SLCL professors and graduate students are consistently being recognized across campus for their hard work, innovation, and commitment to student success.

Have an honor you'd like to share with the school? Please email us.

2023-2024

Campus Awards

Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching

The Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching recognizes sustained excellence and innovative approaches in undergraduate teaching and contributions beyond classroom instruction that have an overall positive impact on undergraduate student learning. Honorees are represented in three employee categories – faculty, specialized faculty and teaching assistants.

Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching for Teaching Assistants

Building Pathways for Emerging Leaders at Illinois (Office of the Provost)

The goal of this program is to increase the pool of potential academic leaders on campus. This year-long leadership development program is designed for faculty members at the associate professor and full professor rank who demonstrate leadership potential in their current role.

King Broadrick-Allen Award (Campus Honors Program)

This award is given to one faculty member in recognition of outstanding teaching to our Chancellor’s Scholars and in acknowledgment of distinguished service to the Campus Honors Program's educational mission. The award was endowed by the late Sandra Broadrick-Allen to honor her late husband, who promoted and oversaw honors education efforts on this campus for many years before the CHP was founded.

Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research & Innovation (OVCRI) Humanities Teaching Release Time Award

These awards are intended to provide a release from classroom teaching. The Campus Research Board expects that faculty members, during the semester during which the leave is taken, will continue to mentor graduate students, complete service activities, and engage in shared governance processes.  However, departments may exercise some flexibility about service obligations for HRT recipients, thus maximizing the scholar's ability to make progress on their research project during the semester of teaching release.

  • Rodrigo Delgado (Spanish & Portuguese) for his project, "Navigating the Linguistic Landscape: Language Mixing and Latinx Identity in the Digital Age"

  • Alejandro Ramirez Mendez (Spanish & Portuguese) for his project, "Calles migrantes: Transnational Cartographies and Global Cities in the Literary Imagination of the Americas"

Marjorie Roberts and Robert W. Schaefer Professors in Liberal Arts & Sciences

This professorship is named for the late Marjorie Roberts, from the University of Illinois Class of 1923. Upon her death, she left part of her estate to the College of LAS. The professorships are granted to recipients based upon their record of scholarship, contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and contributions to public engagement.

  • Silvina Montrul (Spanish & Portuguese and Linguistics)
  • Harriet Murav (Slavic Languages & Literatures and Comparative & World Literature)
LAS Alumni Distinguished Professorial Scholar 

This is a recognition given to scholars with a particularly outstanding record for their contributions in education and research at the University of Illinois. This five year appointment begins January 2024.

LAS Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching

The College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, in fulfillment of its mission, is devoted to excellence in undergraduate teaching. The purpose of the award program is to reward and honor the college's best tenure system faculty. 

Conrad Humanities Scholars Award

The Conrad Humanities Scholars Award recognizes promising mid-career scholars and provides financial support for continued achievement, research, and scholarship in humanities. The designation is for five years.

LAS-OVCDEI Inclusive Pedagogy Certificate

This highly competitive award, sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, provides 12 selected faculty participants with the opportunity to design or revise syllabi or course materials. The 14-week program engages faculty in hybrid experiential learning and teaches instructors practical tools for designing courses geared towards diverse populations of students.

  • Anna Hunt (Germanic Languages & Literatures)
Graduate Student Leadership Award

This campuswide award is sponsored by the Graduate College and recognizes graduate students who have exhibited outstanding services that has positively impacted the campus and wider communities. 

Graduate College Master's Project Travel Grant

This grant provides reimbursement to Illinois students for travel-related costs incurred for the completion of an off-campus, short-term project required of one of the University’s master's degree programs.  

  • Sibel Arikoglu (Linguistics), "Optimizing Linguistic Choices: Code-switching among Turkish-German Bilinguals in Germany."
  • Luis David Gaytán-Soto (Spanish & Portuguese), "A comparative corpus study of misspellings of Spanish bilinguals, L2s, and native speakers: Their implications for teaching"
Graduate College Dissertation Travel Grant 

This grant provides reimbursement to subsidize travel and associated costs necessary for doctoral dissertation research, whether for exploring a potential dissertation topic (i.e., before extensive research has been done) or for conducting dissertation research. 

  • Ruoyi Bian (East Asian Languages & Cultures), "Softcore pornography in Hong Kong" 
  • Lázaro García Angulo (Spanish & Portuguese), “‘Yet Another Woman-Man’: Representations of Gender Nonconformity in Spain, 1880-1939”
  • Eunyoung Yang (Spanish & Portuguese), “Fluid Borders and Cultural Exchanges: Transpacific Migrations between Mexico and Asia (17th-18th Centuries)”
Humanities Research Institute (HRI) Campus Fellowship

These fellowships are granted to Illinois faculty and graduate students who spend the year engaged in research and writing. The theme for the year is “Think Again...”

Faculty Fellows

  • Alexia Williams (Religion), “Race to Sainthood: Roman Catholicism & the US Racial Imagination”

Graduate Fellows

  • Lázaro García Angulo (Spanish & Portuguese), “‘Yet Another Woman-Man’: Representations of Gender Nonconformity in Spain, 1880-1939”
HRI Summer Faculty Fellowship 

These fellowships are designed to help faculty maximize the summer for research in service of their ongoing professional development. They provide an infusion of resources to jumpstart or fuel an ongoing research project, undertake course development, or pursue a professional training opportunity over the summer months.

Course Development

  • Amy Clay (French & Italian), French 103 and 104: Intermediate French I and II 
  • Daniel Leon (Classics), CLCV 250: Sports and Society in Ancient Greece and Rome 

Research

  • Daniel Nabil Maroun (French & Italian), “Filial Failures: Writing Queer Kinship and Community in Contemporary France”
  • Rini Bhattacharya Mehta (Comparative & World Literature and Religion), “Unreason and Capital: Calcutta’s Long 19th Century 
HRI Mellon Interseminars Graduate Fellowship

This fellowship is an opportunity for a doctoral student in the humanities to collaborate with faculty conveners in the design of cross-departmental and cross-college courses, participating in the project’s two summer intensives, an interdisciplinary methods seminar and themed seminar course, and engaging in collaborative research. The project spans an 18-month period, culminating in a public-facing event in fall 2025.

HRI Research Prize

These prizes recognize outstanding humanities research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Honorable Mentions

  • Eric Calderwood (Comparative & World Literature), “The Palestinian al-Andalus,” from On Earth or in Poems: The Many Lives of al-Andalus (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2023)
European Union Center Title VI Award 

The Title VI National Resource Center (NRC) Program at the European Union Center provides grants to establish, strengthen, and operate language and area studies centers that serve as national resources. 

Birmingham-Illinois Partnership for Discovery, Engagement and Education (BRIDGE) Strategic Partnership Grant

This funding supports the development of faculty networks, builds cognate research areas, expands educational exchange opportunities, and strengthens strategic aspirations for institutional engagement.

  • Valeria Sobol (Slavic Languages & Literatures), “Russophone Literary Diversity and Peripheries”
Campus Research Board Research Support Award

This funding is intended to help Illinois faculty members pursue research and creative activities that have a transformative influence across disciplines and a profound impact for the future of our nation and the world.

  • Silvina Montrul (Spanish & Portuguese and Linguistics), “The Impact of Schooling on the Acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese Language Structure"

Arnold O. Beckman Award

This additional designation is given by the Campus Research Board to “projects of special distinction or promise."

  • Eduardo Ledesma (Spanish & Portuguese), "Expanding Cinemas: Experimental Filmmaking across the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic since 1960"
Illinois Library Open Textbook Incentive Program

The Open Textbook Faculty Incentive Program supports undergraduate students by creating incentives for teaching faculty to develop alternative lower-cost educational materials rather than high-cost textbooks.

  • Amy Clay (French & Italian), French 103 & 104 Open Textbook
Center for Advanced Study Associate

CAS Associates are tenured faculty members whose proposals are selected in an annual competition. These appointments grant one semester of teaching release time in order to pursue an individual scholarly or creative project. With the professors and fellows, they form the core of the Center for Advanced Study Community. 

Leman Center Faculty Research Grant

These grants provide funding opportunities for University of Illinois faculty members engaged in research related to Brazil. 

Leman Center Collaborative Research Grant

These grants are intended for collaborative projects between University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty and faculty members from Brazil's universities and public research institutions.

Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies Whitten Fellowship

Awards are intended primarily to support graduate students at the master’s or doctoral level wishing to conduct research in Latin America. Any graduate student with Latin American-related interests is eligible to apply.

Gender and Women's Studies Marianne A. Ferber Graduate Scholarship

This scholarship awards $2,500 to a graduate student with the most outstanding dissertation proposal related to Gender and Women's Studies. Moore received it for work on her dissertation "Police Recruits and the Discursive Construction of Rape in Sexual Assault Training."

External Awards

  • Lorena Alarcón (Spanish & Portuguese): American Association of Applied Linguistics Indigenous Language Scholarship to attend and present her paper, “Assessment of Indigenous Languages in Northern Argentina” at the 2024 AAAL conference
  • Allison T. Casar (Linguistics): Committee on Gender Equity in Linguistics (COGEL) Travel Award to attend Linguistics Society of America 2024 meeting
  • Sarah Clark (Linguistics): Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society (IUS) Graduate Student Paper Award for her paper "The Veteran Dialect: Discourses of Identity in the Liminal Space between Institutions and Ideologies"
  • Jonathan Dunn (Linguistics): Marsden Fund Standard Grant from the Royal Society Te Apārangi in New Zealand ($660K NZD)
  • Luis David Gaytán-Soto (Spanish & Portuguese): Committee on Ethnic Diversity (CEDL) Travel Grant to attend Linguistics Society of America 2024 meeting
  • Tania Ionin (Linguistics): National Science Foundation Grant for GASLA-17 conference organization costs 
  • Brett Ashley Kaplan (Comparative & World Literature): Nannerl O Keohane Visiting Distinguished Professor at Duke University and the University of North Carolina, 2023-24
  • Katherine Kwak (Linguistics): Phi Kappa Phi Love of Learning Award from the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi
  • Mariselle Meléndez (Spanish & Portuguese): Elected president of the Iberoamerican Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
  • Mithilesh Mishra (Linguistics): Service to Hindi Award from the International Hindi Association
  • Silvina Montrul (Spanish & Portuguese and Linguistics): Leonard Bloomfield Book Award from the Linguistics Society of America for her book, "Native Speakers, Interrupted" (Cambridge University Press, 2023); ranked in Top 2% of World Scientists according to Stanford-Elsevier Ranking; National Science Foundation Grant for GASLA-17 conference organization costs; Korean Studies Grant from the Academy of Korean Studies
  • Britni Moore (Linguistics): Harry F. Guggenheim Emerging Scholars Fellowship ($25,000) for work on her dissertation, "Police Recruits and the Discursive Construction of Rape in Sexual Assault Training" 
  • Sergei Motov (Slavic Languages & Literatures): Awarded Judge's Choice in NYU Jordan Center’s Graduate Student Essay Competition for his essay, "Dostoevsky’s Most Stubborn Bureaucratic Type: Titular Councilor, Eternal Or Former?"
  • Harriet Murav (Slavic Languages & Literatures and Comparative & World Literature): NEH Scholarly Editions and Translations Award for her collaborative translation of “In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union"
  • Eman Saadah (Linguistics): Qatar Debate Fund ($10,000); Qatar Foundation International Grants for Summer Institute for Languages of the Muslim World ($34,000)
  • Nora Stoppino (French & Italian): Support for the Teaching of Italian courses in Higher Education Institutions, 2023-24, from the Italian Ministry of Culture 
  • Ilaria Strocchia (Spanish & Portuguese): Tinker Foundation Research Fellowship to conduct archival research in Mexico City related to her dissertation project, entitled “Rethinking the Urban as a Space of Liquid Modernity: The Case of Mexico City” 
  • Joyce Tolliver (Translation & Interpreting Studies and Spanish & Portuguese): Elected to a three-year term as president of the Asociación Internacional de Galdosistas
  • Xun Yan (Linguistics): Selected as co-editor of the journal Language Testing, beginning on January 1, 2024; Best Article Award from the Association for Language Testing and Assessment of Australia and New Zealand
  • Brian Yang (Slavic Languages & Literatures): Elected as the sole student board member of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, starting in January 2024

2022-2023

Campus Awards

Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching

This award recognizes sustained excellence in and innovative approaches to undergraduate teaching and contributions beyond classroom instruction that have an overall positive impact on undergraduate student learning.

Campus Executive Officer Distinguished Leadership Award

This award recognizes outstanding academic leadership and vision by an executive officer within a college or campus unit. The recipient will be an exemplar of effective leadership who has led diverse groups through strategic improvements within her/his unit or campus. 

Larine Y. Cowan Make a Difference Award: Advocacy for LGBTQ Affairs

This award is presented annually to University of Illinois faculty and staff by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in four categories. Named in honor of the past assistant chancellor and director of what is now the Office for Access & Equity, this award reflects the commitment to human rights advocacy and diversity that defined the leadership of Larine Y. Cowan for nearly 20 years at Illinois.

Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) Academic Leadership Program Fellowship 

The Academic Leadership Program was created by the provosts of the Big Ten Academic Alliance, the academic consortium of the Big Ten universities, to develop the leadership potential of participating faculty, with particular emphasis on enriching the diversity of leadership in BTAA institutions. The Office of the Provost selects up to five individuals from across campus to participate in the ALP.

LAS Dean’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching

The College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, in fulfillment of its mission, is devoted to excellence in undergraduate teaching. The purpose of the award program is to reward and honor the college's best tenure system faculty. 

LAS Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching for Graduate Teaching Assistants

LAS Academic Professional Award

The LAS Academic Professional Award identifies and honors selected academic professionals for their outstanding contributions to the college. The program is sponsored by alumni and friends of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.

Conrad Humanities Scholars Award

The Conrad Humanities Scholars Award recognizes promising mid-career scholars and provides financial support for continued achievement, research, and scholarship in humanities. The designation is for five years.

Lincoln Excellence for Assistant Professors (LEAP) Award

The LEAP Award is granted to faculty early in their career based on scholarly productivity and contributions to the educational mission of their departments and the College of LAS. Scholars hold the title for two years.

LAS Student Innovation Grant

This funding is given to teams of faculty and staff to advance innovative ideas that aim to improve student experiences.

LAS-OVCDEI Inclusive Pedagogy Certificate

This highly competitive award will provide 16 selected faculty participants with a one-course release in Spring 2023 to help with the design or revision of syllabi or course materials to be taught for the academic year of 2023-2024. The 14-week program engages faculty in hybrid experiential learning and teaches instructors practical tools for designing courses geared towards diverse populations of undergraduate and graduate students. 

Graduate College Dissertation Completion Fellowship

These fellowships help outstanding graduate students complete the doctoral degree by providing a one-year stipend of $25,000 along with waivers of tuition and various fees. In addition, the fellow will receive partial payment of the graduate student health insurance fee per semester as well as basic dental and vision coverage. The intent of the fellowship is to help students complete their dissertations. 

Humanities Research Institute (HRI) Campus Fellowship

These fellowships are granted to Illinois faculty and graduate students who spend the year engaged in research and writing. There will be no research theme for the year; applicants were invited to propose projects investigating any subject. 

HRI Campus Faculty Fellowship

HRI Campus Graduate Student Fellowship

HRI Summer Faculty Research Fellowship

These fellowships are designed to help faculty maximize the summer for research in service of their ongoing professional development.

HRI Research Prize

These prizes recognize outstanding humanities research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Lemann Center Faculty Research Grant

These grants are available to full-time University of Illinois faculty members who are developing research about Brazil.

Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies (CLACS) Graduate Student Fellowships

Tinker Field Collaborative Fellowship

This grant is designed to support student field research and promote opportunities for joint experimentation, tool-building, and knowledge exchange on the institutional level. 

Tinker Summer Fellowship 

This grant is designed to provide graduate students with their initial exploratory experience in developing independent research projects and conducting field research in Latin America.

Whitten Fellowship 

These awards are intended primarily to support graduate students at the master’s or doctoral level wishing to conduct research in Latin America.

Division of Disability Resources and Educational Services (DRES) Karen Wold Level the Learning Field Award

This award was created in memory of Karen Wold, an access specialist at DRES who spent her career working to make the learning field more level and accessible. The purpose of the award is to identify exemplary faculty and staff who are advocating and/or implementing instructional strategies, technologies, and disability-related accommodations which afford students with disabilities equal access to academic resources and curricula.

External Awards

  • Ping-Lin Chuang (Linguistics): 2022 Duolingo English Test Doctoral Dissertation Award for her dissertation “What makes an argument effective? Triangulating task characteristics, essay performances, and rating processes in an L2 integrated argumentative writing test"
  • Aylin Coşkun Kunduz (Linguistics): National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (NSF DDRIG) for her dissertation titled, "How flexible are grammars past puberty? Evidence from heritage language returnees"
  • Florencia Henshaw (Spanish & Portuguese): 2022 Distinguished Service Award in the category of Exemplary Teaching and Training, granted by the Illinois Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ICTFL); Excellence in Teacher Development Award, granted by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Teacher Development Special Interest Group
  • Heejin Kim (Linguistics): Co-PI, Speech Accessibility Project, $3.5 million dollars/5 years – Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft
  • Maxine Katz (Religion): 2023 National Security Program (NSP) David L. Boren Fellowship to study Hindi through the South Asian Flagship Languages Initiative (SAFLI)
  • Daniel Nabil Maroun (French & Italian): Lead faculty of the highly competitive grant awarded to the Department of French & Italian by the French Embassy and the FACE Foundation as part of the initiative "French in Higher Education" for the proposal "Professionalizing French in Illinois: Empowering French and Francophone Studies"
  • Danielle Massulo Bordignon (Spanish & Portuguese): Tinker Field Collaborative Fellowship through the Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies for her project, “Insurgent Allegory: Revising Literary Style in Authoritarian Brazil”
  • Randall Sadler (Linguistics): Meta Platform Technologies, LLC & Immerse Inc. Grant ($300K) for use of VR technology in K-12 
  • Mara Wade (professor emerita, Germanic Languages & Literatures): Renaissance Society of America Digital Innovation Award for 2022-23 for her team's digital project, Emblematica Online (Mara R. Wade, principal investigator; Timothy W. Cole and Myung-Ja Han; Hands Brandhorst; Thomas Kilton; and Thomas Stäcker)
  • Craig Williams (Classics): Short-Term Whitney J. Oates Fellowship in the Humanities Council and Department of Classics at Princeton University for his pathbreaking research, which brings together a wide range of Indigenous writers from across North America, from the seventeenth century to today, who have engaged with ancient Greece and Rome in a Native voice, cumulatively contributing to Indigenous survivance on this continent. 
  • Peter Wright (Slavic Languages & Literatures): Selected as 2023-24 Fulbright Scholar for Croatia to conduct research for his book project, "The Business of Solidarity"

2021-2022

Campus Awards

Chancellor’s Academic Professional Excellence (CAPE) Award

The CAPE Award is designed to recognize demonstrated excellence by academic professional staff on the Urbana campus. Nominees are judged on three criteria: work, personal, and professional contributions.

Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching

The Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching recognizes sustained excellence and innovative approaches in undergraduate teaching and contributions beyond classroom instruction that have an overall positive impact on undergraduate student learning. Honorees are represented in three employee categories – faculty, specialized faculty and teaching assistants.

Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching for Faculty

Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching for Instructional Staff

Campus Award for Excellence in Online & Distant Teaching

This award honors excellence and innovation in online and/or distance teaching; contributions to student learning through innovative uses of technology; creativity in course development and instruction; and for having had a positive influence on the quality, extent, and development of a department’s online/distance program.

Illinois Student Government Teaching Excellence Award

This award recognizes instructors for outstanding performance both in and out of the classroom. Honorees have demonstrated a commitment to teaching and to students in every capacity of their experience at Illinois.

Executive Officer Distinguished Leadership Award

This award recognizes outstanding academic leadership and vision by an executive officer within a college or campus unit. Recipients are exemplar of effective leadership who have led diverse groups through strategic improvements within her or his unit or campus.

University Scholar 

The University Scholars program aims to recognize outstanding members of the faculty and to provide each with a funding allocation to enhance her or his scholarly activities. University Scholar awards represent recognition of the recipient’s excellence and the university’s commitment to fostering outstanding people and their work.

LAS Dean’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching

The College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, in fulfillment of its mission, is devoted to excellence in undergraduate teaching. The purpose of the award program is to reward and honor the college's best tenure system faculty. 

LAS Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching for Instructional Staff

LAS Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching for Graduate Teaching Assistants

LAS Academic Professional Award

The LAS Academic Professional Award identifies and honors selected academic professionals for their outstanding contributions to the college. The program is sponsored by alumni and friends of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.

Conrad Humanities Scholar

The Conrad Humanities Scholars Award recognizes promising mid-career scholars and provides financial support for continued achievement, research, and scholarship in humanities. The designation is for five years.

LAS Program of Faculty Study in a Second Discipline

This fellowship offers faculty members an opportunity to extend their scholarship through study in a separate field. Up to two fellowships are awarded to faculty members in the humanities and humanistic social sciences who wish to receive training in digital methods to advance their scholarship, with possible implications for curricular development. 

Humanities Research Institute (HRI) Campus Fellowship

These fellowships are granted to Illinois faculty and graduate students who spend the year engaged in research and writing. This year’s theme is “Un/Doing.”

  • Amanda Smith, “21st Century Black Beauty Resistance: Collectivism, Individuality, and In/Visibility in Black French Women’s Body and Hair Representations” (French & Italian)
HRI Mellon Pre-Doctoral Public Humanities Fellowship

This fellowship is an opportunity for a doctoral student in the humanities to be in residence with HRI’s Odyssey Project and to pursue a public humanities-related project under the guidance of a designated faculty mentor.

  • Eva Kuras, “Crossing Paths” (Comparative & World Literature)
HRI Summer Faculty Research Fellowship

These fellowships are designed to help faculty maximize the summer for research in service of their ongoing professional development.

  • Eda Derhemi, “Endangered Arvanitika in Zeriki, Greece” (French & Italian)
Center for Advanced Study Associate

CAS Associates are tenured faculty members whose proposals are selected in an annual competition. These appointments grant one semester of teaching release time in order to pursue an individual scholarly or creative project. With the professors and fellows, they form the core of the Center for Advanced Study Community. 

External Awards

  • Ping-Lin Chuang (Linguistics): 2022 Summer Research and Measurement Sciences (RMS) internship program at the Educational Testing Service (ETS) in Princeton, New Jersey; Midwest Association of Language Testers (MwALT) Best Presentation Award for her paper, "Argumentation structure and quality as validity evidence for integrated writing assessment"
  • Tyler Dolan (Slavic Languages & Literatures): Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) Summer Dissertation Writing Grant for summer 2022
  • Zsuzsanna Fagyal (French & Italian and SLATE): NSF & Amazon FAI Research Grant to work on inclusive speech recognition: “A New Paradigm for the Evaluation and Training of Inclusive Automatic Speech Recognition,” in collaboration with M. Hasegawa- Johnson (PI, UIUC), N. Dehak, P. Zelasko, and L. Moro-Velazquez (co-PIs, John Hopkins University)
  • Carolyn Fornoff (Spanish & Portuguese): Best Article in the Humanities by the Latin American Studies Association's (LASA) Mexico section for her article, "Planetary Poetics of Extinction in Contemporary Mexican Poetry," published in Mexican Literature as World Literature (2021)
  • Rachel Harris (Comparative & World Literature) and Dan Chyutin: The Janovics Center Award for Outstanding Humanities Research in Transnational Film and Theatre Studies - Best Book Award for Casting a Giant Shadow: The Transnational Shaping of Israeli Cinema 
  • Florencia Henshaw (Spanish & Portuguese and FLTE): Postsecondary Award for Excellence in World Language Instruction Using Technology, granted by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) in collaboration with the Faculty Development Programs of Cengage Learning and the International Association for Language Learning Technology (IALLT); Excellence in Online Language Teaching Award for Higher Education, granted by ACTFL and Computer-Assisted Language Instruction Consortium (CALICO); elected president of the downstate Illinois chapter of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP)
  • Lilya Kaganovsky (Slavic Languages & Literatures): National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) summer stipend for her project, "Fifty Years of Soviet Women’s Cinema, 1929–1979"
  • Daniel Maroun (French & Italian): Lawrence R. Schehr Memorial Award from Contemporary French Civilization, published by Liverpool University Press, for his essay, “Do Black Lives Matter in France? Agency, Culpability and Police Brutality" 
  • Emanuel Rota (French & Italian): France@Illinois Center of Excellence Grant for his research project, "Understanding Narratives of Racialization in the Mediterranean” in collaboration with a transatlantic team of researchers
  • Sara Saez-Fajardo (Spanish & Portuguese) elected communications/professional development coordinator of the downstate Illinois chapter of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP)
  • Tricia Thrasher (French & Italian and SLATE): Network of Modern Language Teacher Associations (NFMLTA) Dissertation Support Grant to work on her dissertation, "Saying ‘Au Revoir’ to Anxiety in a Heartbeat: The benefits of Virtual Reality for Language Learning"
  • Xun Yan (Linguistics): Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) Essentials New Scholar Award; 2022 TOEFL Committee of Examiners (COE) Research Grant from Educational Testing Service for the proposal, “Comparing the use of the English proficiency test scores in higher education admissions” in collaboration with Rurik Tywoniw (EPT Coordinator)

2020-2021

Campus Awards

Campus Award for Excellence in Graduate & Professional Teaching
Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching 

Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching for Faculty

Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching for Teaching Assistants

Illinois Student Government Teaching Excellence Award
LAS Dean's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching
LAS Dean's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching for Instructional Staff
LAS Dean's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching for Graduate Teaching Assistants 
LAS Dean’s Fellow for Faculty Development
LAS Academic Professional Award
Conrad Humanities Scholars
LAS Named Scholar Positions
Helen Corley Petit Scholar (for early career scholars)
LAS Dean's Distinguished Professorial Scholar
LAS Alumni Distinguished Professorial Scholar
Lynn M. Martin Professorial Scholar Award
Lincoln Excellence for Assistant Professors (LEAP) Award
Humanities Research Institute (HRI) Campus Fellowships
HRI Campus Faculty Fellows
  • John Barnard, “The Edible and the Endangered: Food, Empire, Extinction” (Comparative & World Literature)
HRI Campus Graduate Student Fellows
  • Megan Gargiulo, “Race, Gender, and Recogimiento: Discursive Representations of Space, Sexuality, and Productivity in Late Colonial Mexico” (Spanish & Portuguese)
  • LeiAnna X. Hamel, “Undisciplined Bodies: Deviant Female Sexuality in Russian and Yiddish Literatures, 1877–1929” (Slavic Languages & Literatures)
HRI Prize for Research in the Humanities
Center for Advanced Study (CAS) Fellowship
Center for Advanced Study Professorship
Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory Fellowships
Senior Research Fellowship
Junior Research Fellowship
National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) Faculty Fellowship
  • Silvina Montrul (Spanish & Portuguese and Linguistics) in collaboration with David Dubin (School of Information Sciences) and Todd Nicholson (NCSA)
Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (ISEE) Teaching Sustainability Fellowship
Diversity and Social Justice Education Outstanding Graduate Student Award 
Humanities Released Time Award

External Awards

  • Xiomara Cervantes (Spanish & Portuguese): Latin American Studies Association 2021 Premio Sylvia Molloy for Best Article in the Humanities for her article, “Paz’s Pasivo: Thinking Mexicanness from the Bottom"; 2021 Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty (funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and administered by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars)
  • Eda Derhemi (French & Italian) and Francesco Ferrari (French & Italian): Literary Translation Award from the Albanian Ministry of Culture and the National Center for Books and Reading for their translation of the Albanian novel, “Mjaltë në teh” by Romeo Çollaku into Italian, under the title, “Miele sul coltello”
  • Eider Etxebarria-Zuluaga (Spanish & Portuguese and Linguistics): National Science Foundation (NSF) Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Award for her dissertation, “Subject Expression in Spanish in Contact with Basque and in Spanish-Basque Bilingualism"
  • Eduardo Ledesma (Spanish & Portuguese): National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship for his project, “Visually Impaired Filmmakers and Technologies of Sight”
  • Harriet Murav (Slavic Languages & Literatures): Honorable Mention, Modern Language Association's Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies for her book, "David Bergelson’s Strange New World: Untimeliness and Futurity" 
  • Daria Semenova (Slavic Languages & Literatures): 2021 Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) Summer Dissertation Writing Grant in support of her project, “At Home and Away: Community Belonging in Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian Adventure Fiction, 1918-1960"
  • Tricia Thrasher (French & Italian and SLATE): Duolingo Research Grant in Language Learning with Technology for her thesis, "Social Virtual Reality’s Impact on Language Anxiety and Interpersonal Oral Production by French Learners"
  • Anna Tsiola (Linguistics): National Science Foundation (NSF) Dissertation Research Improvement Grant 

2019-2020

Campus Awards

Campus Award for Excellence in Instruction
Illinois Student Government Teaching Excellence Award 
Illinois Campus Research Board Award
University Scholar
LAS Academic Professional Award 
LAS Dean's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching
Conrad Humanities Scholar
LAS Dean's Distinguished Professorial Scholar
LAS Lincoln Excellence for Assistant Professors (LEAP) Scholar
Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) Fellowship
IPRH Summer Faculty Research Fellowship
IPRH Prize for Research in the Humanities 
  • François Proulx (French & Italian) for “Bourget, the Chambige Affair, and the Queer Seductions of the Novel,” included in his recent book, Victims of the Book: Reading and Masculinity in Fin-de-Siècle France
  • Eduardo Ledesma (Spanish & Portuguese) honorable mention for “Staging the Spanish Civil War: History and Re-enactment in Joris Ivens’ The Spanish Earth (1937),” Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies (November 2019)
Center for Advanced Study (CAS) Fellowship
Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory Junior Research Fellowship
“The Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTL) Partnership Grant” Recipient
President’s Executive Leadership Program (PELP)
  • Mariselle Meléndez (Spanish & Portuguese) named by U of I President Killeen as member of the President’s Executive Leadership Program 
Catherine and Bruce Bastian Professor of Global & Transnational Studies at the U of I
  • Harriet Murav (Slavic Languages & Literatures and Comparative & World Literature)

External Awards

  • Eric Calderwood (Comparative & World Literature): L. Carl Brown AIMS Book Prize (outstanding book in the area of North African Studies) for Colonial al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture (Harvard University Press 2018); Nikki Keddie Book Award honorable mention, Middle East Studies Association (for Colonial al-Andalus); Laura Shannon Prize Silver Medal (for Colonial al-Andalus)
  • David Cooper (Slavic Languages & Literatures): 2019 Prize for Best Scholarly Translation for his book, The Queen’s Court and Green Mountain Manuscripts With Other Forgeries of the Czech Revival (Michigan Slavic Publications 2018) from the American Association for Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL).
  • Florencia Henshaw (Spanish & Portuguese) named to Editorial Advisory Board for The Language Educator, a publication of the American Council of the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL); Conference Attendee Travel Stipend Award for American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP) 2020 Annual Conference
  • Jack Hutchens (Slavic Languages & Literatures): 2019 "Article of the Year" for his article, "Julian Stryjkowski: Polish, Jewish, queer," published in Canadian Slavonic Papers, from the Canadian Association of Slavists
  • Elizabeth Lowe (Translation & Interpreting Studies): Literature Translation Fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)
  • Silvina Montrul (Spanish & Portuguese): National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Award from the National Institute of Health for her project, “Validating New Measures of Later Language Development with Spanish and English Monolinguals and Bilinguals" in collaboration with Kiel Christiansen (Educational Psychology), Jessica Montag (Psychology), Pam Hadley (Speech and Hearing Sciences) and Xun Yan (Linguistics).
  • Armine Mortimer (French & Italian) will receive a Literature Translation Fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)
  • Valeria Sobol (Slavic Languages & Literatures): Prize for the Best Article in the field of Ukrainian history, politics, language, literature, and culture (2018-19) from the American Association for Ukrainian Studies for, “’Tis Eighty Years Since’: Panteleimon Kulish’s Gothic Ukraine,” in Slavic Review (awarded in 2020)
  • Mara Wade (Germanic Languages & Literatures): 41st president of the Renaissance Society of America (RSA), April 2020
  • Dov Weiss (Religion): National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) summer stipend for his book project, “Rabbinic Inferno: Hell and Salvation in Classical Judaism”

  • Leianna Xenia Hamel (Slavic Languages & Literatures): Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) Summer Dissertation Writing Grant (2020)

2018-2019

Campus Awards

U of I Presidential Initiative to Celebrate the Impact of the Arts and the Humanities
U of I Outstanding Faculty Leadership Award
University Scholar
Conrad Humanities Scholar
Richard and Margaret Romano Professorial Scholar
  • Lilya Kaganovsky (Comparative & World Literature and Slavic Languages & Literatures)
Lincoln Excellence for Assistant Professors (LEAP) Scholar
Criticism & Interpretive Theory Junior Research Fellowship
Arnold O. Beckman Research Award

External Awards

  • Hans Hock (Professor Emeritus, Linguistics): Honorary Life Membership, Societas Linguistica Europaea.
  • Marianne Kalinke (Center for Advanced Study Professor Emerita, Germanic Languages & Literatures): The Knight’s Cross of the Order of the Falcon (government of Iceland’s highest honor)
  • Tasha Robles (Spanish): “University Advisor of the Year," Hermandad de Sigma Iota Alpha, Inc.
  • Pilar Martinez-Quiroga (Spanish & Portuguese): Outstanding Article Award, American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AASP) research journal, Hispania
  • Mara Wade (Germanic Languages & Literatures): Reimar Luest Prize for International Research Cultural Exchange

2017-2018

Campus Awards

LAS Dean’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching
  • Robert Rushing (French & Italian and Comparative & World Literature)
Conrad Humanities Scholar
LAS Alumni Professorial Scholar
Lynn M. Martin Professorial Scholar
Lincoln Excellence for Assistant Professors (LEAP) Award
Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) Faculty Fellowship
IPRH New Horizons Summer Faculty Research Scholarship
IPRH Research Cluster Grant
Center for Advanced Study (CAS) Associate
Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory Senior Research Fellowship
National Center for Supercomputing Applications Fellowship
Arnold O. Beckman Research Award
Center for Language Instruction and Coordination Excellence in Language Instruction Award

External Awards

  • Jon Ebel (Religion): 2017 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship
  • Glen Goodman (Spanish & Portuguese): Fulbright Visiting Scholar Fellowship to teach and conduct research at the Federal University of Rio Grande Do Sul in Brazil, Spring 2017
  • Mara Wade (Germanic Languages and Literatures): Vice President, Renaissance Society of America
  • Dov Weiss (Religion): Jewish Book Council’s 2017 National Jewish Book Award for scholarship for his book, Pious Irreverence, Confronting God in Rabbinic Judaism

2016-2017

Campus Awards

Campus Executive Officer Distinguished Leadership Award
Campus Distinguished Promotion Award
  • Lilya Kaganovsky (Comparative & World Literature and Slavic Languages & Literatures)
Office of the Provost/Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research Award for "Humanities and Public Life"
University Scholar
Conrad Humanities Scholar
LAS Academic Professional Award
Lincoln Excellence for Assistant Professors (LEAP) Award
Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) Fellowship
Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) Research Cluster Grant 
Center for Advanced Study (CAS) Fellowship
Center for Advanced Study (CAS) Associate
Unit for Criticism & Interpretative Theory Junior Faculty Fellowship
Research Board Award
  • Lilya Kaganovsky (Comparative & World Literature and Slavic Languages & Literatures)
Medical Scholars Program Advisory Committee Outstanding Advisor of the Year
  • Stephanie Hilger (Germanic Languages & Literatures and Comparative & World Literature)

External Awards

  • Antony Augoustakis (Classics): Ovatio Award, Classical Association of the Middle West and South; Langan Professorial Scholar, 2016-2019
  • Roxana Girju (Linguistics): Best Paper Runner-up Award, IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing, 2017; “Best of ACII" and "Best Student Paper" Awards, International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, 2017
  • Raquel Goebel (Spanish & Portuguese): Best Education Initiative, Association of Teachers of Portuguese (AOTP)
  • Glen Goodman (Spanish & Portuguese): Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst/German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Fellowship, Summer 2017
  • Stephanie Hilger (Germanic Languages & Literatures and Comparative & World Literature): 2016 Goethe Society of North America Essay Prize
  • Lilya Kaganovsky (Comparative & World Literature and Slavic Languages & Literatures): Visiting Fellow, University College, University of Oxford, UK, Fall 2016
  • Marcus Keller (French & Italian): Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes académiques, French Cultural Ministry
  • Robert Rushing (French & Italian and Comparative & World Literature): American Association for Italian Studies (AAIS) Film/Media Book Prize for Descended from Hercules (2016)
  • Mara R. Wade (Germanic Languages & Literatures): National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow, Newberry Library, Chicago 2016-2017; Recipient, Patricia H. Labalme Fellowship, in collaboration with the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, from Renaissance Society of America, for research in Venice, Italy

2015-2016

Campus Awards

Conrad Humanities Scholar
Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) Language Pedagogy Reading Group Award
Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) Award for Best Faculty Research
Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) Fellowship
Center for Advanced Study (CAS) Fellowship
  • Harriet Murav (Comparative & World Literature and Slavic Languages & Culture)
Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory Senior Research Fellowship 
Arnold O. Beckman Research Award
Illinois Campus Research Board

External Awards

  • Antony Augoustakis (Classics): Society for Classical Studies Teaching Excellence Award (2016)
  • Roxana Girju (Linguistics): Engineering Council Award for Excellence in Advising
  • Hans Henrich Hock (Linguistics): Sukumar Sen Memorial Gold Medal for 2015 (awarded May 2016)
  • John Karam (Spanish & Portuguese): National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Stipend Award, 2016
  • Douglas A. Kibbee: Fulbright Grant for research in France, 2015-2016
  • Silvina Montrul (Spanish & Portuguese and Linguistics): Co-principal investigator (with Darren Tanner, principal investigator, Linguistics), National Science Foundation Grant, 2015-2017
  • François Proulx (French & Italian): National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship for 2015
  • Valeria Sobol (Slavic Languages & Literatures): National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) Fellowship, 2015-2016
  • Darren Tanner (Linguistics): Principal investigator (with Silvina Montrul, co-principal investigator, Spanish & Portuguese), National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant, 2015-2017

2014-2015

Campus Awards

Helen Corley Petit Scholar
LAS Conference Grant
  • Robert McKim (Religion) co-recipient for “Climate Change and Inequality”
Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) 5th Annual Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities
Center for Advanced Study (CAS) Associate Fellowship
Celebration of Excellence Award, Computer Science Department 
Engineering Council Outstanding Advising Award, College of Engineering

External Awards

  • Jennifer Cole (Linguistics): Institute for Phonetics and Speech Processing Fellowship, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, 2014
  • L. Elena Delgado (Spanish & Portuguese): Premio Nacional de Ensayo finalist (National Literature Award, Essay) for Spain's Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport (2015)  
  • Jill Jegerski (Spanish and Portuguese): Albert Valdman Award (for outstanding publication in Studies in Second Language Acquisition journal), 2015
  • Harriet Murav (Comparative & World Literature and Slavic Languages & Literatures): National Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellowship (jointly with Sasha Senderovich) to translate David Bergelson's Mides-hadin  (Judgment), 2014-2015
  • David Price (Religion): Herzog August Bibliothek Fellowship, Wolfenbuettel, Germany, Summer 2015
  • Robert Tierney (East Asian Languages & Cultures and Comparative & World Literature): IPS International Research Travel Grant for “Research on Nakae Chōmin,” January 2015  
  • Mara R. Wade (Germanic Languages & Literatures): Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellowship, March 2015

2013-2014

Campus Awards

Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching
Illinois Campus Research Board Award
University Scholar
Conrad Humanities Scholar
LAS Humanities Teaching Excellence Award
LAS Academic Professional Award
  • Robert Jenkins, (visiting professor, Germanic Languages & Literatures)
LAS Research Assistantship Award
LAS Centennial Scholar
LAS Centennial Fellowship
LAS Faculty Fellowship for Study in a Second Discipline
  • Stephanie Hilger (Germanic Languages & Literatures) for book project, “Liminal Bodies: Intersexuality in Literary and Medical Discourse"
Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) Faculty Fellowship
  • Robert Rushing (French & Italian and Comparative & World Literature)
Center for Advanced Study (CAS) Associate
  • Marina Terkourafi (Linguistics)
Center for Advanced Study (CAS) Resident Associate
  • Dan Shao (East Asian Languages & Cultures)
Unit for Criticism & Theory Senior Research Fellowship
European Union Center Research and Course Development Grant
International Program and Studies Travel Research Grant

External Awards

  • Eyamba Bokamba (Linguistics): A. Ronald Walton Award for “Distinguished Service on Behalf of The Less Commonly Taught Languages,” 2014 
  • Eda Derhemi (French & Italian): Core Fulbright Award for teaching and research in Albania, Spring 2014; U.S. Fulbright Scholar Award, 2013-2014
  • Dara Goldman (Spanish & Portuguese): U.S. Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center and Foreign Language Area Studies Grant (Principal Investigator and Coordinator), 2014
  • Tania Ionin (Linguistics): Grant from the British Academy, 2013-2015
  • Javier Irigoyen-García (Spanish & Portuguese): 2014 Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize honorable mention, for his book, The Spanish Arcadia: Sheep Herding, Pastoral Discourse, and Ethnicity in Early Modern Spain
  • Elizabeth Lowe (Translation and Interpreting Studies) and Christopher Higgins: National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Grant for three-week institute, “The Centrality of Translation to the Humanities: New Interdisciplinary Scholarship”, July 2013
  • Harriet Murav (Comparative & World Literature): Choice Outstanding Academic Title; American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) Book Prize finalist for Music From a Speeding Train: Jewish Literature in Post-Revolution Russia, 2013
  • Elizabeth Oyler (East Asian Languages & Cultures): INTERSECT Grant (2012-2014)
  • Bruce Rosenstock (Religion): INTERSECT Grant, 2012-2014 
  • Dan Shao (East Asian Languages & Cultures): INTERSECT Grant, 2012-2014
  • Valeria Sobol (Slavic Languages & Literatures): National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) Summer Stipends Award, 2014
  • Mara Wade (Germanic Languages & Literatures):The Palatine Wedding of 1613: Protestant Alliance and Court Festival (co-edited with Sara Smart), Otto Harrassowitz, 2013, Weiss/Brown Publication Subvention Award from the Newberry Library