Honors Faculty News

Sandy Pensoneau-Conway, Associate Professor and graduate coordinator, School of Communication Studies, will present “Navigating Pronouns with Openness and Compassion” at the Southern Illinois Learning in Retirement meeting on Wednesday, Jan. 15. The free, public meeting begins at 10:30 a.m. at Epiphany Lutheran Church, 1501 W. Chautauqua, Carbondale. A coffee and social hour begins at 9:30 a.m. 

John Shaw, Director, Paul Simon Public Policy Institute, discussed presidential transitions during the White House Historical Association’s virtual meeting on Jan. 30. Shaw’s discussion, “A Presidential Transition for the Ages,” is part of the historical association’s “History Happy Hour.” In his talk with Todd Arrington, director of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum, Shaw focused on the transition between Eisenhower and President John F. Kennedy following the 1960 election. 

“Narrating Irish Female Development 1916-2018” by Jane Elizabeth Dougherty, Associate Professor, School of Literature, Writing and Digital Humanities, was recently published by Edinburgh University Press.

John Shaw, Director, Paul Simon Public Policy Institute, will participate in “American Update,” a monthly political analysis segment that looks at American politics, culture, history and sports with FIVEAA Always Adelaide, a popular Australian radio network, based in Adelaide, South Australia. Shaw’s first political analysis for FIVEAA on the “David and Will Morning Show” is at 4 p.m. Central Tuesday, April 1. 

John Shaw, Director, Paul Simon Public Policy Institute, will discuss presidential transitions at 8:30 a.m. Saturday, March 22, on C-SPAN 2 as part of the network’s Presidency Series. The presentation, “Rising Star, Setting Sun,” will be on C-SPAN’s American History channel.

Dr. Kelly Bender (on the Honors Advisory Council and faculty advisor on a large number of Honors contracts) is awarded the 2024 Excellence Award for tenured and tenure-track faculty.

Read more about Dr. Kelly Bender

Charles Ruffner, professor, forestry works with Touch of Nature Outdoor Education Center to help restore native flora and fauna.

Read more about Charles Ruffner

Honors Advisory Council member and UHON faculty, Bobbi Knapp on SIUC’s history of women’s sports. The professor is gathering information and photos to chronicle the university’s groundbreaking role in women’s college athletics.

Read more about Bobbi Knapp

Kenneth Stikkers, Professor of philosophy, was recently named Erasmus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wroclaw in Poland. The appointment is funded through the European Union's Erasmus+ Programme and part of a larger program of collaboration and exchange of faculty and students between SIU Carbondale and University of Wroclaw (Poland).

SIU System President Dan Mahony is joining the board of directors at Intersect Illinois, the state's economic development organization focused on bringing new jobs and investment to the state. 

John Shaw, Director, Paul Simon Public Policy Institute, has been selected to participate in the 2024-2025 Council on Foreign Relations’ Higher Education Ambassador Program. The nine-month program “connects educators across the country with barrier-free resources, professional development activities, and a vibrant network of like-minded professionals who are committed to equipping students with the knowledge, skills, and perspective to navigate today’s connected world.” The program will expand the institute’s contacts across the country and world.

John Shaw, Director, Paul Simon Public Policy Institute, will write a series of monthly essays about statesmanship for the Chicago Tribune, starting in September. The series, “Searching for Statesmanship,” will focus on statesmanship on the global stage as well as in smaller venues that often escape notice, according to the newspaper.

Qian Huang, Associate Professor, architectural studies, recently received a $75,000 U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) Susan Harwood Safety Training Grant program. The competitive grant is awarded to nonprofit organizations to provide training and education programs for employers and workers on the recognition, avoidance and prevention of safety and health hazards in their workplaces and to inform workers of their rights. This is the seventh year Huang has received the grant with total funding at $525,000.

Kevin Mercer (Assistant Professor, digital media arts and animation) has created a new video game - Things Too Ugly.  The game was accepted in the Interactive Film, Game & Virtual Reality category at the San Francisco Frozen Film Festival, July 12th – 15th, 2023; and the Indie Showcase at Southern-Fried Gaming Expo, Atlanta, GA, July 28th – 30th, 2023, and included a live demonstration of the game for the public.

Mercer also gave a lecture titled Things Too Real: Addressing Environmental Disaster through Interactive Narrative at the Festival of Interactive Narrative & Storytelling, hosted by The University of Otago and The New Zealand Centre of Digital Excellence. May 12th, 2023.

“Gender and Deterritorialized Identity: Sonia Boyce, Latifa Echakhch, and Zineb Sedira at the 59th Venice Biennale,” a research article by Laurel Jean Fredrickson, Associate Professor, art history, School of Art and Design, was published recently in the Nov. 1 issue of the Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art.

“Masculinity in Transition” by Allison Hammer, Assistant Professor and coordinator, women, gender, and sexuality studies, School of Africana and Multicultural Studies, is being published this month by the University of Minnesota Press. Focusing on “toxic masculinity,” Hammer traces its roots to a complex set of ideologies embedded in the histories of settler colonialism, racial capitalism and political fraternity. Their bold argument lays bare the underlying fragility of normative masculinity. The publisher will host a virtual book launch at 11:30 a.m. Friday, Oct. 20. Register for the event at z.umn.edu/102023.

“Insurgent Subjectivity: Hope and Its Interactant Emotions in the Nicaraguan Revolution” by Jean-Pierre Reed, Professor, School of Africana and Multicultural Studies and School of Anthropology, Political Science, and Sociology, was recently published in the journal, Theory and Society. The paper examines the role of emotions during insurgent conditions by focusing on the Nicaraguan revolution, in particular the two-year period from 1977-1979 leading to the overthrow of the Somoza regime.

Kenneth Stikkers, Professor, philosophy and Africana studies, recently delivered a presentation “Art as a Way of Life:  Aesthetics of Existence in the American Philosophical Tradition” to the Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University in Paris, France, in May. The seminar showed the importance of early American philosophy for understanding later American philosophy, such as pragmatism. 

Jeffrey Punske, Associate Professor, School of Languages and Linguistics, and co-author Andrew McKenzie earned the 2023 Canopus Award for Published Short-Form Nonfiction for their 2020 article, “Language development during interstellar travel.” The award was part of the organization’s Excellence in Interstellar Writing, recognizing the “finest fiction and non-fiction works that expand our understanding of the challenges, opportunities, pitfalls, and rewards of interstellar space exploration.” 

Dr. Kwangho Choiy (Associate Professor, School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences) was invited to participate in the Trimester Program as Gastwissenschaftler at the Hausdorff Research Institute for Mathematics (HIM),  Bonn, Germany and to make a research visit as IHÉS invited researcher at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHÉS) in Bures-sur-Yvette, France. Dr. Choiy works in the fields of number theory and representation theory in pure mathematics and is teaching an Honors seminar in Fall 2023, Arithmetic en route to the cosmos.

David Sutton, Professor of anthropology, in collaboration with former SIU Ph.D. student Leonidas Vournelis, published a chapter in The Handbook of Food and Material Culture, Bloomsbury Publishing earlier this year. The chapter, “When the Numbers Prosper, The People Suffer: Robust Food Cultures, Tacit Knowledge and the Abstractions of Contemporary Neoliberal Culture,” explores some of the key symbolic oppositions of Neoliberalism in Greece.

Benjamin Bricker, Associate Professor, political science, and interim associate dean, recently presented the findings from his invited chapter, “Referrals” at the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Judicial Behavior Conference at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Faculty of Law Center. The chapter will be part of “The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Judicial Behavior” to be published later this summer.

Jyotsna Kapur, Director, University Honors Program and Professor, Cinema and Media Studies, discusses the 2002 film "Harry Potter and the Chambers of Secrets" on Fantasy/Animation, a podcast series devoted to the academic discussion of the relationship between fantasy storytelling and animation. The sequence explores the relationship between childhood, capitalist expansion in the Clinton-Bush era, and fantasy.

Dong Han, Associate Professor, School of Journalism and Advertising, is part of a 23-member task force led by Illinois State Sen. Steve Stadelman to study the decline of local journalism in Illinois, propose public policy to strengthen local journalism and recommend ways to revive the industry. The task force held its first virtual meeting on March 27 with plans to hold public meetings elsewhere in the state. The task force will send a report to the legislature and Gov. J.B. Pritzker.  Professor Dong will be teaching an Honors seminar in  Fall 23 (How to think about intellectual property).

Brent Pease, Assistant Professor, School of Agricultural Sciences, will present “Nature Is All Around Us You Just Have to Listen,” at 7 p.m. Friday, March 24, in the meeting room at the Carbondale Township Hall, 217 E. Main St., Carbondale. He will discuss several ongoing research projects focused on changes in biodiversity and bird communities across Southern Illinois.

Dr. Francesca Dennstedt wins the 2023 College of Liberal Arts Early Career Faculty Excellence Award. 

Dr. Betsy Dougherty wins the 2023 College of Liberal Arts Outstanding Teacher Award.

Dr. JP Reed, Associate Professor, Sociology has a new book out.

In Spring 23, Dr. Reed will teach an Honors seminar, Social Movements. The seminar sets out to answer the following questions: What is a social movement? In what ways do they change society? Under what conditions do social movements emerge? What are the objective and subjective conditions that make political contention possible? The specific case study will be the U.S. civil rights movement.

Dr. Ken Stikkers, professor, philosophy and Africana studies, wins the 2022 Stuart Hall Outstanding Mentor Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association (CPA). The award goes to "activists, artists, scholars, teachers, and theorists who have cultivated influential critical communities."

He is currently teaching the UHON seminar, Contemplating the Apocalypse in Literature, Film, and Philosophy.

Dr. Jennifer Smith, (Associate Professor, Spanish and Chair, Department of Languages, Culture, and International Trade) has published Women, Mysticism, and Hysteria in Fin‑de‑Siècle Spain (Vanderbilt University Press); a study on the 19th and early 20th century debate on women, mysticism and hysteria in Spain.

Scholars of late nineteenth-century of “fin-de-siècle” European literature, comparative literature of this era, modern Spanish literature, and women’s studies will find much useful information about hysteria, mysticism, and the relationship between the two."
- Elizabeth Smith Rousselle, author of Gender and Modernity in Spanish Literature:1789-1920 (2014)

Three Honors faculty win University Level Excellence Awards

Dr. Diana Tigerlily, Associate Professor of practice, Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and University Honors wins the Teaching Excellence Award (non-tenure track).
Read more about Diana Tigerlilly

Dr. Bobbi Knapp, Associate Professor, Kinesiology is recognized as the Women of Distinction.
Read more about Bobbi Knapp.

Dr. Sandy Pensoneau-Conway, Associate Professor and Chair, communication studies, and Interim Director, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies wins the Emerging Leader award.
Read more about Sandy Pensoneau-Conway

Dr. Laurel Fredrickson (Assistant Professor, School of Art and Design) has published Jean-Jacques Lebel and French Happenings of the 1960s: The Erotics of Revolution, Bloomsbury Visual Arts. 

Fredrickson re-invests the 1960s Happening with revolutionary ideology in her fascinating examination of Jean-Jacques Lebel's radical art. She reveals a committed coordinator of deliberately disconcerting challenges to orthodox thinking, as she adroitly negotiates some of the social dilemmas raised by his political poetry-in-action.” 

–  Simon Anderson, Associate Professor of Art History, Theory & Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA

We are proud to begin the new year with a new book by Dr. Jean-Pierre Reed (Associate Professor, Sociology): Sandinista Narratives:  Religion, Sandinismo, and Emotions in the Making of the Nicaraguan Insurrection and Revolution. (Lexington Books, 2020).

Enrique Oltuski, chronicler of and participant in the Cuban revolution once rightly said, "No book can ever convey the greatness of a people in revolt." Jean-Pierre Reed’s magisterial life work, Sandinista Narratives:Religion, Sandinismo, and Emotions in the Making of the Nicaraguan Insurrection and Revolution, is destined to be the book against which that claim is measured.

— John Foran, University of California at Santa Barbara

Dr. Hamilton Brehm is part of the SIU team working on testing kits for Covid 19. 
Read more about testing kits for Covid 19.

Dr. Hamilton-Brehm leads a team of researchers who have recently isolated a bacterial genus found deep beneath the area formerly known as the Nevada Test Site; a life form that is anaerobic and thrives at hot temperatures. 
Read more about this new bacterium.

Dr. Jeffrey Punske has published, Language Invention in Linguistics Pedagogy (Oxford University Press, 2020).  Coedited with Nathan Sanders and Amy Fountain.

Dr. Walter Metz, Department of Cinema and Photography presented, The Long and the Short of the Romanoffs at the Literature/Film Association Conference. Portland State University; and Television's Liberal Blackface: A Reception-Based Interrogation at the Reception Study Society Conference. Brigham Young University. Provo, UT. September 27, 2019.

Dr. Pinckney Benedict, Department of English, presented, The Page that becomes Immortal: Borges, Homer's Odyssey, and Virtual Reality, at the Annual Classics Symposium at Hollins University in Roanoke VA, October 2019

Jyotsna Kapur, University Honors Program, presented “What is home in a capitalist world? At 7 p.m., Sept. 12, at Southeast Missouri State University’s Catapult Creative House in Cape Girardeau. The lecture is part of the university’s “After Hours: Conversations on Art and Culture” series. 

Dr. Izumi Shimada, Professor Anthropology, received the Order of Sacred Treasure award, a high recognition given by the Emperor of Japan for distinguished achievements in research and scholarship to advance society.

Dr. Jyotsna Kapur (Professor, Cinema and Photography and Director, UHP) was invited to Kinnaird College for Women, Lahore for a series of lectures on Media Studies.  She also gave a keynote on the integration of Sciences and Arts at their 1st International Conference on Science, Technology, and Innovation (2nd-4th April, 2019).