LAS: About Us: Meet Our Faculty

The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is home to nearly 700 faculty members who are committed to excellence in scholarship and teaching.

Nearly half have been nationally recognized for their accomplishments through honors and induction into national academies—the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the U.S. National Academy of Science, the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Our humanities and social sciences faculty are nationally sought after to serve as editors of well–known traditional journals and groundbreaking new ones including the Journal of American Literary History, the Journal of Women’s History, Slavic Review, American Journal of Primatology, and Ethos.

Among the many other honors bestowed on the faculty are the following:

Nobel Prize
Crafoord Prize
National Medal of Science
Spendiarov Prize of the USSR Academy of Sciences
MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award
National Book Award
Hubbell Award
Lannan Literary Award
Whiting Writers’ Award
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching U.S. Professors of the Year Award
France’s Chevalier de l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques
Guggenheim, Sloan, and Fulbright Fellowships

Meet a few of LAS's distinguished faculty.

Molecular and integrative physiologist Albert Feng developed an intelligent hearing aid that filters out background noise.

At a dig in the Czech Republic, anthropologist Olga Soffer discovered the earliest evidence of textiles, pushing their emergence back more than 7,000 years.

Bruce C. Berndt has received mathematics’ highest awards. But his most prized achievement is his decades–long quest to prove the claims left in the “lost notebooks” of Ramanujan, one of India's greatest mathematicians.

Frederick Hoxie, one of the nation’s foremost scholars in Native American history, explores how cultures are preserved.

Chemist Ken Suslick, along with Neal Rakow, developed an artificial nose that works better than the real one by visualizing odors. It is one of this prolific scientist’s many discoveries.

Entomologist May Berenbaum is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and since 1984, the organizer of the U of I annual Insect Fear Film Festival.

Prize–winning novelist and Swanlund professor of English Richard Powers is a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award and the National Book Award.