newsmakers

BEADLES’ RESPONSIBILITIES EXPAND BEYOND COUNSELING

Cindy Beadles has been named director of counseling and accessibility services, a new College position that combines two previously separated duties. Most recently director of counseling services, Beadles will BEADLES now oversee compliance with the regulations of the Americans with Disabilities Act, such as documenting students who require special accommodations in the classroom or while living on campus. Beadles, whose first master’s degree is in special education, specializes in behavior disorders, emotional disturbance and learning disabilities—experience which she believes will also help her set students up for academic success.

CORNELIUS TAKES TOP PRIZE AT MUSEUM’S ART EXHIBITION

Grace Cornelius, a freshman art major, took the top first-place honor at the Figge Art Museum’s College Invitational Art Exhibition in February. Her submission was a color photograph of an outdoor installation CORNELIUS about the overwhelming impact of plastic on society. Now in its 12th year, the Davenport, Iowa, museum’s competition featured the work of students from eight area colleges.

COMMUNICATION AND DATA SCIENCE FACULTY COLLABORATE ON RESEARCH

the communication studies faculty. Hinck and Utterback have also received a grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Border Trade and Immigration Institute, which asked them to analyze media from Central America, Mexico and the United States regarding migration.

Monmouth professors Robert Utterback and Robert Hinck collaborated last fall on a research article for the non-profit, non-partisan website The Conversation HINCK UTTERBACK (theconversation.com) that analyzed how Russian, Iranian and Chinese media covered the U.S. presidential election. Along with a professor from Oklahoma State University, Hinck collected research in part by using algorithms provided by Utterback, who teaches in Monmouth’s data science program. The topic had been a focus of research by Hinck, a member of

SIMMONS EARNS PRESTIGIOUS AWARD FOR CLASSICS DAY

Bringing ancient Greece and Rome to life through his ambitious Classics Day events earned Monmouth classics professor Bob Simmons the 2020 Society for Classical Studies Outreach Prize. Simmons brought SIMMONS Classics Day to Monmouth from his previous classics faculty position at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, where he first held the event in 2011. Presented for the first time on campus in 2015 during Simmons’ first year on the faculty, it has been held a total of four times and has expanded to a week-long festival, which draws as many as 1,000 students to campus in a given year. Past recipients of the Ouotreach Prize have included producers of documentaries and founders of academic journals.

THORNDIKE GAINING RECOGNITION AMONG NEW LATIN AMERICAN GOTHIC WRITERS

Jennifer Thorndike, assistant professor of modern languages, literatures & cultures, was featured in the leading national Spanish newspaper El Pais as one of a group of female fiction writers whose work is styled the “New Latin American Gothic.” According to El Pais,

THORNDIKE

the featured authors have turned “their eye to fantasy. After years of realism and autofiction, the darkest imagination is used to portray social, political and gender issue.” A Peruvian by birth, Thorndike is part of a growing movement of Latin American authors who live and publish their work in the United States and are considered members of a literary movement called “The New Latino Boom.” Her work in the gothic realm includes three novels and several short stories.