Now in its 12th year, the HRI Prizes for Research in the Humanities celebrate excellence in humanities scholarship among faculty and students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Faculty Prizes

Winner
Krystal Smalls (Anthropology & Linguistics), “Race, Signs, and the Body: Toward a Theory of Racial Semiotics,” Chapter 12 in The Oxford Handbook of Language and Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). Nominated by Jenny Davis.

Honorable Mentions
John Levi Barnard (Comparative and World Literature), “The Bison and the Cow: Food, Empire, Extinction” American Quarterly 72:2 (June 2020).

David Sepkoski (History), “Extinction in the Anthropocene,” excerpted from Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the Value of Diversity from Darwin to the Anthropocene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020).

Graduate Student Prizes

Winner
Laura Coby (English), “The Specter in Drag: The Afterlives of Ross Laycock,” submitted for Soc 596/GWS 590: Gender, Race, Sexuality, taught by Professor Ghassan Moussawi.

Honorable Mentions
Rhiannon Hein (History), “Agents of Empire? Alexander von Humboldt’s South America and the Global Enlightenment,” nominated by Professor Maria Todorova and submitted for HIST 502: Microhistory, taught by Professor Todorova.

Po-Chia Tseng (Sociology), “Subordinated Agency: Negotiating the biomedicalization of masculinity among gay men living with HIV,” nominated by Professor Zsuzsa Gille and submitted for SOC 599: Thesis Research, directed by Professor Gille.