CoLA News

Faculty and Staff News

Podcast: Assistant Professor K Allison Hammer featured on "Gender Stories" Podcast Series
Hammer spoke with Gender Stories about their new book, Masculinity in Transition. The book traces the roots of “toxic masculinity,” showing that while toxic strains of masculinity are mainly associated with straight, white men, trans and queer masculinities often reiterate similar patterns of behavior. Arguing that these malignant forms of masculinity can be displaced, K. Allison Hammer’s bold rethinking lays bare the underlying fragility of normative masculinity.
You can find the episode wherever you listen to podcasts, or watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/n6MOw87BgdU?si=V4iXRbB26jHPwHwn

Appointment: Rose Series in Sociology Editorial Board
The American Sociological Association Publications Committee approved the nomination of Rachel Bridges Whaley to serve on the Rose Series in Sociology Editorial Board beginning January 1, 2024. The Rose Series is a joint effort of ASA and the Russell Sage Foundation. It seeks to publish books that offer synthetic analyses of specific substantive areas of sociology, challenge prevailing paradigms, and/or offer fresh views of enduring controversiess by mid-career and senior scholars that could reach audiences across fields and disciplines, as well as outside of academia.

Honor
Dr. Anna Sicari
Our Body of Work: Embodied Writing Program Administration, an edited volume that came out with Utah State University Press in 2022, received honorable mention by the Council of Writing Program Administrators. CWPA is the national association of college writing program administrators and they announced this award at their annual conference in July. The text is also currently nominated for the Conference on College Composition and Communication's Best Book Award. CCCCs is the world's largest professional organization for researching and teaching composition.

Our Body of Work invites administrators and teachers of writing to consider how physical bodies inform everyday work and labor as well as research and administrative practices in writing programs.

Event/Award
Salukis in Taiwan (Dr. Shu-Ling Wu): With support from the CoLA Dean’s office, the Chinese program in the School of Languages and Linguistics has received a grant from Taiwan’s Ministry of Education to promote Chinese language and culture education on campus and in the region. The grant supports eight Salukis from a wide range of disciplines to travel to Taiwan to study the Chinese language and culture during Summer 2023. In addition to studying the Chinese language, they engaged with the local junior high school students to learn traditional Chinese instruments, experienced the Chinese dragon boat festival race, and learned local aboriginal culture, history, and ecosystem.
Students interested in participating in the study abroad program in Taiwan can click HERE.

Presentation
Dr. Kenneth Stikkers, Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies, delivered a presentation to the Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University in Paris, France that was titled, “Art as a Way of Life:  Aesthetics of Existence in the American Philosophical Tradition.”

Published Chapter
In collaboration with his former student and SIU PhD Leonidas Vournelis, Dr. David Sutton published a chapter in the volume The Handbook of Food and Material Culture (Bloomsbury, 2023). The chapter explores some of the key symbolic dichotomies of Neoliberalism in Greece, and is titled "When the Numbers Prosper, The People Suffer: Robust Food Cultures, Tacit Knowledge and the Abstractions of Contemporary Neoliberal Culture."

Keynote Speaker
Dr. Gretchen R. Dabbs, Professor of Anthropology, delivered the Keynote Speech at the American Research Center, Egypt's 2023 Fellows' Symposium. The symposium is titled "Questioning Narratives: Reflecting on New Questions with Old Evidence". Dabbs' talk, titled "The importance of time, space, and reflexivity in Egyptology: Examining the evidence for an epidemic disease at Akhetaten", introduces mortuary practice and biological data from the skeletal remains of individuals buried in four non-elite cemeteries at Amarna (ancient Akhetaten) to the corpus of previously published work addressing the presence of an epidemic disease at the New Kingdom capital city. These sources, which come from religious texts, diplomatic correspondence, and archaeological remains from broader Egypt, have been used to claim an epidemic disease was a driving factor in the near-abandonment of the ancient capital after the death of Akhenaten, the pharaoh.

Invited Presentation
Dr. Benjamin Bricker (Political Science) presented the findings from his invited chapter “Referrals” at the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Judicial Behavior Conference, which was held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Faculty of Law Center from December 13-16, 2022. The chapter will be published Summer 2023.

CESL Instructor Geoff Young runs CESL's U.S. Culture Immersion Program for Japanese groups
Geoff did an amazing job leading this program for groups from both Soka University and Tokushima University in Japan. He went above and beyond to give the students a wide variety of interactive cultural experiences they would not be able to get at home.

Student News

MFA Student Work Presented at the Electronic Visualization & the Arts Conference in London, England.
The work of four MFA students--Lindsay Pierce, Dajonea Robinson, Mi Tran and Whitney Graham—was represented by Lindsay Pierce at the Electronic Visualization & the Arts Conference in London, England. The event was held in July 2023 and was organized by The Computer Arts Society. For more info, please see the description, video, and print publication here.

Anthropology MA Student Wins Illinois State Academy of Sciences Research Competition
Abraham Packard (MA Student, Anthropology) recently won First Place among graduate student oral presentations in Anthropology and Archaeology at the Illinois State Academy of Sciences annual meeting in Peoria. His paper was based on his recently defended thesis, titled "Bones, Bugs and Bioerosion: Dermestid Beetle Substrate Preference and their Taphonomic Effect on Bone". His advisor, Gretchen R. Dabbs (Professor, Anthropology) was co-author of the paper.

Myla Burton State Department Language Funding
Political Science PhD student Myla Burton was accepted into Indiana University's Summer Language Workshop for language training in Russian, Polish, or Ukrainian this summer, and received a US State Department Title VIII Grant to attend the Indiana workshop courses.

Political Science PhD student presented paper at international conference in Liverpool.
Political Science doctoral student Ayodeji Oyekunle presented her paper, “Gender Inequality, a Global Issue; a Descriptive Representation of Subnational Legislators, Illinois, United States of America”, at the 73rd PSA Annual International Conference, April 3–5, 2023 at the University of Liverpool, United Kingdom.