SIUE Interim Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Ann Boyle has named Dr. Eric W. Ruckh as interim Honors Program director and chair of the Honors Advisory Council. Ruckh is an associate professor of history in the College of Arts and Sciences. As chair of the BRIDGE Committee, he led the general education reform on campus that resulted in the Lincoln Program.
“Dr. Ruckh has a deep, passionate interest in interdisciplinary teaching and scholarship,” Boyle said. “He is looking forward to beginning an inclusive campus conversation about formulating an innovative honors program that builds on the strengths of the University and is aimed at cultivating self-reflection and self-development among our students.”
Ruckh has been offering innovative seminars in SIUE’s honors program since 2005. These courses have examined the history of friendship, myth and meaning, examinations of the good life and the meaning of the modern apocalyptic imagination. This semester, he is offering a freshman honors seminar that is examining our fascination with monsters.
Ruckh has written about the historical work of Georges Bataille, the politics of friendship in the work of Herman Hesse and the contemporary state of higher education. He is currently working on a series of articles dealing with the modern literary representation of friendship.
The work of Ruckh and the Honors Advisory Council will coincide with and inform a renewed search for a permanent honors director. That search will begin this semester.
Ruckh earned his bachelor’s in liberal arts from Bucknell University in 1989 and his Ph.D. in history and critical theory from the University of California-Irvine in 1997. He joined the SIUE faculty in 1999.