College Professorships and Fellowships

Dawan Coombs

Humanities+ Public Humanities Award

Dawan Coombs teaches courses in English/language arts methods, adolescent reading, and young adult literature . Her research explores adolescent reader identity, preservice teacher identity, and dialogical approaches to literacy education . Her coauthored book, Novice Teachers Embracing Wobble in Standardized Schools: Using Dialogue and Inquiry for Self- Reflection and Growth, was published by Routledge in 2020 . The Humanities+ Public Humanities Award recognizes Dawan's contributions to public education and her influence at BYU and in the community . In addition to her her many students and working with English teachers in the public school system, she currently serves as the BYU Secondary Education Coordinator, working with the BYU Center for the Improvement of Teacher Education (CITES), BYU's Education Preparation Program, partnership school districts, and all the faculty members at BYU responsible for preparing future teachers .

Jill Rudy

Humanities+ Student-centered Research Award

Jill Terry Rudy has received university and college support since 2013 for mentored student research on fairy tales and media, involving superb graduate and undergraduate students: Madeleine Dresden, Kristy Stewart, Jessie Riddle, Megan Armknecht, Lauren Matthews, Grace Taito, Ariel Hubbard, Lauren Redding, Preston Wittwer, Gigi Valentine Knapp, Eliza Schow, Logan Groll, Jacqueline Smith, Cortlynd Olsen, Erica Smith, and Claire Gillett . Four graduate students, Emma Nelson, Ashley Walton, Christa Baxter, and Becca Hay, published two coauthored chapters in her book Channeling Wonder: Fairy Tales on Television coedited with Pauline Greenhill . The Routledge Companion to Media and Fairy-Tale Cultures, coedited with Greenhill, Naomi Hamer, and Lauren Bosc, includes a chapter by Jessie Riddle . Fairy-Tale TV, a Routledge Television Guidebook coauthored with Greenhill, was published in 2020 . For more student work, visit fttv.byu.edu.

Spencer Scoville

Humanities+ Experiential Learning Educator Award

As Arabic Section Head in the Department of Asian & Near Eastern Languages, Spencer Scoville was faced

with a particularly difficult pandemic challenge . Given the proscription on student travel abroad, and the Arabic program’s major requirement for student participation in the Amman Jordan Study Abroad Program, Professor Scoville supervised arrangements for dozens of students to participate in a remote, intensive Arabic program (“abroad” in Provo) during Fall Semester 2020 . Students interacted remotely with mentors and tutors tuning in daily from Jordan and participated in other activities to strengthen their Arabic language skills and deepen their cultural understanding .

Allen Christenson

College Excellence in Teaching Award

Allen J . Christenson has been a fulltime professor at BYU since 1998 (having come to us from his previous life as a Maya shaman, Air Force major, general dentist, oral surgeon, and aged art history graduate student) . He teaches a wide variety of courses, emphasizing the art and literature of the ancient Maya, the United States, and Latin America, as well as senior and graduate seminars in Early Modernism, Victorian Great Britain, and Europe in La Belle Époque . He would be the first to tell you that there is a lot of Emerson in the worldview of the ancient Maya and a lot of Aztec philosophy in the writings of Stéphane Mallarmé, so his lectures are not as unrelated as it might appear at first glance . He is the author of seven books, eighteen book chapters, and a number of journal and encyclopedia articles . His work as an anthropologist, art historian, and highland Mayan language translator informs his teaching and mentoring opportunities in ways that, as he describes, make it a transcendent joy to go to work each morning . Dr . Christenson is a dedicated and passionate teacher who inspires his students to excel in all that they do . His student ratings routinely point to his enthusiasm for course materials and for the ways he brings to life topics ranging from the worlds of the ancient Maya to Victorian art .

Matthew Gibbons

Adjunct Faculty Achievement Award

Matthew Gibbons is the longest- serving adjunct in the Digital Humanities and Technology program and one of two resident Whovians in the Office of Digital Humanities . He developed curricula for three DigHT web technology courses, which he continues to refine each semester . Matt is very cognizant of his students needs, tailoring his instruction to what will be of most use to them in their studies and future employment . He recently went above and beyond the scope of his responsibilities when he restructured his web publishing course to focus on accessibility issues after a legally blind student enrolled in his section .

Berenice Ventura

Adjunct Faculty Achievement Award

Berenice Ventura, a native of Uruguay, is an excellent teacher that has proven invaluable for the department of Spanish and Portuguese’s 300-level courses (teaching SPAN 321, 322, 339, and 355) . She has also been instrumental in piloting and editing materials for the new SPAN 321 curriculum and serves as a member of the College's INSIGHT committee . Berenice is a talented translator and writer, an amazing and well liked instructor, and is loved and respected across the college . She loves nature, friends, and books, but not necessarily in this order .

Jeff Beatty

Adjunct Faculty Professional Contributions Award

Jeff Beatty has been a key adjunct faculty member for the translation and localization minor since 2015 . He has made meaningful contributions in all areas of the program, including curriculum development, adjunct mentoring, and software training . He has been willing to take on additional assignments and has been a valuable consultant to the Center for Language Studies . His expertise, vast professional network, and genuine concern for the students has allowed the program to progress and develop into a full- fledged, content-rich minor . It is fair to say that his contributions will benefit translation and localization students for years to come .

Marc Yamada

Humanities Center Fellow (1 year)

Marc Yamada has been teaching in the interdisciplinary humanities section of the Department of Comparative Arts & Letters since 2013, after teaching Japanese literature and East Asian film for three years at Wake Forest University . He has published articles on Japanese and East Asian film, literature, and culture, and a monograph on Japan’s Heisei period: Locating Heisei in Japanese Fiction & Film: The Historical Imagination of the Lost Decades (Routledge, 2019) . He is currently working on a monograph on the films of Koreeda Hirokazu, which is under contract with the Contemporary Film Directors Series at the University of Illinois Press .

Mary Eyring

Humanities Center Fellow (1 year)

Mary Eyring has been teaching English and American studies at BYU since 2014 . She received her PhD in Literature from the University of California, San Diego, and taught English for one year at Pace University’s Manhattan campus . Her book, Captains of Charity: The Writings and Wages of Postrevolutionary Atlantic Benevolence, was published by the University Press of New England in 2017 . She has coedited special issues

of Early American Studies and the Journal of Transnational American Studies and contributed a chapter to the collection Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking: Towards New Comparative Methodologies and Disciplinary Formations (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020) . She has also published in American Literature, Early American Literature, and other journals . She is completing a second book, Saltwater: Globalizing Early American Grief. It studies common afflictions—such as miscarriage, homelessness, unhappy marriages, and disability—that shaped the mood of early American life even more than the tragedies and crises we usually associate with early American grief . When it is finished, this book will be published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press .

Paul Westover

Humanities Center Fellow (3 year)

Paul Westover joined the Department of English in 2008 after completing a PhD at Indiana University . He specializes in British Romanticism, literary geography, and the history of literary tourism . Paul is the author of Necromanticism: Traveling to Meet the Dead, 1750–1860 (2012) and coeditor, with Ann Wierda Roland, of Transatlantic Literature and Author Love in the Nineteenth Century (2016) . Over the last several years, Paul has collaborated with Nick Mason and other colleagues, including some terrific students, on two major electronic critical editions: William Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes (published by Romantic Circles in 2012, revised in 2020) and Dorothy Wordsworth’s Lake District (currently under review) . He has just completed a three-year term as graduate coordinator, and he is also a recovering book review editor for the Journal of British Studies. Paul teaches, among other things, courses in post-1800 Anglophone literature, and currently he supervises our BYU interns at the Wordsworth Trust . Though wounded by missing out on this year’s Literature and Landscape study abroad program, he is jazzed to be back on campus and eager to contribute as a Humanities Center fellow .

Brian Price

Scheuber-Veinz & Humanities Center Fellow (3 year)

Brian Price is Professor of Spanish American Literature and Culture at Brigham Young University . Before joining the faculty at BYU, he completed doctoral work at the University of Texas at Austin and taught at Wake Forest University . His areas of scholarly interest include 20th and 21st-century Mexican literary, film, and cultural studies; Latin America’s historical novel; comparative literature; and rock and roll . He is the

author of Cult of Defeat in Mexico’s Historical Fiction: Failure, Trauma, and Loss (2012), editor of Asaltos a la historia: Reimaginando la ficción histórica hispanoamericana (2014), and coeditor of TransLatin Joyce: Global Transmissions in Ibero-American Literature (2014) and The Lost Cinema of Mexico: From Lucha Libre to Cine Familiar and Other Churros (2022) . He is currently completing two book projects on the ways that rock music transformed Mexican literature and cinema . Over the last couple of years, Brian has spent a fair amount of his spare time practicing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and is trying to figure out a way to turn this extracurricular interest into another book .

David Laraway

Britsch Professorship (5 years)

David Laraway received his BA with majors in Spanish and philosophy, as well as an MA in Spanish, at BYU . At Cornell University he received an MA and PhD in Romance studies with an emphasis in Hispanic literature . He also did doctoral coursework in philosophy at Cornell University and the University of Utah and received a PhD in philosophy, art, and social thought from the European Graduate School in 2015 . He joined the BYU faculty in 1998 and served as chair of the Department of Spanish & Portuguese from 2011–2017 . He currently serves as visiting chair of the Department of Philosophy . In addition to numerous articles and book chapters, he is the author of three books: Árbol de imágenes: nueva historia de la poesía hispanoamericana (2007, with Merlin Forster), American Idiots: Outsider Music, Outsider Art, and the Philosophy of Incompetence (2018), and Borges and Black Mirror (2020) . He and his wife Michelle are the parents of Alex, Simon, and Eva, all currently BYU students .

Heather Belnap

Humanities Professorship (3 year)

Heather Belnap is an associate professor of art history and the coordinator of the European Studies program . Her work is guided by the core value of the advancement of women and other underrepresented communities . She is an ardent promotor of experiential learning and a dedicated mentor, and values collaboration with her peers and former students . In addition to her work at BYU, she is also engaged in professional citizenship and with a number of public humanities initiatives . In recent years, the purview of her work has expanded to include religion in modern art and culture— more specifically, transatlantic Mormonism and the Latter-day Saint tradition .