Faculty Honored at the Annual College of Arts and Sciences Convocation
The College of Arts and Sciences hosted its annual Faculty Convocation March 25, 2024, at the UT Conference Center in Downtown Knoxville. Faculty from across the college received awards for excellence in teaching and advising, academic outreach, research and creative activity, and more.
Congratulations to all the award recipients on your outstanding service to our college, UT, the state, and beyond.
College Marshal
Ernest Freeberg, professor of history, was named the 2023 College Marshal during the UT College of Arts and Sciences Faculty Convocation. The College Marshal Award is the college equivalent of the university macebearer and is, therefore, the highest college honor awarded to a member of the faculty.
Freeberg stepped onto the UT campus in 2003 and began his 20+ years as a Volunteer. His long standing service to our college and the university, as well as his record of outstanding scholarship is why we honor him with the College Marshal award. He served as department head for history from 2013 until 2022, and holds the titles of both Beaman Professor and Distinguished Professor of the Humanities.
His research has been supported by grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Huntington Library, Newberry Library, and others. His two most recent books, A Traitor to His Species: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement and The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America are notable not only for their scholarly excellence, but also accessibility to a general audience, who he knows well from his several years on the board of the Knoxville History Project.
Lorayne W. Lester Award
This year, the college honored Nahla Abu Hatab and Dianna Beeler with the Lorayne W. Lester Award, which recognizes a faculty member or an exempt staff member who has demonstrated outstanding service through research, outreach, and/or administrative, teaching, or advising services to the UT College of Arts and Sciences, State of Tennessee, local community, or beyond.
Nahla Abu Hatab, senior lecturer and director of general chemistry, is a champion of chemistry and recognized for her support of high-quality teaching in our general chemistry courses. She continuously demonstrates excellence in teaching large, lower-level division chemistry classes, which can be a real challenge!
As a lab program director, she supports lab safety and first-year chemistry labs in general, and contributed to the new curriculum of the first-year chemistry labs. Not only does she serve our college and help students achieve success in their first years of chemistry, she works with colleagues in the education college to study the pedagogical techniques in our first-year chemistry labs and lectures for continuous improvement.
Dianna Beeler, business manager for the Department of Political Science, is a Vol through and through. As the business manager in political science, Beeler assists with human resources paperwork and hiring, bill paying, event planning, and budget preparation. During the remodeling of the 12th floor of McClung, however, Dianna became a superhero – going above and beyond to support the McClung community during a tumultuous time.
In her 25+ years at UT, she’s worked all over campus and says she has never been to a department that did not feel like family. And for her, working at UT really is a family affair. Her husband works for Facility Services, her daughter is with our World Languages and Cultures department, and her son-in-law works with OIT. Dianna is a loyal employee who has made UT her home away from home.
Outstanding Service Award
Elisabeth Schussler, Professor, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
In her role as Director of Biology Teaching and Learning, Professor Schussler ensures our students in the lower-division biology courses receive excellence instruction from our graduate teaching assistants and nontenure-track faculty.
She provides professional development opportunities for instructors to be at the top of their teaching game and it is this passion for high-quality teaching across the natural sciences that led her to build teams of faculty members across the college and university who also want high-quality instruction in lower-level courses. As Faculty Senate president, she supported the ideas of liberal arts learning through cultivation of a strong shared governance process.
Faculty Academic Outreach Awards
Research & Creative Activity
Derek Alderman, Professor, Department of Geography and Sustainability
Alderman is an exemplary role model of a scholar leveraging their research to assist wider communities in addressing issues of racial inequality and pushing for social justice in landscapes of public commemoration, naming, and tourism. A departmental awards committee composed of faculty and student members chose him as a nominee for his innovative perspective as a cultural geographer whose scholarship seeks to challenge and transform inequities in the organization of places, institutions, and social practices.
Alderman is a nationally recognized authority on street-naming, especially for civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. He explores place names as cultural arenas for reckoning with the histories and ongoing legacies of racism and as tools for promoting reconciliation, anti-racist education, and social justice.
Chris Elledge, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology
Elledge’s research program is focused on bullied, socially marginalized, and anxious youth in the Knoxville community. He is a highly valued and accomplished associate professor and associate director of clinical training for the clinical psychology PhD program in the Department of Psychology. Elledge has particular interest in developing school-based interventions that can promote or enrich the peer relationships of at-risk youth.
His commitment to serving children and families in the Knoxville community is exceptionally impressive. His Recess VOLs program pairs at-risk children with UT student mentors who visit children twice weekly for two academic semesters. The program has placed approximately 450 UT students with children across 10 Knox County elementary schools, serving approximately 300 youth.
Laura Alexandra Russo, Assistant Professor, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Russo is an outstanding faculty member in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology whose outreach has raised the profile of UT Knoxville scientifically and to the public. Her research engages the public, community groups, state agencies, students, and others to tackle declines in bee species and other pollinators and what can be done to reverse these trends. Her approach exemplifies engaged scholarship that is conducted with and in communities.
Russo regularly leads outreach events at state parks like Seven Islands and Roan Mountain and national parks like the Great Smoky Mountains, including pollinator and plant hikes and bio blitzes in which community members find, identify, and document biodiversity. She actively engages with UT Extension, giving seminars and running outreach events at UT’s research and education centers across the state.
Teaching
Misty Anderson, Professor and Head, Department of English
Since joining UT in 1996, Anderson has sought to make an impact not only in scholarship about the 18th century, but through her active collaborations with the Clarence Brown Theatre, directly impacting our cultural landscape.
This award acknowledges her work with the Institute for American Civics to produce Joseph Addison’s 1713 play Cato on campus last September. The play, which was performed by George Washington’s troops at Valley Forge, presents the story of Cato, a Roman general who resisted the tyranny of Julius Caesar, pitting virtuous citizenship in conflict with authoritarianism.
Following each performance, Anderson facilitated a conversation with selected actors and invited scholars about the implications of the play on our conceptions of human values, citizenship, and governance today.
James R. and Nell W. Cunningham Outstanding Teaching Award
Lois Presser, Professor, Department of Sociology
Presser’s nomination came at the urging of our graduate students, who refer to Presser as “one of the most inspiring and dedicated professors” with whom they have worked. They especially note her efforts to hone their research skills, commenting that “she does this by offering extremely detailed feedback on every assignment, creating a space where we feel safe to facilitate discussion, ask questions, and seek additional help whenever and for whatever reason.”
Across her career, Presser has received 21 fellowships and grants, including a Fulbright. She published four monographs, edited five books, and published 61 other papers. Among those papers are several co-written with graduate students who have gone on to remarkable careers of their own. Presser has supervised 17 thesis and dissertation projects and eight senior honors projects. She has taught classes on narrative criminology (an area of criminology that she founded) in Finland, Italy, and Norway. Presser received the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2014 and the Excellence in Research (mid-career) award from the College of Arts and Sciences in 2015. Last spring, she was named Outstanding Graduate Director of the Year by the Graduate Student Senate.
Colin Sumrall, Associate Professor
Throughout his 20 years at UT, Colin Sumrall has been an incredible educator who has contributed in meaningful ways to teaching at all levels from introductory courses about dinosaurs to graduate student training in presentation development to initiating our new paleontology minor. Throughout his teaching, a common theme is that Sumrall emphasizes scientific literacy and communication at all levels, while using fossils as a tool to promote better scientific understanding and appreciation in all learners. He places emphasis on the scientific process rather than rote memorization of facts and processes, which promotes general scientific literacy, a deeper understanding of covered material, and provides room for students to explore topics within the framework of the class that interest them.
Overall, Sumrall is an incredibly skilled, engaged, and diverse teacher—he has done it all and does it extremely well. A student noted in a course evaluation “It’s always a joy to have him as a professor and I’m so glad he’s here!”, a sentiment to which that sums up why he is so deserving of this award.
Excellence in Teaching Awards
Lecturer
Melissa Hinten, Senior Lecturer, Department of Geography and Sustainability
Hinten is the director of the sustainability program in the Department of Geography and Sustainability. She has successfully led the program since 2017 and helped it to transition from an IDP to a full major. She has created numerous courses in sustainability, physical geography, and ecology courses which are essential to the sustainability program. As an instructional leader with the UT Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning she helped institute evidence-based teaching and helped to make these programs more accessible to graduate students.
Hinten earned the Chancellor’s Honors Award for Excellence in Advising in 2019. Her teaching, mentorship and passion for knowledge greatly contribute to the broader goal and objectives of the department to not only provide an excellent education to our students, but also to create an environment for the college, the community, and our university.
Benjamin Keck, Lecturer, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Keck is an outstanding and dedicated lecturer for the University of Tennessee who has supported student learning in the classroom, in the field, and in the lab for many years. His teaching practice stands out for his high level of innovation, enthusiasm, and positive course climate.
Keck is a dedicated undergraduate teacher of both introductory biology courses and upper-level majors courses. His appointment is across two units—general biology and EEB—and he makes a huge contribution both as a teacher and a mentor to students. As the Director of the Ichthyology Collection at UT, Keck also makes outstanding contributions to community outreach efforts to highlight the diversity and importance of fishes in Eastern Tennessee.
Florence Abad-Turner, Distinguished Lecturer of French, Department of World Languages and Cultures
Abad-Turner’s teaching style and choice of relevant materials promote a relaxed yet very studious classroom atmosphere in which students take pleasure in learning. One of her students powerfully describes the quality and long-lasting impact of her work as a teacher: “The sign of a good teacher is when you find their class difficult while taking it, but when you see that teacher after the course, you treat them like a celebrity, and Madame Abad-Turner embodies this sentiment. She challenges you in the classroom while truly investing in you as a student, person, and language learner outside of the classroom.”
Abad-Turner is an exceptional instructor who consistently demonstrates a passion, a commitment to teaching, and a talent for inspiring and motivating students to achieve their full potential.
Junior
Joon Sue Lee, Assistant Professor , Department of Physics and Astronomy
Lee is a dedicated and meticulous teacher who takes every opportunity to improve the undergraduate experience across all levels in physics and astronomy. His recent update of the senior electronics lab, an important course for majors, now provides them with the skills and expertise needed to translate their fundamental physics knowledge to technology and industry.
Caglar Tas, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology
Tas is an outstanding teacher and mentor who cares deeply about her students’ learning. She has taught courses at the undergraduate and graduate level, largely focused on research methods, which are some of the most difficult courses for psychology majors.
Tas demonstrates remarkable skill in engaging students and providing opportunities to apply the material learned in her courses. She encourages students to ask questions and actively participate in discussions. Students in her courses describe her as “an amazing professor,” “always accessible,” and “incredibly knowledgeable.” In addition to the courses she teaches, Tas is an extremely sought-after mentor at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Her incredible passion about teaching and mentoring truly energizes her students.
Senior
Annachiara Mariani, Associate Professor of Italian, Department of World Languages and Cultures
Mariani is an exceptional teacher who creates an interactive and collaborative classroom environment that stimulates a desire to learn in each of her students.
One comment that repeatedly comes out in the student evaluations is that Chiara is the most energetic, passionate, and enthusiastic teacher they have had in their college experience. Students appreciate the critical thinking skills they develop in her classes and admire and respect the point she constantly makes: that studying another language and culture is meaningful and relevant because of its ability to promote tolerance, understanding, and communication in a global perspective. Chiara’s students also praise her unparalleled dedication outside the classroom. As one of her students said, “I’ve never seen or had a professor where so many students flock to her after or before class and have huge smiles on their faces.”
Randy Small, Professor, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Small is a full professor in EEB and has been the director for Teaching and Learning in the Division of Biology since 2019. His first rate and long-standing contributions to the educational mission of the College of Arts and Sciences makes him the perfect winner of this award. Legions of students in EEB as a department and the whole Division of Biology have benefited from Small’s dedication to student success, outstanding teaching practice, and educational vision and leadership. This award is long overdue.
Diversity Leadership Award
Kalynn Schulz, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology
Schulz is a remarkable scholar and educator whose actions on campus, regionally, and nationally, demonstrate an unwavering commitment to increasing academic representation of and support for scholars from historically marginalized groups.
Schulz’s diversity leadership is perhaps best exemplified by her developing and launching a pilot, cross-institutional research training program between the psychology departments at UT Knoxville and the historically Black university Tennessee State University called STARS (Scholarly Trainees Acquiring Research Skills). The program was designed to prepare TSU students for graduate-level research in psychology and support their transition into graduate school.
Schulz energized department-wide involvement of faculty and graduate students as research mentors, academic coaches, and peer mentors. TSU students from the first cohort are now thriving in graduate school.
Faculty Advising Service Award
Michael McKinney, Professor, Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences
McKinney is an outstanding advocate for student success and education, especially within the field of environmental geosciences and sustainability. He has advised nearly all of the majors in the Environmental Studies concentration since he initiated it as an IDP in 2001. McKinney’s work with these students is extensive, engaged, and highly impactful. He sees his interactions with students as a time to discuss how they can best express their passions for solving environmental problems in an effective and meaningful way.
During this process, McKinney often works as a “matchmaker” to identify internship opportunities in the community which match the goals of individual students and provides the connection for them to develop through placement into those experiences. Within EEPS, McKinney is widely known as someone who cares very deeply for helping undergraduate students succeed and develop outstanding careers and we are grateful for his decade of incredible service.
Kalynn Schulz, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology
Schulz exemplifies our college’s commitment to outstanding advising, implementing proactive and developmental advising models to build positive working relationships with students in support of their academic and career goals. Schulz is committed to supporting all students, and especially under-represented minority students. Students consistently express gratitude for her care and concern for their personal well-being in course evaluations.
One student noted, “Schulz thinks of the students who tend to be shy and embarrassed to ask questions in class and the students who may not be doing well and openly offers her most undivided attention and support to assure us that she will always be there to help. Schulz is more than a professor, teacher, instructor—she is a life mentor and an inspiration.”
Excellence in Research/Creative Achievement Awards
Early Career
Brooke Bauer, Assistant Professor, Department of History
Bauer’s book, Becoming Catawba: Catawba Indian Women and Nation Building, 1500-1940, published in November 2022, won three book prizes in 2022-2023. The South Carolina Historical Society, the American Society for Ethnohistory, and the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians have all lauded its innovative interdisciplinary methodology and its deeply felt narration of Catawba women’s struggle for survival and identity.
Bauer has now embarked on an exciting research trajectory, co-authoring a book that explores how the histories of tribal nations are represented (and misrepresented) in museums and historical sites, among other projects. She has demonstrated remarkable originality and nuance in the histories she researches and writes. These traits are recognized with this Early-Career Research Award.
Nicholas Dygert, Associate Professor, Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences
Dygert is a geologist who combines detailed laboratory and modeling analyses to generate novel insights into the evolution of planetary bodies. Dygert has established at UT a world-class experimental laboratory that is used to synthesize rocks under high temperature and pressure conditions directly relevant to planetary interiors. The equipment can reproduce conditions in the lunar core, or in Earth’s crust or upper mantle. Running experiments makes it possible to constrain the properties of minerals and melts under controlled pressures and temperatures. In particular, these experiments provide the ability to constrain the rheological (viscous) properties of magmas.
Dygert has earned numerous grants from NASA and NSF to support his research and has published more than 30 journal articles appearing in high profile venues including Nature Communications, Earth and Planetary Science Letters, and the Journal of Geophysical Research. His work is extremely well regarded and cited. He even earned an award for the most cited paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research in 2019. Overall, Dygert has achieved outstanding success to date and has exceptional future potential. He is an incredible scientist and faculty member who will continue to make an outstanding impact at our institution.
Mid-Career
LaToya Eaves, Associate Professor, Department of Geography and Sustainability
Eaves is one of the most significant scholars and intellectual leaders in the field of human geography. She is credited with pioneering the new area of “Black Geographies” as an emerging sub-discipline that has altered how all of human geography conceptualizes race, gender, and location.
Her studies focus on Black people’s lived experiences with placemaking and spatial knowledge, specifically how race, gender, class, and regional/place context interact to form patterns of identification, belonging, and social injustice. For her contributions, she is one of the first associate professors to be selected as a lifetime Fellow of the American Association of Geographers, with two prestigious awards from that association.
Abner Salgado, Professor, Department of Mathematics
Salgado received his PhD from Texas A&M University in 2010 and joined the faculty of UT in 2013 after finishing his postdoc at the University of Maryland with research in numerical analysis. He is a very talented numerical analyst, one of the best in the country in his generation.
During the past 10 years at UT, Salgado’s research has focused on the design and analysis of efficient yet accurate computational algorithms for solving PDEs which describe fractional diffusion and complex fluids. He is a world leader in these areas and has been invited to deliver plenary presentations in the country and around the world. Salgado has a phenomenal record of research productivity, with over 80 publications and many of them have appeared in the most prestigious journals in his research area. His research has been continuously supported by NSF in the past 10 years.
In 2022, Salgado and his UT colleague Steven Wise published a mammoth textbook—almost 1,000 pages—titled Classical Numerical Analysis: A Comprehensive Course, by Cambridge University Press. The book received very good reviews.
Senior
Michelle Brown, Professor, Department of Sociology
Brown is an acclaimed visual criminologist who joined the University of Tennessee in 2011, received early tenure, and was promoted to professor in 2018. She is an excellent researcher who has published two books on criminology and culture and has another book under contract, all with NYU Press, along with 50 other peer-reviewed pieces.
Brown edited the Palgrave MacMillan Crime, Media, and Culture book series and was editor of the Sage journal Crime, Media, Culture. Very notably, she served as the senior editor of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Crime, Media, and Popular Culture, which received Library Journal’s Best Reference Work Award in 2018.
In addition to a Chancellor’s Award for Teaching and the College’s Diversity Leadership Award, she has also received the University’s Jefferson Prize along with the College’s Award for New Research in the Arts and Humanities. The American Society of Criminology named Michelle Brown the Critical Criminologist of the Year in 2016.
Anthony Mezzacappa, Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy
Mezzacappa is a College of Arts and Sciences Excellence Professor and the Newton W. and Wilma C. Thomas Endowed Chair of Theoretical and Computational Astrophysics. He is a recognized international leader in the field of core-collapse supernova simulations. His reputation is built on exacting standards for the numerical methods and leadership class supercomputing he employs to simulate the deaths of massive stars in core-collapse supernovae and the resulting births of neutron stars and black holes.
New Research, Scholarly and Creative Projects in the Arts & Humanities
Charles Sanft, Professor, Department of History
Sanft is working on a fascinating book project, Twenty Poems from Dunhuang. This work focuses on a unique set of ninth-century manuscripts describing the literal and metaphorical landscapes of a desert oasis town in northwestern China.
The significance of Sanft’s project is not simply bringing rare early Chinese medieval texts to a twenty-first century audience, but also his interdisciplinary approach. He examines these poems as historical sources, as literary imaginings, and as material objects. While in Dunhuang, he intends to visit places identified in the poems to gain experiential understanding of their relative locations and environmental characteristics.
Weaving these insights together in the introduction to the poems and then in his commentary on each individual poem will offer readers a remarkably textured analysis of these short, but powerful, texts.
Distinguished Research Career at UT
Deborah Welsh, Professor, Department of Psychology
Welsh has been a faculty member in psychology at UT for more than 30 years and has an exceptional record of research scholarship and student research mentorship. Her research program has focused on understanding adolescent and emerging adults’ romantic relationships and their impact on functioning and has been funded by multi-year research grants from the National Institutes of Health.
Even while serving for 10 years as head of the psychology department, Welsh remained research active. She is passionate about research mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students. Her mentees have had successful careers and received elite postdoctoral fellowships and national awards. In recognition of her research accomplishments, Welsh has received numerous awards from UT Knoxville, including most recently a Chancellor’s Professorship, the 2023 College of Arts and Sciences College Marshal, and the 2023 Extraordinary Service to the University Award.