching and research interests in Late Antiquity, late ancient Christianity, and Byzantine Studies. His early work focused on the life and writings of Epiphanius of Cyprus, and he was the editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Council of Nicaea. His interests have since shifted in a variety of directions, including work in Modern Greek Studies and the writings of Luis Alfaro. As an Institute fellow, he will return to his love for the ancient world and prepare his book manuscript entitled Cyprus and the Historiography of Late Antiquity.

Lecture – Cyprus and the Historiography of Late Antiquity
Thursday, January 23, 2025, 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM

Emmanuel Ortega is a Curator, the Marilynn Thoma Scholar and Assistant Professor in Art of the Spanish Americas at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), and a Scholar in Residence at the Newberry Library (2023–2024). Ortega has lectured nationally and internationally on nineteenth-century Mexican landscape painting, ex-votos, and visual representations of the New Mexico Pueblo peoples in Novohispanic Franciscan martyr paintings. His recently curated art show titled “Contemporary Ex-Votos Devotion Beyond Medium” produced an accompanying catalog published by the New Mexico State University Art Museum this spring. An essay titled “Beyond European Palettes: The Overlooked Contributions of Indigenized Artists in the Historiography of Painting in Mexico.” will appear this fall as part of the Routledge Companion to Art and Empire: Aesthetics and Imperialism, 1800-1950. His book Visualizing Franciscan Anxiety and the Distortion of Native Resistance: The Domesticating Mission is under contract with Routledge.

Lecture – The Domesticating Mission: Franciscan Anxiety as the Distortion of Native Resistance
Tuesday, September 24, 2024, 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM

Kareem Rabie is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Chicago. His work focuses on privatization, housing, and the state-building project in the West Bank and he is the author of Palestine is Throwing a Party and the Whole World is Invited, published by Duke University Press in 2021. Previously he was Assistant Professor of Anthropology at American University in Washington, DC; visiting fellow at CUNY’s Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and Committee on Globalization and Social Change; Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago; and Marie Curie Fellow/Senior Researcher at the University of Oxford Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society (COMPAS). His current research on Palestine and China has been supported by the ACLS, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Graham Foundation for Advancement in the Fine Arts, UIC, and others. His most recent work can be found in Their Borders, Our World, edited by Mahdi Sabbagh (Haymarket, 2024); The Baffler; and on the Macrodose and Death Panel podcasts.

Lecture – Everywhere in the World there is a China- town, in China there is a Khaliltown
Thursday, April 10, 2025, 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM

Sultan Tepe’s research centers on the challenges hindering democratic inclusion and the institutions and processes that minoritize various groups. Her analyses demonstrate the critical need for interdisciplinary and comparative approaches and span multiple contexts, including the US, India, Israel, and Turkey. Among others, she investigates the reasons behind the persistence of polarization, authoritarianism, and populism, the specific mechanisms supporting anti-democratic practices, and efforts to resist them at local and national levels. Her methodological interventions aim to bridge the gap between humanities and social scientific approaches. Her innovative research and approaches have been recognized by APSA’s Weber Best Paper and Distinguished Reviewer Awards. She has received multiple awards for her graduate and undergraduate teaching and mentoring. Professor Tepe is the co-editor of Religion and Politics (a Cambridge University Press Journal), the author of numerous journal articles and chapters as well as the forthcoming book Building Faith: Islam, Urban Space and The Making of American Muslims (NYU Press), and the award-winning Beyond Sacred and Secular (Stanford University Press, 2008).

Lecture – Regulating Morality: State and Censorship in Authoritarian Regime
Wednesday, February 19, 2025, 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM