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Recognition round-up

The College of Liberal Arts is known for having highly-regarded scholars as faculty members. Here, we compiled just a few of their recent recognitions between January – May 2018.

by Heather Rodriguez ’04

The College of Liberal Arts is known for having highly-regarded scholars as faculty members. Here, we compiled just a few of their recent recognitions between January – May 2018.

For assistance in proposal development, contact Julie Masser.

Billur Aksoy from the Department of Economics and Nigel Lepianka from the Department of English are the two graduate students in the College of Liberal Arts to receive the 2018 U.S. Senator Phil Gramm Fellowship. This highly competitive fellowship awards up to two graduate students and is named for Phil Gramm, who served as an economics professor at Texas A&M before becoming a successful politician in both the U.S. Senate and Congress. Aksoy and Lepianka were honored with an awards ceremony on April 4 at the Stark Galleries in the MSC.

Sheela Athreya from the Department of Anthropology was awarded a $20,000 external grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, a private operating foundation dedicated to advancing anthropology throughout the world, for her project “A Multidisciplinary Study of Early Homo Sapiens in India: Re-Evaluating ‘Anatomical Modernity.’” She also recently received a $290,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to fund other parts of this project.

Andrew Brown, a Ph.D. student in the Department of History, just received the Smithsonian Institution Fellowship for dissertation research at the Smithsonian Institution Archive for the 2018-2019 academic year worth $27,000.

Five College of Liberal Arts students pursuing master’s and doctoral degrees have been named Distinguished Graduate Students for 2018. The recipients are being recognized for exemplary accomplishments in one of three categories: Research Doctoral, Research Master’s, and Teaching. The 2018 recipients, along with their departments and faculty advisors, are as follows:

Research – Doctoral

Patrick Anderson, Philosophy & Humanities, College of Liberal Arts

Faculty Advisor: Dr. Tommy Curry

Crystal Dozier, Department of Anthropology, College of Liberal Arts

Faculty Advisor: Dr. Alston Thoms

Gisele Cardosa de Lemos, English, College of Liberal Arts

Faculty Advisor: Dr. Marian Eide

For Teaching:

Grace Brannon ﹸ19, Communication, College of Liberal Arts

Faculty Advisor: Dr. Richard Street, Jr.

Carrie Marie Murawski ﹸ19, Communication, College of Liberal Arts

Faculty Advisor: Dr. Tasha Dubriwny

Recipients will be presented their awards on Monday, April 23, 10:30 a.m., at The Association of Former Students, Clayton W. Williams, Jr. Alumni Center.  

The Department of History is one of 20 departments nationwide to receive a Career Diversity Implementation Grant from the  American Historical Association (AHA). Funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and administered by the AHA, these grants will support the department as it integrates broad-based professional development into their department’s culture and doctoral curriculum. The recipients, selected from the 36 departments who participated in the AHA’s year-long Career Diversity Faculty Institutes, represent institutions of varying sizes, locations, and institutional cultures.

Joe Feagin from the Department of Sociology is the 2018 recipient of the American Sociology Association (ASA)’s Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award. Feagin continues and mirrors the legacy of Oliver Cromwell Cox, Charles S. Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier of civically engaged academic scholarship in the service of social justice. For more than half a century, through his research, teaching, and service across the profession with international acclaim, he represents the important disciplinary tradition of critical racial analysis of inequality, race, ethnicity and power.

Byeibitgul Khaumyen, a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology, has received a $20,000 International Fellowship from the American Association of University Women (AAUW) for her project “Kazakh Women in Mongolia: Negotiating Religious and Ethnic Identity in a Post-Socialist Context.” Byeibitgul is finishing her 2nd year in our Ph.D. program. She lives in College Station with her husband and two daughters. She also plans to complete a graduate certificate from the Women’s and Gender Studies Program.

Katelyn McDonough with the Department of Anthropology was awarded a $5,000 Jonathan O. Davis Scholarship from the Desert Research Institute (DRI) for her dissertation project, “Paleoenvironmental Reconstruction of Terminal Pleistocene/Early Holocene Transition in the Fort Rock Basin, Oregon.” The DRI is a world leader in investigating the effects of environmental change and advancing technology aimed at assessing a changing planet. The scholarship funds support graduate research within the Great Basin.

Laura Lee Oviedo, a graduate student in the Department of History, was awarded the American Latino Experience Building Curatorial Excellence Pre-Doctoral Fellowship from the Division of Armed Forces History at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. This is a one-year (2018-2019) $37,000 fellowship that includes $5,000 for research and travel expenses. The scholarship affords the recipient the opportunity to conduct independent research on the experiences of Latino Americans relating to the United States military.

Morgan Smith from the Department of Anthropology was awarded a $1200 Explorers’ Club Student Grant for his project “Exploring Florida’s Rivers for Ice Age Archaeology.” Established in 1904, the Explorers Club is an international multidisciplinary professional society dedicated to the advancement of field research and the ideal that it is vital to preserve the instinct to explore.

Gabriela Zapata, from the Department of Hispanic Studies, has received an award from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for her project “Growing the Heart of Texas: Exploring the Role of Mexican Americans in Food Production and Rural Communities.” The objective of this project is to develop an interdisciplinary minor in Hispanic Agriculture Studies that will offer A&M students a deeper recognition of the crucial social and economic role played by Hispanics in agricultural production and food culture. NEH is an independent federal agency created in 1965. It is one of the largest funders of humanities programs in the United States.