Visiting Fellows

The UIC Institute for the Humanities hosted the prominent activist and theorist Verónica Gago as our 2025-2026 Visiting Fellow from October 6-9, 2025. While in residence, Professor Gago presented a well-attended public lecture, “The Authoritarianism of Financial Freedom;” a seminar for UIC faculty and graduate students, “Feminism, Debt, and the Commons;” and a methodologies workshop for graduate students, “Feminist Research in Authoritarian Times.” Please enjoy the recording of the public lecture and photos from her visit. Check out the recording of a local radio interview with Soledad Álvarez Velasco and Barbara Sostaita on Lumpen Radio.

Verónica Gago’s landmark work, Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies (Duke University Press, 2017), in the words of one reviewer, consecrated her “as a new cartographer of popular practices, a philosopher of difference, and a pioneer of a renewed kind of philosophical anthropology of the economy.” She teaches political science at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and critical theory and gender theory at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM); in recent years, she has been a visiting fellow, scholar, or chair at institutions such as Georgetown University, NYU, the International Consortium of Critical Theory, Columbia University, and the Université Paris 8. Earlier this year, she was awarded the LASA/Oxfam Martin Diskin Memorial Lectureship, given annually to “an outstanding individual who combines commitments to activism and scholarship.”

A leading feminist activist, Verónica Gago is a member of the #NiUnaMenos collective and a member of the radical collective press Tinta Limón. Situated at the intersection of theory and practice, her works also include Feminist International (Verso, 2020) as well as the co-authored (with Luci Cavallero) A Feminist Reading of Debt (Pluto Press, 2021). Her latest book, co-authored with Luci Cavallero, Contra el autoritarismo de la libertad financiera, was just published with Tinta Limón.

2021-2022 Gerald Horne • John J. and Rebecca Moores Professor of History and African American Studies, University of Houston

2019-2020 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak • English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

2018-2019 Bonnie Honig • Modern Culture and Media & Political Science, Brown University

2017-2018 T.J. Clark • Art History, UC Berkeley

2016-2017 Robin D.G. Kelley • U.S. History, UCLA

2015-2016 Robin D.G. Kelley • U.S. History, UCLA

2014-2015 Jill Lepore • American History, Harvard University

2013-2014 Michael Warner • English, Yale University

2012-2013 Richard White • American History, Stanford University

2011-2012 Nancy Fraser • Political & Social Science, New School for Social Research

2010-2011 Linda Gordon • History, NYU

2009-2010 Adolph Reed • Political Science, University of Pennsylvania

2008-2009 Houston A. Baker, Jr. • English, Vanderbilt University

2007-2008 Cathy Davidson • English, Duke University

2006-2007 Manthia Diawara • Comparative Literature & Film, NYU

2005-2006 Mary Louise Pratt • Spanish and Portuguese, Social & Cultural Analysis, NYU

2004-2005 Michael Fried • Humanities, Johns Hopkins University

2003-2004 Carlo Ginsberg • Italian Renaissance Studies, UCLA

2002-2003 Natalie Zemon Davis • History, Princeton University

2001-2002 Barbara Herrnstein Smith • Comparative Literature and English, Duke University