Faculty Fellows

Inhabiting the Transit: Migrant Spatial Struggles from Global South America to the U.S.

Lecture: Tuesday, January 20, 2026

Dr. Soledad Álvarez Velasco is a social anthropologist and human geographer analyzing the interrelationship between mobility, control, and spatial transformations across the Americas. She holds a Ph.D. in Human Geography from King’s College London. Before joining the University of Illinois Chicago in January 2023 as Assistant Professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Latin American and Latino Studies, she was an Assistant Professor at Heidelberg University. She is the author of Frontera sur chiapaneca: El muro humano de la violencia (Mexico: CIESAS-UIA, 2016) and co-editor of Luchas Migrantes en Tiempos Pandémicos y de Crisis (Puerto Rico: Editorial Educación Emergente, 2025). Her research has appeared in Geopolitics, the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Studies in Social Justice, Antipode, Migration and Society, and the ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. She co-founded and co-coordinated the transnational digital projects (Im)Mobilities in the Americas (2020) and Children on the Move: An Ethnographic Mosaic of the Americas, funded by the National Geographic Society (2019).

Fossil Lebanon: Oil and the Making of the Lebanese State

Lecture: Wednesday, April 8, 2026

Zachary Davis Cuyler is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Chicago and a fellow at Century International.  His scholarship focuses on the historical and contemporary politics of infrastructure, energy, and the environment in the mashriq.  His academic work has been published in International Labor and Working-Class History, Historical Materialism, Labor History, and the Arab Studies Journal, and he has written on the contemporary politics of the mashriq for Middle East Report, Synaps, and L’Orient-Le Jour.  Zachary’s book project, “Fossil Lebanon,” examines how Lebanon’s relationship to the oil industry shaped the country’s politics, economy, and built environment across the mid-20th century.

Stream, Flow, River: The Endless Visual Pleasures of Amazon Prime

Lecture: Thursday, October 30, 2025

Kaitlin Clifton Forcier is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Illinois Chicago. An interdisciplinary media theorist, she researches and teaches on the visual culture of the digital age. Her first book project, “The Infinite Aesthetic,” analyzes iteration and endlessness in digital media and art, from the 1960s to today, as it intersects with the expansionist logics of new modes of capitalism. Her research has appeared in The Journal for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies, Afterimage, and Media-N. She received her PhD in Film & Media from UC Berkeley.

No Ways Tired: The Life Legacy and Making of the King of Gospel, Rev. James Cleveland

Lecture: Wednesday, September 24, 2025

Johari Jabir is a contemplative artist, scholar, and aspiring episcopal priest. Johari was born and raised in the Black Working-class community of St. Louis, MO. He is a roots musician with modern tendencies; gospel music has been the primary vehicle for his musicianship. Johari is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Black Studies at UIC.

Johari’s work as a musician overlaps with his scholarship and teaching. His first book, Conjuring Freedom: Music and Masculinity in the ‘Gospel Army’ of the Civil War considers the nightly conjuring practices of the soldiers in ring shout. He is currently working a second book entitled, No Ways Tired: A Biographical Meditation on Rev. James Cleveland, the King of Gospel Music.

As a teacher, Johari specializes in early undergraduate education. He is taught inside prisons as a prison abolitionist, and other sites of community-based education.

Embodied Nonalignment: Vietnamese Diasporic Aesthetics and Cold War Mediations

Lecture: Thursday, February 19, 2026

Justin Quang Nguyên Phan (he/they) is an Assistant Professor of Global Asian Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. His interdisciplinary research and teaching broadly engage insights from critical race and ethnic studies, feminist epistemologies, postcolonial theory, and Southeast Asian/American visual culture. They’ve written exhibition catalog essays for the RAW Material Company in Dakar, Senegal and the Fine Arts Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and has journal articles published and/or forthcoming with Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures in the Americas and Trans Asia Photography. His current book manuscript, Embodied Nonalignment: Vietnamese Diasporic Aesthetics and Cold War Mediations, aims to theorize how Vietnamese diasporic cultural productions refract Cold War legacies through diasporic genealogies of nonalignment. By looking at multiple mobilizations of Global Asias, the book employs visual and performance analysis to demonstrate how Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic artists unsettle Cold War, colonial, and postcolonial nationalist frameworks in favor of freedom and liberation.

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

Skill as Practical Knowledge

Lecture: Wednesday, March 18, 2026

Will Small is Associate Professor of Philosophy. He works on questions of human agency and practical knowledge in the philosophy of action, ethics, and epistemology. He has written on the metaphysics and epistemology of intentional action, the role of skill and know-how in intentional action, the transmission of skill through teaching and training, the metaphysics of practical abilities, the logic and teleology of practical reasoning, and the relationships between virtue, skill, and habit. He also has research interests in the history of analytic philosophy, especially the works of Gilbert Ryle and Elizabeth Anscombe. He has been a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Forschungskolleg Analytic German Idealism (Universität Leipzig) and his work on virtue, skill, and habit has been funded by the Center for Ethics and Education and the Educating Character Initiative. He is preparing a book manuscript on skill as a form of practical knowledge while at the Institute.