Category Archives: Faculty

New Chemistry Textbook Offers Instructor a Way to Reach New Audiences

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – For Illinois Wesleyan University’s James E. House, writing textbooks is more than sharing information, it is the chance to teach students across the nation and around the world. “Last year, I taught at several universities, and the students have never heard my voice,” said House, speaking of chemistry textbooks. His latest book, Inorganic Chemistry (Academic Press), was published in August and is slated to be used by universities in the spring.

Inorganic Chemistry is House’s fourth textbook in seven years. A second edition of his Principles of Chemical Kinetics (Academic Press) came out last summer, another second edition, Fundamentals of Quantum Mechanics (Academic Press), was published in 2005, and Descriptive Inorganic Chemistry (Brooks Cole) was released in 2001. “People ask me why I am writing these books and I tell them that I guess it’s because I can,” said House, who has been teaching chemistry for more than 40 years, and joined the Illinois Wesleyan Chemistry Department as an adjunct faculty member in 1997. “I’ve seen a lot of textbooks through my years, and I thought maybe it was time to give my views on some topics.”

University Gains Access to New Supercomputer

BLOOMINGTON, Ill.— Illinois Wesleyan University will be able to conduct scientific research on a new supercomputer.

Once built, the computer will be housed at National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) on the campus of The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (U of I), and will be available to all members of the Great Lakes Consortium (GLC). The Consortium, of which IWU is a member, is a collaboration of dozens of universities, colleges, research laboratories and institutes from around the country. The GLC is developing the world’s first sustained “petascale” computational system dedicated to open scientific research.

This unprecedented machine, based on a powerful new system design from IBM, will be called Blue Waters™. Supported by a $208 million grant from the National Science Foundation, it will come online in 2011 at the U of I.

“IWU appreciates how quickly emerging techniques become woven into the technological and educational fabric of our society,” said Rebecca Roesner, chair of the Chemistry Department at Illinois Wesleyan, who noted several faculty members are exploring how the activities of the Great Lakes Consortium might dovetail with their ongoing scholarly efforts.

New Students Told to Let Themselves Be Led Astray

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. — Illinois Wesleyan University first-year and transfer students packed, standing-room only, into Westbrook Auditorium to be welcomed to the University on Tuesday during the annual “Turning Titan: New Student Orientation.”

The 595-student class of 2012 is one of the largest in University history, said President Richard F. Wilson. “This is a very talented group, and you come to us from all over the nation and the world,” he said. “You and your fellow students hail from 22 states – from Massachusetts and California to Texas and Michigan – and from 13 different countries around the world, including Romania, India, China and Nigeria to name a few.”

Keynote speaker Brian Hatcher, the McFee Professor of Religion, challenged students to make their college journey one that will do more than help them gather facts and figures they might need for their careers. “It’s not just about gaining knowledge. You’ve got to be led astray from yourself,” said Hatcher, whose speech was titled “You’re Here to Change.” Listen to Hatcher’s remarks.

Encouraging students to step outside their comfort zone, Hatcher pressed them to follow the advice of American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson. “He said we must always do the thing we fear the most,” said Hatcher, “and that means looking hard at yourself in an honest fashion – being honest about areas of belief or conviction or anxiety to which you hold so tightly you cannot imagine putting it to the test.” Far from asking students to abandon all beliefs, Hatcher challenged them to explore new ideas, whether it was through taking a class outside their major, or taking a study abroad to Cameroon. “Unless you test those beliefs and values, they do not really hold any meaning for you. It takes courage to put those truisms to the test. That is how your life becomes your life, and not merely one that you accepted on loan from somebody else,” he said.

Professor’s Book Takes Different Look at Horrors of Holocaust

BLOOMINGTON, Ill.— Historians have explored the horrors of the Holocaust during World War II for decades, whether through the eyes of the Nazi officials, or through the memoirs of victims. Few, however, have looked at the dynamic interaction between the camps or ghettos created by the Germans, and the cities that surrounded them.

Gordon Horwitz, associate professor of history at Illinois Wesleyan University, examines the chilling evolution of the Holocaust as it came to Lodz, Poland, in his new book, Ghettostadt: Lodz and the Making of a Nazi City (Harvard University Press, 2008). “What interested me most was to explore the relationship between the ghetto and the city,” said Horwitz, who has been researching the book for more than a decade.

One of the first occupied cities to be annexed to the Third Reich, Lodz possessed the second-largest Jewish population in Poland with more than 200,000 Jews, constituting a third of the city’s residents. Horwitz said the Nazis set about remaking the city into a pristine and modern example of German ingenuity, and devoid of Jews. “Today we would call the process ‘ethnic cleansing,’” said Horwitz of the Nazi goal to populate many cities in Eastern Europe with “pure” ethnic Germans. “This was a city that was undergoing radical demographic shift under the Nazis, who were colonizing Poland, and Lodz was to be a showcase of this colonization effort,” Horwitz said. “This is a rather large microcosm of what the Germans were doing in Eastern Europe during the occupation.”

Professor’s Book Gives Self-Taught Poets Their Due

BLOOMINGTON, Ill.—It has been called poetry of the uneducated, the peasant class or the laboring class. Yet these terms demean what a group of poets from the 1700s produced, said Julie Prandi, a professor at Illinois Wesleyan University. “Their work has meaning and life that we can see even today, but it has often been dismissed as lower class or second rate,” she said.

In Prandi’s latest book, The Poetry of the Self-Taught: An Eighteenth-Century Phenomenon (Peter Lang Publishing, May 2008), she adopts the term “self-taught poets” for those who did not have formal educations through universities. The book is one of the first real attempts to compare the works of self-taught poets in Germany and the United Kingdom during the eighteenth century. “Many people have studied these poets individually, and found what they thought were idiosyncrasies, or just charming elements of their writing,” said Prandi, “when in fact they were characteristics these poets shared with other self-taught poets.”

Prandi, a professor of German who has written a book and several articles on the poet Goethe, discovered the self-taught poet Anna Louise Karsch in the 1990s when working with Women in German, a scholarly organization devoted to research on female, German authors. “I found her work exciting, and I had never seen it in any anthology,” said Prandi. “I thought, ‘this has to be a mistake that she was left out.’” Through her research, Prandi uncovered that few self-taught poets were included in anthologies or textbooks. “Many of them enjoyed fame in their lifetimes, but scholars dismissed them because their work did not follow the standards of what was being taught at universities at the time,” said Prandi.

Because of this bias, much of the work of the self-taught poets vanished as centuries passed. “We assume that poetry disappears from literary history because it was bad, and did not stand the test of time,”’ said Prandi. “But sometimes scholars make mistakes.”

Mohan Named to Professorship

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Illinois Wesleyan University President Richard F. Wilson announced Tuesday that Chemistry Professor Ram Mohan has been awarded the Earl H. and Marian A. Beling Professorship in the Natural Sciences at Illinois Wesleyan.

“Endowed professorships honor faculty members who have distinguished themselves in terms of teaching, research, and service,” said Wilson. “Dr. Mohan is a recognized scholar, both nationally and internationally, and is an exemplary teacher and mentor for students at Illinois Wesleyan. We are pleased to recognize his accomplishments in this very special way.”

“I am both deeply honored and humbled to be named the Beling Professor,” said Mohan, who has been teaching at Illinois Wesleyan since 1996. “It offers great encouragement and validation for the work I have been doing at Illinois Wesleyan with our own students.” Mohan’s celebrated research is geared toward discovering environmentally friendly synthetic methods for chemists to use at pharmaceutical and other companies. His work is known worldwide and published in international journals.

“The Belings, who are remembered as humanitarians and philanthropists dedicated to their community and education, established the professorship because of their admiration for the liberal arts at Illinois Wesleyan and because of the quality of the IWU faculty,” said Ben Rhodes, associate vice president for advancement at Illinois Wesleyan. Earl Beling, who died in 1977, was the founder of Beling Engineering Consultants, which had offices throughout the Midwest. A resident of Moline, Ill., Mr. Beling was a former president of the Illinois Association of School Boards, and was one of the founders of Black Hawk College. Mrs. Beling, who died in 1970, was known for her volunteer work, and held several leadership positions with the Central Illinois Conference of the United Methodist Church.

Human Encroachment on Coasts Worsens Impact of Natural Disasters

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – The 2008 Cyclone Nagris in Myanmar, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the 2004 tsunami in Thailand – all these natural disasters have something in common, they all occurred around vanishing ‘bio-guards.’ An Illinois Wesleyan University professor believes the planned destruction of these bio-guards is contributing to the catastrophic nature of some coastal storms, and jeopardizing human lives.

“Bio-guards are natural barriers between the water and the coastline,” said Given Harper, chair of the biology department at Illinois Wesleyan and an instructor in the University’s Environmental Studies Program. Coming in the form of salt-tolerant plants and trees in the mangroves of Myanmar, or barrier islands and coastal marshes along Louisiana’s shore, bio-guards can help shield the land and people living there from the ravages of storms. “Scientific studies have shown that bio-guards are important in protecting people from the impact of hurricanes and cyclones,” Harper said.

After the cyclone devastated Myanmar in early May, leaving more than 80,000 dead and tens of thousands more missing, the secretary-general of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) said the tragedy was exacerbated by the double punch of people moving into the coastal areas and the loss of coastal bio-guards, such as the mangroves. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reported that since 1975 nearly 250,000 acres of Myanmar mangroves have been destroyed in the delta that was worst hit by the recent cyclone, and that vegetation might have provided a much-needed buffer.

According to Harper, the tightly knit roots and trees of mangroves act as a barrier that can deflect wind and some of the energy of a storm surge. “Coastal marshes can offer the same protection,” he said. “It has been estimated that 2.7 miles of coastal marsh will reduce storm surge by a foot. They simply absorb the energy from the wave.”

The natural barrier of bio-guards is disappearing as human encroach on coastlines for business and pleasure. According to the UN, more than 20 percent of the world’s mangroves have been lost over the past 30 years. “For mangroves, it appears that aquaculture – development for fishing and shrimping – and also tourism seem to be major factors in their depletion,” he said. Harper has witnessed the transformation of coastlands firsthand. Throughout the 1990s, he led several student study abroad trips to Queensland, Australia, during the University’s May Term.

Students Vote Theune Professor of the Year

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.

Dey Wins 2009 Top Teaching Prize

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Illinois Wesleyan University’s Jonathan Dey, professor of biology and the Miner Linnaeus Sherff Professor of Botany, was named as the 2009 winner of The Pantagraph Award for Teaching Excellence at the University on Wednesday, April 16, at the annual Honors Convocation in Westbrook Auditorium of Presser Hall.

Listen to the award announcement or the Convocation address (mp3 files).

The $1,000 teacher-scholar award is the University’s top teaching honor and is sponsored by the daily newspaper headquartered in Bloomington that services eight counties and more than 60 communities in Central Illinois. The honoree is selected by Illinois Wesleyan’s Promotion and Tenure Committee based on nominations received from members of the faculty.

Dey has traveled the country in his studies of botany, and has discovered, described and named several lichens through his research. A graduate of Oregon State and Duke universities, his doctoral research centered on lichens of high mountain areas of the Southern Appalachians in North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.

Beginning his career as a secondary school teacher in Nigeria with the Peace Corps, Dey came to Illinois Wesleyan in 1974. Known on campus for his dedication to his students, he has lead them into fieldwork for decades. “He embodies the spirit of John Wesley Powell, that is his apparent beliefs that work in the field is vital for students to learn about the natural world,” said Provost Beth Cunningham, comparing Dey to the famed explorer and former Illinois Wesleyan professor, who was the first to lead students on field trips in the 1800s. “Dr. Dey has taken students to places such as the Alleghenies upland area of West Virginia and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee nearly every summer, where students have the opportunity to work side-by-side with him.” She added he is known as a mentor to both students and fellow faculty members.

Record-Breaking Grant Supports Research Using Virtual Reality to Examine Sexual Choices

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Virtual reality may be able to transform people into a world of fantasy, but an Illinois Wesleyan University faculty member is hoping it will lead to real-world answers to help fight the spread of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

Assistant Professor of Psychology Natalie Smoak is co-recipient of a $1.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, the largest grant in the history of the University, that will use virtual reality to study how people make health decisions that could lead to sexually transmitted diseases (STD), including the transmission of HIV, the virus which causes AIDS.

Recent studies from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) estimate one in four teenagers in the United States carries an STD. Smoak believes the statistics reflect an attitude of invincibility that can harm students. “Students don’t think they need to use condoms. They think they can tell by looking at someone if they have a sexually transmitted disease, which we know is rarely the case,” said Smoak. The CDC, which promotes condom use as a highly effective STD prevention method, also estimates 40,000 people become infected each year with HIV.

Smoak and Kerry Marsh, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut, will enlist the help of virtual reality to place people in social situations and study their reactions, seeing whether they make safer sex-related decisions. “Studying people’s sexual choices is not like studying fitness, where you can walk down to the local gym and observe behavior,” said Smoak of choosing virtual reality for the five-year program of research. “You can’t really follow people around at parties to observe their choices.”

One of the goals of the study is to see if risky sexual decisions are based upon environmental cues or personality. “Do young people happen to be in environments that facilitate risky decisions or is it a matter of individuals with certain personalities looking for less safe environments?” said Smoak. “This study will help us know whether it is better to intervene on an environmental or a personal level to promote safer choices.”

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