Honors Faculty News | University Honors Program | SIU

Honors Faculty News

2024

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 all about it here. 

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

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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 all about it here. 

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).

2023

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 12^th – 15^th, 2023; and the Indie Showcase at Southern-Fried Gaming Expo, Atlanta, GA, July 28^th – 30^th, 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 12^th, 2023.

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.

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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.

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.

2022

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.

2021

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)

 

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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

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

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

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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

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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

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