James Andrew Dengate is an emeritus professor of Classics at Illinois and has worked with campus museums since 1975. With a B.A. from Michigan State University and M.A. and Ph.D. in Classical Archaeology from the University of Pennsylvania, he is currently Director of Record for the Excavations at Halieis, Greece with which he has worked since 1965. Two volumes of the final reports of these excavations have appeared along with many preliminary reports.
Wayne Pitard is an emeritus professor in the Department of Religion at Illinois and retired director of the Spurlock Museum of World Cultures. With a Ph.D. from Harvard University in Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, his research has focused primarily on the religion of the ancient Canaanites, particularly on the only surviving library of Canaanite religious texts, found in the ruins of the city of Ugarit, Syria, and dating to about 1200 BCE. In September 2024, he also published Watchman, Tell Us: John J. Bird and Black Politics in Post-Civil War Illinois, research that began while he was director of the Spurlock Museum.
Wendy Mathewson and Beth Watkins (both BA '96) met in an avant-garde honors seminar, "The History that Music Made." They became roommates and lifelong friends. Both graduates of the Department of History, both women are employed by the university today. Mathewson is the undergraduate advisor for the Department of History, and Watkins is the Education and Publications Coordinator at the Spurlock Museum. In this interview, they describe campus life in the 1990s and the gradual shifts in their political, religious, and worldview perspectives that they attribute to a liberal arts education. They reflect on enduring friendship across deep differences, the value of finding smaller communities within a large university, exposure to diversity, and the importance of resilience.
Winton Solberg, professor emeritus in the Department of History, wrote numerous articles and published multiple books on the University of Illinois's history. Born in 1922, Solberg grew up during the Great Depression and served in World War II, and after the war decided to pursue a PhD in history. He came to the University of Illinois in 1961, when university president David Dodds Henry approached Solberg to write a volume on the university's history. He taught American Intellectual and Cultural History as well as an occasional survey course until his retirement from teaching in 1992. In the spring of 2018, he had two manuscripts pending publication in addition to the recently released Creating the Big Ten: Courage, Corruption, and Commercialization.
