Featured Speakers
This series highlights the speaker biographies of the faculty featured in the Authors@EIU events.
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Dr. Linda Ghent
Linda Ghent
Linda S. Ghent is an award-winning economics professor at Eastern Illinois University. A former editor of the Journal for Economics Teaching, Linda has presented and published many articles about teaching economics. The second edition of her book (co-authored with Alan Grant), Seinfeld and Economics: Lessons on Everything from the Show About Nothing, published in 2024.
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Dr. Amie Whittemore
Amie Whittemore
Amie Whittemore (she/her) is the author of the poetry collections Glass Harvest (Autumn House Press), Star-tent: A Triptych (Tolsun Books) and Nest of Matches (Autumn House Press, 2024). She was the 2020-2021 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. She teaches creative writing at Eastern Illinois University. Learn more at amiewhittemore.com.
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Dr. Ryan Burge
Ryan Burge
Dr. Ryan Burge is an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University. He is the author or co-author of four books including The Nones, 20 Myths about Religion and Politics in America, and The Great Dechurching. He has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and POLITICO. He has also appeared on 60 Minutes, where Anderson Cooper called him, "one of the leading data analysts of religion and politics in the United States." He has been a pastor of an American Baptist Church for over seventeen years.
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Dr. Stephen Eskilson
Stephen Eskilson
Stephen Eskilson received his PhD from Brown University in 1995. He is the author of Graphic Design A New History (Yale UP, 3rd ed. 2019) and The Age of Glass (Bloomsbury, 2018). He is an avid sailor and pick-up basketball player.
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Dr. Julie Campbell
Julie Campbell
Dr. Julie D. Campbell is Professor of English and Coordinator of the Premodern Global Studies Minor at Eastern Illinois University. She is a co-editor of Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Her research focuses on early modern women and their transnational contexts.
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Dr. Bob Klein
Bob Klein
Bob Klein serves as Chair and Professor of Teaching, Learning, and Foundations. Klein’s recent publications include Middle of Somewhere but also Why Rural Matters 2023: Centering Equity and Opportunity. His research focus is equity broadly, and rural and Indigenous education more specifically. Klein comes to EIU after having spent nearly 18 years at Ohio University in various academic and leadership roles.
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Dr. Alexis Jones
Alexis Jones
Dr. Alexis Jones is an Associate Professor in the Teaching, Learning, and Foundations Department at Eastern Illinois University. Before earning her doctorate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she was an elementary teacher and then grant coordinator for a small, urban school district. At Eastern, she frequently teaches undergraduate courses on assessment and graduate courses on assessment and research methods and has published in numerous journals, including The Educational Forum, the Journal of Culture and Values in Education, Teachers College Record, and Issues in Teacher Education.
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Dr. Scott Meiners
Scott Meiners
Dr. Scott Meiners is a plant ecologist interested in community dynamics, species invasions, and biotic interactions. His undergraduate and Masters degrees are from Miami University (Botany), and his doctorate (Ecology) from Rutgers. He currently teaches at Eastern Illinois University and grows trees on his farm near there.
