Benn Williams
Fellowships and Awards Coordinator
Institutional advisor/liaison for Boren, CLS, DAAD, DZL, Fulbright, Fulbright-Hays, and NSF GRFP; Co-Coordinator of WriteON!
Graduate College
Pronouns: He/Him
Contact
Building & Room:
UH 633 (remote)
Address:
601 South Morgan St. Chicago, IL 60607
Office Phone:
Email:
About
Trained as an historian, Benn Williams embodies the "alt-ac" professional. After teaching at local colleges, he moved into administration starting with a small interdisciplinary graduate program (neuroscience). Currently, he oversees most of the Graduate College's internal fellowships and awards; serves as the institutional advisor and/or liaison for a number of external funding opportunities (Boren, CLS, DAAD, Fulbright, Fulbright-Hays, NSF GRFP); created or co-created three writing initiatives for graduate students (GC 512, GC513, and WriteON!); liaises with the Office of Financial Aid and UIC Advancement; and co-founded and ran the Digital Humanities Working Group.
Williams has helped UIC to be recognized in 2021, 2022, and 2023 as a Fulbright Hispanic-Serving Institution Leader by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and the 2020 Laspau University Award for UIC's "outstanding support and contribution in working with Laspau-administered scholarship grantees" with Laspau staff underscoring UIC's professionalism, responsiveness, humor, and volume of students helped.
Selected Grants
Department of Education, Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Award, #P022A220052, Program Director
NSF, Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP), Award #1842398, PI
Selected Publications
As author and editor: Aukje Kluge and Benn E. Williams (eds.), Re-examining the Holocaust through Literature (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009).
As editor of the William L. Potter Publications series for the Center for French Colonial Studies: Mark Walczynski, Inquietus: LaSalle in the Illinois Country (2019).
As translator: Laurent Joly, “French Bureaucrats and Anti-Jewish Persecution: The ‘Jewish Service’ of the Paris Police Prefecture, 1940-1944,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies vol. 33, no. 1 (Spring 2019): pp. 39-59. https://doi.org/10.1093/hgs/dcz013
As co-translator: Laurent Joly, “The Parisian Police and the Holocaust: Control, Round-ups, Hunt, 1940-4,” Journal of Contemporary History vol. 55, no. 3 (2020): pp. 557–578. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022009419839774
As translator: Jacques Commaille, “In a Trouble World: A New System of Knowledge about Law?” in In the Realm of Corona Normativities. A Momentary Snapshot of a Dynamic Discourse, ed. Werner Gephart, Rechts als Kultur no. 23 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2020), pp. 61-66.
As translation editor: Christian Bessy, Expropriation by Law. Intellectual Property, Value and Labor. New Horizons in Institutional and Evolutionary Economics (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2024).
Service to Community
Perennial reviewer for the Critical Language Scholarship (first-round)
Staff Translator: Droit et Société. Théorie et sciences sociales du droit
Education
University of Illinois Chicago (ABD),
Major field: Modern European History
Minor fields: Early Modern Germany, Modern Germany, History of Science & Medicine
Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization, Holocaust Education Foundation – Northwestern University
Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan (France)
Graduate (DEA) program of study: Public Action and Contemporary Societies
University of Illinois Chicago, M.A.
Major field: Modern European History
Minor fields: French Revolution, Modern Germany
Université Stendhal-Grenoble 3 (France), DELF
Program of (unaffiliated) study: French Language and Culture
Karl-Ruprechts-Universität-Heidelberg (Germany), PNDS
Fields of study: German Language and Culture
North Central College (IL), B.A. magna cum laude
Major fields: Modern European Intellectual History; German
Professional Memberships
National Association of Fellowship Advisors (NAFA)
American Historical Association (AHA)
American Literary Translators Association (ALTA)