June 2021

Awards

President Gabel has appointed Professor Julie Schumacher (English) as a Regents Professor, the highest honor the University of Minnesota bestows on its faculty.

Assistant Professor Benjamin Toff (HSMJ) has received the 2020 Kaid-Sanders Best Political Communication Article of the Year Award for his work “All the News that’s Fit to Ignore."

Professor Joachim Savelsberg (Sociology) has won the Harry J. Kalven, Jr. Prize from the Law & Society Association, recognizes "empirical scholarship that has contributed most effectively to the advancement of research in law and society" and is given in recognition of a body of scholarly work.

Assistant Professor Douglas Kearney (English) has received the inaugural Campbell Opera Librettist Prize from Opera America.
 

Fellowships and Grants

The Office of the Vice President for Research has awarded a Minnesota Futures grant to Professor Wilma Koutstaal (Psychology) and Contract Associate Professor Bonnie Klimes-Dougan (Psychology) along with the Medical School's Associate Professor Kathryn Cullen for "Measuring and Enhancing Creativity and Brain Flexibility in Adolescents with Depression."
 

May 2021

Awards

Professor Tanisha Fazal (Political Science) was awarded the prestigious Andrew Carnegie Fellowship. Each recipient receives a grant of $200,000 in philanthropic support for scholarship in the humanities and social sciences that addresses important and enduring issues confronting our society. Professor Fazal is one of 26 fellows selected this year out of 311 people nominated. Her award will support the research and eventual publication of a book titled Military Medicine and the Hidden Costs of War.

Associate Professor Patrick McNamara (History), Assistant Professor Monica Moses Haller (Art), Associate Professor Kate Derickson (Geography, Environment and Society and Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies), and Professor Brenda Child (American Studies and American Indian Studies) have been selected as one of nine recipients for this year’s University of Minnesota Community-Engaged Scholar Award.This award is presented to University faculty or staff members for exemplary publicly-engaged scholarship that embodies the University of Minnesota’s definition of public engagement.

Associate Professor Cheryl Olman (Psychology) has received the 2021 President’s Award for Outstanding Service which recognizes faculty and staff who have provided exceptional service to the University, its schools, colleges, departments and service units. Such service must have gone well beyond the regular duties of a faculty or staff member, and demonstrate unusual commitment to the University community.

Professor Vanessa Lee (Psychology), Assistant Professor Aren Aizura (Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies), and Professor Josephine Lee (English and Asian American Studies) have been selected as the recipients of this year’s Arthur “Red” and Helene Motley Exemplary Teaching Award. The Motley Award recognizes faculty of the college who are outstanding teachers of graduate and undergraduate students. The award guidelines call for faculty who show an interest in individual students' well-being; who give of themselves generously in advising, counseling, and directing projects; and who create an active classroom atmosphere.

Contract Assistant Professor Evan Roberts (Sociology and Population Studies) and Contract Assistant Professor Caprice Niccoli (Psychology) are the recipients of the 2020 Career Readiness Teaching Awards. These awards recognize instructors who have demonstrated leadership in the Career Readiness initiative to deepen students’ capacity to reflect on their growth across the breadth and depth of their undergraduate experience and to enable students to articulate the value of a liberal arts education.

Professor Douglas Kearney (English) has been selected as a recipient of the McKnight Presidential Fellow Award, a mid-career faculty award given to the most promising individuals who have been granted both tenure and promotion to associate professor in an academic year. 

Teaching Specialist Said Salah (African American & African Studies) has received the International Somali Awards’ Lifetime Achievement Award for his work teaching Somali language courses at all levels.

Ascan Koerner, Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education, and Judy Anderson, Director of Career Readiness, were recently awarded a Technology Excellence Award from the National Association of Colleges and Employers for their their work in CLA's Career Readiness Initiative.

PhD Candidate Caitlin Curry (Sociology) received the Office for Equity and Diversity's Scholarly Excellence in Equity and Diversity (SEED) Awards, which honors underrepresented undergraduate, graduate, and professional students for their outstanding work in advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion at the University of Minnesota and in the community.
 

Fellowships and Grants

Professor Ananya Chatterjea (Dance) has been awarded a 2021 choreographer fellowship by the McKnight Artist Fellowships. 

Grant in Aid Recipients
The Grant-in-Aid of Research, Artistry, and Scholarship program (GIA) promotes the research, scholarly, and artistic activities of faculty and supports academic excellence throughout the University. The following are CLA's recipients:

Assistant Professor Hassan Abdel Salam (Sociology)
“Palestine’s Human Rights Fatwas: An Exploration of the Legal Opinions of Imams and Jurists in Palestine.”

Assistant Professor Marissa Benedict (Music)
“New Music for a New Century - The Evolution of Brass Music in the 21st Century.”

Assistant Professor Jennifer EunJung Row  (French & Italian)
"The Body Perfect: the Aesthetics of Ableism and Race in the French Early Modern.”

Associate Professor Paul Shambroom (Art)
“Purpletown: Portraits from the Thin Divide.”

Associate Professor Diane Willow (Art)
"Open Air Cycle.”

April 2021

Awards

Assistant Professor Jennifer EunJung Row (French & Italian), Gabriela Spears-Rico (Chicano & Latino Studies, American Indian Studies), Assistant Professor Zozan Pehlivan (History), and Assistant Professor Ying Song (Geography, Environment & Society) have been selected as recipients of the University of Minnesota McKnight Land-Grant Professorship, a two-year award designed to advance the careers of exceptional junior faculty.

Professor Michael Silverman (School of Music) and Professor Vanessa Lee (Psychology) were selected as recipients of the University of Minnesota Distinguished McKnight University Professorship, an award designed to recognize exceptional mid-career faculty. 

Assistant Professor Caprice Niccoli (Psychology) has received the CLA Career Readiness Teaching Award in recognition of her demonstrated leadership in the Career Readiness initiative to enable students to articulate the value of a liberal arts education.

Director of Choral Activities Kathy Saltzman Romey (Music) is the 2021 recipient of the Chorus America Distinguished Service Award which recognizes a member whose long-term service to the choral field significantly furthers Chorus America’s mission “to empower singing ensembles to create vibrant communities and effect meaningful change.” 

Amelious Whyte Jr., Director of Public Engagement in CLA's Office of Institutional Advancement, has been chosen as a recipient of the Spring 2021 Josie R. Johnson Human Rights and Social Justice Award on behalf of the Office for Equity and Diversity.

Melanie Johnson, academic advisor for the MLK Program, has been selected as this year’s recipient of the University of Minnesota 2021 Outstanding Community Service Staff Award, the highest honor the University of Minnesota gives to a staff member for service to the community. The award recognizes the significant contributions she has made to the community, including building University-community partnerships and programs that benefit our students, faculty, staff, and community partners.

Professor Deniz S. Ones (Psychology), a Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Distinguished University Teacher of the University of Minnesota’s Department of Psychology was awarded the 2021 Joyce and Robert Hogan Award for Personality and Work Performance by the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) for their Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America paper on Conscientiousness.
 
Associate Professor Cheryl Olman (Psychology) has received the 2021 President's Award for Outstanding Service which recognizes faculty and staff who have provided exceptional service to the University, its schools, colleges, departments and service units.

Fellowships and Grants

PhD candidate Aleisha Barton (Art History) was awarded the The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS)’s 2021 Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellows in American Art. This year, eight exceptional doctoral candidates have been recognized for their promising research in object- and image-based American art history. 
 

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)
 

The Interdisciplinary Collaborative Workshop
The Interdisciplinary Collaborative Workshop (ICW) program spurs new collaborations among scholars in CLA and beyond. It provides support to bring together faculty, staff, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students from a variety of fields to intensively study a topic. The ICW full grants in this round are as follows:

ArTeS: Catalyzing Creative Interdependence
ArTeS is an intercollegiate initiative, emerging from CLA, that centers the arts in Art+Technology+Science collaborations at the University of Minnesota. We affirm, as our core value, systematically creating a diverse, equitable, and inclusive network and exchange among people, communities, and disciplines essential to creating and realizing a transformative vision of ArTeS that supports creative interdependence. ArTeS proposes an expanded collaboration among faculty, students, staff, and community collaborators to participate in the process of co-creating a vision, prototyping participatory activities (virtual and on-campus), and generating an implementation plan that will guide us as we seek external funding for this initiative.

Team Members
Associate Professor Diane Willow - Department of Art
Associate Professor Vicente Diaz - Department of American Indian Studies
Associate Professor Sumanth Gopinath - School of Music
Associate Professor Daniel Keefe - Department of Computer Science & Engineering
Technology Architect Colin McFadden - Liberal Arts Technologies & Innovation Services
Assistant Professor Jennifer Newsom - School of Architecture
Associate Vice Provost Virajita Singh - Center for Sustainable Building Research

Refusing Disposability: Racial and Disability Justice Toward Another World
COVID-19 amplifies vulnerabilities that render disabled, Black, Indigenous, and other bodies “disposable” and “sacrificable.” Thinking alongside disability and racial justice activists, our three-year interdisciplinary workshop examines intersectional analyses, public histories, and transformative praxis as a form of counter-knowledge that contends that #NoBodyIsDisposable. We will disseminate this knowledge by creating new University of Minnesota courses and an open-access public-facing curriculum. Ultimately, we aim to further the interrogation of, and resistance to, the causes and consequences of disposability.

Team Members
Assistant Professor Jennifer EunJung Row - Department of French & Italian
PhD Candidate Angela Carter - UMN Disability Resource Center
Professor Jigna Desai - Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies
Assistant Professor Erin Durban - Department of Anthropology
Assistant Professor Rachel Presley - Department of Writing Studies
PhD Candidate Nathan Stenberg - Department of Theatre Arts & Dance
President's Postdoctoral Fellow Jessica Horvath Williams - Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies

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.