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.
Working for educational justice
Alumna Jasmin Patrón-Vargas strives for big causes in her career as a professor
LAS Communications Coordinator for History and Latina/Latino Studies interviews Jasmin Patrón-Vargas (BA, '11, Latina/Latino studies and gender and women's studies). Patrón-Vargas is an assistant professor of teaching, learning, and culture at Texas A&M University. She earned her MEd in education policy studies at the University of Illinois Chicago in 2015 and her PhD in curriculum, instruction, and teacher education and Chicano/Latino studies from Michigan State University in 2022. Her research examines how educational systems can better serve minoritized communities. She said her degree in Latina/Latino studies and gender and women's studies was "foundational" to her career and sparked her commitment to studying social structures and educational justice.
Read on for a Q&A with professor Patrón-Vargas to learn more about her career.
Why did you decide to pursue a degree in Latina/Latino Studies?
My interest in history, social movements, and justice began during my K–12 education. However, it wasn’t until I took my first Latina/Latino studies (LLS) course that everything truly clicked. I was immediately drawn in. LLS gave me the language and analytical tools to make sense of my experiences as a Chicana from a working-class background and to connect those experiences to broader social and structural forces.
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Did you double major or minor in any other fields while attending the U of I?
Yes, I double majored in gender and women’s studies (GWS). Pursuing GWS expanded my understanding of how power operates through intersecting systems such as race, gender, class, and sexuality. While LLS helped me analyze racialized social structures, GWS deepened my awareness of how heteronormative and patriarchal norms also shape institutions and everyday life.
940 Feet series
Join LAS professors and students for a stroll on the Quad, and learn more about the influential people advancing our community.
David Wright Faladé's story, based on personal experience, took a long journey from idea to publication
English professor David Wright Faladé’s new short story in The New Yorker examines the racial, class and gender tensions in his Texas hometown.
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.
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.
