CLA Celebrates Faculty Excellence
The College of Liberal Arts gathered as a community to honor the creative, scholarly, and instructional work of our outstanding and internationally renowned faculty at Faculty Excellence held on Tuesday, April 17 in the Best Buy Theater at Northrop Memorial Auditorium.
Dean's Medalist
The Dean’s Medal gives us the opportunity to celebrate scholarly achievement, fearless inquiry, mentoring of colleagues and students, program building, and public engagement being exercised at the highest levels of distinction. This description perfectly fits our 2018 Dean’s Medalist, McKnight Distinguished University Professor and Professor of History and American Indian Studies, Jean O'Brien. Read her full profile.
Scholars of the College
Honors faculty whose exemplary scholarly research and creative work shows intellectual risk and rigor, and who have achieved a high level of distinction in teaching and service.
Thomas Holmes holds the Curtis L. Carlson Chair in Economics. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society, research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a consultant at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. His research focuses on industrial organization, economic geography, and international trade. Some of his best-known work examines how firms and industries decide where to locate and how these decisions interact with state policies intended to attract businesses. Highlights of his service to the profession including being elected president of both the Midwest Economics Association and the Urban Economics Association.
Laurie Ouelette is a professor of communication studies and cultural studies & comparative literature. She works across the interdisciplinary fields of media and cultural studies, focusing on media’s role in shaping, governing, and regulating bodies, subjectivities and differences (gender, sexuality, race, ability, class). She has written 2 books, co-authored another, edited 4, and published nearly 2 dozen anthology essays, along with another dozen articles. She serves as a consultant and judge for the Peabody Awards, is a member of the Library of Congress National Recording Preservation Board, and is routinely interviewed for television, radio, and publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe.
JB Shank is a Distinguished University Teaching Professor of History and director of the Center for Early Modern History and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Consortium for the Study of the Premodern World. In his courses in modern European intellectual history and the history of Western civilization, Professor Shank’s students experience history as a series of complex and contentious conversations and his innovative pedagogy resulted in a 2015- 16 Morse-Alumni Undergraduate Teaching Award. He is also a leader of CLA’s Humanistic Commons teaching initiative, which puts wide-ranging creative and intellectual energy at the center of University academic life.
Arthur & Helene Motley Award for Exemplary Teaching
Recognizes faculty of the College who are outstanding teachers of graduate and undergraduate students.
Lisa Channer is an assistant professor in the Department of Theatre Arts & Dance. Her pedagogy, directing, and performance focus on biomechanics and physical improvisation as well as a variety of social and political issues. She is the co-founder of Theatre Novi Most and co-founder and co-artistic director of Sleeveless Theatre. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the New England Foundation for the Arts, Artslink International, the Fund for Women Artists, the Edith Markson Travel Fund, and the McKnight Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota.
Njeri Githirie, associate professor of African American & African studies, specializes in African artistic and cultural production and African diasporic studies. She tackles subjects from immigration to diasporic literatures and pays particular attention to the politics of food in literary and cultural contexts. Employing theoretical analysis and insightful readings of English- and French-language texts, she explores the prominence of alimentary-related tropes and their relationship to sexual consumption, writing, global geopolitics and economic dynamics, and migration. She concentrates on the gendered and sexualized dimensions of consumption metaphors in works by women writers from Haiti, Jamaica, Mauritius, and elsewhere.
Korey Konkol was appointed to the School of Music in 1992 as a professor of viola. He has extensive experience in solo, chamber music, and orchestral performance and has received the American Viola Society Founders Award. He has performed throughout Europe, Latin America, and South America; often performs with the Minnesota Orchestra and Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra; and was principal violist with the Ann Arbor, Peoria, and Knox-Galesburg Symphony Orchestras. Professor Konkol’s students have placed in major competitions and hold positions in professional orchestras and string quartets, and many of them pass on his expertise through their own teaching.
