McKnight University Awards for English Faculty
Congratulations to English Professors Aamina Ahmad, Megan Giddings, and Douglas Kearney, who have all received University of Minnesota 2026 McKnight Awards! These system-wide honors recognize faculty for their excellence in research and leadership and offer support at different points in their careers.
Professor Douglas Kearney has been awarded the Distinguished McKnight University Professorship, which recognizes outstanding faculty members who have recently achieved full professor status. Recipients hold the title for as long as they remain employed at the University. Kearney is a poet, essayist, and librettist whose writing incorporates such interdisciplinary elements as performative typography, comics grammar, and critical/creative hybrids. His work most frequently examines the collisions between Black people, violence, and entertainment. He is working on a monograph examining aesthetic rupture in Black music; a poetry collection about disintegration; and a speculative opera about the afterlife of Bessie Coleman.
Assistant Professor Megan Giddings has received the McKnight Presidential Fellow Award, a three-year award given to the most promising individuals who have been granted tenure and promotion to associate professor in an academic year. Recipients are chosen based on excellence in scholarship, leadership, and potential to build top-tier programs. Featured on Late Night with Seth Meyers, Giddings writes literary-speculative fiction about Midwestern Black women, thinking deeply about the ways that the uncanny can illuminate avenues of understanding across race, class, and gender. Her novel Meet Me at the Crossroads was a Washington Post best science fiction novel of 2025, an NPR choice for Books We Love, and one of Town and Country's Best Books of 2025. Giddings is also the author of the novels Lakewood and The Women Could Fly.
Assistant Professor Aamina Ahmad has been named 2026-2028 McKnight Land-Grant Professor. This two-year University program seeks to advance the careers of assistant professors at a crucial point in their professional lives. Drawing on new scholarship and family history, Ahmad is working on a historical novel about a disillusioned British Indian soldier in the Great War who finds his way to the Indian revolutionary movement. Ahmad is the author of the novel The Return of Faraz Ali, which was awarded the Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize from the UK Society of Authors, the LA Times Book Prize's Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and the Best First Novel award from the Writers Guild of Great Britain, and was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2022. Ahmad's story collection July Sun is forthcoming in June 2026.
Cheers for all!
