IPRH Humanities Showcase – Awards & Honors

Poshek Fu (History / Asian American Studies) received a 2014-15 fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Study. (Source) 

Clifford Christians (Research Professor Emeritus of Communications/Professor Emeritus of Media Studies/Journalism) won the Louis Forsdale Award for Outstanding Educator in the Field of Media Ecology from the Media Ecology Association (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). 

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. 

Areli Marina (Art History / Medieval Studies) won the Howard R. Marraro Prize for best work in Italian history for her book, The Italian Piazza Transformed, from the American Catholic Historical Association and the American Historical Association (Source). 

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). 

Bruce Michelson (English / Director of the Campus Honors Program / President of the American Humor Studies Association) has been named a Fulbright grantee for 2013-2014. He will serve as Fulbrigh Professor of American Studies with the University of Antwerp (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).

IPRH factuly fellow Jennifer Monson's (Dance) Live Dancing Archive has been named the best dance of 2013 by TimeOut New York (Source). 

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

Amita Sinha (Landscape Architecture) won the Prize for the Best Article Published in the Journal of Planning History from the Society for American City and Regional Planning History for her article  “Jamshedpur: Planning an Ideal Steel City in India,” published November 2011 (Source). 

Debra Richtmeyer (Music) became the first woman to receive the North American Saxophone Alliance Honorary Lifetime Member Award (Source). 

Rebecca Ginsburg (EPOL, Landscape Architecture, and Director EJP) won the 2012 Abbott Lowell Cummings Prize from the Vernacular Architecture Forum for her book At Home With Arpartheid: The Hidden Landscapes of Deomestic Service in Johannesburg (Virginia, 2011). The prize recognizes a significant contribution to the study of vernacular architecture and cultural landscapes of North America.

Cara Finnegan (communication) has won the “Outstanding Book of the Year” award from the National Communication Association’s Visual Communication Division. (Source)

Evening’s Empire (Cambridge, 2011) by Craig Koslofsky (History, IPRH Fellow 2013–14) was cited by Atlantic magazine as one of the 15 best books reviewed by the magazine or published in 2012. Benjamin Schwarz, the magazine’s literary editor, assembled a top-five list for the year, followed by a list of ten runners-up, which included Koslofsky’s book. The book was reviewed in the April 2012 issue of Atlantic magazine. Evening’s Empire was also named the Longman-History Today Book of the Year for 2011 in January 2012. One criterion for the award is accessibility for the general reader of history. 

Erik McDuffie (African American Studies, IPRH Fellow 2010–11) received the Wesley-Logan Prize from the American Historical Association for his book Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Duke, 2011). The Wesley-Logan Prize in African diaspora history is jointly sponsored by the American Historical Association and the Association for the Study of African American Life & History, and is is awarded annually for an outstanding book on some aspect of the history of the dispersion, settlement and adjustment, and/or return of peoples originally from Africa. 

Jennifer Monson (Dance and IPRH Fellow 2013–14) was honored at the Movement Research Gala on May 13, 2013. Movement Research serves as a laboratory for exploration and experimentation in movement-based art forms while capturing the diversity of artists and audiences. Each year, choreographers, dancers, and other motion-centered innovators are recognized for their contributions.

Junaid Rana (Asian American Studies, IPRH Fellow 2005–06)received the Association of Asian American Studies (AAAS) Book Award for the Social Sciences, for Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora (Duke, 2011). The award was conferred at the AAS Annual Conference in Seattle in April 2013.

Mahir Şaul (Anthropology) received Utne Reader magazine’s Visionaries Award for his role as a “debunker of African stereotypes.” For 15 years, Şaul has taught a course on African film and society, emphasizing their vast intellectual and cultural accomplishments. Last winter, he introduced the first African film series to Instanbul Museum of Modern Art audiences.

Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert (American Indian Studies) was awarded a 2013 Spur Award by the Western Writers of America, in the category of Best Western Short Nonfiction, for “Marathoner Louis Tewanima and the Continuity of Hopi Running, 1908–1912,” which appeared in the Autumn 2012 issue of Western Historical Quarterly. Western Writers of America, Inc., was founded in 1953 to promote the literature of the American West and bestows Spur Awards for distinguished writing in the Western field.

AMERICAN COUNCIL OF LEARNED SOCIETIES (ACLS)

ACLS Fellow
D. Fairchild Ruggles
Project: Shajar al-Durr: The Extraordinary Architectural Patronage of a 13th-Century Egyptian Slave-Queen

Digital Innovation Fellow
Ted Underwood, English
Project: Understanding Genre in a Collection of a Million Volumes

Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellow
Carol Symes, History
Project: Public Acts: Performance, Popular Literacies, and the Documentary Revolution of Medieval Europe
For residence at the National Humanities Center during academic year 2013–14

New Faculty Fellow
Susan N. Johnson-Roehr, Architecture PhD, 2011
Dissertation: "The Spatialization of Knowledge and Power at the Astronomical Observatories of Sawai Jai Singh II, c. 1721–1743 CE"
Appointed in Art at University of Virginia, 2013–14 and 2014–15.

NATIONAL CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES

Residential Fellowship
Heather Hyde Minor, Architecture
Project:Giovanni Battista Piranesi's Lost Words

 NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES (NEH)

Summer Stipend
Mireya Loza, Latina/o Studies and History
Project: The Bracero Program: A History of the U.S.-Mexico Guest Worker Program, 1942–1964

Digital Start-Up Grant
Ted Underwood, English
Project: Understanding Genre in a Collection of a Million Volumes

Humanities Collections and Reference Resources
Mara Wade, Germanic Languages and Literatures
Project: Emblematica Online II

  FULBRIGHT PROGRAM

Eda Derhemi, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese
Fulbright Scholar for 2013–14, Albania, Spring 2014

Bruce Michelson, English, Emeritus
Fulbright Professor of American Literature, University of Antwerp, Spring 2014

Zohreh Sullivan, English, Emerita
Fulbright Scholar for 2013–14, University of Jordan
Project: Writers and the Battlefield of History

INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDIES (IAS), U OF BRISTOL

IAS Colston Research Fellow &
Benjamin Meaker Visiting Professor
Sharon Irish

AMERICAN THEATRE & DRAMA SOCIETY

Faculty Research Travel Award
Valeri Hohman, Theatre
Project: Cold War Performances: Soviet Performances in America after Stalin

CANADIAN SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES RESEARCH COUNCIL

Insight Development Grant
Jeananne Nichols, Music Education
Louis Bergonzi, Music Education
Project: To collect quantitative and qualitative data over a two-year period in order to investigate tenure status, gender/sexuality, and race/ethnicity in Canadian and US post-secondary music schools.

COUNCIL FOR EUROPEAN STUDIES (CES)

Mellon-CES Dissertation-Completion Fellowship
Diana Georgescu, Ph.D. Candidate, History, and IPRH-Nicholson Fellow 2012–13
Project: Ceauşescu’s Children': The Making and Unmaking of Romania’s Last Socialist Generation (1965–2005)

DUMBARTON OAKS RESEARCH LIBRARY AND COLLECTION

Junior Fellow, Garden and Landscape Studies
Rachel Koroloff, Ph.D. Candidate, History (declined 2013–14 IPRH Fellowship)
Project: "Seeds of Exchange: Russia's Apothecary and Botanical Gardens in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century"

The Journal of Late Antiquity, edited by history professor Ralph W. Mathisen, has been named the 2013 recipient of the Codex Award, given by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. The award is given for distinction within all disciplines and areas of the world covered in the ancient and medieval periods (Source).

Ken Cuno (History) was awarded the 2015 Albert Hourani Book Prize for his book Modernizing Marriage: Family, Ideology, and Law in Nineteenth - and Early Twentieth-Century Egypt. (Source)

Not Straight, Not White: Black Gay Men From the March on Washington to the AIDS Crisis, the latest work by Kevin Mumford (History), has been named a Stonewall Honor Book in the Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award category by the GLBT Round Table of the American Library Association. [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]

Charles D. Wright (English) won the Medieval Academy of America's CARA Award for Teaching Excellence (Source).

Erik McDuffie (African American Studies and History) has been awarded an ACLS Fellowship to work on his project "Garveyism in the Diasporic Midwest: The American Heartland and Global Black Freedom, 1920-1980." [Source]

Carole Palmer (Library and Information Science) won a Thomson Reuters Outstanding Information Science Teacher Award from the Association for Information Science and Technology (Source).

Bonnie Mak (GSLIS) has been named visiting senior fellow at the Center for Humanities and Information a newly-formed collaboration at Pennsylvania State University between the university’s College of the Liberal Arts and the University Libraries. (Source)

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

Joy Harjo (American Indian Studies) will receive the first Black Earth Institute Award, given to an artist who "best exemplifies the goals and mission of the institute in their work and life" (Source).

Joy Harjo (American Indian Studies / English) won the 2013 Creative Nonfiction Prize for her memoir “Crazy Brave” from PEN Center USA. (Source)

Lynne Dearborn (Architecture / Urban and Regional Planning) and John Stallmeyer (Architecture) won the 2013 EDR Achievement Award from the Environmental Design Research Association for their book Inconvenient Heritage. (Source)

John Vasquez (Political Science) has been awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Conflict Processes Section of the American Political Science Association. Founded in 1903, the Association is the leading professional organization for the study of political science and serves more than 12,000 members in more than 80 countries. [Source]

Krannert Art Museum curator of African Art Allyson Purpura and Professor Prita Meier (Art History) have received a National Endowment for the Humanities planning grant for the exhibition World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts Across the Indian Ocean (Source).

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

Karen Fresco (French, Medieval Studies & GWS) was named Officier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques. This prestigious title is awarded to members of the international community for outstanding contributions to French pedagogy, scholarship, and culture, as well as to the French language. L’Ordre des Palmes Académiques was instituted by founded by Emperor Napoléon Bonaparte on March 19, 1808. 

David M. Chasco (Director of the School of Architecture) was named a fellow by the American Institute of Architects. The fellowship program was developed to recognize architects who have made a significant contribution to architecture and society and who have achieved a standard of excellence in the profession (Source). 

A book translated from Portuguese by Elizabeth Lowe (professor and director of the U. of I. Center for Translation Studies) is one of five nominated by libraries worldwide in the Portuguese category for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.Lowe translated “The Only Happy Ending for a Love Story is an Accident,” by J.P. Cuenca. Overall, 142 titles have been nominated for the 2015 award. (Source) 

Five University of Illinois faculty members have been awarded National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships for 2016. The fellowship recipients and their projects are: 

- Eugene Avrutin (History): “The Velizh Affair: Jews and Christians in a 19th-century Russian Border Town”
- Eric Calderwood (Comparative and World Literature): “The Memory of Al-Andalus and Spanish Colonialism in Morocco, 1859-1956”
- Cara Finnegan (Communication): “American Presidents and the History of Photography from the Daguerreotype to the Digital Revolution”
- Gabriel Solis (Music): “Music, Race, and Indigeneity in Australia and Papua New Guinea”
- Derrick Spires (English): “Black Theories of Citizenship in the Early United States, 1787-1861”

Read more about the award recipients and their projects. 

Three faculty members were appointed Provost Fellows for this academic year. The faculty members are Lauren Goodlad (Professor of English and director of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory), Wendy Heller (professor of psychology and of gender and women’s studies), and Kelly Tappenden (the Kraft Foods Human Nutrition Professor in the department of food science and human nutrition).

The program provides academic leadership experience in key campus administrative roles for distinguished faculty members. For more information, please visit http://news.illinois.edu/ii/13/1219/ach.html.

Doug Kibbee (Medieval Studies, Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education, French and Center for Global Studies) has received a Fulbright fellowship to do research in France next academic year for his project “A Missing Link in the Creation of Standard French." (Source)

Antony Augoustakis (classics) has received an Award for Excellence in Teaching from the Society for Classical Studies. (Source)

Fred Hoxie’s (Swanlund professor of history) book, This Indian Country: American Indian Activists and the Place They Made has won the 2013 Caughey Western History Association Prize for the most distinguished book on the history of the American West (Source).

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has recieved three National Endowment in the Humanities grants. 

Bethany Anderson (University Archives) has recieved a Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant to work on her project: " Cybernetics Thought Collective: A History of Science and Technology Portal Project." You can learn more about the Cybernetics Thought Collective here.

Two different groups have recieved Digging into Data grants. Scott Althaus, Wouter van Atteveldt, and a Hatmut Wessler are working on "A Global Comparative Analysis of News Coverage about Terrorism from 1945 to present, " and Gabriel Solis, Simon Dixon, Hélène Papadopoulos, and Martin Pfleiderer are working on "Analyzing Large-Scale Data for Patterns in Jazz." [Source]

Jennifer Monson (Dance and IPRH 2013–14 Faculty Fellow) has been awarded a Doris Duke Impact Award (Source). 

Harry Liebersohn (History) has been chosen to receive the Humboldt Research Award, honoring a career of research achievements, and an American Academy fellowship. (Source)

Leslie Reagan (History, EUI, Gender and Women's Studies) has received 2015 William H. Welch Medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine for Dangerous Pregnancies:  Mothers, Disabilities, and Abortion (2010).  The medal is awarded for a book of outstanding scholarly merit in the field of medical. 

Beverly Smith, assistant director of the Native American House, has been accepted to be a member of the Higher Learning Commission Peer Corps. The Higher Learning Commission (HLC) was founded in 1895 as an independent corporation. It serves as one of six regional institutional accreditors in the United States. [Source]

The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the two-year project “Exploring the Billions and Billions of Words in the HathiTrust Corpus with Bookworm: HathiTrust + Bookworm.” The project will be directed by J. Stephen Downie (Co-Director of the HTRC and Professor and Associate Dean of Research at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science) in collaboration with multiple internal and external partners (Source).