August 15, 2007
College of Liberal Arts adds 17 tenure-track faculty
CARBONDALE, Ill. — The College of Liberal Arts at Southern Illinois University Carbondale welcomes 17 new tenure-track faculty members this school year into 10 departments in the college. The new faculty includes a new director for the Center for the Study of Crime, Delinquency and Corrections, which oversees the administration of justice program, an additional faculty member in the Black American Studies program, and a replacement faculty member in the Department of Sociology who will contribute to the new Latino and Latin America studies minor.
"The College of Liberal Arts had another round of excellent hires this year," Dean Alan Vaux said, adding that he is "very excited to have these new colleagues join our faculty."
New faculty includes:
Ronald A. Caffey, assistant professor, Black American Studies
Caffey earned his doctoral degree from SIUC in educational administration in 2007, but he is no stranger to campus. Since 2001, Caffey served as director of the Minority Engineering Program, an academic support-summer bridge program designed to increase enrollment, retention and graduation rates among ethnic minorities. Caffey is the first Black American Studies professor hired from SIUC. He begins teaching in the spring 2008 semester and will cover several core classes, including the Black American Experience and Education in Black America.
Kimberly Kempf Leonard, director, Center for the Study of Crime, Delinquency and Corrections
Kempf-Leonard comes to SIUC from the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas, where she was a professor of criminology. Her research interests include juvenile justice, crime and delinquency patterns and administration of justice issues pertaining to race, ethnicity and gender. In 1997, she won the Gustavus Myer Award for Human Rights in North America for "Minorities in Juvenile Justice," a book she co-edited. She began her professional academic career at the University of Pennsylvania as a teaching fellow in 1983. She also held teaching and research positions at Temple University, Kent State University and the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Several of Leonard's university positions have been cross appointments with public policy, women and gender studies or political science. She earned a master's degree in sociology and a master's degree in criminology at the University of Pennsylvania. She also earned her doctoral degree there in 1986, in social systems sciences, specializing in criminology. Her bachelor's degree in criminal justice and women's studies is from the University of Nebraska.
Nicholas Corsaro, assistant professor, Center for the Study of Crime, Delinquency and Corrections
Corsaro, who joins the department in the spring 2008 semester, expects his doctoral degree this year from Michigan State University. He was a researcher on the Indianapolis Violence Reduction Partnership, the national Project Safe Neighborhoods initiative and the Violent Crime Impact Team project that was conducted by the ATF division in Washington, D.C., and recently researched deterrence to gun violence. He lists among his specializations theories of violent crime, environmental criminology, public policy and quantitative statistical analysis, including GIS mapping. He has teaching experience at MSU and at Indiana University-Bloomington.
Kristine M. Miller, assistant professor, Center for the Study of Crime, Delinquency and Corrections
Miller earned her doctoral degree in criminology at the University of Texas at Dallas where she was a student of new CSCDC director Kimberly Kempf-Leonard. Her recent research includes participation in a statewide project in Texas for which she surveyed male inmates about sexual assault experiences during incarceration. She was managing editor and is now on the editorial board of "Crime and Delinquency," a professional publication of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency. She lists homicide, capital punishment, corrections and sexual assault among her teaching and research specializations. This fall, she teaches Introduction to Corrections and a course on criminal violence.
Nancy Morris, assistant professor, Center for the Study of Crime, Delinquency and Corrections
Morris expects her doctoral degree from the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland this year. Her recent research includes examination of cross-national predictors of homicide victimization rates. She also collected data for a National Consortium on Violence Research project on women's experiences of violence. Her research and teaching interests include social networks and crime reduction or crime enhancement, the role of trust in co-offending, procedural justice and police behavior. She teaches introductory courses in criminal justice research this fall.
Dan M. Wiley, assistant professor, English
Wiley earned his doctoral degree in comparative literature in 2000 from Harvard University. He was an assistant professor at Hastings College in Nebraska before joining SIUC this fall. Wiley's specialization is medieval Irish, English and Welsh languages and literatures. He contributed several articles to Sean Duffy's "Medieval Ireland: An Encyclopedia" among other publications, and is working on a critical edition and translation of Middle Irish language sagas about King Diarmait mac Cerbail, who died in 565. Wiley's research and teaching interests include Celtic and British literature and languages. This fall, he teaches courses on literary analysis and early British literature.
Yasuko Taoka, assistant professor, Foreign Languages and Literatures
Taoka earned her doctoral degree this year from Ohio State University. She was a visiting instructor at Kenyon College in Ohio, where she taught reading courses in Latin and Greek and a course in translation on Roman literature and civilization. Her dissertation treated the Roman philosopher and playwright Seneca. Taoka teaches two sections of beginning Latin this fall and a course on Roman historians.
Guangxing Wang, assistant professor, Geography and Environmental Resources
Wang earned his doctoral degree in 1996 from the University of Helsinki in Finland, where he worked on remote sensing technology applied to forest resources. He completed post-doctoral work at the University of Illinois where he was a research associate and team leader for the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences. Throughout his academic career, he focused on forests and managing the resources found there. Among his research and teaching interests, Wang lists remote sensing and GIS technologies, spatial statistics, environmental and natural resources sampling and inventory, human-environment interactions and land use, land cover and soil erosion. He teaches courses in cartography, or mapping, and remote sensing this fall.
Matthew Therrell, assistant professor, Geography and Environmental Resources
Therrell earned his doctoral degree in 2003 from the University of Arkansas and was involved with post-doctoral research at the University of Virginia. His research focused on the past, with emphasis on dendrochronology, which is the science of using trees and tree rings to date events and environmental change, historical climatology, ancient forests and global change. He is also interested in modern water resource issues. Here at SIUC, he plans to develop tree-ring chronologies for use in the study of paleoclimatology. His other interests include biogeography and landscape ecology, human-environmental dynamics and archaeology. This fall, he teaches courses on weather, climate and society and on global climate changes.
Joseph Sramek, assistant professor, Department of History
Sramek earned his doctoral degree in 2007 from the City University of New York Graduate Center. His research and teaching interest focuses on the British Empire, in particular the perception of masculinity during the time of British Imperialism. Recent works include a paper on British tiger hunters in India. He also indicates interest in 20th-century Britain and the aftermath of the Empire. This fall, he teaches courses in the history of Western civilization and a course on culture and imperialism.
Gray Whaley, assistant professor, Department of History
Whaley earned his doctoral degree in 2002 from the University of Oregon. His previous teaching experience includes University of Oregon, Western Michigan University, Grand Valley State University and SIUC. He was hired here last year as a lecturer and now joins the tenure-track faculty. His research and teaching interests include American Indian history, American Empire and colonialism and the Pacific Northwest and American West. This fall, he teaches courses on modern America and its origins and on American Indian history.
Billie Hagemier, assistant professor, School of Music
Hagemier earned her doctoral in music degree from Indiana University in 2005. She earned a Master of Music degree specializing in voice in 1972 from the University of Missouri at Kansas City, and then began a performance career before returning to school. She was a finalist in the Metropolitan Guild Auditions and then she was accepted into the apprentice program of the Opernhaus Zurich in Switzerland. She also performed for several years at Pfalztheater Kaiserslautern and also at the Deutsche Opera. She teaches voice this fall.
Paul Transue, assistant professor, School of Music
Transue earned his doctoral degree in 1999 in accompanying and chamber music, with a specialty in opera coaching, from the Eastman School of Music, part of the University of Rochester. He is the principal coach and accompanist and assistant conductor for the Toledo Opera. His past work experience includes the Cleveland Institute of Music, Seattle Opera, Cleveland Opera, Ohio Light Opera, Opera in the Ozarks, Lyric Opera Cleveland, Janiec Opera Company of the Brevard Music Center, Chautauqua Institute Vocal Program, A. J. Fletcher Opera Program of the North Carolina School for the Arts and the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University. He teaches musical coaching classes this fall.
Yoonho Kim, assistant professor, Department of Political Science
Kim earned his doctoral degree from Cornell University's Institute for Public Affairs in 2007. His research and teaching interests include public administration, budgeting and policy analysis. This fall, he teaches two graduate courses, one in data management and mainframe and one in public budgeting and fiscal management.
Melissa Curtin, assistant professor, Department of Speech Communication
Curtin expects her doctoral degree from the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque this year and begins her career as a Saluki with the spring 2008 semester. In 2006, Curtin won Teaching Assistant of the Year from her university's Center for the Advancement of Scholarship in Teaching and Language.
Paul Etcheverry, assistant professor, Department of Psychology
Etcheverry earned his doctoral degree from Purdue University in 2004 and completed two years of postdoctoral study at Iowa State University. His teaching and research interests focus on health behaviors, in particular how interpersonal relationships and social influences affect individual health-behavior choices. This fall, he teaches social psychology and field research methods.
Mark Leach, assistant professor, Department of Sociology
Leach earned his doctoral degree this year from the University of California at Irvine. His research and teaching interests include Mexican immigration and Latino populations. Several of his courses are part of the new Latino and Latin America Studies minor. This fall, he teaches statistics and quantitative methods.