From the Dean | September 2021

Dear Arts and Science community,  

One of the many challenges facing higher education during the pandemic has been the ability of faculty to continue to conduct research and pursue creative expression. At many institutions, discovery writ large ground to a halt. With limited budgets, travel restrictions, closed archives, constrained operations of research labs, staff shortages, and supply chain issues, such slowdowns were inevitable. 

However, the College of Arts and Science faculty have nevertheless pressed forward on our mission of exceptional research. Our faculty were determined to pursue excellence in their work—in the lab, the field, the studio, and the library—and to continue exploring solutions to the most pressing issues of our time. Our faculty, in effect, made lemonade from these many lemons. 

I am especially proud that, even in these trying circumstances, our faculty received competitive grants and secured prestigious awards that recognize their cutting-edge research. Below are but a few examples of these wonderful acknowledgments from recent months:

• Carwil Bjork-James (Anthropology) won a National Science Foundation Senior Research Award for his work studying the consequences of violence during social movements.
• Kirsty Clark (Medicine, Health & Society) won a National Institutes of Mental Health grant to study the associations between interpersonal and place-based stigma on suicide risk and mental health among LGBTQ adolescents.
• Isabel Gauthier (Psychology) won a Mid-Career Award from the Psychonomic Society for “excellent scientific contributions to the field of experimental and cognitive psychology and related areas,” recognizing her work studying many aspects of object and face recognition.
• Jonathan Gilligan (Earth and Environmental Sciences) won two National Science Foundation grants: one to lead a study on sustainable infrastructure in the Southeast and one that explores how new technology can provide safe, clean drinking water.
• Emily Greble (History) was awarded a highly selective 2021 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in European and Latin American History.
• Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, along with Jessie Runnoe and Stephen Taylor (Physics and Astronomy), were selected as awardees by the National Science Foundation Research Traineeship Program to create a graduate student training program in multi-messenger astrophysics.
• Vesna Pavlović (Art) was awarded the inaugural project grant from The Current Art Fund, administered by Tri-Star Arts, to support the research and production of her new video about the history of David Island titled “The River Memorial.”
• Lijun Song (Sociology) received the American Sociological Association’s 2021 Best Publication Award in the Sociology of Mental Health section for her paper “Social capital, social cost, and the relational culture in three societies.”
• Paul Stob (Communication Studies) received the 2021 James A. Winans-Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address from the National Communication Association for his book Intellectual Populism: Democracy, Inquiry, and the People.

These accomplishments represent only a small part of our faculty’s many scholarly contributions. They would be noteworthy at any time, but are especially impressive in the time of COVID, when many scholars around the world have had to put their work on hold. I am inspired by the A&S faculty for their ability to pivot, persevere, and significantly advance knowledge in their respective fields. As they have shown, never more than in the past year, they will continue to push boundaries, explore difficult questions, and find groundbreaking discoveries that have a positive impact on our world regardless of the obstacles before them.

My best,

John G. Geer
Ginny and Conner Searcy Dean, College of Arts and Science
Professor of Political Science