News Bureau

Champaign campus has never had an African-American head football or basketball coach.

University trustees approved a 1.7 percent tuition increase for incoming freshmen that matches last year's increase - both the smallest since 1994.

The UI Board of Trustees signed off on several infrastructure improvements at its Dec. 2 meeting in Springfield, though not all of them were related to physical plant upgrades.

At the Jan. 22 meeting of the U. of I. Board of Trustees, trustees directed university administrators to seek options for preserving employee retirement benefits in light of recent pension legislation.

New hires, rehires and other employment issues topped the agenda of the U. of I. Board of Trustees at its July 25 meeting at UIC.

The U. of I. Board of Trustees presented its Distinguished Service Medallion to retiring President Bob Easter May 7, honoring his more than 40 years with the university that began as a graduate student and took him to the presidency.

James Kilgore, the embattled Urbana campus lecturer with a criminal past, urged the U. of I. Board of Trustees to not include criminal background checks as part of its specialized faculty hiring policy.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. Twelve new department and unit heads on the University of Illinois campus were approved by the UI Board of Trustees at its July 12 meeting.

The University of Illinois Board of Trustees on Thursday approved a revised policy requiring background checks for all new faculty, academic professional and civil service employees.

The board of trustees gave its final approval on a background check policy for new faculty, academic profession and Civil Service employees and will consider whether to expand the policy to include graduate students and internal transfers in the future.

The U. of I. Board of Trustees approved a resolution at its May 7 meeting meant to keep the university operating legally after its current fiscal year ends June 30.

U. of I. leaders, aware that the expiration of a temporary state income tax increase next January would lead to reductions in the state's education budget, will spend this spring lobbying legislators for level university funding.

It’s official: Chief Illiniwek, the symbol of the athletic teams at the Urbana campus since 1926, will be retired. The UI Board of Trustees, which met March 13 in Urbana, voted 9-1 in favor of retiring the Chief, the object of heated debate in recent decades by opponents who viewed him as offensive and racist, and advocates who said that he honored Native Americans.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Louis Garippo, a former circuit judge in Cook County, will present his report on Chief Illiniwek to the Board of Trustees beginning at 1:30 p.m. during the regular board meeting Wednesday (Nov. 8) in Urbana.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Issues related to gay male body image will be explored in a new exhibition on view June 10 through July 9 at I space, the Chicago gallery of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - The campus police department's newest "officer" has a nose for trouble.

How social scientists, humanists can better use computers and Anthology focuses on American poetry about the Spanish Civil War

A new book on birds of Illinois was 100 years in the making.

Political corruption, minimal policing and firefighting resources, limited transportation, public works deficiencies and condemned buildings. It's not the backdrop for a prime-time cop show - this is a city three hours from Champaign.

A new book looks at aspects of how the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program affects health and well-being. “SNAP Matters” includes a chapter on obesity by University of Illinois economist Craig Gundersen, one of the book’s editors.

In the new book "China Forever: The Shaw Brothers and Diasporic Cinema" (University of Illinois Press), Poshek Fu, professor of history, of cinema studies and of East Asian languages and cultures at the UI, draws together scholars from diverse disciplines such as history, cultural geography and film studies to address the history and cultural politics of the Shaw Brothers' movie empire.

Champaign County, Urbana has a rich and dynamic history. Today, Urbana counts nationally known film critic Roger Ebert and several Nobel Prize laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners as current or former residents. Yet, there was no book on the history of Urbana still available in print until "Images of America: Urbana" (Arcadia Publishing), by Ilona Matkovszki and Dennis Roberts.

Service members often jokingly say that military intelligence is an oxymoron.

The “University of Illinois Tax Workbook,” used by tax schools in 17 states (including Illinois), has been published at the UI since 1965. Originally called the Farm Income Tax Workbook, the book is created annually by staff members in the UI Tax School Program (in the UI College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences) and Facilities and Services’ Printing Department.

Suburbanization of small towns is reversing the exodus of the best and brightest that led sociologist E.A. Ross to declare in 1915 that Midwestern towns “remind one of fished-out ponds populated chiefly by bullheads and suckers.”

Some girl-saving, mentoring programs marginalize the very girls they are intended to empower, and use a cookie-cutter definition of girlhood that excludes black girls' experiences, according to Ruth Nicole Brown, who holds appointments in educational policy studies, gender and women's studies and a zero-time appointment in theater. In her new book, "Black Girlhood Celebration: Toward a Hip-Hop Feminist Pedagogy" (Peter Lang Publishing, 2008), Brown offers "practical insight and empirical evidence about one way to celebrate black girlhood in a contradictory culture that both loves and hates Black girls' and women's bodies, talents and intellect."

The daunting challenge of leaving an anthropological field site and moving to another halfway across the globe may be a situation most familiar to anthropologists, but the intellectual and emotional challenges of uprooting one's life for one's field of study are something that many scholars can relate to, says Alma Gottlieb, a UI professor of anthropology.

Korean diasporic theater takes center stage in a new collection of plays compiled by Esther Kim Lee, a professor of theater and of Asian American studies at the UI.

They baked New England's Thanksgiving pies, preached their faith to crowds of worshippers, spied for the patriots during the American Revolution, wrote that human bondage was a sin, and demanded reparations for slavery.

Oral history is a powerful historical tool, one that can illuminate the often-overlooked individual voices behind a historical event.

The history of nuclear energy research from the height of the Cold War into space colonization of the future is detailed through one man's career in the new book "Life at the Center of the Energy Crisis: A Technologist's Search for a Black Swan," published by World Scientific.

Historians have long been interested in patterns of human movement. Throughout history, people have had to move to survive, either through regular circuits that bring them to communities and resources or through occasional, long-distance migrations, in search of new ways of life.

As both an idea and an institution, the family has been at the heart of Chicano/a cultural politics since the Mexican American civil rights movement emerged in the late 1960s. In "Next of Kin: The Family in Chicano/a Cultural Politics" (Duke University Press, 2009), Richard T. Rodríguez, a professor of English and of Latina/Latino Studies at Illinois, explores the competing notions of la familia found in movement-inspired literature, film, video, music, painting and other forms of cultural expression created by Chicano men.

Five years ago, with a Fulbright Fellowship funding his summer study in Malta, U. of I. architecture professor Mir Ali agreed to assist the Malta Environmental and Planning Authority and the University of Malta in determining whether more skyscrapers should be built in the tiny island nation. As one of the most densely populated countries in the world, Malta consists of a group of islands, the largest of which is the "rock" just off the toe of Italy. The Republic of Malta's government had received close to 50 proposals from developers wanting to build high-rise office buildings, hotels and condominiums.

The myth of the open road and the reality of the American driving experience is explored by John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle in their new book, "Motoring: The Highway Experience in America" (The University of Georgia Press/2008).

Within the past two decades, technological advances have changed the way readers consume text, from online blogs to e-readers. Some critics and scholars have suggested that we were embarking on a radically new age of information.

Over the course of several centuries, Western masculinity has successfully established itself as the voice of reason, knowledge and sanity - the basis for patriarchal rule - in the face of massive testimony to the contrary. In a new book, "Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness" (Harvard University Press, 2008), Mark S. Micale challenges this vision of the stable and secure male by examining the central role played by modern science and medicine in constructing and sustaining it.

The U.S. and Brazil have a few things in common. Both are continent-spanning nations that began as European colonies. Both have a history of African slavery. And both developed iconic music with strong roots in their respective black communities.

It is common knowledge that the U.S. economy has continued to thrive despite the loss of industry because of the booming information sector, with high-paying jobs for everything from wireless networks to video games. We are told we live in the Information Age, in which communications networks and media and information services drive the larger economy.

Throughout history, in many cultures, menstruation has been fraught with shame, controversy and misinformation, and has been politicized as a debility that served as the basis for denying women equity in education, employment and citizenship.

Juggling the demands of being a faculty member, as well as trying to find time for yourself and family and friends can seem overwhelming. "The Joyful Professor" (Henschel Haus, 2010), by Barbara Minsker, a professor of environmental and water resources systems engineering, provides tips for balancing the many roles of researcher, teacher, coach and mentor, while maintaining a healthy personal life.

Architecture professor and world traveler extraordinaire James Warfield returned briefly to the Illinois campus in January following the opening of his “Roads Less Traveled” photography exhibition in Shanghai. He stuck around long enough to unpack his suitcase, do laundry and re-pack before embarking on his next journey: a return trip to Rajasthan, India.

Travel authors often showcase the foreign lands they visit with colorful descriptions of the food and tourist attractions they encounter. Books of this genre depict abbreviated and relaxing trips.

Anyone who subscribes to the science of popular culture has been led to believe any imaginable post-apocalyptic world will be overrun with plodding zombies intent on feasting on the brains of survivors.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -Among the UI campus's largest non-white ethnicities, Korean American students arrive at college hoping to realize the liberal ideals of the modern American university, in which individuals can exit their comfort zones to realize their full potential regardless of race, nation or religion. In her new book "The Intimate University: Korean American Students and the Problems of Segregation" (Duke University Press, 2009), Nancy Abelmann, a professor of anthropology and of East Asian languages and cultures, explores the tensions between these liberal ideals and the particularities of race, family and community in the contemporary university.

The U.S. media features Latina stars such as Jennifer Lopez and Eva Longoria, but that same media often reinforces the image of Latinos as eternal foreigners, always having to prove they belong.

In her book “Charles Ives Reconsidered” (UI Press), musicology professor Gayle Sherwood Magee notes that even before his death in 1954, the composer has always had “an unusual, almost cult-like following.”

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -Nearly every year, areas of the Midwest are subjected to massive flooding. Sandbags are filled and stacked, FEMA arrives and there is a discussion of whether this is a 500-year flood, a 1,000-year flood, or just another flood typical of the summer season.

The idea that love - especially the unrequited variety - and the passion associated with it could render one physically ill goes way back on the cultural-historical timeline. According to Valeria Sobol, a UI professor of Slavic languages and literatures, scholars have traced the concept of "lovesickness" all the way back to the Greeks.

The 76-year-old author of a provocative new novel about 1950s racism in the American South says his concern for "better understanding" among those of the younger generations made him feel obligated to write the book.