faculty notes & student news Department Chair and Professor of History Catherine Forslund, Ph.D., has published a chapter on Edith Kermit Roosevelt in “A Companion to First Ladies,” Katherine A. S. Sibley, ed., John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2016. ESL Instructors Jessica Williams and Mirela Papandreou had news articles published in the Illinois Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages’ (ITBE) quarterly newsletter in the fall. Department Chair and Associate Professor of Psychology Joel Lynch, Ph.D., recently was featured in an October news spot on DeKalb, Ill., public radio station WNIJ. His commentary on why people don clown costumes to scare others touched on the psychological motivations for one of the creepiest trends of 2016. Robert Evans, an associate professor of political science, department chair and associate professor of economics, business and accounting, was featured in an October 2016 “Perspectives” spot on DeKalb, Ill., public radio station WNIJ, sharing his thoughts on the issues presented by early voting in a general election. 8
Dean of the College of Arts & Humanities, Associate Professor of English and Faculty Athletic Representative Michael Perry, Ph.D., was featured in a November 2016 “Perspectives” spot on DeKalb, Ill., public radio station WNIJ for his insights on superstition and the finallybroken Chicago Cubs curse, which he posits may never have existed in the first place. Perry and some of his students also hosted a panel discussion at Geek’d Con in Rockford, Ill., in October 2016 on what is entailed in inviting graphic novels into the greater literary tradition. Department Chair and Associate Professor of Modern and Classical Languages & Religion John Burns, Ph.D., presented his poetry book titled “El mismo río” (Ediciones El Quirófano, 2016) at the Festival de poesía Ileana Espinel in Guayaquil, Ecuador, in November. Burns also contributed the essay “From Manifiesto to Manifestation: The Infrarrealista Movement on the Margins of Mexican Literary Culture” to the volume “Alternative Communities in Hispanic Literature and Culture” (Luis H. Castañeda and Javier González eds.), published by Cambridge Scholars in September 2016. Additionally, he presented on the poetry of Mario Santiago at the Andean Conference of Latin American Literature in La Paz, Bolivia, in