Eastern’s Board of Trustees voted Monday to award Honorary Degrees to actress Joan Allen and University of Illinois professor Marianne Ferber.

Allen attended Eastern from 1974-1976 where she appeared in plays such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Dracula, The Glass Menagerie and Death of a Salesman.

Her screen career has included appearances in Peggy Sue Got Married, Pleasantville, Face/Off, The Ice Storm, Nixon and The Contender, a role for which she earned an Oscar nomination.

Eastern’s Alumni Association presented Allen with a Distinguished Alumna Award in 1998. Allen appeared in an EIU Theatre Arts recruitment video in 1991, and in 2000 told Parade Magazine she had chosen Eastern for its excellent theater department, according to a report submitted to the BOT.

Born in Czechoslovakia, Ferber earned her bachelor’s at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada and her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago.

Ferber is currently a professor emeritus of economics and women’s studies at the U of I Champaign-Urbana. From 1993-1995, she was the Horner Distinguished Visiting Professor at Radcliffe’s Public Policy Institute.

She is co-editor of several books on gender and economics, including Work and Families: Policies for a Changing Work Force; Academic Couples: Problems, Promises; Women in the Labor Force and Non-Standard Work: the Nature and Challenge of Changing Employment Arrangements. Ferber also co-authored The Economics of Women, Men and Work, the report said. Many of her works are used in Eastern’s economics courses.

Ferber served as president of the Midwest Economics Association and the International Association for Feminist Economics. McMaster University awarded her the 1996 Distinguished Alumni Award for the Arts.

In 2001, Ferber was the keynote speaker at Eastern’s Women’s History and Awareness Month.

The recipients will receive their awards at the next possible commencement ceremony.