Faculty and Staff
Many of the faculty members at Illinois State University have experience with community and economic development in the United States and around the world. This list includes departmental chairs and graduate program advisors, Stevenson Center staff, and the faculty most involved with the programs, either as sequence core instructors or instructors of required degree program courses. Please also see web sites for the Departments of Economics, Politics & Government, and Sociology & Anthropology for further information on these and additional faculty members.
Frank D. Beck : Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University
Dr. Beck is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Faculty Director of the Stevenson Center. He works in the area of community economic development, local policy, persistent poverty, and the relationship between schools and the economic health of communities. Regarding the latter, Dr. Beck is completing work on a $500,000 grant
examining the causes and consequences of school closure and consolidation. Dr. Beck regularly teaches the Seminar in Community Development and the graduate statistics course in Sociology.
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Beverly Beyer: M.S., Illinois State University; M.A. College of William & Mary
Ms. Beyer serves as Stevenson Center
Associate Director. A certified Professional Community and Economic Developer, she coordinates the Peace Corps Fellows Program, Applied Community and Economic Development Fellows Program, and Peace Corps Master’s International Program. Ms. Beyer is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (Bulgaria) and has served with AmeriCorps and non-profit organizations. She has taught grant writing and English, and she has a graduate certificate in project management.
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Sherrilyn Billger: Ph.D., University of Illinois
Dr. Billger is an Associate Professor of Economics with research interests in labor economics, education, and applied econometrics. She is serving as Interim Department Chair and Undergraduate Program Director. Her work on single-sex education and on incentive pay for teachers and administrators has been presented before the American Education Finance Association, Society of Labor Economists, and the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. Her research appears in Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Journal of Labor Research, Industrial Relations, Developments in School Finance, and Applied Economics Letters and has been funded by the USDA National Research Initiative. She was a Visiting Scholar at Cornell University and has been named a Research Fellow at the Institute for Labor Studies (IZA) in Bonn, Germany.
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Martha Boudeman: B.S., Illinois State University
Ms. Boudeman serves as staff clerk for the Stevenson Center and supports the center’s operations. She has thirty-five years professional experience as an administrative assistant and an educator of children with learning differences.
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Joan M. Brehm: Ph.D., Utah State University
Dr. Brehm is an Associate Professor of Sociology. In July 2011, Dr. Brehm began as Graduate Coordinator for the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. Her areas of specialization are natural resources/environment, community, and demography. Her research interests center around how communities function and what factors influence their various relationships and attitudes towards 'nature' and what those attitudes mean for both sustainable land management and broader community well-being. One avenue of investigation has focused on an examination of the role of natural environment amenities in community attachment and their relationship to community well-being in rural areas in the Intermountain West. More recently, she has focused her scholarship on research that examines the role of values, attitudes, and place attachment in the development of sustainable, watershed-scale stewardship of water quality and natural resources at the community level. Dr. Brehm teaches People in Places: Understanding and Developing Community, Introduction to Social Research Methods, Society and Environment, and Applied Community Project Design and Management.
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Thomas Burr: Ph.D., University of California, Davis
Dr. Burr is an Assistant Professor of Sociology. His area of expertise includes economic, cultural, and organizational sociology; the sociology of consumption; and historical sociology, with a special interest in world history and long-term globalization. His research interests include the historical analysis of consumer markets. His current main project is on the national bicycle markets of France and the United States around the turn of the twentieth century. He has also started a research project on industry-wide institutions, including trade shows, professional associations, and the trade press. He has taught Global Development and Economic Change numerous times, and welcomes interdisciplinary collaboration with Stevenson students on macrosocial factors in development.
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Oguzhan Dincer: Ph.D., University of Oregon
Oz Dincer is an Assistant Professor and Graduate Coordinator in the Department of Economics. His research interests are in Economic Growth and Development as well as Public Economics with particular focus on causes and consequences of institutions. His published work appears in Public Choice, International Tax and Public Finance and Applied Economics. His teaching experience includes Macroeconomics, Public Economics, Econometrics, and International Economics. He joined Illinois State University following three years with Massey University in New Zealand.
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Johanna Haas: Ph.D., Ohio State University; J.D., Ohio State University
Johanna Haas is an Assistant Professor of Geography in the Department of Geography-Geology. Her areas of specialization are natural resources/environment, energy, and rural areas. Her current research focuses on the political economy of property in rural extractive communities in Appalachia and Alaska. Within these areas she explores theorizing land as a holistic entity, conceptualizing complexity in blended systems, the legal geography of property, and the impacts of all of these ideas on rural communities.
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Robert W. Hunt: Ph.D., Princeton University
Dr. Hunt is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Stevenson Center Senior Faculty Fellow. He has written extensively in the area of political participation and development, focused on the role of the "civil society" in development in Asia and Africa. He has consulted with the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the United Nations throughout the world, particularly on the role of community economic activity in development. In 1994, Dr. Hunt launched Illinois State University's Peace Corps Fellows Program, the first in the nation in community and economic development (joint with Western Illinois University).
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David Malone : Ph.D., University of Wisconsin
Dr. Malone has been Chairperson of the Department of Geography-Geology since 2000. His major fields of interest are Structural Geology, Stratigraphy, Geologic Mapping, Ore Deposits, and Field Geology. He has authored dozens of research articles, field guides, and geologic maps. He is a strong advocate for geologic mapping, and the publication of geologic maps, which are fundamental infrastructure that is needed for resource development issues.
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Aaron Pitluck: Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison
Dr. Pitluck is an Assistant Professor of Sociology. His areas of expertise include global development, economic sociology, globalization, and finance. His non-U.S. geographical areas of expertise are Southeast Asia, Asia-Pacific, and Europe. His primary research project is a study of how social forces structure the behavior of professional fund managers in the United States, Canada, and Malaysia. By studying such social forces on professional investors, Dr. Pitluck is interested in policy-making to shape fund managers' behavior in ways constructive to development. The second project is a study of real utopian financial markets, a study that includes case studies of the socially responsible investment movement and Islamic finance. He teaches Global Development & Economic Change and Economic Sociology. Dr. Pitluck welcomes research assistance or collaboration with Stevenson students.
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Ali Riaz: Ph.D., University of Hawaii
Dr. Riaz is Professor and Chair of the Department of Politics and Government. His areas of interest include: South Asian politics, community development, religion and politics, and political communication. His articles appeared in scholarly journals such as Asian Survey, Journal of Asian and African Studies, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, and Asian Profile. Dr. Riaz has seven books in English and ten in Bengali. His recent publications include Faithful Education:
Madrassahs in South Asia (Rutgers University Press, 2008),
Islamist Militancy in Bangladesh: A Complex Web (Routledge, 2008).
His previous publications are State, Class and Military Rule: Political Economy of Martial Law in Bangladesh (1994), God Willing: The Politics of Islamism in Bangladesh (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), and Unfolding State: The Transformation of Bangladesh ( de Sitters Publications, 2005). Dr. Riaz has received numerous awards including Dean's Award for Outstanding Scholarship in 2004, Outstanding College Researcher in 2005, and
Pi Sigma Alpha Excellence in Teaching Award in 2006.
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Rebecca Rossi: M.S., Illinois State University
Ms. Rossi serves as the Assistant Director at the Stevenson Center. Rebecca has spent most of her career in the non-profit sector working in crisis services and affordable housing. She has an interest in sustainability, specifically sustainable development and green building, and she was most recently the sustainability specialist at Heartland Community College. Rebecca has taught residential development and project management. Along with an M.S. from Illinois State University, she holds a graduate certificate in Project Management and is a LEED Accredited Professional.
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Kam Shapiro: Ph.D., John Hopkins University
Dr. Shapiro is an Associate Professor of Political Science and serves as Graduate Advisor for the Department of Politics And Government. His work focuses on somatic and aesthetic dimensions of sovereignty and citizenship. He is the author of Sovereign Nations, Carnal States (Cornell University Press, 2003) and Carl Schmitt and the Intensification of Politics (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008) along with various articles and reviews.
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Fred Smith: Ph.D., University of Michigan
Dr. Smith is Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. He is a human paleontologist who has spent 40 years studying the paleobiology of European Neandertals and the broader issue of the origin of modern humans. The author of almost 200 professional publications, Smith has been a Fulbright Fellow (Croatia), an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow (Germany), and a National Academy of Sciences Exchange Scholar
(Yugoslavia). This 1984 book, The Origin of Modern Humans, was named the Outstanding Book in the Life Sciences for that year by the American Association of Publishers, and in 2006 he received the initial Hermann Schaaffhausen Prize for the Study of Neandertals from the State Museum of the Rhineland in Germany.
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Mike Sublett: Ph.D., The University of Chicago
Dr. Sublett is a Professor of Geography and former Chair of the Department of Geography-Geology. He has been a member of the faculty at Illinois State since 1970 and coordinated the required internship program for undergraduate Geography majors in the non-teaching sequences since 1987. With a research focus on the Midwest, he has published monographs dealing with agricultural land tenure, creation of counties, and diffusion of the township form of government. In addition to the Geography of Illinois, he teaches Doing Geography, Field Geography, and Seminar in Geography.
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T.Y. Wang: Ph.D., State University of New York at Buffalo
Dr. Wang is Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Politics and Government and Director of Unit for International Linkages, ISU Office of International Studies and Programs. He is currently the co-editor of the Journal of Asian and African Studies . His areas of specialization include: East Asian politics and research methodology. Dr. Wang has authored or edited five books and published 30 book chapters and articles in such scholarly journals as the American Political Science Review, Asian Survey, International Studies Quarterly and Journal of Peace Research . His current research focuses on cross-Strait relations, US policy towards China and Taiwan and China’s local elections. Dr. Wang has received research grants from a variety of foundations, including the National Science Foundation, the Pacific Cultural Foundation and the World Society Foundation. He has been frequently invited to conduct workshops and present papers in China, Germany, Japan, and Taiwan. Dr. Wang is on the Advisory Board of the Korean Association of Public Policy and the Editorial Board of the Taiwanese Political Science Review and the Journal of East Asian Studies.
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Anne Wortham: Ph.D., Boston College
Dr. Wortham, a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (Tanzania III, 1963-1965), is an Associate Professor of Sociology. Her scholarship interests are the sociology of culture, the history of social thought, social stratification, and American political culture. She has been a John M. Olin Foundation Faculty Fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, and a Visiting Scholar at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Dr. Wortham is the author of The Other Side of Racism: A Philosophical Study of Black Race Consciousness (1981), and numerous articles on civil rights policy, American identity and the melting pot ideal, and ethical individualism in American culture. Her two-hour conversation with Bill Moyers for his 1989 PBS documentary series, "A World of Ideas," is widely distributed as a video recording and published in his book, A World of Ideas. Her current research focuses on Booker T. Washington as a cultural carrier of the nineteenth-century success ethic. She is also developing an anthology of her essays on individualism.
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