Dialogues Across the Disciplines

This series of interdisciplinary talks on the Illinois Wesleyan University campus was originally conceived and funded as part of the Re-Centering the Humanities grant which the university received from the Mellon Foundation in 2014.

The series was intended to celebrate the ongoing interdisciplinary work being done across campus and to model the kind of cross-disciplinary poaching scholars at IWU encourage in their students. Since the fall of 2016, faculty and students have gathered each fall and spring for an invited talk. Papers are circulated prior to the talk, and students are invited to serve as discussants in conscious imitation of the academic conference format. For years, the series met in the Evelyn Chapel’s Fellowship Hall, but the tradition was interrupted in 2021 by the COVID-19 pandemic. Undaunted, the series has been resurrected and began meeting in the more capacious Beckman Auditorium of Ames Library since 2022.

In addition to these paper presentations, Dialogues participants have regularly sponsored reading groups to prepare campus members for invited speakers or to educate ourselves on issues related to the university’s current theme or the Martin Luther King, Jr. Teach-In, which is held annually on campus. In this way, our reading groups have convened on the works of Valerie Traub, Claudia Rankine, Amir Jina, Alexander Hemon, Charlene Carruthers, and Ira Katznelson.

Dialogues of 2024: Talks and Reading Groups

Dialogues of 2023: Talks and Reading Groups