Arts & Sciences Chancellor’s Professors

Amy Elias is a Humanities Distinguished Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences and has served as director of the UT Humanities Center since 2017. She authored Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), and won the George and Barbara Perkins Book Prize from the International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN).

She is the principal founder of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) and has served in a variety of roles for that organization. She hosted the association’s launch conference in Knoxville in 2009, featuring work by 115 speakers from China, the UK, the US, Japan, Canada, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain.

She is also the founding co-editor-in-chief of ASAP’s scholarly publication, ASAP/Journal. She has served on the executive boards of both ASAP and ISSN, and on book prize committees for ASAP, ISSN, and the Modern Language Association. She has a bachelor’s from Wilkes University and a master’s and PhD from the Pennsylvania State University, all in English.

Shih-Lung Shaw holds the Alvin and Sally Beaman Professorship and Arts and Sciences Professorship in the Department of Geography. A Fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS), he is a recipient of the Edward L. Ullman Award for outstanding contributions to the field of transportation geography and the Outstanding Scholar Award in Regional Development and Planning, both from the Association of American Geographers (AAG).

His research specializes in transportation, geographic information sciences, space–time analytics, human dynamics, and spatial data science. Shaw earned his undergraduate degree from National Taiwan University and has a master’s and PhD in geography from the Ohio State University.

Dawnie Wolfe Steadman is director of the Forensic Anthropology Center and a professor of anthropology. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a past recipient of the Betty Lynn Hendrickson Professorship. Her primary role at the Forensic Anthropology Center is to generate and facilitate research—particularly novel technological applications—using the center’s resources, including the Bass Donated Skeletal Collection and the Anthropology Research Facility.

Her research interests focus on forensic anthropology, bioarcheology, and human rights investigations. She is a Diplomate of the American Board of Forensic Anthropology and has served the board as vice president. Steadman earned her bachelor’s at the University of Arizona and both her master’s and PhD at the University of Chicago, all in anthropology. Before coming to UT she was a professor at Iowa State University and Binghamton University–State University of New York.