IPRH Humanities Showcase – Awards & Honors

Sharon Irish (Library & Information Science) has received an Arts Writers Grant for her project Stephen Willats in the Yew Kay (Source).

Shelley Weinberg (Philosophy) has been awarded the annual best book in the history of philosophy by the Journal of the History of Philosophy for her 2016 book, Consciousness in Locke. JHP Books is devoted publishing works in textual and archival history, scholarly editions and translations, and interpretive and contextual studies of philosophers and philosophical movements. [Source]

Donna Buchanan (music), Elizabeth Hoiem (information sciences), Candice Jenkins (English), Paul Kapp (architecture), D. Fairchild Ruggles (landscape architecture) and Craig Williams (classics) have been awarded National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships for 2018. (Source)

Dennis Baron (English and Linguistics), Craig Koslofsky (History and Germanic Languages and Literatures), Ralph W. Mathisen (History, Classics, and Medieval Studies), Rebecca Stumpf (Anthropology), Karin A. Dahmen (Physics), and Mei-Po Kwan (Geography and Geographic information) have all been named Guggenheim Fellows. (Souce)

Soo Ah Kwon and Nancy Abelmann (Assian American Studies), as well as their co-principal investigators Adrienne Lo and Tim Liao have recieved a grant from the Spencer Foundation for their proposal for “The American University Meets the Pacific Century (AUPC).”  The project examines how the escalating number of degree-seeking international undergraduates is transforming the understanding and meaning of race and diversity at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (Source). 

Outgoing IPRH Advisory Committee Member Stephanie Foote (English and GWS) has launched Resilience: A Journal of Environmental Humanities, with co-editor Stephanie LeMenager, an Associate Professor of English at University of California, Santa Barbara. A digital, peer-reviewed journal of the Environmental Humanities, Resilience provides a forum for scholars from across humanities disciplines to speak to one another about their shared interest in environmental issues, and to plot out an evolving conversation about what the humanities contributes to living and thinking sustainably in a world of dwindling resources. Volumes will be published in digital form by the University of Nebraska Press. The journal can be visited at www.resiliencejournal.org. 

Two Illinois professors have received NEH Fellowships for University Teachers: Carol Symes (History / Global Studies / Medieval Studies) for her project “Activating Texts: Mediated Documents and Their Makers in Medieval Europe” and Erik McDuffie (African American Studies / History) for his project “Marcus Garvey and the American Heartland, 1920–1980.” [Source]

Tariq Ali (History) was awarded the Sardar Patel Dissertation Prize for the best dissertation written on South Asia in any institution of higher learning in the United States for 2012 (Source).

Tere O’Connor (Dance) has received a Doris Duke Artist Award for 2013. Professor O’Connor brings metaphor, memory, and aspects of consciousness to the forefront in many of his works. Funding from the Doris Duke Artist Award will allow him to both explore projects that connect writing, teaching, experiencing dance, mentoring, and advocacy and move farther away from the concept of authorship toward dances that are structured to allow for external ideas from the performers and the audience to shape them. The award includes an unrestricted grant of $250,000 over three to five years, $25,000 toward a retirement account, plus the possibility of additional funds for outreach and audience engagement. The ten-year Doris Duke Artist Award program is designed to “recognize the potential of individual artists and insure their future viability.”

Tere R. O'Connor (Dance) has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Source). 

Timothy Robert Pauketat (Anthropology/Medieval Studies) has been awarded a 2014 NEH Collaborative Research Grant for the project Cahokia’s Richland Farmers: Agricultural Expansion, Immigration, Ritual and the Foundations of Mississippian Civilization (Source). 

Valeria Sobol (Slavic Languages and Literatures) has received an NEH Summer Stipend for her work The Haunted Empire: The Russian Literary Gothic and the “Imperial Uncanny,” 1793–1844 (Source).

Valleri Hohman (Theatre) won a Fulbright Award from The J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board to work with Nikolai Kolyada at the Kolyada Theatre in Ekaterinburg, Russia in 2014 (Source).

Wäil Hassan (Comparative and World Literature and Director of the Center for Translation Studies) has recieved a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies for his research project Arab Brazil: Literature, Culture, and Orientalism in the Racial Democracy. (Source)

WaÏl S. Hassan (Comparative and World Literature and English) has been elected as the American Comparative Literature Association’s second vice president. Next year, he’ll become vice president and will serve as president the year following. [Source]

Walter Feinberg (professor emeritus of education policy, organization and leadership) was honored with the John Dewey Society’s 2014 Outstanding Achievement Award (Source). 

Yasemin Yildiz (Germanic Languages and Literatures) received the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for her book Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (Fordham, 2011). The Modern Language Association of America (MLA) awards this prize biennially for an outstanding scholarly work on the linguistics or literatures of the Germanic languages. Professor Yildiz received the prize in January at the MLA annual convention in Boston. Professor Yildiz received an IPRH Prize for Research in the Humanities in spring 2012.