2024-2025 faculty and student achievements in the humanities and arts

davemarr on July 14, 2025

Rumya Putcha

Humanities and arts faculty and graduate students at UGA continued to showcase the world-class quality of their research, teaching, and public engagement during the 2024-25 academic year, collecting nationally competitive fellowships and awards, publishing books ranging from academic monographs to fiction and poetry, mounting acclaimed exhibitions, and distinguishing themselves in innumerable other ways. Below is a sampling of their accomplishments.

If you have received a major grant, fellowship, or prize in the humanities and arts, or had a significant publication, exhibition, or performance of your work, please let us know. We would love to share the news of your success.

Pictured: Rumya Putcha, associate professor in the Hugh Hodgson School of Music and the Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies.

 

• Aruni Kashyap, associate professor of English and director of the Creative Writing Program, was selected as a 2024-2025 Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellow. The year-long fellowship provides the rare opportunity to intensely pursue ambitious projects in the unique environment of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, one of the world’s leading centers for interdisciplinary exploration.

• Yuri Balashov, professor of philosophy, was awarded a National Science Foundation grant in the amount of $136,969 to support his interdisciplinary project exploring cognitive, linguistic, and philosophical aspects of human and machine translation. Learn more about the grant and project at the department of philosophy website.

• Paola De Santo, associate professor of Italian in the department of Romance languages, won the Josephine Roberts Award for a Scholarly Edition, granted by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender. De Santo and her co-editor and translator, Caterina Mongiat Farina of DePaul University, share the award for their edition of Isabella Andreini’s Letters, a “collection of inventive writings in letter form from a sixteenth-century star of commedia dell’arte.” De Santo’s work on the edition was supported in part by the Willson Center.

• A collaborative artwork by Lamar Dodd School of Art Director Joseph Peragine and Professor of Art Mary Hallam Pearse was installed along the Atlanta Beltline from October 3 – November 3, 2024. Titled Steered by Falling Stars,the piece was produced with the aid of a Willson Center Faculty Research Grant for a biennial show organized by The Temporary Art Center.

• Saurabh Anand, a rhetoric and composition studies PhD student in the department of English and assistant director of the Willis Center for Writing, was awarded the LGBTQIA+ Advocacy & Leadership Award by the National Council of Teachers of English. Anand was recognized at the NCTE’s annual conference for his contributions to the Council and to the development of its professional community.

• Jorge García Granados, a faculty member in the department of Romance Languages, was awarded the American Philosophical Society’s Franklin Research Grant for his project “Andean Baroque on Stage.” Granados prepared his proposal during the spring 2024 pilot session of the Special Grant Seekers’ Edition of the Felson Writing Retreat.

• Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing (Ohio State Univ. Press, 2023) by Esra Mirze Santesso, professor of English, was awarded honorable mention for the second annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Middle Eastern Studies by the Modern Language Association. The MLA award committee’s citation called Santesso’s book “the first major study of comics by and about Muslim people” and praised it for inviting readers “to rethink the concept of witnessing in the context of war.” Santesso’s research for the book was supported in part by a Willson Center Fellowship.

• Chigozie Obioma, Helen S. Lanier Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing, was honored by New Africa Magazine in its list of the most influential Africans of 2024. Obioma is a native of Akure, Nigeria. His first two novels, The Fishermen (2015) and An Orchestra of Minorities (2019) were finalists for the Booker Prize and have been translated into 30 languages. His third book, The Road to the Country, a novel about the Nigerian Civil War, was published in June 2024.

• Barbara McCaskill, Distinguished Research Professor of English and Willson Center associate academic director, participated in a virtual program on the 18th-century African American poet Phillis Wheatley Peters for the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. The program featured McCaskill and her collaborators on the Wheatley Peters Project, Sarah Ruffing Robbins and Mona Narain of Texas Christian University, as well as curators and archivists at the museum.

• Rumya Putcha, associate professor in the Hugh Hodgson School of Music and the Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies, was awarded the Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize for her 2024 book The Dancer’s Voice: Performance and Womanhood in Transnational India (Duke University Press). The prize honors outstanding and innovative scholarship across discipline and country of specialization for a first single-authored English-language monograph on South Asia. Putcha’s book also won the de la Torre Bueno First Book Prize, awarded annually to the best first book in dance studies published in the English language. Read more from the Hugh Hodgson School of Music, along with this profile of Putcha and her work from earlier this fall.

• Sha’Mira Covington, assistant professor in fashion in the department of textiles, merchandising, and interiors, curated Go’n by the House: Solidarities of Black Southern and Appalachian Women through Material Culture, which opened April 3, 2025 in the Lounge Gallery at the Lyndon House Arts Center. The exhibition illuminates the shared histories, struggles, and cultural practices of Black Southern and Appalachian women by centering material culture as a vital force in shaping their identities and solidarities.

• J. Derrick Lemons, professor and head of the department of religion and the Willson Center’s religion fellow, has received a three-year, $259,255 grant from the John Templeton Foundation to support his project, Between Relativism and Reproach: Exploring Value Judgements about Good Human Lives within Theologically Engaged Anthropology. This is the third Templeton grant awarded to Prof. Lemons in the past 11 years.

• Faculty members and students in the arts and humanities were honored for their excellence and accomplishments in research, teaching, mentorship, and service during 2025 Honors Week at UGA. All are part of a thriving community that is served by the Willson Center through its grants and research awards.