Illinois State University
02/28/2026 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 02/28/2026 09:53
Research and Honors, March 2026
Research and Honors is a monthly column of the Illinois State Report newsletter, celebrating recent Honors, Publications, and Presentations of faculty and staff.
Presentations
Camille Cole, HIS, presented a paper on "Investing in Debt and Violence: Tax Farming Economies in Late Ottoman Basra" at the American Historical Association Conference in Chicago.
Richard Hughes, HIS, presented at a roundtable on "The Making of a Teacher: Looking Back, Looking Forward" at the American Historical Association Conference in Chicago.
Megan VanGorder, HIS, presented on a panel titled "The University Water Park Crisis: Lead Poisoning, a Private Utility, and the Struggle for Environmental Justice in the Chicago Southland" at the American Historical Association Conference in Chicago.
Taylor Soja, HIS, presented a book chapter, "War and the colonial careerist: colonial war as professional success in the lives of British Army officers," at Indiana University's European History Workshop. She also led a professionalization seminar for the History Department's grad students.
Megan VanGorder, HIS, chaired and provided comments for a panel titled "Teaching Freedom: Approaches and Resources on Freedom-Seeking and the Underground Railroad in Illinois" at the Illinois Network to Freedom Collective Conference in Jacksonville, Illinois.
Publications
Caitlin Mercier and Brea Banks, both PSY, co-authored an article titled "Shades of Stress: Colorism as Minority Stress for Women of Color" in Psychology of Women Quarterly.
John R. Blakeman, MCN, co-authored a scientific statement titled "Acute Coronary Syndromes in Premenopausal Women: A Scientific Statement from the American Heart Association" in Circulation.
Heba Elgazzar, TEC, published "A System for Real-Time Classification of Phishing Emails Using Large Language Models (LLMs) with Natural Language Processing (NLP)" in IEEE 16th Annual Ubiquitous Computing, Electronics & Mobile Communication Conference (UEMCON).
Eric Kramer, KNR, published "Social anchor of the Pelican State: Intangible benefits and economic impact of the Superdome" in Journal of Contemporary Issues in Sport, December 2025 and also published "Paying College Athletes: A Reference Handbook" in Bloomsbury Publishing, January 2026.
Erol Sozen, FCS, published "Insights from the environmental management processes of us craft breweries" in Journal of Foodservice Business Research, November 2025.
Oscar Nunez Enriquez, KNR, published "Inclusion Challenges and Educational Practices of Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students in a Physical Education Teacher Education Program from a Latin-American Country" in Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, January 2026.
Dawn Beichner-Thomas, CJS, published "'I Have Already Lost My Kids': Mothering Experiences of Women in Jail" in International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, January 2026.
Tahmid Rashid, IT, published "MAVREN: A multilayered adaptive framework for deploying vision-language models on resource-constrained unmanned aerial vehicles for autonomous search and rescue" in Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence [Elsevier], December 22, 2025.
Mangolika Bhattacharya, IT, published "Defect-Aware Automation: A Low-Cost IoT Approach to Closed-Loop Control in Additive Manufacturing" in IEEE, December 22, 2025.
Elke Altenburger and Gabriela Fonseca Pereira, both FCS, co-authored "Navigating the Space between Soft Lead and Mixed Reality with Design Students" in Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, January 2026.
Charles Bell, CJS, "Meeting Parental School Discipline Advocacy with Violence: How Schools Retaliate Against Families" in The Urban Review, February 2, 2026.
Megan VanGorder, HIS, published a book, A Mother's Work: Mary Bickerdyke, Civil War-Era Nurse.
For questions, please contact Valerie Welsh in Media Relations and Strategic Communications at [email protected], or [email protected].
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