administrators

Daniel L. Everett is chair of the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, and a professor of anthropology and linguistics at Illinois State University. Everett began his linguistics work in 1977 as a missionary with SIL International (Summer Institute of Linguistics) in Brazil, where he studied the indigenous language Pirahã. He eventually began and completed an Sc.D. in linguistics at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP). His current research is concerned with understanding how cultural values constrain language.

Jane Elliott, the adaptor of the Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes exercise, will lead a three-hour presentation teaching about the anatomy of prejudice. The Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes exercise, which she developed in her Riceville, Iowa, classroom, was the subject of the Peabody Award-winning documentary "The Eye of the Storm" and the follow-up PBS/FRONTLINE production "A Class Divided." She will show clips and discuss that film and explore with the audience the problems of racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, and ethnocentrism, and ways to eliminate them from ourselves and our environment.

Amy Sedaris is best known for her role as Jerri Blank in the television series and 2006 movie adaptation of Strangers with Candy, and, most recently, for sharing her domestic skills in the satirical guide to entertaining I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence. Sedaris has appeared in the movies Elf, School of Rock, Maid in Manhattan, the film version of Bewitched and on television in Rescue Me, Monk, Just Shoot Me!

Lost Nation explores the dramatic saga of the Ioway Indians from their ancestors - known as the Oneota - to their present day locations in Kansas and Oklahoma. It tells the dramatic true story of two brothers' struggle to save their people from inevitable American conquest, and the Ioway's current fight to reclaim and maintain their unique history and culture. Filmmakers Kelly and Tammy Rundle are perhaps best known for their award-winning documentary Villisca: Living with a Mystery, which won Best Documentary at the 2006 CRI Film Festival.

Steven Bucci is the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense. He oversees the policy issues involving the defense domains, National Guard operational issues, Domestic Counter Terrorism, and readiness exercises. He was the Military Assistant to the Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and served through the 9/11 attack and the Global War on Terrorism. He led a team of twenty-five other colonels to Baghdad to directly assist the Coalition Provisional Authority leadership in the final six-month period leading to the transfer of sovereignty.