Faculty Affiliates

Ann Abbott, Dept. of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese 
Andrew Alleyne, Dept. of Mechanical Science and Engineering 
Flavia Andrade, Department of Kinesiology and Community Health 
Kathryn Anthony , School of Architecture 
Mary Arends-Kuenning, Dept. of Agricultural and Consumer Economics 
Phyllis Baker, Office of the President 
Maimouna Barro, Center for African Studies 
Kathryn Baylis, Dept. of Agricultural and Consumer Economics 
Venera Bekteshi, School of Social Work 
Shanondora Billiot, School of Social Work 
Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz, Department of Religion 
Trever Birkenholtz, Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science 
Tami Bond, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering 
Merle Bowen, Dept. of African American Studies 
Cynthia Buckley, Dept. of Sociology
Antoinette Burton, Dept. of History
Kathryn Clancy, Dept. of Anthropology
Shao Dan, Dept. of East Asian Languages
Lynne Dearborn, School of Architecture 
Norman Denzin, Institute for Communications Research 
Pradeep Dhillon, Educational Policy, Organization and Leadership
Hadi Esfahani, Dept. of Economics 
Margareth Etienne, College of Law 
Karen Flynn, Dept. of African American Studies and Gender and Women Studies 
Charles Fogelman, LAS Global Studies Program
Robin Fretwell Wilson, College of Law
Paolo Gardoni, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering 
Dara Goldman, Dept. of Spanish 
Diana S. Grigsby-Toussaint, Kinesiology and Community Health and Division of Nutritional Sciences 
Faye Harrison, Dept. of African American Studies and Anthropology
Geoffrey Hewings, Dept. of Geography and IGPA
Valerie Hoffman, Dept. of Religion
Heidi M. Hurd, College of Law
Cindy Ingold, Social Sciences, Health and Education Library 
Iwona Jasiuk, Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering 
Ezekiel Kalipeni, Dept. of Geography 
Patrick Keenan, College of Law 
Margaret Kelley, Dept. of Sociology 
Wynne Korr, School of Social Work 
Susan Koshy, Dept. of English 
Emily Labarbera-Twarog, School of Labor and Employment Relations 
Denise Lewin Loyd, Gies College of Business 
Reitumetse Mabokela, Vice-Provost for International Affairs and Global Strategies 
Tim McCarthy, Dept. of Philosophy and Linguistics 
Monica McDermott, Dept. of Sociology
Robert McKim, Dept. of Religious Studies and Philosophy
Paul McNamara, Dept. of Agricultural and Consumer Economics 
Ruby Mendenhall, Depts. of Sociology, African American Studies, Urban and Regional Planning and School of Social Work 
Hope Michelson, Dept. of Agricultural and Consumer Economics 
Faranak Miraftab, Dept. of Urban and Regional Planning; Dept. of Gender and Women's Studies 
Ghassan Moussawi, Department of Sociology 
Eunmi Mun, Dept. of Sociology and School of Labor and Employment Relations
Chantal Nadeau, Dept. of Gender and Women's Studies 
Radha Nandkumar, National Center for Supercomputing Applications 
Mimi Nguyen, Dept. of Gender and Women's Studies and Asian American Studies
Robert Pahre, Dept. of Political Science 
Lissette Piedra, School of Social Work 
Judith Pintar, Illinois Informatics, School of Information Science
Elizabeth Powers, Dept. of Economics, Institute of Government and Public Affairs 
Marcela Raffaelli, Dept. of Human and Community Development 
William Rose, School of Architecture 
Rebecca Sandefur, Dept. of Sociology and College of Law 
Carla Santos, Dept. of Recreation, Sport, and Tourism; Anthropology and Landscape Architecture 
Clifford Singer, Dept. of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering 
Karen Tabb, School of Social Work 
Rebecca Thornton, Department of Economics 
Angharad Valdivia, Institute for Communications Research 
Madhu Viswanathan, Dept. of Business Administration 
Kate Williams, Graduate School of Library and Information Science
Timothy Wedig, Global Studies Program
Lesley Wexler, College of Law
Chi-Fang Wu, School of Social Work
Min Zhan, School of Social Work

Ann Abbott, Department of Spanish, Italian & Portuguese

Annie Abbott is Assistant Professor, Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She also directs the Spanish and Illinois program which includes curricular and extra-curricular opportunities that bring together University of Illinois students, Illinois enterprises and Hispanic communities to form mutually beneficial relationships. Her work with community-based learning in Spanish courses moves students beyond the university and into the local Spanish-speaking communities and the organizations that serve them. Her research projects concentrate on the effects of community-based learning on both students and the communities with which they work. Additionally, she works with community-based learning and social entrepreneurship initiatives in Spain and in Costa Rica. return to top of page

Andrew Alleyne, Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering

Andrew Alleyne is a Professor in Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois. Professor Alleyne's research addresses a range of issues within controls: the analysis and design of control systems in a dimensionless framework, advanced motion control through iterative learning control and adaptive feedforward techniques, and robust control approaches to gain-scheduling as they relate to vehicle dynamics, large- and small-scale manufacturing systems and fluid power. Professor Alleyne is leading the campus effort for the new National Science Foundation Center for Compact and Efficient Fluid Power, based at the University of Minnesota. He, MechSE colleague Elizabeth Hsiao-Wecksler, and Department of Aerospace Engineering professor Eric Loth are working together to develop a small prosthetic device that uses fluid power to return flexibility of motion to people who have lost muscle control over their feet. He is also leading research on the coordination and control of power generation and power flow within a distributed network of connected components. He and other researchers at the Center for Nanoscale Chemical-Electrical-Mechanical Manufacturing Systems (NanoCEMMS) recently set new benchmarks for precision control and resolution in jet printing processes by developing methods that combine electrically induced fluid flow with nanoscale nozzles. return to top of page

Flavia Andrade, Department of Kinesiology and Community Health

Flavia Andrade is Professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Community Health, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Her current research projects focus on the health, well-being and quality of life in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and among Latinos in the U.S. In particular, she is interested on how transitions at the population level (e.g. demographic, nutritional, and epidemiological) are influencing the growth of obesity and related disorders on these populations and, in turn, how obesity and related conditions are impacting the health and life expectancy of these populations. In one of her current projects, she has been analyzing the impact of diabetes and chronic conditions in the quality of life and life expectancy in LAC. In another project (Up Amigos), a multidisciplinary project focusing on the health and wellbeing of young adults in Mexico, the group has been focusing on environmental and biological determinants of unhealthy fat accumulation (obesity). On her third project, she focuses on aspects related to health among Latinos in the U.S., particularly on the role of social support, by means of emotional, instrumental or financial support, in buffering or reducing the impacts of stressful life events. These projects highlight important health differentials in between men and women across the life course. By addressing gender inequalities in health, these projects aim at increasing awareness of cultural norms, values and socioeconomic discrimination that shape women’s trajectories in health and disability. . return to top of page

Kathryn Anthony, School of Architecture

Kathryn Anthony is Professor at the School of Architecture, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) , former Chair of the Design Program Faculty and the Building Research Council. She also serves on the faculty of the Gender and Women's Studies Program and the Dept. of Landscape Architecture. The longest-serving woman faculty at the UIUC School of Architecture, she holds a Ph.D. in architecture and a Bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the recipient of the 2009-10 Distinguished Professor Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture and other national awards. Throughout her academic career, Dr. Anthony has served as a catalyst to challenge and change architectural education and practice, inspiring faculty to create more humane learning environments, architects to create more humane working environments, and stduents to empower themelves. Her teaching, research, writing, and service have educated hundreds of architecture students, faculty, and practitioners -- and the public -- about the critical importance of designing for diversity, designing spaces for people, and research design. Dr. Anthony has made a national impact as a spokesperson about architectural issues on National Public Radio (NPR); Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC); Media Tracks national syndicated radio program, KIIS FM Radio in Los Angeles, and WILL Radio in Urbana. Her print media interviews include the Chicago Tribune, Dallas Morning News, Kansas City Star, Los Angeles Times, Time.com, U.S. News & World Repor t, and the Wall Street Journal . Following her interview in April 13, 2009, The New York TImes featured her words as the Quotation of the Day . return to top of page

Mary Arends-Kuenning, Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics

Mary Arends-Kuenning is Associate Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois. She received a B.S.F.S. from Georgetown University, an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Prior to joining the University of Illinois, she was a Berelson Post Doctoral Fellow at the Population Council in New York City. Dr. Arends-Kuenning's research examines economic and demographic issues in developing countries, focusing on issues with important gender dimensions. The subjects of her research include child labor and children’s schooling, programs that pay children to attend school, family planning programs, and the transnational migration of health care workers. She has published articles in a variety of journals and books including Demography, World Development, Population and Development Review, Studies in Family Planning and Economics of Education Review . She has experience living and working in Nicaragua, Bangladesh, Brazil, Peru, and South Africa. She has worked as a consultant for the International Food Policy Research Institute, the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank, and the Population Council. Current research projects include investigating why children’s schooling improved in the 1990s in Brazil, examining how women learn from each other about contraceptive use in Bangladesh, and evaluating the role of foreign-trained doctors and nurses in the U.S. health care system. Dr. Arends-Kuenning teaches ACE 451 Economics of Agricultural Development and ACE 474 The Economics of Consumption at the undergraduate level and ACE 502 Demand, Supply, Firms and Households and ACE 570 Family and Consumption Economics at the Ph.D. level. She seeks to use her work experiences to interest students in learning more about developing countries. return to top of page

Phyllis Baker, Department of Sociology

Phyllis Baker is the Special Assistant to the President. She arrived at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Fall 2015. She hails from the University of Northern Iowa where she was most recently the Department Head of the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminology. Professor Baker has been Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies and the Associate Dean in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. She was an American Council of Education Fellow 2011-2012 placed in the Office of the Provost at the University of Iowa. She is an alumnus of the Office of Women in Higher Education Regional Women’s Leadership Forum and the Higher Education Resource Services Denver Summer Institute. Professor Baker received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, San Diego. Professor Baker’s scholarship and teaching frame her concerns about inequalities. One of her most recent publications uses survey data to explore gender differences in sexual socialization as a determinant of hooking up by college students. Another is an ethnographic analysis of high school wrestling. She and her co-author found that the behavior of high school wrestlers fell along a gender continuum between an orthodox masculinity and an orthodox femininity making it necessary to understand men’s sporting behavior within framework of gender, not just masculinity. Dr. Baker is currently involved in cross national research on the relationship between growing inequality among men and women’s well-being. In addition to her research, teaching, and administrative roles, Dr. Baker is the president elect of the Midwest Sociological Society.

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Maimouna Barro, Center for African Studies

Dr. Maimouna Barro is Associate Director of the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois. She received a Master's in African Studies, a doctoral degree in education, as well as a minor in Gender Relations in International Development (GRID) from the University of Illinois. In her role as Associate Director in charge of academic programming and curriculum development, Dr. Barro teaches undergraduate and graduate core courses in African Studies and oversees an undergraduate minor, a graduate minor, a Master of Arts degree, as well as a joint degree in African Studies and Library Information Science. Her research interests include issues related to women, gender, education, and social change in Senegal and West Africa. Her current research addresses questions related to a more people-centered approach to regional integration and focuses on the importance of women's informal networks in the regional integration project in West Africa. She is the author of various articles and a book: The Role of Literacy in Enhancing Women's Agency and Well-Being: A Qualitative Inquiry of the Effects of the Tostan Educational Program on the Lives of Women in a Rural Community in Senegal.

Katherine Baylis, Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics

Kathy Baylis is an assistant professor in Agriculture and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois. She joined the department after several years as an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia where she is still an adjunct. She earned her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 2003, where she specialized in agriculture and trade issues. Kathy has worked in agricultural policy in both Canada and the United States. In 2001-02, she was the staff economist in charge of agriculture for the Council of Economic Advisors in the White House, and in the mid-1990s, she worked as Executive Secretary with the National Farmers Union in Canada. She has published a number of journal articles on agricultural trade and environmental policy and has coauthored a textbook on Canadian-U.S. agricultural policy. Among her publications are: Agricultural Policy, Agribusiness and Rent-Seeking Behaviour with A.Schmitz and W.H.Furtan,(2002) and "Expanding Horizons: Can Women's Support Groups Diversify Peer Networks in Rural India?" with E. Kandpal, 2013, and working papers such as "Empowering Women Through Education and Influence: An Evaluation of the Indian Mahila Samakhya Program" with E, Kandpal and M. Arends-Kuenning, 2013.return to top of page

Venera Bekteshi, School of Social Work

An assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's School of Social Work, Dr. Bekteshi educational background includes a Postdoctorate Fellowship, Washington University in St. Louis Medical School, Siteman Cancer Center; Ph.D. (social work), M.S.W., Boston College; M.P.A., Columbia University; M.A. (political science), St. John’s University; B.A. (journalism and political science), University of Oklahoma. The purpose of Dr. Bekteshi’s research is to provide evidence to be utilized in the elimination of breast cancer disparities impacting Latina/Hispanic immigrant women by studying the full range of barriers to their mammography screening participation. Specifically, Dr. Bekteshi’s research aims to examine the role that non-structural barriers play in this population’s lack of participation in mammography screening, and the extent of their impact. These non-structural barriers are comprised of beliefs and emotions related to cancer that may be largely influenced by Latino culture, as opposed to the more structural barriers such as lack of health insurance, ability to pay outright or English language skills. Previously, Dr. Bekteshi served as a Deputy Director at the Albanian American Women’s Organization in New York, Deputy Director at New York City Department of Youth and Community Development’s Beacons After School Program, Program Manager at the New York City Department of Homeless Services’ Homeless Prevention Program, Administration Coordinator at Aon Re Inc. and International Rescue Committee and Research Associate at the United Nations Development Program. She has completed Ethical Leadership Training at The Woodhull Institute in New York, Leadership Middle Management Training at the Institute for Not-for-Profit Management at Columbia University, and training in International Popular Economics at the Center for Popular Economics. Dr. Bekteshi has presented widely in numerous international and national, academic and non-academic conferences. When not investigating health disparity among immigrant communities, she devotes her time to practicing piano and learning new languages. (Dr. Bekteshi is fluent in Albanian and English and proficient in Spanish and Serbo-Croatian). return to top of page

Shanondora Billiot, School of Social Work

Shanondora Billiot (United Houma Nation) has a PhD in Social Work from Washington University in St. Louis. She holds a Master’s of Social Work from the University of Michigan and both Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science degrees from Louisiana State University. Prior to entering graduate school, Dr. Billiot had 10+ years of experience working in the field from crisis intervention and post-disaster grassroots community development to implementing and analyzing federal and international health and mental health policies. Her current research uses mixed methods to explore indigenous-specific factors, like connection to land, historical trauma and discrimination, and their relationship to global environmental change exposure and health outcomes among members of her tribal community currently located along the Gulf Coast of southeast Louisiana. return to top of page

Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz, Department of Religion

Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz is Assistant Professor of Hinduism in the Department of Religion. She earned her PhD in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago in 2010, and then joined the Department of Religion at Rutgers University as an ACLS New Faculty Fellow. Her areas of research include the comparative study of Hindu religious identity, practice, and literature from the medieval period to the present day, Hindu goddess traditions in Nepal and India, and gender and religion. She is currently working on a book manuscript, under contract with Oxford University Press, that examines the history and development of Nepal’s Svasthani goddess tradition, the widely read Svasthani Vrata Katha, and the role both goddess and text have played in Nepal’s historical construction as a Hindu state. She is also co-editing a volume, under contract with Routledge, on religion and modernity in the Himalayas. Professor Birkenholtz is the Book Review Editor for Himalaya, the journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies. return to top of page

Trevor Birkenholtz, Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science

Trevor Birkenholtz is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science. He is a cultural and political ecologist, and development geographer. His work attempts to link the political economy of access to and control over environmental resources to issues of technology, knowledge, and social power. To date, Dr. Birkenholtz has advanced these concerns by investigating the transformation of groundwater-based irrigation, and urban and rural water supplies in South Asia. He has a particular interest understanding the ways in which new water-supply technologies rework existing socio-ecological relations along lines of caste, class and gender. He also serve as Environment and Society Section Editor for the journal Geography Compass. return to top of page

Tami Bond, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Tami Bond is Associate Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is also an Affiliate Professor in Atmospheric Sciences. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in air quality monitoring and modeling. Her research addresses the interface between energy use, atmospheric composition, and global climate. Her group studies the chemistry, physics, and optics that govern the environmental impacts of combustion effluents, especially carbonaceous particles. Her research includes development of past, present and future global emission inventories, global simulations of aerosol transport and fate, and laboratory and field measurements of particle emission rates and properties. Dr. Bond is a member of American Geophysical Union and American Association for Aerosol Research, and an Editor at Aerosol Science and Technology. She recently served on a National Academy of Sciences committee regarding the international transport of air pollutants. She holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Washington, an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering (UC Berkeley) and an Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Atmospheric Sciences, Civil Engineering and Mechanical Engineering (University of Washington, 2000). Awards include an NSF CAREER grant (2004-present), the Arthur and Virginia Nauman Faculty Scholar Award (2006-present), the Xerox Award for Faculty Research (2007), a Center for Advanced Study Fellowship at the University of Illinois (2008), and a NOAA Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship (2000-2002). return to top of page

Merle Bowen, Political Science and African Studies

Merle L. Bowen is the Director of the Center for African Studies and a professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois. She also holds an appointment in the Gender and Women's Studies Program (GWS) and is an affiliate in the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) and Women and Gender in Global Perspectives Program (WGGP). Her research and teaching interests include politics in Africa and the African Diaspora, race, ethnicity and gender, agrarian and rural issues, and social movements and globalization in the postcolonial world. She is the author of The State against the Peasantry: Rural Struggles in Colonial and Postcolonial Mozambique , as well as numerous journal and book chapters. Her current book project focuses on land tenure reform, the state, and black rural communities in Brazil and Mozambique. Professor Bowen has been awarded fellowships from the Frederick Douglass Institute, the University of North Carolina at Chapel HIll, and Northwestern University. At the University of Illinois, she has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study and the Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society. She is the recipient of several grants from the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, as well as the Gulbenkian Foundation in Portugal. return to top of page

Cynthia Buckley, Department of Sociology

Cynthia Buckley is a Professor of Sociology and Faculty Affiliate of the Russian, East European and Eurasian Center at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She also serves as a consultant on Eurasia for the Social Science Research Council. A social demographer, Buckley presently serves as the co-chair of the U.S./Russian Federation CSPP (Civil Society Private Partnerships) Committee on International Migration. She has served, or current serves, on the editorial boards of the Nationalities Papers, Central Asian Survey, Slavic Review, Sociological Research, and the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, and has served as a U.S. Embassy Policy Specialist (on Migration) in Dushanbe. Publications from her previous research projects cover issues of rural development, population aging, maternal and child health, reproductive health and HIV/AIDS, appearing in journals including Demographic Research, the Gerontologist: Social Science, International Migration Review, Studies in Family Planning, International Family Planning Perspectives and Europe-Asia Studies. The lead editor of, Migration, Homeland and Belonging in Eurasia (Johns Hopkins Press, 2008), she is presently writing a book on the socio-cultural implications of male labor out migration in the southern Caucasus. Buckley is also the Primary Investigator on the project, "People, Power and Conflict in the Eurasian Migration System". Funded through the DoD/NSF Minerva initiative, this three-year project examines the geopolitical implications of Russia emergence as an international migration destination state. return to top of page

 

Antoinette Burton, Department of History

Antoinette Burton is a feminist historian of the British empire with expertise in world history, race and postcolonialism and cultures of resistance. She came to Illinois in 1999. She has been chair of History, Interim Head of Sociology and is currently director of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. The recipient of funding from the NEH, the ACLS and the Guggenheim Foundation, she is Principle Investigator of several grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, including Humanities Without Walls (http://www.humanitieswithoutwalls.illinois.edu/ ). She was recently elected a professor in the Center for Advanced Study, and she is a Presidential Fellow for 2016-18. return to top of page

Kathryn Clancy, Department of Anthropology

Dr. Kathryn Clancy is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois, with additional affiliations in the Program for Evolution, Ecology, and Conservation, and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science & Technology. Clancy’s research integrates life history, evolutionary medicine, and feminist biology to contest clinical definitions of normal in women’s health. Clancy’s critical research on the culture of science has also received widespread attention. She and her colleagues have empirically demonstrated the continued problem of sexual harassment and assault in the field sciences in a 2014 paper in PLOS ONE, and astronomy and physics in upcoming publications.return to top of page

Shao Dan, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures

SHAO Dan is an associate professor of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. She primarily studies the historical roots of contemporary problems, and particularly the problems concerning the making, shifting, and lifting of social and legal boundaries in Chinese society. She has endeavored to cross the historical marks that conventionally distinguish “modern” from “pre-modern” and to traverse the existing national borders that define China’s territory. Shao has published on the Manchus in Manchuria and Chinese nationality law. Her current research projects focus on unintended social consequences of China's importation of legal concepts and codes in medicine during the past century. She teaches courses on Cultures of Law in China, China's borderlands, Reading in Chinese Legal History, and Gender and Women in East Asia.return to top of page

Lynne Dearborn, School of Architecture

Lynne M. Dearborn is an assistant professor of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Illinois where she teaches design and theory courses focused on cultural change and social justice in relation to human settlement patterns. Her research interests include the residential choices of marginalized populations, the built environment and social (in)justice, residential environments of immigrant and minority populations, and healthy, sustainable residential environments. These research and teaching interests have led Professor Dearborn's research in Hmong immigrant communities, Native American communities, and African American communities in the US and Highland villages in Thailand and Laos and includes such publications as: "Homeownership: The Problematics of Ideas and Realities," "Supportive Housing Environments: Design and Development Links with Resident Well-being," "Reconstituting Hmong Culture and Traditions in Milwaukee, Wisconsin," and Inconvenient Heritage: Erasure and Global Tourism in Luang Prabang, Laos . Her teaching, research, and service has also linked to The East St. Louis Action Research Project (ESLARP). Professor Dearborn is a member of ESLARP's Campus Advisory Committee and for several years taught the interdisciplinary ESLARP studio with faculty in Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning. Through ESLARP, she has conducted investigations of predatory lending and mortgage fraud in the East St. Louis area and has worked with homeless shelter providers. Professor Dearborn received her professional Bachelor of Architecture degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and is a licensed architect. She received her Ph.D. in Architecture from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2004. return to top of page

Norman Denzin, Institute of Communications Research

Norman K. Denzin (Ph.D., 1966, Sociology, University of Iowa) is Distinguished Professor of Communications, College of Communications Scholar, and Research Professor of Communications, Sociology and Humanities, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of numerous books, including Performance Ethnography: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Culture, Screening Race: Hollywood and a Cinema of Racial Violence; Performing Ethnography ; and 9/11in American Culture. He is past editor of The Sociological Quarterly, co-editor of The Handbook of Qualitative Research, 2/e , co-editor of Qualitative Inquiry , editor of Cultural Studies--Critical Methodologies , editor of Studies in Symbolic Interaction , and founding President of the International Association of Qualitative Inquiry. return to top of page

Pradeep Dhillon, Education, Organization and Leadership

Pradeep A. Dhillon currently holds the title of Associate Professor in Educational Policy Studies/Linguistics at UIUC. She is also Editor of the Journal of Aesthetic Education, and serves as the Chair of Education for the American Society for Aesthetics. She received her Ph.D. in philosophy of education at Stanford University in 1991. Her research interests straddle philosophy of language, both analytic and continental, mind, aesthetics, cognition, and human rights education. Currently, she is working in the areas of Kant's theory of judgment and neuro-aesthetics, neurophilosophy, education and environmental aesthetics. Among her publications are:The Theater of Meaning: Aesthetics in Semantic Theory (2006), "Postmodernism and Globalization," in the Encyclopedia of Global Studies (2012), and "The Role of Education in Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right," in a special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory (Vol.43, #4, April 2011). return to top of page

Hadi Salehi Esfahani, Department of Economics

Hadi Esfahani is Professor of Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has also worked for the World Bank as a visiting staff economist and a consultant. He has received B.Sc. in engineering from Tehran University in 1977 and Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1984. His research focuses on the theoretical and empirical issues of the political economy of development, partly focusing on Middle Eastern economies. He has published many articles in scholarly journals on the role of politics and governance institutions in the formation and outcome of fiscal, trade, and regulatory policies. return to top of page

Margareth Etienne, College of Law

Margareth Etienne is Professor of Law at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Professor Etienne received her bachelor's degree in history with honors from Yale University, and earned her law degree from Yale Law School. Following law school, Etienne clerked for Judge Diana G. Motz on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Before joining the faculty, she practiced criminal law in state and federal courts for several years. In 2004, Professor Etienne was awarded a Fulbright Grant to conduct judicial training on white collar crime in Senegal. She served as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in 2012-13, and was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago Law School in 2007-08. She has made presentations at Stanford Law School, the University of Chicago Law School, Northwestern University Law School, Yale Law School, University of Illinois College of Law, Fordham Law School, University of Oregon Law School, Notre Dame Law School, and the American Bar Foundation. She is an executive board member of the AALS Section on Professional Responsibility. Her select publications include "Understanding Parity As A First principle of Sentencing" (58 Stanford L. Rev., 2006); "The Ethics of Cause Lawyering: An Empirical Examination of Criminal Defense Lawyers as Cause Lawyers" (95 J. Crim. L. & Criminology, 2005); "The Declining Utility of the Right to Counsel in Federal Court: An Empirical Study on the Role of Defense Attorney Advocacy Under the Sentencing Guidelines" (92 California Law Review, 2004); "Remorse, Responsibility, and Regulating Advocacy: Making Defendants Pay for the Sins of Their Lawyers" (78 New York University Law Review, 2003). Her article, "Addressing Gender Based Violence in an International Context," appeared in 18 Harvard Women's Law Journal 139 (1995).return to top of page

Karen Flynn, African-American Studies Program

Karen Flynn is an Assistant professor in the African-American Studies Program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She received her Ph.D. in Women's Studies from York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada where she completed her dissertation, "Race, Class and Gender: Black Nurses in Ontario, 1950-1980." She received her Master's & Bachelor's degrees in History from the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Her research interests includes women, work, family, racism, health, migration, feminist and critical anti-racist theory, and post-colonial studies. Her current research focuses on Caribbean migrant and Black Canadian born women during the post World War II era. Dr. Flynn is currently working on a manuscript tentatively titled: Caring at Home and Abroad: Black Nurses in the American Diaspora. Dr. Flynn has received numerous awards including the 2004 International Program and Studies, William and Flora Hewlett International Research Travel Grant; the 2003 CARE Initiative Bremer Foundation Grant awarded to the Committee on Diversity in Education (CODE); and in 2000, the Hannah institute of Medicine Doctoral Fellowship, the Ramsay Cooke Fellowship, the Ethel Armstrong Bursary, and the Lillian Sholtis Brunner Summer Fellowship (University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing). Dr. Flynn has published several refereed academic articles, and has several book chapters in a number of edited collections. In addition, she has published numerous editorials in Share , Canada's largest ethnic newspaper, which serves the Black & Caribbean communities in the Greater Metropolitan Toronto area. Dr. Flynn is also a free-lance writer for Canada Extra. return to top of page

Charles Fogelman, LAS Global Studies

Charles Fogelman is a lecturer in the Global Studies Program whose research and teaching focus on international development. He is trained as a geographer and is broadly interested in questions of property rights, poverty, gender, and development aid. Charles’s research has largely focused on Southern Africa, where he explored the logics, processes, and outcomes of a major U.S.-sponsored land reform in Lesotho. He has also written about climate change adaptation and global famines. His current and future work explores global land reforms, as well as housing rights/homelessness. He received his Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Illinois in 2017. return to top of page

Robin Fretwell Wilson, College of Law

Robin Fretwell Wilson is the Roger and Stephany Joslin Professor of Law at the University of Illinois College of Law, where she directs the College of Law’s Family Law and Policy Program and the Epstein Health Law and Policy Program. She specializes in family law and health law, and her research and teaching interests also include biomedical ethics, law and religion, children and violence, and law and science. Professor Wilson is the author of eleven books, including, most recently, The Contested Place of Religion in Family Law (Cambridge University Press, 2018, ed.). In 2018, Professor Wilson was honored as one of the 150 for 150: Celebrating the Accomplishments of Women at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for its sesquicentennial celebration in 2018. She ranks among the Top 10% of Authors in all time downloads on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). Also in 2018, Professor Wilson received the Thomas L. Kane Religious Freedom Award from the J. Reuben Clark Law Society, which is presented annually to an individual who exemplifies the spirit of religious liberty for all and who has contributed in significant ways to the defense of religious freedom in the public square. Professor Wilson’s work has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic Monthly, U.S. News and World Report, ABA Journal, Chronicle of Higher Education, Chicago Tribune, CNN Headline News, Good Morning America, ABC News, CBS News, Philadelphia Inquirer, Essence Magazine, The American Prospect, People Magazine, The American Conservative, The Australian, The Guardian and Al Jazeera, among others. Prior to joining the University of Illinois College of Law, she was the Class of 1958 Law Alumni Professor of Law at Washington & Lee School of Law, where she was named Professor of the Year by the Women Law Students Organization. A graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law, Professor Wilson clerked for The Honorable E. Grady Jolly on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and practiced at Fulbright & Jaworski, LLP and Mayor, Day, Caldwell & Keeton, LLP. return to top of page

Paolo Gardoni, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Paolo Gardoni is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received a Laurea (equivalent to a B.S. and M.S.) in Structural Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano, Italy, a Master of Engineering in Structural Engineering from the University of Tokyo, a Master of Arts in Statistics from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering also from the University of California, Berkeley. Before coming to Illinois, Prof. Gardoni was an Associate Professor at Texas A&M University, during the 2010-2011 academic year, he was a Visiting Professor at Princeton University and prior to joining Texas A&M University, Dr. Gardoni worked as a consultant in the management consulting company ZS Associates in Princeton, NJ. His teaching and research are at the forefront of developing a new kind of engineer and researcher that has interdisciplinary knowledge and, as a result, the unique skills required to solve the most pressing global challenges of the 21st century. To achieve this, Prof. Gardoni has developed a new paradigm in co-advising students with faculty from diverse areas of expertise, thereby making his teaching and research cross-cutting and interdisciplinary. He has established successful collaborations working with several faculty members from the Colleges of Engineering, Liberal Arts and Science and Public Policy at both national and international universities. Prof. Gardoni's areas of expertise include sustainable development and planning; reliability, risk and life cycle analysis; decision making under uncertainty; performance assessment of deteriorating systems; ethical, social, and legal dimensions of risk; policies for natural hazard mitigation and disaster recovery; and engineering ethics. return to top of page

Dara Goldman, Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Dara E. Goldman is an Associate Professor of Spanish, specializing in contemporary Caribbean and Latin American literatures and cultures, gender and sexualities studies and cultural studies. She is the author of Out of Bounds: Islands and the Demarcation of Identity in the Hispanic Caribbean (Bucknell Univ. Press, 2008) and is currently completing a project on how recent Cuban cultural production challenges dominant depictions of the island as a land frozen in time, available for touristic consumption, or as a model of anti-imperial resilience. The book analyzes literature, film, and music that challenges such depictions, unearthing the conditions they mask. She has also published numerous articles on how Caribbean identities are represented in contemporary literature and film. She regularly teaches undergraduate and graduate courses that examine gender and sexuality in 19th, 20th, and 21st Century Latin American literatures and cultures. Professor Goldman has served as Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies/Lemann Institute for Brazilian Studies and also holds appointments as Affiliate Faculty in several camps units, including the Comparative and World Literatures, Center for Global Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, the Program in Jewish Culture and Society, Latina/Latino Studies and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretative Theory. return to top of page

Diana S. Grigsby-Toussaint, Kinesiology and Community Health and Division of Nutritional Sciences

Diana S. Grigsby-Toussaint is an Associate Professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Community Health and the Division of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As a social epidemiologist, her research attempts to elucidate how and why socio-environmental factors influence health in local, national, and international (e.g., Uganda) contexts. Her specific focus involves exploring the three pillars of health (diet, physical activity, and sleep) on non-communicable disease risk among vulnerable populations. In her work, she utilizes an interdisciplinary approach spanning epidemiology, geography, nutrition, and behavioral economics. Dr. Grigsby-Toussaint has served as PI or co-PI on several externally-funded multidisciplinary projects supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the USDA, and the National Science Foundation, and her work has been featured in the Huffington Post, the Dallas Morning News, and the Chicago Tribune. At the U of I, Dr. Grigsby-Toussaint has received the Team Award for Research Excellence from the College of Agriculture, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences (2015) and the Phyllis J. Hill award for Exemplary Mentoring for the James Scholar Program from the College of Applied Health Sciences (2017).return to top of page

Faye Harrison, Department of African American Studies and Anthropology

Faye Harrison is a Professor in the Departments of African American Studies, Anthropology, and faculty affiliate with the Center for African Studies. Dr. Harrison is a sociocultural anthropologist specializing in the study of social inequalities, human rights, and intersections of race, gender, class, and (trans)national belonging. She has also contributed to the history of anthropology and African American/African Diaspora studies. She earned her BA at Brown University and her MA and PhD at Stanford University. She has done research in the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, and South Africa as well as in the United States. She has published extensively on the gendered division of labor within Jamaica’s urban informal economy; the interplay of gangs, crime, and politics in Jamaica; the impact of neoliberal globalization on everyday life in Jamaica, Cuba, and United States; racism, antiracism, and human rights in the global context; and critical race feminist methodology as a tool for global research. Dr. Harrison is the author of Outsider Within: Reworking Anthropology in the Global Age and editor of and contributor to Resisting Racism & Xenophobia: Global Perspectives on Race, Gender, & Human Rights; African-American Pioneers in Anthropology (co-ed.); and three editions of Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further toward an Anthropology for Liberation (1991, 1997, 2010). She has contributed to several important anthologies on the African Diaspora, among them: Afrodescendants, Identity, and the Struggle for Development in the Americas; Transnational Blackness: Navigating the Global Color Line; Afro-Atlantic Dialogues: Anthropology in the Diaspora; and Blackness in Latin America & the Caribbean. Her writings also appear in several significant feminist collections (e.g., Third World Women & the Politics of Feminism; Women Writing Culture; Situated Lives: Gender & Culture in Everyday Life; Gender & Globalization: Women Navigating Cultural & Economic Marginalities; and most recently Feminist Activist Ethnography). return to top of page

Geoffrey J.D. Hewings, Department of Geography

Geoffrey J.D. Hewings is Professor of Geography, Professor of Economics, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning, and Director of Regional Economics Applications Laboratory (REAL) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He received a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Birmingham (England) in 1965, a Master of Arts in 1967 and a Ph.D. in 1969 from the University of Washington in Seattle. His major research interests lie in the field of urban and regional economic analysis with a focus on the design, implementation and application of regional economic models. He has devoted considerable time to the way in which these models might become useful in policy formation and evaluation. In addition to the continuing development of regional econometric-input-output models for a number of US states and metropolitan areas, Professor Hewings is working on several modeling projects in Brazil, Colombia, Japan, Korea and Indonesia. Recent work in the Midwest, Brazil and Korea has focused on linking regional macro models with transportation network models to explore impacts of unexpected events (earthquakes), expansion of transportation infrastructure and the impacts of port efficiency. At the metropolitan scale, attention has been directed to the estimation of intra-metropolitan flows of good, people, income and consumption expenditures within the Chicago region to measure the changing degree of interdependence. Theoretical work remains directed to issues of economic structure and structural change interpreted through input-output, social accounting and general equilibrium models. Dr. Hewings is responsible for the overall direction of REAL, coordination with funding agencies and clients and supervision of graduate students who work for REAL on the Urbana campus of the University of Illinois. return to top of page

Valerie Hoffman, Department of Religion

Valerie Hoffman is Professor and Head of the Department of Religion. She is a specialist in Islamic thought and practice. Dr. Hoffman has worked on many aspects of Islam, from the time of the Prophet to the contemporary period; She has conducted textual studies and has done fieldwork. Dr. Hoffman did two major fieldwork projects in Egypt, one on Muslim women's religious lives in contemporary Egypt (1980-81) and another on Sufism in modern Egypt (1987-89). She then studied Swahili and spent two summers in Zanzibar, where she became aware that two distinct strands of Arabian Islam had impacted the Swahili coast: the Sultanate of Oman and the Hadramawt region of Yemen. She spent the 2000-2001 academic year in Oman and the Hadramawt, and became particularly interested in the Ibadi sect of Islam, an ancient and small sect that is neither Sunni nor Shiite and is practiced in Oman and small pockets of North Africa. She has since written the first English-language study of Ibadi theology and has become a specialist in Ibadism in the modern period, especially in Oman and Zanzibar. return to top of page

Heidi M. Hurd, College of Law

Heidi M. Hurd, the David C. Baum Professor of Law and Philosophy, served as the University of Illinois College of Law's 11th and first woman dean from 2002 through 2007. As a scholar and teacher, Professor Hurd focuses on the areas of criminal law, torts, evidence, environmental ethics, political and moral theory, general jurisprudence, political philosophy and global justice. She is the author of Moral Combat, and has two co-authored books forthcoming entitled Debts and Demands of Conscience and Essays in Criminal Law Theory. Her articles have appeared in the nation's top law and philosophy journals, and she has given well over 150 lectures and paper presentations worldwide. She provided testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee on the proposed Hate Crime Prevention Act of 1999. Her work on hate crime legislation has since been the topic of several international conferences and symposia, and she has made frequent guest appearances on national radio and television programs discussing high-profile hate crimes. return to top of page

Cindy Ingold, Women and Gender Library

Cindy Ingold, Women and Gender Resources Librarian and Associate Professor, works in the Education and Social Science Library at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of several articles on women's studies librarianship. In 2005, Cindy co-edited Women's Studies: A Recommended Bibliograpphy , 3rd ed., which was honored with the ACRL Women's Studies Section/Routledge Press Award for Significant Achievements in Women's Studies Librarianship. Professionally, Cindy is active in the Women's Studies Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) where she has served on and chaired several committees. She is also a member of the national Women's Studies Association. Cindy recevied a BA in History and an MA in English from Western Illinois University, and an MLS in Library and Information Science from the University of Missouri-Columbia. She worked at the Penn State University Libraries before coming to Illinois in 2002. return to top of page

Iwona Jasiuk, Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering

Iwona Jasiuk is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering. She also holds affiliate faculty appointments in Bioengineering Department, Civil and Environmental Engineering Department and the Institute of Genomic Biology, and is a part-time faculty at the Beckman Institute and Micro and Nanotechnology Lab. She holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University in theoretical and applied mechanics. Her expertise is in mechanics of materials and structures. Her research focuses on the experimental and theoretical studies of materials for aerospace, mechanical, electrical and civil engineering applications. In parallel, she is studying mechanics and biology of tissues in a human body. She is an editor of Journal of Mechanics of Materials and Structures since 2009 and serves on editorial boards of eight journals. She is a Fellow of Americal Society of Mechanical Engineers and Society of Engineering Science (SES). She served on Board of Directors of SES (2000-2006) and as vice-President (2005) and President (2006) of that society as well as the SES representative to US National Committee on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (2007-2010) run by National Academy of Sciences. In addition, she is a site director of the National Science Foundation Industry and University Cooperative Research Center on Novel High Voltage and Temperature Materials and Structures. return to top of page

Ezekiel Kalipeni, Geography and African Studies

Ezekiel Kalipeni is Associate Professor of Geography and African Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He holds both Ph.D. & MA degrees in Geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a population/medical/environmental geographer interested in demographic, health, environmental, and resource issues in sub-Saharan Africa. He has in the past taught at the University of Malawi (1986-1988), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1988-1991), and Colgate University (1991-1994). His research interests focus on health care issues in Africa, population, the environment and medical geography. He has published numerous articles in scholarly journals. His books include: Population Growth and Environmental Degradation in Southern Africa (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1994); Issues and Perspectives on Health Care in Contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa (Edwin Mellen Press, edited with Philip Thiuri, 1997); AIDS, Health Care Systems and Culture in Sub-Saharan Africa: Rethinking and Re-Appraisal (special issue of African Rural and Urban Studies , Michigan State University Press, Vol 3(2) edited with Joseph Oppong, 1996); Sacred Spaces and Public Quarrels: African Economic and Cultural Landscapes (Africa World Press edited with Paul T. Zeleza, 1999); HIV/AIDS in Africa: Beyond Epidemiology (Blackwell Publishers, edited with Susan Craddock; Joseph Oppong; and Jayati Ghosh, 2004). HIV/AIDS in Africa: Gender, Agency and Empowerment Issue s (special issue of Social Science and Medicine , Vol. 64(5), pp. 1015-1150, guest edited with Assata Zerai and Joseph Oppong); Global Studies: Africa (McGraw-Hill Contemporary Learning Series, co-authored with T. Krabacher and A. Layachi, 2009); Strong Women, Dangerous Times: Gender and HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa (Nova Publishers, co-edited with K. Flynn and C. Pope, 2009); and Geographic Approaches to HIV/AIDS Risk in Africa and the Developing World (Special issue of GeoJournal, guest edited with C. Pope, forthcoming). return to top of page

Patrick Keenan, College of Law

An expert in human rights and international law, Professor Patrick Keenan focuses his research and scholarship on the connections between human rights, economic development, and business. He has published articles on conflict minerals, human trafficking and tourism, China’s role in Africa, the human rights potential of sovereign wealth funds, the International Finance Corporation’s investments in Africa and the Caribbean, and other issues. Professor Keenan teaches courses on human rights, development, international criminal law, and the responsibilities of lawyers. In addition to teaching at the University of Illinois, he served as a visiting professor at the University of Chicago Law School and lectured at the Chuo University School of Law in Tokyo. Before coming to Illinois, Professor Keenan litigated death penalty cases in Georgia and Alabama as an attorney with the Southern Center for Human Rights. Professor Keenan graduated from Yale Law School and Tufts University, clerked for Judge Myron H. Thompson of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama, and served in the Peace Corps in the Democratic Republic of Congo. return to top of page

Margaret Kelley, Department of Sociology

Margaret Kelley is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois. Professor Kelley’s work focuses on broad issues of gender and social choice. Her current project involves collecting and analyzing data on the role of “natural mentors,” specifically teachers and coaches, in delinquency outcomes for adolescents. Professor Kelley’s next project is investigating the role of gender schemas for career choice in cross-cultural and international settings. She has recently written and published articles about college drinking, gender, delinquency, and sports. return to top of page

Wynne Korr, School of Social Work

Wynne S. Korr, PhD, is Dean and Professor at the School of Social Work, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. From 1994-2002 she was a professor at the School of Social Work, University of Pittsburgh. She was the co-director of the Center for Mental Health Services Research and directed the doctoral program during her tenure at Pittsburgh. From 1980-1993, she taught at the Jane Addams College of Social Work, University of Illinois at Chicago. Her first professional position was as a Program Evaluator in the Illinois Department of Mental Health. She has taught courses in program evaluation, services research, and mental health policy and has published on evaluation of mental health services, legal issues in mental health, and other related topics. Her current research is financing of non-profits. She is active in the Council on Social Work Education and has served as chair of the Commission on Accreditation. She has served on the Board of Directors of the National Association of Deans and Directors of Schools of social work, as President of the St. Louis Group, and Vice President of the Society for Social Work and Research. return to top of page

Susan Koshy, Department of English

Susan Koshy is Associate Professor of English and Asian American Studies, and an affiliate of the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work draws on the insights of literature, anthropology, legal studies, and history. Her work on race, gender, sexuality, and diaspora is part of a larger theoretical interest in modernity, (neo) colonialism, and the processes of globalization. Her research is situated at the intersection of area studies, postcolonial studies, and ethnic studies and interrogates the boundaries of these disciplinary formations. Her book, Sexual Naturalization (Stanford University Press, 2004) locates narratives of white-Asian miscegenation in the context of anti-miscegenation laws, Asian immigration to the US, and US expansionism in Asia. She is also the co-editor of a multi-disciplinary anthology, Transnational South Asians (Oxford UP, 2008). Her articles on human rights, transnational feminist theory, comparative racialization, Asian American literature, South Asian diasporic literature, and immigration and naturalization law, have appeared in PMLA, American Literary History, the Yale Journal of Criticism, Boundary 2, Differences, Diaspora, Social Text, and in several anthologies. She received her PhD from UCLA, and her B.A. and M.A. from Delhi University. return to top of page

Emily Labarbera-Twarog, School of Labor and Employment Relations

Emily E. LB. Twarog is an associate professor of history and labor studies at the University of Illinois’ School of Labor and Employment Relations – Labor Education Program and Director of the Regina V. Polk Women’s Labor Leadership Conference. She earned her doctorate in American History at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a master’s in Labor Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Labor Resource and Research Center. Her book Politics in the Pantry: Housewives, Food, and Consumer Protest in 20th Century America (Oxford University Press, 2017) examines the ways in which housewives in America used food protests as political tools to gain political influence both locally and nationally. Emily is sits on several boards including the Labor and Working Class History Association, Mother Jones Heritage Project, and the Working Women’s History Project. She is also the Innovations Editor at the Labor Studies Journal and an Editorial Board Member of LaborOnline, the online journal of LAWCHA. Emily grew up in New England and after moving around the country settled in the Chicago area in 1999. She spent 15 years in the food service industry as a line cook, drive-thru cashier, assistant pastry chef, bread baker, scone entrepreneur, and server. She was the president of GEO/UAW Local 2322 at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a community organizer with the Campaign for Labor Rights and Jobs with Justice, and a member of UNITE HERE Local 1 and a union steward in a downtown Chicago hotel where she worked as a server. She currently lives in Skokie with her husband who organizes workers, two marvelously curious boys who are growing up on the picket line, and one very fluffy dog named Roxi. In 2017, she was elected to the Skokie School District 73.5 for a four year term. return to top of page

Denise Lewin Loyd, Gies College of Business

Denise Lewin Loyd is an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior in the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her work on diversity in teams examines how group composition and the social status of group members interact to affect individual, interpersonal, and group outcomes. She uses a primarily experimental approach to understand the micro processes underlying interaction in diverse contexts. Her work has received recognition from the Academy of Management, the International Association for Conflict Management, the Journal of Management Education, and the State Farm Foundation. Prior to joining UIUC, she was on the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She earned her PhD in Management and Organizations from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management in 2005 return to top of page

Reitumetse Mabokela, Vice-Provost for International Affairs and Global Strategies

Reitumetse Obakeng Mabokela is the Vice-Provost for International Affairs and Global Strategies. Prior to joining the University of Illinois, she served as the Assistant Dean for International Studies in the College of Education and Professor of Higher Education in the Department of Educational Administration. Originally for South Africa, she received her BA in Economics from Ohio Wesleyan University, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. She pursued and graduated with a Master’s in Labor & Industrial Relations and a Ph.D in Educational Policy Studies, both from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prof. Mabokela's research seeks to understand experiences of marginalized populations and aims to inform and influence institutional policies that affect these groups within institutions of higher education. Her research centers or has centered on the examination of four interrelated themes: 1) organizational change and organizational culture in higher education; 2) gender in higher education; and 3) higher education in transitional societies. She has devoted a significant part of her career over the past decade studying these education issues in South Africa, Namibia, Tanzania, Ghana, Egypt, and Pakistan among others. Professor Mabokela employs inter-disciplinary approach to her research, drawing largely on theoretical approaches from Comparative & International Education, Policy Studies, Sociology, and Organizational Theory. With training in both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, Prof. Mabokela has devoted a significant part of her scholarly endeavors engaged in studies that employ a variety of qualitative approaches. Prof. Mabokela is the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of seven books, including Voices of Conflict: Desegregating South African Universities (RoutledgeFalmer 2000); Soaring Beyond Boundaries: Women Breaking Barriers in Traditional Societies (Sense 2007); Hear Our Voices! Race, Gender and the Status of Black South African Women in the Academy (UNISA 2004); Islam and Higher Education in Transitional Societies (Sense, 2009). She has published more than 50 articles in academic journals including Comparative Education Review, American Educational Research Journal, the Africa Education Review, and The Review of Higher Education, Comparative Education, Higher Education, among others. In the course of her career, she has raised more than $27 millions to support her research and other scholarly activities. return to top of page

Tim McCarthy, Department of Philosophy

Timothy G. McCarthy is Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Trained as a mathematician, he received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Johns Hopkins. His research interests lie mainly in mathematical logic, Philosophy of logic and mathematics as well as metaphysics. In addition to numerous articles, and an edited volume, he is the author of Radical Interpretation and Indeterminacy, a book on the foundations of the theory of meaning. He is interested in the problem of risk from the standpoint of decision theory and the theory of social choice. He also is interested in issues relating to higher education and inequality in a global context. He currently is chairing the Education subcommittee of the Illinois Inequality Initiative coordinated by WGGP. return to top of page

Monica McDermott , Department of Sociology

Monica McDermott is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, having received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University in 2001. She is the author of Working-Class White: The Making and Unmaking of Race Relations (2006), an ethnographic study of interracial interactions and white identity in Atlanta and Boston. She has also conducted participant observation research in new immigrant destinations, focusing especially on the impact of the Immigrant Rights marches of 2006 on the attitudes of native-born whites towards Latina/o immigrants. In addition, she has authored articles on white racial identity and attitudes, race and neighborhood contexts, and the black middle class. return to top of page

Robert McKim , Program for the Study of Religion

Robert McKim is Director of the Program for the Study of Religion and Professor of Religious Studies and of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has a Ph.D. in Religious Studies and Philosophy from Yale University and has been a member of the UIUC faculty since 1982. His major research interests include philosophy of religion, the history of early modern philosophy (especially Berkeley), and applied ethics. He has recently taught courses in philosophy of religion and in environmental ethics. He is currently writing a book on the implications of religious diversity. Recent publications include Religious Ambiguity and Religious Diversity (Oxford University Press, 2001); "The Goodness of the Real" Sophia, 2003; "Berkeley's Notebooks" in The Cambridge Companion to Berkeleyedited by Kenneth Winkler (Cambridge University Press, 2005); and "Berkeley", forthcoming in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Second Edition, edited by Donald Borchert (New York: Macmillan, 2005). return to top of page

Paul McNamara, Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics

Paul McNamara is Associate Professor of Consumer and Family Economics in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. McNamara is a health eonomist and consumer economist and his research addresses policy-relevant questions facing consumers and society. His research concentrates on health-related themes and it seeks to inform public debates and discussions surrounding nutrition and food policy issues. His food safety research (joint with Professor Gay Y. Miller and several co-authors) applies a general social welfare analysis framework to organize a set of sub-analyses concerning the gains to pork producers and the potential costs and health risks to cnsumers from the use of antibiotics in feeds at low levels of concentration (sub-therapeutic use) and to examine food safety issues in the pork system. Their model raises a number of potential policy approaches, which have not received much attention in the animal antibiotic use debate. Their analysis raises the possibility that, in addition to bans or restrictions on sub-therapeutic use in pork production, information-based strategies (including targeted permits and taxes) also might lead to overall social welfare gains. Their farm-to-fork simulation model has yielded estimates of the risks posed by pork-borne salmonellosis and they have applied it to the evaluation of measures aimed at reducing food safety risks in pork (Miller et al. 2005, McNamara et al., forthcoming). In the area of food policies and dietary behaviors, Wilde et al. (AJAE 1999) investigated the impact of participation in the Food Stamp Program and the WIC program on the likelihood of a person's adherence to the dietary guidelines as expressed in the Food Guide Pyramid. Findings indicated that there were small positive impacts on dietary quality, particularly for the WIC program. return to top of page

Ruby Mendenhall, Departments of Sociology, African American Studies, Urban and Regional Planning and School of Social Work

Ruby Mendenhall is an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She holds joint faculty appointments in Sociology, African American Studies, Urban and Regional Planning, and Social Work. She is currently a Faculty member at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology and a Faculty Affiliate at the Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences and Gender and Women Studies. She is the recipient of the Richard and Margaret Romano Professorial Scholar for outstanding achievements in research and leadership on campus. She is also a Grand Challenge Learning Teaching Fellow in the Health Track. Mendenhall’s research focuses on understanding the lived experiences of Black women and the consequences of racial oppression on mental and physical health using various research methods such as surveys, in-depth interviews, topic modeling, and visualizations. She teaches the following courses: Research Methods; Social Stratification; Urban Communities and Public Policy; Black Women in Contemporary U.S. Society; Genes and Behavior: Black Mothers in Englewood from Science to Society; and Stress and Health in Urban Communities. Her research has appeared in academic journals such as Social Forces, Social Science Research, Demography, Housing Policy Debate, The Review of Black Political Economy, The Black Scholar, and Social Service Review. return to top of page

Hope Michelson, Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics

Hope Michelson is an assistant professor of agricultural economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Professor Michelson earned a PhD in applied economics from Cornell University’s School of Applied Economics in the microeconomics of development and an MS in agricultural economics from the University of Illinois. She spent three years as a post-doctoral fellow at Columbia University. Her research has two primary themes: examining the dynamics and welfare effects of small farmer participation in contract farming, and analysis of small farmer agricultural production, soil fertility and food security in Sub-Saharan Africa. Current research projects include an impact evaluation of Walmart’s small farmer supply chains in China, an analysis of the effects of the provision of soil information to small farmers in Tanzania, experiments testing the effects of allocation mechanisms on uptake of fertilizer trees in Malawi, and a study of the poverty and food security effects of Malawi’s 2006 national small farmer input subsidy program. return to top of page

Faranak Miraftab, Urban and Regional Planning and Gender and Women's Studies

Fanark Miraftab is Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interest concerns social aspects of urban development. In this broad area, she is interested in how low-income groups and women in particular access housing and basic urban services. Key concepts in her research include debates on community-based strategies and mobilizations, non-governmental non-profit organizations and grassroots social movements, participatory planning processes, empowerment, citizenship and development. A native of Iran, she completed her undergraduate education at the College of Fine Arts at the Tehran University. While in political exile in Trondheim, Norway, she graduated with a Masters degree in Architecture at the Norwegian Institute of Technology and then completed doctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Over the years, her research and teaching has spanned several countries including Chile, Mexico, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and the United States. Her teaching covers multi-cultural understanding of cities as social processes; community development and the role of grassroots mobilizations; transnational urbanism; migration and development nexus; the reconfigured state-society relations of basic services and housing within the dominant global neoliberal policy framework. She also serves as the coordinator of The Transnational Planning Stream at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois.return to top of page

 

Ghassan Moussawi, Department of Sociology

Ghassan Moussawi is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and a faculty affiliate of the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign. He works in the areas of gender and sexualities, racialization, postcolonial feminist theory, queer theory and transnational/global studies. His current project focuses on gender, everyday life disruptions and queer visibilities in post-war Beirut. It also explores discourses of exceptionalism and cosmopolitanism, and realities of exclusion in Beirut.return to top of page

Eunmi Mun, Department of Sociology and School of Labor and Employment Relations

bio coming soonreturn to top of page

Chantal Nadeau, Gender and Women's Studies

Chantal Nadeau is Professor and Chair of the Department of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she is also affiliated with the Unit for Criticism and Interpretative Theory. Her research interests intersect queer theory; gender, sexuality, and nationalist rhetoric; visual cultures and sexuality; and contemporary queer legal cultures in nationalist and transnational contexts. She is the author of Fur Nation: From the Beaver to Brigitte Bardot (Routledge 2001). She is currently completing two book manuscripts: Beastly Politics: Queer, Rights and Democracy (contracted with University of Minnesota Press), and Ma Vie En Rose: A Queer Film Classic (contracted with Arsenal Pulp), and is co-editing with Martin F. Manalansan IV, Richard T. Rodriguez and Siobhan B. Somerville a special issue of GLQ on "Queering the Middle: Sexual Diasporas, Race, and a Queer Midwest". In her pre-UI life, Nadeau was Graduate Program Director and Director of the Joint Ph.D. Program in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University (Montreal, Quebec) for ten years.return to top of page

Radha Nandkumar, National Center for Supercomputercomputing Applications

Dr. Radha Nandkumar joined the staff of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Illinois in 1985, after completing her doctoral degree in Physics at UIUC. She also completed an Executive M.B.A. at the University of Illinois. Her thesis research in the area of condensed matter physics extrapolated to astrophysical systems has extended to theoretical modeling and computational science. She has more than ten publications in peer-reviewed journals related to her research work. She is currently the Program Director in charge of NCSA’s Campus Relations and International Affiliations and she has two decades of leadership and program management experience in computational science, strategic planning, and facilitating outreach on national and international levels. Dr. Nandkumar has managed computational resources, data, customer relations and information management on supercomputing research projects, resource allocations, peer review processes and technology transfer. She has given more than 100 technical presentations related to NCSA’s High Performance Computing infrastructure, The TeraGrid, applications research and information technologies. She is well recognized for her leadership roles in events promoting women in computing and in coalitions to diversify computing. Her current interests are related to high performance computing and grid computing, cyberinfrastructure and their impact on computational science research and society at large. In spearheading the International Affiliates Program for NCSA, Dr. Nandkumar identifies the synergy between activities at NCSA and academic institutions abroad, in the areas of cyberinfrastructure, high performance, cluster and grid computing, and applications sciences, and brokers relationships. Under her guidance, NCSA has established affiliations with sister institutions in Australia, Brazil, China, India, Korea, Russia, Taiwan, Singapore, South Africa, and the CCLRC in UK, and the UK eScience Program. NCSA is also a member institution in the Pacific Rim Applications and Grid Middleware Assembly (PRAGMA). In addition to this, she also hosts international research and management teams regularly at NCSA and represents NCSA abroad. She also serves on the advisory committees of several academic institutions both within the U.S.A. and around the globe for enabling science, computational science alliances, and cyberinfrastructure. Prior to her Ph.D, she worked at the University of Chicago’s Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research and at the Indian Space Research Organization’s Indian Scientific Satellite Project for conducting observations of X-ray astronomical objects using satellite and rocket borne payloads. return to top of page

Mimi Nguyen, Gender and Women's Studies and Asian American Studies

Mimi Thi Nguyen is Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her first book is The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages (Duke University Press, 2012; Outstanding Book Award in Cultural Studies from the Association of Asian American Studies, 2014). Her following project is called The Promise of Beauty. She has also published in Signs, Camera Obscura, Women & Performance, positions, Radical History Review, and Artforum. Nguyen was named a Conrad Humanities Scholar in 2013, a designation supporting the work of outstanding associate professors in the humanities within the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and a John A. and Grace W. Nicholson Scholar in 2017, both at the University of Illinois.return to top of page

Robert Pahre, Department of Political Science, European Union Center

Robert Pahre is currently Director of the European Union Center and Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received a Ph.D. in Political Science from UCLA and a B.A. in Intenational Relations and German Studies from Stanford University. His research focuses on the European Union; transboundary cooperation in wildlife and the environment; two-level games; and the politics of international trade. He is the author of Leading Questions: How Hegemony Affects the International Political Econom y and Politics and Trade Cooperation in the Nineteenth Cenury: The "Agreeable Customs" of 1815-1914 as well as several edited volumes and numerous book chapters and journal articles. return to top of page

Lissette Piedra, School of Social Work

Lissett Piedra is an associate professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Chicago School of Social Services Administration, a M.S.W. from Loyola University School of Social Work and a B.A. from Syracuse University College of Liberal Arts. Professor Piedra’s research examines how the language and culture of immigrants affect their access to and use of social and health services. Specifically, her analyses have focused on three interrelated topics, as they apply to Latino immigrants: (1) the mental health service barriers created by linguistic and cultural incongruence, (2) the increased need for bilingual and interpretational services in communities with rapidly growing immigrant populations, and (3) the adaption of interventions to these new service contexts through university and community partnerships. More recently, Dr. Piedra has worked on a transnational collaboration that seeks to bring sustainable water to rural communities in Guatemala. Together with faculty and students from the School of Social Work, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Wuqu’ Kawoq (WK), a Guatemala-based NGO that provides health services in to Maya communities, she is exploring the ways in which successful development projects can facilitate gender and community empowerment.return to top of page

Judith Pintar, Illinois Informatics, School of Information Science

Judith Pintar is a sociologist of science, technology, information & medicine, with a career focus on collective trauma and healing, and an area interest in Central Europe and the former Yugoslavia. She is a faculty affiliate with the Russian, East European & Eurasian Center (REEEC) and the European Union Center (EUC). She directs the Electronic Literatures and Literacies Lab, and is the co-director of the IPRH Research Cluster "Playful by Design: Interdisciplinary Games Studies @ Illinois". She is interested in gaming pedagogies used to teach issues of global concern, and collaborative game design as social intervention. return to top of page

Elizabeth Powers, Economics, Institute of Government and Public Affairs

Elizabeth Powers is an associate professor of Economics and a faculty member in the Institute of Government and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to joining the University of llinois in 1996, Elizabeth was an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and a junior staff economist with President George H.W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.A. in Economics from Vassar College. Elizabeth is the author of numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and has served on the editorial boards of Economic Development Quarterly and National Tax Journal . The recipient of fellowships and awards for her scholarship from the University of Pennsylvania, Vassar College, the Brookings Institution and the University of Illinois, she has been a principal investigator on numerous grants. In addition to research on incentive effects of U.S. welfare programs, her work on the effects of child health on maternal labor supply (appearing in the Journal of Human Resources and American Economic Review ) has been widely cited. Ongoing research projects are in the areas of child wellbeing, work disability, and development disabilities. She currently serves as a consultant on early child development to the Inter-American Development Bank. In this capacity, she is conducting a study of the impact of family member economic migration on children's cognitive development. For the past decade, Elizabeth has taught the course, "Health, Education, and Human Capital" to Ph.D. students, as a complement to the Development and Labor Fields. This course focuses on issues of fertility, investments in child quality (including education and health), the returns to schooling, and health behaviors. She has also advised and served on the committees of many Ph.D. students in the labor, development, and public fields. return to top of page

Marcela Raffaelli, Department of Human and Community Development

Marcela Raffaelli, Professor in the Department of Human and Community Development, studies child and adolescent development in culturally and economically diverse families. She received her B.A. from Williams College and her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1990. She held post-doctoral positions at Johns Hopkins and Rutgers, where her work focused on HIV/AIDS prevention projects for Brazilian street youth and ethnically diverse residents of U.S. inner cities. Her current interests center on issues of gender and sexuality, immigrant adaptation, and child development under conditions of extreme poverty. She is a long-time member of the Center for the Psychological Study of Street Youth at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil. She travels regularly to Brazil to participate in the Center’s training and outreach activities and has an active program of research in collaboration with colleagues at the Center. Professor Raffaelli recently created a study abroad course on Brazilian families. return to top of page

William Rose , School of Architecture

William Rose is Research Architect for the Building Research Council in the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his Master of Architecture degree from Harvard University and his A.B. degree from the University of Notre Dame. He is a licensed architect and his current research focuses on the Healthy Homes Initiative of HUD. His recent publications include Water in Buildings (John Wiley & Sons, 2005), “Should the walls of historic buildings be insulated?” APT Bulletin (Association for Preservation Technology) 2005, and T echnology assessment report: A field study comparison of the energy and moisture performance characteristics of ventilated versus sealed crawl spaces in the south, Rose, W., et al. 2002. US Department of Energy/Advanced Energy. return to top of page

Rebecca Sandefur, Department of Sociology

Rebecca L. Sandefur is Associate Professor of Sociology and Law at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and Faculty Fellow at the American Bar Foundation, where she founded and leads the Foundation's access to justice research initiative. Sandefur's research focuses on inequality, particularly as it relates to law. Her scholarship includes investigations of work and inequality in the legal profession and other professional occupations, lawyers' pro bono service and its contributions to legal aid, and studies of ordinary people's experiences with common problems that could bring them into contact with the civil justice system. Her current research on the public includes the Community Needs and Services Study (CNSS), a community-sited, multi-method study of ordinary people's experiences with civil justice problems and the resources available to assist them in handling those problems. The CNSS is funded by the National Science Foundation (SES-1123507) and the American Bar Foundation. In 2013, she was the The Hague Visiting Chair in the Rule of Law, affiliated with the Hague Institute for the Internationalization of Law. Her public service has included advising state access to justice commissions and service on the Right to Counsel Committee of the California Access to Justice Commission, the Research Advisory Board of the Civil Right to Counsel Leadership and Support Initiative, and the Sargent Shriver Civil Right to Counsel Evaluation Committee. Before joining the American Bar Foundation and the University of Illinois, Sandefur received her PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago in 2001 and served for 9 years on the sociology faculty of Stanford University. return to top of page

Carla Santos, Department of Recreation, Sport, and Tourism

Carla Santos is Associate Professor in Department of Recreation, Sport, and Tourism and Departments of Anthropology and Landscape Architecture at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Her research program is focused on the examination of communicative practices (from mass mediated narratives to the face-to-face dyad) as a means of addressing the socio-political and cultural impact of tourism on the world's people and cultures. Professor Santos' main areas of interests are in the socio-cultural and political aspects of tourism and heritage; the personalized worlds of experience guided by tourism representations; and, the ideological forces that shape and organize tourism representations and cultural heritage management. Central to her research is the notion that community involvement in tourism planning and cultural heritage management is fundamental if we are to facilitate sustainable development, as well as inspire and foster productive social change. return to top of page

Clifford E. Singer, Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering

Clifford E. Singer is Professor of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at the University of Illinois, and is currently co-director of the College of Engineering Initiative on Energy and Sustainability Engineering. Singer received a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Illinois, a Ph.D. in biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley and was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT. He subsequently did research in plasma physics, advanced space propulsion, and the computational simulation of thermonuclear plasma performance at the University of London, Princeton University, and the University of Illinois. He was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institutes for Strömungsforschung and Plasmaphysik at Göttingen and Garching in Germany and is a member of American Physical Society and the American Nuclear Society. Singer has worked extensively on issues related to the cessation of production of nuclear materials for nuclear explosives programs, including related matters dealing with outer space and the future of nuclear explosives stockpiles. He is currently supervising research on global energy economics with emphasis on spent nuclear fuel management, sources of energy for transportation, and greenhouse gas emissions. Prior to completing a recent sabbatical leave at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Center for Technology and Security Policy in Washington, DC, he was the Director of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security (ACDIS). return to top of page

Karen Tabb, School of Social Work

Karen Tabb received her PhD in Social Welfare from the University of Washington in Seattle. She was a TL1 multidisciplinary clinical research trainee through the Institute for Translational Health Sciences funded by the National Institutes of Health National Center for Research Resources. She received her Master’s in Social Work (Social Policy and Evaluation) from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and her Bachelor of Arts in Sociology at Eastern Michigan University. Professor Tabb is interested in translational research projects that emphasize social epidemiology and behavioral factors related to health across the life course. Her past research experiences center on racial and ethnic health disparities (e.g., diabetes and cancer) and include coordinating research with community health clinics and assisting with community based participatory research projects. Dr. Tabb’s current research focuses on the social determinants of health and mental health outcomes for pregnant and postpartum women. She is conducting a pilot study in a racially and ethnically diverse public health clinic to screen perinatal women for psychosocial risk factors during pregnancy. She is also a part of a team investigation to identify the multiple social determinants of pregnancy outcomes and health disparities over the life course. return to top of page

Rebecca Thornton, Department of Economics

Rebecca Thornton is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Thornton completed her PhD in Political Economy and Government with a joint degree from the Harvard University Economics Department and the J.F. Kennedy School of Government in 2006. She was an NIA post-doc from 2006 to 2008 at the University of Michigan Population Studies Center. Her research focuses on health and education in developing countries including topics such as HIV prevention, reproductive health, primary education, and social networks. Dr. Thornton is an affiliate with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) whose main aims are to use experimental methods to translate research into policy action and alleviate poverty in the developing world. She is also a junior affiliate in BREAD (Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development). return to top of page

Angharad Valdivia, Institute of Communications Research

Angharad Valdivia is Research Professor of Communications, Professor of Media Studies, Professor of Latina/Latino Studies, Professor of Unit for Interpretive Criticism, and Professor of Gender and Women's Studies Her primary areas of interest are Gender and ethnicity in popular culture, especially U.S. Latina/o and Latin American; Media Studies; International communications; and feminist studies. Professor Valdivia's research combines the areas of gender and feminist studies with ethnic studies. She brings these together in the examination of contemporary mainstream popular culture in an approach that explores the tension between agency and structure. She has conducted field research in Nicaragua, Peru, and Chile. Current research projects include hybridity theory as it applies to Latina/o Studies, ambiguity as a strategy of ethnic representation, and differentiation within Latinidad. She is working on a book length manuscript entitled "The Gender of Latinidad" and several other projects. Professor Valdivia is the author of A Latina in the Land of Hollywood [Arizona, 2000]and the editor of The Media Studies Companion [Blackwell, 2003]; Feminism, Multiculturalism, and the Media: Global Diversities [Sage: 1995]; the communication and culture section of the Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women [2000] and co-editor of Geographies of Latinidad [Duke, 2006]. She has published essays in the Communication Review, Global Media Journal, Journal of Communication, the Journal of International Communication, the Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies, the International Journal of Inclusive Education, Women and Language, Chasqui, and in many edited anthologies. Professor Valdivia is an affiliate faculty member with Women and Gender in Global Perspectives Program and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. return to top of page

Madhu Viswanathan, Business Administration

Madhu Viswanathan, Professor of Business Administration, has been on the faculty at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, since 1990. His research programs are in two areas; measurement and research methodology, and literacy, poverty, and subsistence marketplace behaviors. He has authored books in both areas: Measurement Error and Research Design (Sage, 2005), and Enabling Consumer and Entrepreneurial Literacy in Subsistence Marketplaces (Springer, 2008, in alliance with UNESCO). His research program with a methodological orientation on measurement and research design paralleled many years of teaching research at all levels. It culminated in a book directed at the social sciences that provides a most detailed conceptual dissection of measurement error. This work is a striking departure from the existing literature, which emphasizes a statistical orientation without sufficient elucidation of the conceptual meaning of measurement error. His research on subsistence marketplaces takes a micro-level approach to gain bottom-up understanding of life circumstances and buyer, seller, and marketplace behaviors. This perspective aims to enable subsistence marketplaces to move toward being ecologically, economically, and socially sustainable marketplaces. His research is synergized with innovative teaching and social initiatives. He teaches courses on research methods, and at the intersection of subsistence and sustainability - on sustainable product and market development for subsistence marketplaces, and on sustainable marketing enterprises. He directs the Subsistence Marketplaces Initiative (www.business.illinois.edu/subsistence). His research is applied through the Marketplace Literacy Project (www.marketplaceliteracy.org), a non-profit organization that he founded and directs. return to top of page

Kate Williams, Graduate School of Library and Information Science

Kate Williams is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Her research question asks this: Is community possible in the digital age? She follows in the footsteps of the early urban sociologists, who debated whether community was possible in the industrial age. Part of this question is: What is the role of the public library in this process? Her scholarship makes use of five interrelated concepts: community, social capital, public computing, cyberpower, and the informatics moment. By focusing on community and social capital, she has clarified how community technology adoption and transformation rely primarily on forces within that community, even in underresourced communities. By examining public computing—public places where people learn and use computers—she has demonstrated the usefulness of these spaces for local community members and explained how they function. By applying the concept of cyberpower to the study of communities, she has focused attention on the results for communities that use information technology rather than one technology itself as a social intervention. And by identifying the informatics moment, she has shifted attention from the structural deficit model implied in the concept “digital divide” to a process model of self-reliant community transformation. return to top of page

Timothy Wedig, Global Studies Program

Dr. Timothy Wedig joined the Global Studies Program at the University of Illinois as a Visiting Lecturer in 2008 and became Associate Director in 2013. He holds a PhD in Political Economy from the University of Maryland, College Park. Research and teaching interests are focused on approaches to sustainable peacebuilding, conflict prevention, humanitarian intervention, and information technology. Dr. Wedig has over 15 years’ experience in designing and facilitating simulation exercises for classroom and professional training environments. return to top of page

Lesley Wexler, College of Law

Professor Lesley Wexler joined the Illinois Law School faculty in fall 2010, teaching torts, laws of war and international environmental law. Before coming to Illinois, Professor Wexler taught at the Florida State University College of Law. Prior to teaching at Florida State, she spent two years at the University of Chicago Law School as a Bigelow Fellow and Lecturer on Law. Professor Wexler has broad research interests in international humanitarian law, human rights law, and sex discrimination. Professor Wexler specializes in those legal areas that reflect the movement of anti-discrimination and humanitarian norms through domestic law, international law, social movements, and corporations. She has written on the legitimacy of targeting decisions, the blood diamond trade, and the regulation of depleted uranium and landmines, along with a series of articles on human rights impact statements. Her work has drawn on case studies using DeBeers, Wal-Mart, and Chik-fil-A. Professor Wexler earned her B.A. with honors from the University of Michigan and her J.D. with honors from the University of Chicago Law School. While in law school, she served on the board of both the Chicago International Law Journal and the Chicago Legal Forum. return to top of page

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Chi-Fang Wu, School of Social Work

Chi-Fang Wu is an Associate Professor and PhD Program Director in the School of Social Work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She received her master’s degree in social work from National Taiwan University and her Ph.D. in social work from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has taught courses in social welfare planning, social welfare policy and services, policy advocacy and practice, program evaluation, and social work research methods. Her research areas focus on poverty, gender inequalities, food security, access to public benefits and support service for low-income families, and program evaluation. Her research interest is in assessing the effectiveness of different strategies for promoting economic advancement among women. She has extensive experience analyzing complex, longitudinal, state administrative data and national, population-based data. Her current research investigates the effects of unemployment and underemployment on the well-being of low-income families with children, examines the impact of SNAP on food security and health status, and explores the effects of Affordable Care Act on the social and economic well-being of low-income families. Furthermore, she collaborates with faculty and students from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UIUC. They have been investigating social-cultural barriers hinders the use of water treatment projects in Guatemala and evaluating its health impacts on the residents. return to top of page

Min Zhan, School of Social Work

Min Zhan is an Associate Professor with the School of Social Work, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is also a faculty associate of the Center for Social Development at Washington University. As a social policy researcher, Dr. Zhan has studied various topics related to poverty, social welfare policies, and socioeconomic inequality. Her research centers on examining the impact of postsecondary education, financial asset development, and financial management training in the economic well-being of low-income families, in particular, among low-income women with children. Her research has been published in about 40 journal articles, and in book chapters and reports. She received her Ph.D. in social work from Washington University in St. Louis. return to top of page