Miriam L. Wallace is Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Illinois-Springfield, and Professor of English. She is a graduate of Swarthmore College (BA) and the University of California, Santa Cruz (MA/PhD) in Literature. As a proud liberal arts graduate, she advocates for the value and impact of academic study, art making and performance, public presentations, and study abroad—noting their impact on self-confidence, intellectual curiosity, and personal and professional growth.

I am the Wepner Distinguished Professor of Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois at Springfield. I am a Californian by birth, and a first-generation American, raised by parents who immigrated from England in the early 1960s. I received my B.A. in History from California State University, Hayward (now CSU East Bay) before journeying to the land of Lincoln, where I earned my M.A. and Ph.D. in American History from Northwestern University. I spent a year at Rhodes College in Memphis and seventeen years at Saint Xavier University in Chicago before coming to UIS in 2019.

Heather Bailey has a Ph.D. in modern European history from the University of Minnesota and has been teaching modern European and Russian History courses at UIS since 2002. Her research focuses on the intellectual, cultural, and diplomatic relations between France and Russia in the nineteenth century. She has published extensively on negative attitudes about Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church in western European discourses.

Daniel Platt is a scholar of law, political economy, and political culture. Raised in the Chicago area, he earned his PhD in American Studies at Brown University in 2018 and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University at Buffalo School of Law before joining the faculty at UIS in 2020. His first book, The Price of Misfortune (2023), examined struggles over debtors' rights in the late nineteenth century. His current research deals with religion and the prison abolition movement in the late twentieth century.

Associate Professor of History 

Chair, History Department

Ph.D. Public History and United States History

Loyola University Chicago

Email: dhunte2@uis.edu

Phone: (217) 206-7432

Office: UHB 3056

Teaching Concentration: Public History, Urban History, Twentieth Century United States History

CV upon request