BLOOMINGTON, Ill. — Professor of English Brandi Reissenweber was awarded the highest teaching honor at Illinois Wesleyan University on April 15 as the 2027 recipient of the Kemp Foundation Award for Teaching Excellence.
The recipient is selected by a committee of faculty and is based on nominations from colleagues. Supported by the Kemp Foundation, the award recognizes teaching spirit, passion, scholarship and service.
Robert Harrington Endowed Professor of English, and Chair of the English department, Michael Theune was delighted to announce Reissenweber as the awardee, saying he “always wanted to be a game show host,” referring to the Kemp Award tradition of teasing the audience with a series of increasingly specific clues hinting at the winner.
Theune cited testimonials from alumni describing Reissenweber’s instruction as compassionate and patient, balancing structure and freedom to keep creativity flowing, and he referred to her work in ensuring fair and ethical hiring practices at IWU and connecting her students with the Bloomington-Normal community.
“Once he said, ‘She took a bite out of the Big Apple,’ I started to wonder, ‘Could it be me?’” Reissenweber said after the ceremony. She earned her M.F.A. in creative writing from New York University.
Reissenweber joined the IWU faculty in 2006 for her first professorship as a visiting assistant professor. She was promoted to full professor in 2024.
Reissenweber’s fiction and scholarly writing have been published and presented in dozens of publications and conferences, and she has served as a writer-in-residence with the Kerouac Project of Orlando and as a James C. McCreight fiction fellow with the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, as well as several other fellowships and residencies between the Midwest and New York.
At IWU, Reissenweber has secured tens of thousands of dollars in grants for creative writing course development, including grant funding to expand IWU’s offerings in journalism. She has also been a member and chair of more than a dozen committees and was previously the faculty advisor for IWU’s undergraduate fiction journal, Tributaries. She is currently the chair of the Faculty Development Committee and is the founding advisor of the Narrative 4 Student Ambassador Program.
The ceremony’s keynote address, “Life of a Species Seeker,” was delivered by 2026 Kemp Award recipient, Robert W. Harrington Endowed Professor of Biology Edgar Lehr.
Born in Frankfurt, West Germany, Lehr saw a role model in his father, a zoologist and evolutionary biologist. Following in his footsteps, he was encouraged by his parents in his childhood habit of looking for “archeological” items, including misplaced false teeth that he thought were the remains of a “cave man.”
Lehr described himself as a lackluster high school student. “Had I told my English teacher that I would be teaching in English and writing in English, he would have laughed himself to death,” Lehr said. But he found his confidence when, as a teenager, he successfully bred two red-eared slider turtles in captivity – an accomplishment that was believed to be impossible in the mid-80s.
Lehr described his field of study as using “morphology, DNA, behavior, and natural history to identify and separate species.”
Lehr has done so by conducting dozens of expeditions searching for, discovering and naming over 100 species of reptiles and amphibians. He has accounted for nearly 9% of the scientifically described Peruvian herpetofauna, and he has named species after the IWU Titans, Harrison Ford and Jane Goodall. He had the privilege of personally meeting both Ford and Goodall. In Goodall’s case, their meeting was only weeks before her death in 2025.
In his closing remarks, Lehr, who has gone on scientific expeditions to more than 30 countries, encouraged his colleagues and students to “travel with an open mind, be kind, see the world, make friends, and build your worldviews.”
At the end of the ceremony, members of the IWU faculty who retired at the end of December or will be retiring this summer were recognized: Associate Professor of Art Connies Estep, Semour and Dianne Galina Endowed Professor of Biology Will Jaeckle, Associate Professor of the School of Nursing Noel Kerr, and Associate Professor of Nursing Brenda Knoll ‘89.