2021-2022 faculty and graduate student achievements in the humanities and arts
Humanities and arts faculty and students at UGA continued to showcase the world-class quality of their research, teaching, and public engagement during the 2021-22 academic year, once again collecting highly competitive national and international honors and awards across a variety of fields. Below is a sampling of their accomplishments. If you have received a major grant, fellowship, or prize in the humanities and arts and are not listed here, please let us know. We would love to share the news of your success.
• Elizabeth Wright, Distinguished Research Professor of Spanish literature in the department of Romance languages and associate academic director of the Willson Center, and Nicholas Jones of the University of California, Davis, were awarded an NEH Collaborative Research Grant to produce an international conference and a special journal issue on Recovering Black Performance in Early Modern Iberia (1500–1800).
• Claudio Saunt, Russell Professor in American History, was awarded the Ridenhour Book Prize for Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory, his 2020 book that previously had won the Bancroft Prize and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, been a finalist for the National Book Award, and earned many other honors. More recently, Saunt was also awarded a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship for his project “The Land Beneath Our Feet,” following Scott Reynolds Nelson and Cindy Hahamovitch as the third member of the department of history faculty to earn the fellowship in the past four years.
• Cassia Roth, associate professor of history and Latin American and Caribbean studies, won the 2021 Murdo J. MacLeod Book Prize from the Southern Historical Association, Latin American and Caribbean Section, and a 2021 Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title from the American Library Association, for her book A Miscarriage of Justice: Women’s Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil.
• The Willson Center, working with College of Education Professor Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor and other faculty representatives of the UGA Arts Council, was awarded a grant from the CDC Foundation to help increase vaccine confidence through community participation in the arts. The project, which included murals painted by UGA art students and a TikTok competition, was a partnership between UGA arts units, students, and community partners.
• Jennifer Palmer, associate professor of history, was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities for 2022. Palmer will use the fellowship for her book project, Possession: Gender, Race, and Ownership in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic France. She was awarded a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies in 2021 for the same project.
• Rumya S. Putcha, assistant professor of women’s studies and music, earned the 2022 Paula J. Giddings Best Article Award from Meridians Journal for “The Mythical Courtesan: Womanhood and Dance in Transnational India.”
• Chanara Andrews-Bickers, a PhD candidate in the department of English, was selected as a National Humanities Without Walls Career Diversity Workshop Fellow for summer 2022.
• Timothy Yang, associate professor in the department of history, was awarded the 2022 Hagley Prize for the best book in business history. Yang won for his book A Medicated Empire: The Pharmaceutical Industry and Modern Japan. The Hagley Prize in Business History is awarded jointly by the Hagley Museum and Library and the Business History Conference.
• Rielle Navitsky, associate professor of theatre and film studies, was awarded a 2022-23 fellowship from the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation for her project Transatlantic Cinephilia: Film Culture Between Latin America and France.
• Ari Levine, Horace Montgomery Professor of History, was awarded a membership at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton for 2022-23 for his book project, Mirrors of the Mind: Vision and Visuality in Song China.
• Kimberly Van Orman, lecturer in the Institute for Artificial Intelligence, represented UGA in the Responsible Artificial Intelligence Curriculum Design Project at the National Humanities Center in June, 20-22. The project brought faculty from fifteen colleges and universities to the NHC for an intensive, weeklong institute to foster the creation and implementation of courses designed to help students comprehend the myriad ways AI technologies are integrated into modern life, and to think through the ethical issues involved in developing and deploying them.