Awards & Honors: Spring 2011

Staff

Six staff members in the College received a 2011 President’s Outstanding Staff or Supervisor Award in recognition of extraordinary contributions to the continuing success of the university including:

• Sally Dickson (European Studies)
• Jared Diener (Religious Studies)
• Nancy Moses (Government)
• Annelise Notzon (English)
• Maria Pineda (Germanic Studies)
• Gail Sanders (Teresa Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies)

The College of Liberal Arts is proud to announce the 2011 winners of its Staff Excellence Awards:

• Christopher Adams (Middle Eastern Studies)
• W. Grant Barger (Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services)
• John K Fleming (Warfield Center for African and African-American Studies)
• Olga Macha (Slavic & Eurasian Studies)
• Courtney Meador (History)
• Stephanie Valdez (Department of Philosophy)

Five academic advisors were honored with the Texas Exes James W. Vick Award for Academic Advising. These unique awards are student nominated and selected. College recipients are Calina Coakwell and Richard Ribb (Student Affairs).

Faculty

Six of the seven faculty members selected to receive the President’s Associates Teaching Excellence Award for the 2010-11 academic year are from the College of Liberal Arts. The award recognizes the consistent level of excellence the faculty members achieved in teaching undergraduate students. College recipients include:

• Elizabeth Engelhardt (American Studies)
• Ami Pedahzur (Government)
• Kirsten Belgum (Germanic Studies)
• Stephen Friesen (Religious Studies)
• Domino R. Perez (English)
• Charters Wynn (History)

The 2011 Texas Exes Teaching Awards recognize top professors and teaching assistants on campus, and are chosen by students. Among the honorees from the College are Associate Professor Elizabeth Richmond-Garza (English) and Assistant Instructor and graduate student Emilie Destruel (Linguistics).

Linda Ferreira-Buckley (English, Rhetoric and Writing) was named a recipient of The Eyes of Texas Excellence Award for the spring 2011 semester. The Eyes of Texas is an anonymous campus organization that recognizes contributions to student life at the university.

The College of Liberal Arts has awarded five professors with Raymond Dickson Centennial Endowed Teaching Fellowships, an honor that recognizes excellence in teaching and commitment. It provides a one-year fellowship appointment and a $3,000 salary supplement for the 2011-12 academic year. The recipients are:

• Rebecca Bigler (Psychology)
• Kenneth Greene (Government)
• Julie Hardwick (History)
• Allen MacDuffie (English)
• Thomas Vessley (French and Italian)

John Higley (Government) was designated a “Star of Australia” at a gala, “G’Day Australia” celebration organized by the Australian American Chamber of Commerce in Houston. Australian Ambassador to the United States, the Hon. Kim Beazley, presented the award.

Juliet Walker (History) was awarded the Carter G. Woodson Scholars Medallion for 2010 by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. The medallion is presented to a scholar whose career is distinguished through at least a decade of research, writing and activism in the field of African-American life and history.

Jacqueline Angel (Sociology) received the Senior Service Scholar Award presented at the Gerontological Society of America’s (GSA) Annual Meeting. GSA recognized her long-standing research on the social inequalities in the health of older adults, particularly Latinas.

Julia Mickenberg (American Studies) was awarded a 2011-12 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for her project, “The New Woman Tried on Red: Russia in the American Feminist Imagination, 1905-1945.”

Cristine Legare (Psychology) received funding from the United Kingdom’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) as part of a $6 million grant to examine the causes and consequences of ritual in human societies. This five-year research program will include field studies and controlled cross-cultural experiments at approximately twelve field sites around the world.

Charles (Josh) Holahan (Psychology) was elected as a member of the Academy of Distinguished Teachers.

Jennifer Gates-Foster (Classics) was awarded a fellowship for 2011-12 by the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C. The fellowship will support her work on a book project titled “Power Across Frontiers: Networks of Influence in Hellenistic Egypt.”

Robert Dull (Geography and the Environment) was appointed to a four-year term on the editorial board of The Professional Geographer, a publication of the Association of American Geographers (AAG).

Sabine Hake (Germanic Studies) was appointed editor of German Studies Review, the journal of the German Studies Association, for a five-year term, starting in January 2012.

Marjorie Curry Woods (English) was accepted into the Institute for Advanced Study’s School of Historical Studies for the 2011-12 academic year. She will research the practice of assigning schoolboys to write speeches from the point of view of highly emotional female characters through the early modern era in Western Europe.

Alexander C. Huk (Psychology, Center for Perceptual Systems) was chosen as the 2011 winner of the Elsevier/VSS Young Investigator Award. Huk has made significant, groundbreaking contributions to the understanding of the neural mechanisms involved in motion processing and the use of sensory information as a basis for perceptual decisions.

Sheldon Ekland-Olson (Sociology, former College of Liberal Arts dean) is the 2011 recipient of the Jean Holloway Award for Teaching Excellence in Liberal Arts and Natural Sciences. The Jean Holloway Award recognizes individuals whose commitment to students has an effective, positive influence on the educational experience and lives of those they teach.

William Roger Louis (British Studies) was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. The academy, founded in 1780, recognizes international achievement in science, the arts, business and public leadership.

Leticia Marteleto (Sociology, Population Research Center) was selected as a member of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population Scientific Panel on Young People’s Life Course in Developing Countries.

Jason Casellas (Government) was selected as a 2011-12 National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow. The fellowship award of $55,000 assists with the fellow’s salary replacement and research expenses for the fellowship period.  It is administered by the National Academy of Education, an honorary educational society, and funded by the Spencer Foundation.

DeAnna Adkins, Theresa Jones (Psychology) and Dorothy Kozlowski (DePaul University, UT alumna) are the recipients of a four-year $1.1 million grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. There are very few treatments that effectively alleviate motor impairments following traumatic brain injury. Their studies will establish appropriate cortical electrical stimulation parameters that will optimize motor recovery, test the persistence of improvements and quantify brain reorganization due to treatment.

Brad Love and Alison Preston (Psychology) are the principal investigators and recipients of a two-year $414,129 R21 grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. R21 grants are intended to encourage exploratory/developmental research by providing support for the early and conceptual stages of project development. This project will combine computational modeling, eye tracking and neuroimaging to determine how attention and memory interact to guide learning and decision-making.

Book Awards

Arturo Arias, professor of Latin American literature in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, presented “Arias de don Giovanni” (F&G Editores, June 2010) on Nov. 29 at the Guadalajara International Book Fair, the second largest book expo in the world.

Benjamin Brower, assistant professor in the Department of History and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, was awarded the Albert Hourani Book Award for his book titled “A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844-1902” (Columbia University Press, 2009). This non-fiction book award is given by the Middle East Studies Association to the year’s most notable book in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies.

Hans Boas, associate professor in the Department of Germanic Studies, has been awarded the 2011 Leonard Bloomfield Book Award from the Linguistic Society of America for his book “The Life and Death of Texas German.” Boas presents the first major study of Texas German, a unique fusion of English and 19th century German. Boas runs the Texas German Dialect Project, an online digital archive of recordings, transcriptions and translations of interviews with more than 300 Texas German speakers.

Shirley E. Thompson, associate professor in the Departments of American Studies, and African and African Diaspora Studies, was the $10,000 grand prize winner of the Hamilton Book Award. She won for her book, “Exiles at Home: The Struggle to Become American in Creole New Orleans.” Huaiyin Li, associate professor in the Departments of History and Asian Studies, won a $3,000 runner up prize for “Village China Under Socialism and Reform: A Micro-History, 1948-2008.”

Guy Raffa, associate professor in the Department of French and Italian, has been awarded a research fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities for 2011-2012 for his book-project, “Dante’s Bones and the Idea of Italy.”

The Association of Caribbean Historians, the leading association in the field of Caribbean history, has awarded Frank Guridy (History, African and African Diaspora Studies) the Elsa Goveia Book Prize for his book, “Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow,” (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, May 2010).

Richard Valencia (Center for Mexican American Studies) has garnered the 2011 Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association for his newest book, “Dismantling Contemporary Deficit Thinking,” (Routledge, April 2010).

Neil Foley’s (History and American Studies) book, “Quest for Equality: The Failed Promise of Black-Brown Solidarity” (Harvard University Press, May 2010) was selected by the Texas Institute of Letters as the most significant scholarly book for 2010.