Any nightmare vision of what lies in the office of May Berenbaum, longtime head of the Department of Entomology and founder of the Insect Fear Film Festival, is hereby dismissed. There are no glass cases filled with hissing cockroaches, no exotic spiders, no giant moths flapping about the lights. There is, however, something vital to the study of insects at Illinois: history.
The shelves in Berenbaum’s department head office are filled with it, from books written by faculty and alumni to a growing collection of departmental newsletters dating back to 1912. The entomology archives are no mere object of curiosity, either—the department uses its extensive history as a key resource in building future support.
Some newsletters were donated by alumni, but much of the collection has been passed down from one department head to the next for more than a century. Relatively low turnover among department heads (Berenbaum has been head for 21 years and yet still isn’t the longest serving head in department history) has spared the papers from repeated office shuffling.
The history has become a point of pride in the department, and also a way to forge meaningful connections with alumni and prospective students. Berenbaum has gone through the old newsletters enough that she can summon up the names of entomology professors from the early 1900s almost as if they were still on campus.
“Our department has a long track of keeping history of what we do,” Berenbaum says. “I’m very proud of our alums, and our history. And we’re part of a long legacy here. We’ve always been small, but we’ve always had an impact and national presence disproportionately larger than our numbers would suggest. And if you look at these early records, just about every one of these names became quite well known in the field.”
The collection begins with meeting notes and publications from the former entomology club called Hexapoecia, or the “order of the six-footed,” so named by Stephen Forbes, the department’s first faculty head. It continues through the Illient, the departmental newsletter begun in 1933. The Illient name has been dropped, but, aside from a few gaps, the newsletter has continued through today.
The collection has been at the foundation of several important projects. It was used in two separate centennial celebrations for the department—one in 1976, marking 100 years of teaching entomology at Illinois, and again in 2009, marking 100 years since entomology became its own department—that brought many distinguished alumni to campus.
When entomology alumnus Richard Brenner (MS ’76), director of Agricultural Technology Innovation Partnership Foundation, came to campus earlier this fall to give a seminar, Berenbaum was able to look up his previous student activities by digging through the newsletters. And when it came time to request campus funding for the department’s Pollinatarium, a science discovery center for the public, Berenbaum obtained background information from a story written about the Pollinatarium for the alumni in a past newsletter.
“I had all the information I needed from writing the newsletter. So no good deed goes unrewarded,” she says.
Aside from the practical uses, the old newsletters have created a healthy sense of continuity in entomology. The old Illients, for example, were packed with news and humor—with one section dubbed the “Sillient”—giving it a distinctive attitude that the department continues to embrace today.
Current editions of the newsletter, mailed to some 300 or 400 alumni, carry department news, a message from the head, research capsules from faculty and graduate students, obituaries, birth announcements, and a running photo feature of orange and blue insects found in nature. The latest edition ran 64 pages.
“I spoke about the history of the department at the centennial,” Berenbaum says. “Through our entire history, it’s abundantly apparent through Illients, Hexapoecia, and our newsletters, how friendly, engaged, interactive, collegial, and funny the people in our department are. It’s always been a great bunch of people as far as I can tell, and that came through more clearly than just about anything.”
