BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Illinois Wesleyan students have voted Associate Professor of English Michael Theune the 2008 Professor of the Year in the annual election run by Student Senate.
Since joining the faculty in 2002, Theune has served as faculty advisor of Illinois Wesleyan’s award-winning chapter of the international English honor society Sigma Tau Delta. The chapter organizes the annual undergraduate literature conference MUSE and produces The Delta, a journal of undergraduate academic literary essays. He recently received the 2008 Elaine W. Hughes Outstanding Sponsor Award from Sigma Tau Delta for his contributions to the chapter. He is also the faculty advisor of Tributaries, which produces a student fine arts magazine by the same name and organizes the annual Tongue and Ink Undergraduate Writing Conference.
Theune earned a bachelor of arts from Hope College and from Oxford University, a master of fine arts from the University of Iowa, and a doctorate from the University of Houston. He is a working poet and scholar who, in 2007, published his first book, Structure and Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns. His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in a variety of journals, including The Iowa Review, The New Republic, Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing, and Verse.