Rini Bhattacharya Mehta, Assistant Professor of Comparative and World Literature, and Religion, will be the featured discussant for a showing of Mira Nair’s Mira Nair’s 1991 film, “Mississippi Masala,” at the Art Theater in downtown Champaign (126 W. Church St.) on Tuesday, January 29. The start time is yet to be announced. Visit: http://www.thearttheater.org/

Following the movie, Professor Mehta will make some brief comments about the film and then take questions or comments from the audience.

The event is part of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) series of events under the umbrella of its 2018-19 theme, “Race Work,” and is co-sponsored by the University Library and the Spurlock Museum.

“Race Work” recognizes the way race shapes virtually all arenas of humanities research and practice. Race work is, and has long been, an organizing feature of politics, art, memory, the justice system, medicine, religion, the scientific imagination, and everyday life. The IPRH seeks faculty and graduate fellows in and allied with humanities disciplines whose research engages these questions and attempts to reckon with what is at stake in thinking about how, when, where and under what conditions race works.