Advancing our community
LAS influence
The College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is filled with accomplished, thoughtful, and dedicated faculty, staff, students, and alumni whose work influences many advancements throughout our community. LAS strives to address the world’s fundamental problems and grand challenges through indispensable research, innovative courses, and an ingrained focus on diversity.
Read on to learn how the College of LAS is advancing our community in Urbana-Champaign and beyond.
Illinois professor’s New Yorker story, set in his hometown, examines racial, class struggles
David Wright Faladé's story, based on personal experience, took a long journey from idea to publication
Illinois News Bureau's Jodi Heckel interviews Illinois English professor David Wright Faladé. Faladé examines race, class and gender through the eyes of a young college woman spending time in her small Texas hometown in his new short story, “Amarillo Boulevard,” which was published in Oct. 6 issue of The New Yorker.
Faladé writes about themes of race and multiracialness, identity, Americanness and our country as a melting pot: “the amalgamation of identities and people and ways of being in the world and seeing the world,” he said.
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He wrote the original draft of “Amarillo Boulevard” 20 years ago, then came back to it two years ago and revised it. The story’s central event happens when the young woman, Jean, is driving with her boyfriend and her brother and sees a childhood friend working on the street as a prostitute. It is based on an experience Faladé and his sister had when they were both in college.
“When I began writing short stories, that just came back to me. It was something around which to build a story,” Faladé said. “The event itself was striking and memorable and complex. It became a lens through which Jean tries to make sense of her own experience.”
940 Feet series
Join LAS professors and students for a stroll on the Quad, and learn more about the influential people advancing our community.
How a graduate geology course uses tree rings to read Earth's climate history
At the core of Hưng Nguyễn's Geology 593 graduate-level special topics class,“Tree Rings and Climate,” was the idea that trees are more than biological organisms—they are environmental archives. “Trees are time machines,” Nguyễn said. “The wood will record anything that the trees experience in an environment.
Professor discusses "unimagined" findings from one of the first research missions
The 1870s expedition of the HMS Challenger collected enormous amounts of data about the world’s oceans and its creatures. English professor Gillen D’Arcy Wood's book covers the important discoveries made during the voyage.
Differing ideologies led to strained romantic bonds
A new study by communication professor Emily Van Duyn said that online misinformation/disinformation, conspiracy theory groups, and their former partners’ rabbit-holing behaviors caused insurmountable rifts in their relationships.
Faculty research
The College of LAS has more than 600 faculty experts working on the world’s fundamental problems and grand challenges. Learn about their work.
