2015 Board of Directors
2015 Board of Directors
Mark Bouman (President)
Mark Bouman’s association with the Calumet Heritage Partnership dates to the opening presentation he gave at the first Calumet Heritage Conference in 1999, although it was not until 2005 that he joined the board when CHP became formally affiliated with Chicago’s Steel Heritage Project. Since 2007, he has served as CHP’s President. Mark has been closely involved with several Calumet regional efforts, including the Lake Calumet Ecosystem Partnership, Calumet Stewardship Initiative, and the Calumet Environmental Resource Center at Chicago State University. He was the Project Director for a widely distributed map of the Calumet region that originally appeared in the Spring, 2009 issue of Chicago Wilderness magazine. Mark’s association with the Calumet region dates to his undergraduate days at Valparaiso University, where the classic geomorphology field trip from the Kankakee sand islands, across the Valparaiso Moraine, and to the lakefront at Mt. Baldy set the hook for a professional lifetime in geography, and, as it turns out, the Calumet region. Mark’s graduate work in geography at the University of Minnesota focused on the relationship between cities and technology, and his work in that area has appeared in the Journal of Urban History, the Journal of American History, and The Cities and Technology Reader. He was a Professor of Geography at Chicago State University from 1984 to 2012. Since 2012, he is the Chicago Region Program Director in the Division of Environment, Culture, and Conservation at The Field Museum.
Michael Longan (Vice-President, Indiana)
Michael Longan is a Professor of Geography at Valparaiso University. He has a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Colorado at Boulder and earned his masters in geography at the University of Arizona. Mike serves as the webmaster for the Calumet Heritage Partnership website, www.calumetheritage.org.
Sherry Meyer (Vice-President, Illinois)
Sherry Meyer is a community builder, urban guide, and health and policy consultant. She runs the tour company InSites Chicago.
Mary Poulsen (Secretary)
Mary Poulsen is the Director of Community Relations for the City of Blue Island. She is active in a number of regional planning efforts, including the Friends of the Calumet – Sag Trail. She is on the board of the Canal Corridor Alliance.
David Klein (Treasurer)
David Klein has long been engaged in Calumet regional affairs. David served as the Executive Director of the Calumet Project, a Hammond – based community – labor – religious coalition. Among David’s priorities while at the Calumet Project was guiding Northwest Indiana in acknowledging the inequitable effects of polluting industries on the poor and communities of color. David also volunteers on the Board of the Calumet Area League of Women Voters. In that position he developed the League’s Campaign Finance Online project in which all Lake County Indiana Campaign Finance Reports have been published on the League’s website; a first for Northwest Indiana. He is also the local League’s webmaster. David lives in Hammond, Indiana with his spouse Susan Duncan, a researcher in psychology and linguistics, and their undisclosed number of cats.
John Cain
John Cain has served South Shore Arts as executive director since 1993 and as executive director of the Northwest Indiana Symphony since 2008. Leading South Shore Arts through an evolutionary phase that culminated in the opening of two branch locations and its designation by the Indiana Arts Commission as a Regional Arts Partner, he has been instrumental in the organization’s rise as a leader in the cultural life of the Calumet region. He has curated exhibits in Chicago for Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art and the Carl Hammer Gallery. For South Shore Arts he has curated “The Artist As Collector” (2004), “Two Bucks to Pony Up: Curiosities from the Midway” (2012), and “Baby Boom or Bust” (2014). He created the Outstanding Midwest Artist Series and curated solo exhibits for Michael Noland, Lorraine Peltz, Margaret Wharton, and Chris Cosnowski. John serves as a consultant to the Miller Beach Arts & Creative District and Theatre at the Center. He was the founding chairman of the Mayor’s Hammond Commission for the Arts and Humanities. He has served as a board member of Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in Chicago and as a grant panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts.
Heath Carter
Heath Carter joined the faculty of Valparaiso University as Assistant Professor in 2012. A historian of the modern United States, he teaches a variety of courses, ranging from the history of Chicago to American religious history and beyond. Professor Carter’s current research focuses on the complicated – and momentous – relationship between capitalism and Christianity in American history. He is particularly interested in questions about how and why American Christians came to be at peace with great economic inequality, as well as about the extent and limits of Christian resistance to capitalism. He is working on a book entitled Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago, which repositions ordinary workers as key players in the emergence of the American Social Gospel. Union Made will be published by Oxford University Press in 2015. Professor Carter is married and has three young boys. In his spare time he enjoys reading; exploring new neighborhoods on foot or bike; dominating in Boggle; and making dinner for friends.
Kate Corcoran
Kate Corcoran joined the Calumet Heritage Partnership as a volunteer from the Pullman State Historic Site to assist with the rescue of materials from the ACME Steel Coke Plant and with the photographic documentation of the site; she has also worked with preliminary inventory of materials and the metadata descriptions, captions, and identification of photographs on the Industrial Heritage Archives of Chicago’s Calumet Region website in concert with the Pullman State Historic Site and the Southeast Chicago Historical Society. Kate has dual bachelor’s degrees in anthropology and history and two years of post – graduate work from the University of Wisconsin – Madison. She served as the principal photographer for the upcoming second edition of Hollywood on Lake Michigan: Chicago at the Movies, to be published by Chicago Review Press. Kate is director of membership and information systems with the national Medical Library Association. Kate and her spouse Michael (a certified a Chicago Tour Guide) live in the Lincoln Square neighborhood of Chicago.
Richard Lytle
Richard Meredith Lytle is the Local History Librarian at the Suzanne G. Long Local History Room of the Hammond Public Library, Hammond, Indiana. He has a Bachelor of Science Degree in Mass communications from the Walter J. Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass media, Arizona State University; a Master of Arts – History Degree from Northwestern State University of Louisiana, and a Master of Library Science from Indiana University. Currently he has three books in publication and for the last eight years has been the Vice – President of the Hammond Historical Society of Hammond, Indiana.
William Peterman (Vice President)
William Peterman is a Professor of Geography (retired) from Chicago State University. At Chicago State, in addition to teaching courses in statistics, community development and neighborhood planning, he was the director of the Fred Blum Neighborhood Assistance Center. Prior to coming to Chicago State he was the director of the Voorhees Center for Neigborhood and Community Improvement at t he University of Illinois at Chicago. Although retired he holds visiting professor positions at both the University of Bristol and the University of the West of England in the UK.
Thomas Shepherd
Tom Shepherd is past president of the Pullman Civic Organization, president of the Southeast Environmental Task Force, a member of the Historic Pullman Foundation, a member of the Millennium Reserve Steering Committee and a long-time resident of Pullman.
Tiffany Tolbert
Tiffany Tolbert currently serves a Director of Indiana Landmarks Northwest Field Office. A native of Montgomery, Alabama she received a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Political Science and History from Huntingdon College (Montgomery, AL) and a Master of Arts in Historic Preservation from Georgia State University (Atlanta, GA). Previously she has served as an intern with the Alabama Historical Commission and served as African American Programs Assistant at the Georgia Historic Preservation Division. She has completed research on rural African American History in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi, African American Women in the Civil Rights Movement and African American History in Gary, IN. Her research has been published in Reflections, a publication of the Georgia Historic Preservation Division and Traces, the quarterly magazine of the Indiana Historical Society.