Illinois Wesleyan Appoints New Faculty for 2003-04 Academic Year

Aug. 18, 2003

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. -- Seven new faculty members have been added to tenure track positions at Illinois Wesleyan University for the 2003-04 academic year, while seven more have joined the faculty as visiting professors.

The new tenure-track faculty are:

• Sobeira Latorre — Assistant professor of Hispanic Studies. Latorre earned her bachelor’s degree from Amherst College and her doctorate from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Her scholarly interests are in Latin American literature, cultural studies, and women and gender studies. Her recently-completed dissertation is "Crisscrossing Gender, Autobiography and History in Latina Auto-fictional Discourse." At SUNY -Stony Brook, she taught courses in Spanish language and Latino literature, and guest lectured in several courses in Latino studies.

• Jason Moralee — Assistant professor of history. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Santa Barbara and his master’s and doctorate at the University of California at Los Angeles, where he spent a year teaching as the Mortimer Chambers Postdoctoral Lecturer in Ancient History. His doctoral dissertation on ancient inscriptions is titled "For Salvation’s Sake: Provincial Loyalty and Personal Religion in the Dedications for Salvation from the Roman and Late Antique Near East, 100 BC — AD 800." Moralee has taught and/or performed field research in Rome, Israel, and Germany.

• Jin Park — Assistant professor of business administration. Park earned his first bachelor’s degree in crop science at Kon-Kuk University in Seoul, Korea in 1990. He earned a second bachelor’s degree in business from Lewis-Clark State College (Idaho). He received his MBA from Minnesota State University at Mankato and recently completed his doctorate at Temple University with specialization in risk, insurance and healthcare management. He is pursuing certification in the Society of Actuaries and in the Chartered Property Casualty Underwriters.

• Carrie Trimble — Instructor in marketing. Trimble earned her bachelor’s degree in advertising from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and her master’s degree from the University of Illinois at Springfield. She comes to IWU from Michigan State University where she is finishing her doctorate in mass media with a dissertation theme of "Implications of Attribution of Motive for Cause-related Marketing. Trimble has worked in communications for the Illinois Department of Corrections in Springfield and wrote her master’s dissertation on the "Portrayal of Women in Cosmopolitan Advertisements for Female Contraceptives."

• Weiyu Zhu — Instructor in computer science. Zhu earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Control Theory and Applications at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, then came to the U.S. to study "multimedia integrated parallel file system design" at Northwestern for one year. He entered the graduate program for his doctorate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has been a research intern at Siemens Corp. in Princeton, N.J., and at Eastman Kodak in Rochester, N.Y. He is a co-holder of a patent for "closed captioned text-based automatic video news story classification and grouping," granted by the European Patent Office. Zhu’s most recent research is a study of how a robot might autonomously learn to see and recognize objects in its environment.

Two who were faculty members at Illinois Wesleyan last year in a visiting role have been added to tenure-track faculty appointments. They are:

• Stephen Hoffmann — Environmental studies and chemistry. Hoffman earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Hired jointly in environmental studies and chemistry, Hoffman’s doctoral studies have been in the Environmental Chemistry and Technology Program, with his dissertation on natural organic and colloidal ligands for trace metal binding in rivers.

• Sammie Robinson — Business administration. Robinson has a bachelor’s degree from Southwestern University, an M.B.A. from Southern Methodist University, and a doctorate from the University of Kansas. She has previously served as assistant professor in the College of Business at Illinois State University.

The new visiting faculty members are:

• William Brandon — Visiting assistant professor of physics. Brandon comes to IWU from Middle Tennessee State University, where he taught in the department of physics and astronomy. He has considerable practical research experience in atomic physics and in the physics of aeronautical engineering, having worked as an experimental physicist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and as a physicist/engineer for Sverdrup Technology at Arnold Air Force Base (Tenn.). Among other things, he has used lasers to study the properties of negatively charged ions, and has participated in a number of studies of the aeronautical properties and propulsion systems of high-speed aircraft. His theoretical physics interests include formulating a hypothesis on the origin of mass and gravity. He holds bachelor’s and doctorate degrees from the University of Tennessee.

• Mark Criley — Visiting instructor in philosophy. Criley has a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University and a master’s from the University of Pittsburgh, where he is finishing a doctoral dissertation entitled "Concepts, Conceptions, and Conceivability." Criley has previously taught "Philosophy of Law" during IWU’s May Term and is the son of Bruce and Norma Criley, both of whom teach biology at Illinois Wesleyan. He taught 10 different philosophy courses as a teaching fellow while pursuing his graduate degrees at Pittsburgh.

• Michelle Ernst — Visiting assistant professor of psychology. Ernst earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and her master’s and doctorate from the State University of New York at Buffalo. She finished her doctoral degree in clinical psychology in 2001 while nearly simultaneously finishing an American Psychological Association-accredited internship in Child Clinical and Pediatric Psychology at the Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati. Her research interests include the study of osteoporosis-related attitudes, knowledge and behaviors of mothers of girls, and the study of behavioral intervention in the prevention and treatment of childhood obesity. She has been a co-instructor in health psychology at SUNY-Buffalo and co-taught abnormal psychology at IWU in 2001. Since October 2001, she has worked as a family support specialist at The Baby Fold in Normal.

• Jennifer Hancock — Visiting assistant professor of English. Hancock has her bachelor’s and doctorate degrees from Oklahoma State University and earned a master’s of fine arts from Sarah Lawrence College. She comes to IWU from Millikin University where she has taught courses in creative writing, critical thinking/research, and literary history. Her literary history courses have focused on such topics as Harlem poetry and the literature of the Irish Renaissance. Hancock is an accomplished, widely-published poet and has served as editor for Midland Review, Cimarron Review, and Crazyhorse.

• Benjamin Hill — Visiting assistant professor of philosophy. Hill earned his bachelor’s degree from Simpson College and his master’s and doctorate from the University of Iowa. Hill is interested in epistemology and early modern philosophy, but his primary philosophical focus is on the work of Locke, and he has published a number of papers and given numerous presentations on Lockean philosophy, including a March 2003 presentation on "Locke’s Neo-Platonic Ideas of Modes" at Cambridge University. Hill has taught introductory courses in ethics, reasoning, logic, and the philosophy of science at Iowa, Loras, and Simpson.

• Amy McCabe — Visiting instructor in psychology. McCabe has a bachelor’s degree from Augustana (Ill.), where she majored in psychology and minored in French, and a master’s degree from the University of Oklahoma. She is working toward a doctorate at Kansas State University. McCabe’s research projects have covered several areas of social psychology, and she has participated in studies of the perceptions of faculty and administrative staff serving on university search committees; of how individuals respond to job burnout; and of gender and racial stereotyping. More recently, she has studied techniques for reducing the incidence of undergraduate binge drinking.

• Stephen Press — Visiting assistant professor of music. Press earned a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering in 1971 at the University of Southern California. He worked as an air traffic controller in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and in Chicago, and won an award for excellence in "providing on-the-job training" to less senior air traffic controllers in the Great Lakes region. In the mid-1980’s, Press earned a bachelor’s degree in music history and a master’s in musicology at Illinois State University before gaining a doctorate in musicology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Press, who won prizes for both his master’s and doctoral dissertations, is writing a book on the work of Sergey Prokofiev.