Three faculty members from the School of Literatures, Cultures & Linguistics have been named as recipients of the Jozef and Huguette Cohen Innovation Awards, a program supporting visionary research in the arts, humanities, and humanistic social sciences.
The awards provide seed funding for innovative projects that advance new directions in scholarship, creative activity, and public engagement while enhancing the visibility and impact of Illinois research.
Established through a generous philanthropic gift from Jozef and Huguette Cohen and funded in partnership with the colleges, the Office of the Provost, and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation, the program is intended to help faculty pursue ambitious ideas that may be difficult to support through traditional funding mechanisms. The awards support activities such as building new research collaborations, developing emerging areas of inquiry, acquiring specialized skills, engaging with archives and field sites, and creating new pathways for recognition and influence in their fields.
The Cohen Innovation Award recipients from SLCL are:
- Aurore Mroz's project, French In/For/With the Community, investigates how community-based language learning can strengthen multilingualism, linguistic security, and civic engagement among French-speaking communities in Champaign-Urbana. Using a mixed-methods, community-engaged research design, the project reframes language programs as infrastructures that sustain social inclusion and linguistic justice.p>
- Stephanie Thurston's book project will examine racial school segregation through the lenses of moral philosophy, religious studies, and theories of structural injustice. It argues that segregation persists through social practices as well as policy and develops a constructive account of democratic responsibility and education as a common good to inform future scholarship and public debate.
- Angelica Waner's book project will examine bilingual Zapotec literary magazines as sites of Indigenous intellectual production, autonomy, and cultural continuity within Mexico and Latin America. Archival and archaeological research in Oaxaca will connect these publications to longer histories of Zapotec textuality, strengthening the manuscript and positioning it for publication and future external funding.
Recipients were selected through a competitive review process that evaluated proposals for their innovation, potential to elevate the profile of Illinois research, demonstrated qualifications, and clarity of implementation. The awards reflect the university's commitment to fostering creative and transformative scholarship that enhances lives in Illinois, across the nation, and around the world.
Congratulations to this year's awardees for their leadership, imagination, and commitment to expanding the boundaries of research and creative expression. Their projects exemplify the spirit of innovation that the Cohen Awards were created to encourage and will help shape new opportunities for discovery, engagement, and impact across the arts and humanities.
Editor's note: A version of this story first appeared on the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research & Innovation website.