Graduate Students and Faculty Honored
Fall is the harvesting season. Several English department graduate students and faculty were honored at the 12th Annual Faculty Honors Ceremony on October 18, 2022 at George Washington University. This ceremony honored awardees from 2022 and those from 2020 and 2021 who did not have an in-person ceremony due to the pandemic. Their teaching and research models best practices, and we recognize and celebrate their achievements.
Some of the student awardees have since graduated, including Dr. Turni Chakrabarti and Dr. Emily MacLeod, who are thriving in their careers. Dr. Chakrabarti is Assistant Professor in the Jindal School of Languages and Literature at O.P. Jindal Global University in India, and Dr. MacLeod is Assistant Teaching Professor of English, Theatre, and Humanities at Penn State University in Harrisburg.
Along with our current PhD student, Joanna Falk (photo on the left), all three of them received the Philip J. Amsterdam Graduate Teaching Assistant Award which “honors individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to GW teaching and recognizes the important contribution our graduate students make to the educational process.”
Ph.D. candidate Daniel Atherton received the 2022 Writing in the Discipline (WID) Distinguished Graduate Student Teaching Award, which “recognizes outstanding contributions by graduate students to the teaching of writing at GW.”
Presided over by George Washington University President Mark S. Wrighton, Provost Christopher Alan Bracey, and Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs Emily Hammond, the ceremony featured short video interviews of the awardees (shown below is Daniel Atherton).
Dr. Maria Frawley, Chair and Professor of English, received the prestigious Oscar and Shoshana Trachtenberg Prize for Teaching Excellence which recognizes outstanding undergraduate teaching by a tenured member of the faculty who regularly teaches undergraduate students. Congratulations, Professor Frawley!
She is teaching ENGL 1365 Literature and the Environment in Spring 2023, which deals with how natural and built environments are translated into narrative and the relationship between literary production and environmental action.
Former director of the University Honors Program, Professor Frawley’s most recent book is A Companion to Jane Austen (2021). She is an internationally recognized expert on nineteenth-century British literature and print culture, especially the history of institutional care in asylums and Victorian women social reformers.
Professor Alexa Alice Joubin received two awards this year: the Oscar and Shoshana Trachtenberg Prize for Research and the Writing in the Discipline Best Assignment Design Award in recognition of her research accomplishments and teaching effectiveness. She teaches in English, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and University Honors, and is affiliated with International Affairs, Theatre, and East Asian Languages and Literatures. She co-founded the GW Digital Humanities Institute and held the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Global Shakespeare Studies at Queen Mary University and University of Warwick in London. In her outreach work as a public humanist, she has given a congressional briefing on the humanities and globalization on Capitol Hill and a TEDx Fulbright talk, and contributed frequently to various media outlets.
The Trachtenberg research award recognizes “outstanding research accomplishments by a tenured member of the faculty. The award is meant to honor faculty scholarship and to provide a tangible symbol of the George Washington University’s commitment to research and creative endeavors.” This award was established by President Emeritus Stephen Joel Trachtenberg in memory of his parents.
Overseen by the GW University Writing Program, Writing in the Disciplines (WID) courses are “designed to help students develop a robust writing practice throughout their academic careers, starting with intensive attention to writing in a specific topic area.” Professor Joubin received the WID award in recognition of her “excellence in assignment design and implementation” in her courses on critical race and gender studies. One of the assignments she designed uses an open-access collaborative annotation platform to encourage reading and writing as a communal, rather than solitary, enterprise. Sustained student engagement builds a community through critical writing.
Having “completed 25 years of continuous full-time service at George Washington University,” Professor Robert McRuer and Professor Gayle Wald were honored with the title Silver Anniversary Faculty. Congratulations, Professor McRuer and Professor Wald!
A number of faculty were honored as new emeriti faculty and have been inducted into the GW Society of the Emeriti, including Professor Marshall Alcorn, Christopher Sten, and Tara Wallace.
