March 2021

Awards

Professor Vinay Gidwani (Global Studies and Geography, Environment & Society) and Associate Professor Bianet Castellanos (American Studies) are recipients of the 2020-21 Awards for Outstanding Contributions to Graduate and Professional Education. This University-wide honor is awarded to exceptional candidates and reflects the University of Minnesota's strong and enduring commitment to quality graduate and professional education.

Distinguished McKnight University Professor Patricia Frazier (Psychology) and Associate Professor Saje Mathieu (History) are recipients of 2020-21 Horace T. Morse - University of Minnesota Alumni Association Awards for Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education. This honor is awarded to exceptional candidates with an enduring commitment to quality undergraduate education at the University of Minnesota. 

Professor John Robert Warren (Sociology), Director of the Minnesota Population Center, has been elected to the National Academy of Education (NAEd), which undertakes research studies to address pressing educational issues and administers professional development fellowship programs to enhance the preparation of the next generation of education scholars.

Assistant Professor Katerina Marcoulides (Psychology) has received the 2021 Association for Psychological Science "Rising Star" Award. 

Professor Richa Nagar's (GWSS) book Hungry Translations: Relearning the World through Radical Vulnerability, written in journeys with Sangtin Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan and Parakh Theatre of Mumbai, has been selected as the winner of 2021 International Studies Association's Global Development Studies Book Award.

The University has received $7.1 million over six years from the National Science Foundation to launch the Minneapolis-St. Paul Metropolitan Area Urban Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) program, co-led by Associate Professor Kate Driscoll Derickson (Geography, Environment & Society).
 

Fellowships and Grants

Assistant Professor Benjamin Wiggins (History), Director of the Digital Arts, Sciences, & Humanities Program for University Libraries, received a major grant from the National Science Foundation Science to fund his research (with Michael Ralph of NYU and John Clegg of Chicago) on the role of marine insurance in the trans-Atlantic trade in enslaved persons across the eighteenth century.  
 

Publications and Creative Activities 

PhD Candidate Egor Malkov (Economics) has published “Simulation of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) scenarios with possibility of reinfection” in the journal “Chaos Solitons Fractals."

Congratulations to our English Department, which has seen a slew of new publications by their faculty, including:

• Professor Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021)
• Associate Professor Peter Campion, One Summer Evening at the Falls: Poems (University of Chicago Press, 2021)
• Professor Ray Gonzalez, Feel Puma: Poems (University of New Mexico Press, late 2020)
• Assistant Professor Douglas Kearney, Sho: Poems (Wave Books, 2021)
• Assistant Professor Kathryn Nuernberger, The Witch of Eye: Essays (Sarabande Books, 2021)
• Associate Professor Kim Todd, Sensational: The Hidden History of America's “Girl Stunt Reporters” (HarperCollins, 2021)

February 2021

Awards

Professor Monica Luciana (Psychology) Distinguished McKnight University Professor has been appointed as a Starke Hathaway Endowed Chair in Clinical Psychology.

Lead Senior Academic Advisor Barbara Goodwin has been selected to receive a 2020-21 Tate Award. This award recognizes sustained and substantial contributions to undergraduate education at the University of Minnesota through commitment to academic and/or career advising. As the pre-health services coordinator in CLA, Goodwin has transformed how pre-health students are served by creating sustainable resources for pre-health advising.

Assistant Professor Claire Segijn (HSJMC) has won the emerging scholar grant from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. 
 

Fellowships and Grants

Assistant Professor Rotem Tamir (Art) and Lecturer Omri Zin (Art) were selected as Franconia Sculpture Park's 2021 Mid-Career Fellows, undergoing a competitive, multi-staged review panel led by arts professionals from around the country.

The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) Residential Faculty Fellows for 2021–2022 have been announced. Faculty fellows spend a semester in residence at the IAS and together with the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellows (who spend a full academic year in residence), constitute a supportive interdisciplinary intellectual community in which they work intensively on their own research and creative projects and meet regularly to discuss their work and exchange ideas

Fall 2021: 

Assistant Professor Benjamin Bigelow (German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch)
“Scandinavian Racial Ecologies”

Assistant Professor Zozan Pehlivan (History)
“The Political Ecology of Forced Sedentarization: Herd Dependent Peoples, Climate Change, and the Encroaching State (1850-1950)”
History, CLA, Twin Cities

Assistant Professor Scott St George (Geography, Environment & Society)
“Staring Down the Bottom of a Dry Well: Global Society and the Coming Age of Megadrought”

Spring 2022: 

Associate Professor Tracey Deutsch (History)
“The Julia Child Project”

Assistant Professor Gabriela Spears-Rico (Chicano & Latino Studies)
“Mestizo Melancholia and the Legacy of Conquest in Michoacan”

Associate Professor Michelle Phelps (Sociology)
“Police Reform in the Progressive City”

Associate Professor Shaden Tageldin (CSCL)
“The Place of Africa, in Theory: Of Continents and Their Discontents”
 

Publications and Creative Activities 

Professor Peggy Nelson (SLHS) has been named the new editor-in-chief for The Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. 

January 2021

Awards

Professor Leslie Morris, Chair of German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch, has been named a 2020/21-2022/23 Beverly and Richard Fink Professor in Liberal Arts. The endowed chair aims to advance the extraordinary teaching, research, and creative work of faculty who are making exceptional contributions in their field. 

Regents Professor Steve Ruggles (History) has had his paper "Census Technology, Politics, and Institutional Change, 1790-2020," named to Oxford Academic Journals "Best of History 2020" list.
 

Fellowships and Grants

The Art Department and the Katherine E. Nash Gallery have been awarded a grant in the Exhibition Support category from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. This grant is for the gallery's upcoming exhibition "A Picture Gallery of the Soul," honoring, celebrating, investigating, and interpreting Black history, culture, and politics in America.

Associate Professor Carolyn Liebler (Department of Sociology) has been awarded a faculty research award from the Human Rights Initiative Fund for her project “Experiences and Family Impacts of U.S Indian Boarding Schools and Adoption/Foster Care in Native Communities."

PhD student Kristen M. Carlson (Communication Studies) is the 2020-2021 recipient of the American Latvian Association Graduate Fellowship. She will research the rhetorical dimensions of diplomatic action in Latvia with the Immigration History Research Center.

Associate Professor Hiromi Mizuno (History) was recently awarded an NEH Grant in the Fellowships for Advanced Research on Japan Program. Her project called “The Age of Nitrogen: Japan, Empires, and Postcolonial Asia” includes research and writing leading to a book on how chemical nitrogen fertilizer affected the economic, political, and agricultural history of Japan and Asia from the 1900s to the 1970s. 

Professor Lisa Hilbink (Political Science) was awarded a faculty research award from the Human Rights Initiative (HRI) Fund for “The Political Source of Rights Consciousness and Rights Claiming: Analyzing Access to Justice in a Changing Chile."

The Minnesota Human Rights Lab has announced grants to support new interdisciplinary projects aimed at advancing scholarly insights into and promoting the practice of dismantling systemic racism and/or building capacity to defend human rights in challenging times. The grants, funded by the Human Rights Initiative and the Grand Challenges collaborative known as the Minnesota Human Rights Model, fulfill the commitment to supporting research on racial justice made by human rights faculty in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in May 2020. 

The CLA awardees are:
 
Teaching for Action: Exploring Human Rights and Civic Engagement in our Global Communities
Focus: K-12 teacher education on human rights and anti-racism
Lead: Outreach Coordinator Deborah Jane, Institute for Global Studies, College of Liberal Arts
External partners: National Youth Leadership Council, and Institute for World Affairs (IWA), University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
 
Indigenous Migrants: Healing through Arts
Focus: Writing workshops for Guatemalan and Mexican migrants
Lead: Assistant Professor Osiris Aníbal Gómez, Spanish and Portuguese Studies, College of Liberal Arts
External partner: Comunidades Indígenas en Liderazgo (CIELO)
 

Publications and Creative Activities 

Professor Paul Rouzer (Asian and Middle Eastern Studies) has published a two-volume set translation of the poetry of Wang Wei (701-761 CE). Wang Wei was a Chinese poet, musician, painter, and politician during the Tang dynasty and is known as one of the most famous Chinese men of arts and letters of his time.

Professor Nabil Matar's (History and English) new book, Mediterranean Captivity through Arab Eyes 1517-1798 examines the distinct Arabic narrative of captivity. Consulting archives from Tunis to London and from Fez to Rome, Professor Matar has collected accounts that cumulatively recount Arabic stories of the captives, in the captives' native language and idiom.