Accomplishments - April, 2023
Three SIU Saluki football players recently earned the Missouri Valley Football Conference President's Council Academic Excellence Award for their efforts in the classroom and on the field. Guard Chase Evans, quarterback Stone Norton and safety Easton Wolf earned the honors for having a minimum 3.5 cumulative GPA through the fall 2022 semester and participating in athletics a minimum of two years. The student-athlete must be scheduled to graduate by the end of the summer of 2023. In all, 22 Saluki football players earned honor roll recognition by the conference.
Omid Kamran Disfani, assistant professor, marketing, School of Management and Marketing, recently provided information on WalletHub.com about credit card promotions.
Gretchen R. Dabbs, professor of anthropology, will deliver the keynote speech at the American Research Center, Egypt's 2023 Fellows' Symposium, ”Questioning Narratives: Reflecting on New Questions with Old Evidence,” in Cairo, Egypt, on May 6. Dabbs will present “The Importance of Time, Space, and Reflexivity in Egyptology: Examining the evidence for an epidemic disease at Akhetaten,” introducing mortuary practice and biological data from the skeletal remains buried in four non-elite cemeteries at Amarna (ancient Akhetaten) to the corpus of previously published work. These sources, which come from religious texts, diplomatic correspondence and archaeological remains from broader Egypt and the Near East, have been used to assert an epidemic was a driving factor in the near-abandonment of the ancient capital after the death of Pharaoh Akhenaten.
Edward Benyas, professor of oboe, School of Music and director, Southern Illinois Symphony Orchestra, is one of nine national semifinalists for the American Prize in Conducting in the opera and musical theater division. This selection was for Benyas' work "conducting performances of Bizet’s ‘Carmen’ with Salt Marsh Opera in New England and at Festival Musica Malicorne in France; conducting Puccini’s ‘Madama Butterfly’ with Winter Opera St. Louis, and especially for conducting Richard Strauss’ ‘Salome’ at the 2022 Southern Illinois Music Festival.”
Jyotsna Kapur, director, University Honors Program and professor, Cinema and Media Studies, discusses the 2002 film "Harry Potter and the Chambers of Secrets" on Fantasy/Animation, a podcast series devoted to the academic discussion of the relationship between fantasy storytelling and animation. The sequence explores the relationship between childhood, capitalist expansion in the Clinton-Bush era, and fantasy.
Corné Prozesky, director, Recreational Sports and Services, and Ivan Sanchez, assistant men’s and women’s swimming and diving coach, will be among more than 3,000 pickleball players of all ages and skill levels competing April 15-22 in the 2023 Minto U.S. Open Pickleball Championships in Naples, Florida. The competition attracts entries from all 50 states and 26 countries. The event will be streamed daily on Pickleball Channel with the women’s and men’s pro doubles finals broadcast live on CBS Sports Network from 4-6 p.m. April 22.
Clay Nielsen, professor in the Cooperative Wildlife Research Laboratory, was named an Alumni Master by the University of Nebraska during a ceremony in late March. Nielsen was honored for devoting much of his career to research and teaching in the area of wildlife conservation and conducting studies on dozens of species on four continents. Since 1964, more than 400 alumni have participated in Alumni Masters. Its primary goal is to link the university’s outstanding alumni with students who can benefit from their experiences and knowledge, as well as honor alumni for their success and leadership.
“Becoming Turkish: Nationalist Reforms and Cultural Negotiations in Early Republican Turkey 1923-1945,” a 2013 book by Hale Yilmaz, associate professor, School of History and Philosophy, was republished in January 2023 as “Türk Olmak – Erken Cumhuriyet Dönemi’nde Milliyetçi Reformlar ve Kültürel Tartışmalar,” 1923-1945” by Istanbul Bilgi University Press.
Benjamin Bricker, associate professor, political science, and interim associate dean, recently presented the findings from his invited chapter, “Referrals” at the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Judicial Behavior Conference at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Faculty of Law Center. The chapter will be part of “The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Judicial Behavior” to be published later this summer.
