Cohen Innovation Award Winners Named

Eleven faculty members 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 are:

  • Kalani Craig's Virtual Medieval Pilgrimage is a public humanities platform that reimagines medieval pilgrimage through locally customized, geolocation-based experiences inspired by global pilgrimage traditions. The project combines digital humanities, public history, and education to broaden understanding of the Global Middle Ages while creating adaptable resources for universities, schools, and community organizations.

     

  • Osly Flores's interdisciplinary collaboration will investigate slavery heritage sites in Ghana and South Africa as sources for reparative educational practice and collective memory. The team will co-develop conceptual frameworks, methodologies, and partnerships that will underpin larger external proposals focused on educational equity, historical repair, and community-engaged scholarship.

     

  • David Isern's Community Co-Design Collaborative proposes a shared infrastructure that connects architecture, planning, and landscape architecture programs with community partners through sustained, multi-year collaborations. By emphasizing coordination, documentation, and continuity, the initiative seeks to transform community-engaged design into a scalable, research-driven model with lasting public impact.

     

  • Maryam Kashani's three-film experimental documentary series will explore Palestine as a global question through interconnected histories of anti-imperialism spanning Japan, Palestine, and the United States. Combining ethnographic research, filmmaking, and transnational political history, the project examines solidarity, citizenship, empire, and liberation while advancing an ambitious interdisciplinary artistic practice.

     

  • Aja Martinez will collaborate directly with Critical Race Theory founders Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic to preserve, organize, and curate their scholarly archive. By documenting the development of CRT through its principal architects, the project aims to improve public understanding of the field while safeguarding an important record of contemporary intellectual history.

     

  • 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> 

     

  • Anna Schlaack will attend the European Summer University in Digital Humanities to build international collaborations around digital humanities, open metadata, and the responsible stewardship of generative AI in libraries. The experience is intended to strengthen long-term research on information discovery, interoperability, and AI-informed information practices while expanding Illinois' visibility in international digital humanities networks.

     

  • 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.

     

  • Corey Van Landingham will complete a residency at the American Academy in Rome to advance work on The Vessel, a poetry manuscript exploring solitude, exile, empire, and historical memory through figures such as Julia the Elder. Immersion in Rome's artistic and historical environment will help complete the manuscript while fostering interdisciplinary dialogue that deepens its historical and ethical dimensions.

     

  • Damian Vergara Bracamontes's book project traces how undocumented legal status became a defining social and political condition in post-1960s San Diego, introducing the concept of 'administrative checkpoints' to explain how immigration enforcement permeates everyday life. Drawing on archival research, policy analysis, and oral histories, it foregrounds the experiences of migrant women and transwomen while offering a new framework for understanding administrative violence.

     

  • 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.