IPRH Humanities Showcase – Awards & Honors

Michael Rothberg (English, Comparative and World Literature, Germanic Languages and Literatures, Program in Jewish Culture and Society, and IPRH Fellow 2003–04) was recognized by the International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN) for his essay, “Progress, Progression, Procession: William Kentridge and the Narratology of Transitional Justice,” which was selected as the best of the year’s publications in the journal Narrative, published by the ISSN. The article appeared in the January 2012 issue of Narrative. 

Professor Kristin Hoganson (History) has been invited to hold the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professorship in American History at Oxford University for 2015-2016 (Source).

Professor Michael Silvers (Music) has been awarded an ACLS Fellowship for his project Voices of Drought: Forró Soundscapes in Northeastern Brazil. For an overview of all 2015 ACLS fellowship recipients, including two University of Illinois doctoral candidates, please refer to http://www.acls.org/fellows/new.

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).

David W. Plath, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Asian Studies, received the 2013 Association for Asian Studies (AAS) Award for Distinguished Contributions to Asian Studies. Plath was the leader of the Media Production Group, for which he has designed, scripted, hosted, narrated, edited, directed, and often filmed productions. In 2000, the Society for East Asian Anthropology established the David Plath Media Award, given biennially for the best new educational media project on Asian societies and cultures. Professor Plath taught at the U. of I. for 35 years, is perhaps best known for Long Engagements: Maturity in Modern Japan(Stanford UP, 1980). The 2013 Distinguished Contributions to Asian Studies award celebrates his long engagement and many contributions to teaching about Japan at all levels and through many media.

LeAnne Howe (American Indian Studies and English) won a USA Ford Fellowship in Literature from United States Artists. The organization honors 50 of America’s finest artists each year with individual fellowship awards of $50,000. Howe joins a class of 2012 awardees that includes Annie Proulx, Coco Fusco, Guillermo Gomez-Peña, David Henry Hwang, Edgar Heap of Birds, Adrienne Kennedy, and many others. In 2012, Professor Howe was also the winner of the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas.

Matthew Thibeault (Music Education, IPRH Fellow 2012–13) received the Outstanding Emerging Researcher Award from the Center for Music Education Research at the University of South Florida. The award honors music education researchers at an early stage of their careers who are producing high-quality research. Professor Thibeault’s paper, “The Shifting Locus of Musical Experience From Performance to Recording to New Media: Some Implications for Music Education,” will be published in the center’s journal and republished in a book. 

Gilberto Rosas's (Anthropology / Latina/Latino Studies / Latin American and Caribbean Studies) book Barrio Libre: Criminalizing States and Delinquent Refusals of the New Frontier has won the Association of Latina/Latino Anthropologists 2012-14 Book Award (Source). 

Lisa Lucero (Anthropology) was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Election as a fellow is an honor bestowed upon members of the association by their peers. Lucero was honored for “distinguished service in the field of archaeology, with emphasis on the role of water management in Maya society and its contemporary implications.”

David Roediger (History and IPRH Fellow 2012–13) and Elizabeth Esch have been awarded the International Labor History Association (ILHA) Book of the Year Award for 2012 for The Production of Difference: Race and the Management of Labor in U.S. History (Oxford, 2012).

Leslie Reagan (History and IPRH Fellow 2011–12 & 2001–02) received the Arthur J. Viseltear Award for her book Dangerous Pregnancies: Mothers, Disabilities, and Abortion in Modern America (California, 2010). The annual award is given by the Medical Care Section of the American Public Health Association to a historian for outstanding contributions to the history of public health.

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]

Daniel Schneider (Urban and Regional Planning) received the George Perkins Marsh Prize, for Hybrid Nature: Sewage Treatment and the Contradictions of the Industrial Ecosystem (MIT, 2011). Bestowed by the American Society for Environmental History, the prize is awarded to the best book in the field.

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.

Claudia Brosseder (History) has been awarded the American Academy of Religion’s 2015 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in the category of Historical Studies for her book The Power of Huacas: Change and Resistance in the Andean World of Colonial Peru. (Source)

Edna Viruell-Fuentes (Latino/Latina Studies) has been awarded a Fulbright-García Robles Fellowship to research health and migration in Mexico. [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).

Justine Murison (English) and Sarah West (Spanish and Portuguese) are the recipients for the Humanities Council Teaching Excellence Award. Murison and West are recognized for their efforts in humanities instruction. [Source]

Cecily R. Garber, recent English PhD, has been named as one of 20 ACLS Public Fellows (Source).

Marshall Scott Poole (Communications) won the 2013 Joseph E. McGrath Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Study of Groups from the Interdisciplinary Network for Group Research (Source)

Dr. Lisa Cacho's Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected has received the the 2012 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize for best book in American Studies from the American Studies Association (Soruce).

Alex Shakar (English) was named a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction for his novel Luminarium, which focuses on the roles of technology and spirituality in shaping people’s reality. 

Bruno Nettl, Professor Emeritus of Music and Anthropology, is one of four international musicians who received the inaugural Taichi Traditional Music Award, given by the China Conservatory and the Taichi Traditional Music Foundation. Professor Nettl was chosen for his achievements in the field that he helped establish: ethnomusicology, the study of social and cultural aspects of music in local and global contexts. The prize recognizes individuals or social groups who have made “outstanding and original contribution toward the performance, inheritance, theoretical studies or dissemination of traditional music.”

Professor Nettl has also been awarded the Charles Homer Haskins Prize, presented annually to a distinguished humanist by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). This honor includes a cash award and asks the recipient to deliver the Haskins Prize Lecture reflecting on “a lifetime of work as a scholar and an institution builder” at the ACLS annual meeting in May 2014. Named for the first chairman of ACLS, the Haskins Prize Lecture series is entitled “A Life of Learning” and celebrates scholarly careers of distinctive importance. 

Feisal Mohamed (English) was awarded the Milton Society of America’s Irene Samuel Memorial Award, the highest honor from the society for a collection of essays, for his co-edited collection Milton and Questions of History (2012). This is the second consecutive year that he has received an award from the MSA (Source).

Erik S. McDuffie (African American Studies) and Michelle M. Rivera (Communication) have received American Council of Learned Society (ACLS) Fellowships. McDuffie received the ACLS Fellowship, which awards fellowships to individual scholars working in the humanities sand related social sciences. Rivera was awarded the Mellon/ACLS Public Fellows Program, which places recent humanities PhDs in staff positions at partnering government agencies and non-profits. In 2017, the ACLS will award over 300 scholars across a variety of humanities disciplines. [Source1] [Source2]

John Lynn (History) has been awarded a Public Scholar award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The award is one of only 28 such awards totaling $1.3 million given out this year, the third year for the program. This is the first such award for a U of I faculty member.

James Brennan (History) has been awarded the 2013 Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize for his book, Taifa: Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania, published by Ohio University Press in 2012. The prize is given out by the African Studies Association for the best book on East African studies published the previous calendar year (Source).

Robert Rushing’s (French and Italian) new book, Descended from Hercules: Biopolitics and the Muscled Male Body on Screen (Indiana University Press) won the Film and Media Studies book prize from the American Association for Italian Studies. [Source]

Dean Edward Feser (Urban and Regional Planning) received a 2013 Edgar Fellowship from the Illinois Gov. Jim Edgar/Institute of Government and Public Affairs (Source) 

Kenny Cupers (Architecture) has been awarded a Humboldt Fellowship for 2014-2015.

Ellen Swain (Library) was name a fellow of the Society of American Archivists (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)

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)

Elena Delgado (Spanish and Portuguese) has received grant funding from the French National Research Center. (Source)

Leslie Reagan (History, EUI, Gender and Women's Studies) has received a Summer Stipend from The National Endowment for the Humanities for her project "Seeing Agent Orange in the United States and Vietnam: Quilt of Tears" (Source).

John Karam (Spanish and Portuguese) and Tamara Chaplin (History) have recieved NEH Summer Stipends. John Karam will work on his project "Arabs at a South American Border Remaking the Hemisphere," a book-length study of Arab immigrants in the border region of Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina. Tamara Champlin will work on her project "Postwar French Media, and the Struggle for Gay Rights," a book-length study of the history of French lesbian activism since World War II. (Source)

Five professors at the University of Illinois — Asef Bayat (sociology), Joy Harjo (American Indian studies), Cathy Prendergast (English), Stephen Taylor (music composition and theory), and Deke Weaver (Art + Design) — are among 178 Guggenheim Fellows named this year by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Fellowships are appointed to a to a diverse group scholars, artists, and scientists on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise (Source).

Eduardo Ledesma (Spanish and Portuguese) and Catharine Fairbairn (Psychology) have received the Lincoln Excellence for Assistant Professors (LEAP) Award, which is granted to faculty based on scholarly productivity and contributions to the educational mission of their departments and the the college. [Source]

Robert Morrissey (History) won the 2013 Lester J. Cappon Award for Best Article in the William and Mary Quarterly for "Kaskaskia Social Network: Kinship and Assimilation in a French-Illinois Borderland” published in The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Serial, 70, number 1, January 2013 (Source). Morrissey also received a 2012-13 IPRH Prize for Research in the Humanities award for the same article. 

John Lynn (History, emeritus) has received a Public Scholar award from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the 2017 Samuel Eliot Morison Prize, the highest career award in the field of military history. (Source)

Karen Flynn (Gender and Women’s Studies / African Studies / African American Studies) won the Lavinia L. Dock Award for Exemplary Historical Research from American Association for the History of Nursing for her book Moving Beyond Borders (Source) 

Bruno Nettl (Professor Emeritus of Music and Anthropology) gave the ACLS's 2014 Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecture this past May. You can view the lecture here. 

James Kilgore, a research scholar in the Center for African Studies, the Center for Global Studies, and in LAS Global Studies, has been awarded an Open Society Foundation 2017 Soros Justice Fellowship. It will allow him to lead an effort to advance more effective and less punitive policies on the use of electronic monitoring in the criminal justice system. [Source]

Lori Sue Kendall (Library and Information Science) became President of the Association of Internet Researchers (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.”

Kristin Hoganson (History), who delivered the 2013 IPRH Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities this fall, received the 2012 Ray Allen Billington Prize from the Western History Association for her article, “Meat in the Middle: Converging Borderlands in the U.S. Midwest, 1865–1900,” published in the Journal of American History. The association is dedicated to promoting the study of the North American West in its varied aspects and broad sense. 

Martin F. Manalansan (Asian American Studies) has won the Crompton-Noll Award for best essay in lesbian, gay, queer studies in the modern languages/literatures for his essay, "The 'Stuff' of Archives: Mess, Migrations and Queer Lives." (Source)

Hans Hock (Linguistics,Emeritus) has been awarded the Sukumar Sen Memorial Gold Medal from The Asiatic Society in Kolkata (Calcutta), India. (Source)

Janis Johnston (Law) is the 2014 recipient of the Marian Gould Gallagher Distinguished Service Award, given by the American Association of Law Libraries (Source). 

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