College Honors and University Awards

BYU Humanities College Meeting 2014

COLLEGE HONORS AND UNIVERSITY AWARDS

HUMANITIES PROFESSORSHIPS AND FELLOWSHIPS

Stanley V. Benfell, Humanities Professor of Comparative Literature Stanley Benfell has taught comparative literature at BYU since 1994. A specialist in medieval and Renaissance literature from England, Italy, and France, he enjoys teaching GE courses and has developed BYU’s first world literature two-semester survey. Currently on assignment on his third study abroad program at the London Centre, he is the recipient of the Alcuin award and Honors Professor of the Year. His book, The Biblical Dante (University of Toronto Press 2011), argues for Dante’s intimate engagement with the Bible in The Divine Comedy. In addition to recent articles on Dante’s moral philosophy, his current research explores Renaissance comedy and skepticism. He is the former chair of the Department of Humanities, Classics, and Comparative Literature as well as the former director of European Studies at BYU.

Blair E. Bateman, Humanities Center Fellow Blair Bateman is a native of Salt Lake City. He graduated from BYU with BAs in music and Portuguese and later an MA in Portuguese. He holds a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction, Second Languages and Cultures Education from the University of Minnesota. Professor Bateman has taught Portuguese and Spanish at the university and high school levels, and has taught workshops in several locations around the country on the teaching of culture in foreign language classes. His other research interests include foreign language teacher education in general and especially immersion education.

Brian R. Roberts, Humanities Center Fellow After growing up in Hawai’i, Indonesia, and Tennessee, Brian Roberts received a PhD in English from the University of Virginia in 2008. His scholarship and teaching focus on American studies, African American and black diasporan literature and culture, modernism/modernity, archipelagic studies, and literature and diplomacy.

His first book—Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era (University of Virginia Press, 2013)—examines the literary and diplomatic performances of African American writers who traveled as US diplomats during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tracing the interrelated spheres of racial, aesthetic, and international representation, Artistic Ambassadors brings the literary and diplomatic dossiers of famous figures such as Frederick Douglass and James Weldon Johnson into dialogue with the work of lesser-known black writer-diplomats of the New Negro era. The project further demonstrates how historical access to New Negro literary and cultural investments in official US diplomacy is crucial to understanding quasi-diplomatic moments in African American and

black diasporan cultural history, including W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida Gibbs Hunt’s orchestration of the Pan-African Congress and the Indonesian travels of Richard Wright for the Bandung Conference or Asian-African Conference. An article version of a chapter from Artistic Ambassadors received the MLA’s Darwin T. Turner Award for best article of the year in African American Review.

Laura Catharine Smith, Humanities Center Fellow Laura Catharine Smith is an associate professor of German. She completed a joint doctoral program in German Linguistics and Theoretical Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Laura teaches phonetics and pronunciation, history of the German language, and the structure of German in addition to graduate courses on second language acquisition for the SLaT program. Her research interests include second language perception and pronunciation, the role of dialect in second language perception and production, and language acquisition on study abroad. Currently, she is a member of the Linguistics Society of America and the Society for German Linguistics, and serves as the President-Elect of the Utah Chapter of the American Association of Teachers of German.

Kerry D. Soper, Humanities Center Fellow Kerry Soper studied art as an undergraduate at Utah State University. He then attended Emory University where he pursued an MA and PhD in American Studies.

His primary research interests include comic strips, comedy, satire, American art history, and popular film. He has published two books with The University Press of Mississippi: Garry Trudeau: The Aesthetics of Satire; and We Go Pogo: Walt Kelly, Politics and American Satire.

In addition to teaching in the Interdisciplinary Humanities and American Studies programs at BYU, he paints landscapes and attempts to bridge the gap between theory and practice by publishing cartoons and short satiric pieces in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

John S. Bennion, Nan Osmond Grass Professorship John Bennion writes novels, essays, and short fiction about the western Utah desert and the people who inhabit that forbidding country. He has published a collection of short fiction, Breeding Leah and other Stories (Signature Books, 1991), and a novel, Falling Toward Heaven (Signature Books, 2000). He has published short work in Ascent, AWP Chronicle, English Journal, Utah Holiday, Journal of Experiential Education, Sunstone Magazine, Best of the West II, Black American Literature Forum, Journal of Mormon History, and others. He has written two novels, Avenging Saint and Ezekiel’s Third Wife. An associate professor at Brigham Young University, Dr. Bennion teaches creative writing and the British novel. He has made a special study of the late Victorian and Modern writer, Thomas Hardy. As a teacher, he specializes in experiential writing and literature programs, including Wilderness Writing, a class in which students backpack and then write personal narratives about their experiences; and England and Literature, a study abroad program during which students study Romantic and Victorian writers and hike through the landscapes where those writers lived. Dr. Bennion received a BA in English from Utah State University (1977), an MA in English from

BYU (1981), and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston (1989). He lives in Provo with his wife, Karla, who is a psychotherapist and who also writes mystery novels. They are the parents of five children.

COLLEGE OUTSTANDING TEACHING AWARD

Raissa V. Solovieva, Excellence in Teaching Award Raissa Vulfovna Solovieva is an associate teaching professor of Russian. She received her PhD in Russian Literature from Kharkov State University in Ukraine. She joined the faculty of the Department of German and Russian as a visiting assistant professor of Russian in 1992 and became a full-time member of the department in 2000. Raissa teaches courses on Russian cultural history, Russian cinema, intermediate Russian language, and the masterpieces of Russian literature. She is one of the co-authors—with Gary Browning and David Hart—of Leveraging Your Russian With Roots, Prefixes, and Suffixes, a textbook which is used in intermediate and advanced Russian language courses. Raissa’s professional affiliations include memberships in the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.

HUMANITIES+ AWARD

Nancy Turley, Humanities+ Award Nancy Romans Turley grew up in Nebraska, raised her seven children with her husband, Wayne, in Arizona, and then moved to Utah. Her dissertation greatly benefited from taking a BYU corpus linguistics class; life has not been the same since. She graduated with a PhD from Arizona State University in 2009 in Applied Linguistics, receiving her diploma from President Obama. Since then she has taught part-time at BYU in the Linguistics and English Language Department, and has also taught part-time at UVU in the ESL Department. Her BYU undergraduate goal was to someday teach college courses, so there couldn’t have been a happier development in her life! She is busy with teaching and working with the interns in her department. Students today have incredible opportunities, and internships are one of the best. Nancy enjoys music, bike riding, building houses, traveling with her husband, serving in the church, talking to her children, and playing with her 12 grandchildren. And continuing to learn.

OUTSTANDING ADJUNCT FACULTY AWARD

Debbie L. Harrison, Excellence in Teaching Award Debbie Harrison has taught freshman composition and English language courses as an adjunct for the last 38 years. She taught 21 years at Whitworth College in Spokane, Washington, and 17 years at BYU. Since returning to BYU 13 years ago, she has mostly taught Writing 150 for the Composition Department and Modern American Usage (ELang 322) for the Linguistics and English Language Department. She loves teaching writing and watching her students evolve in both their thinking and writing abilities, and she

loves teaching editing and the intellectual pursuit of helping writing to be clear, clean, and compelling. She graduated from BYU in 1976 with a double teaching major in English and Spanish, then earned her Masters in Humanities from BYU in 1978 with an emphasis in 19th century European literature and art. She is a World War II buff, a soccer lover, and a closet fantasy/adventure reader. She loves to camp, hike, and read, read, read. She enjoys lively discussions and finding connections from what she reads to her everyday life. She is married to Mark Harrison and has 6 children and 7 grandchildren, and few things please her more than to listen to her children discuss a book they have read, or to spend time with them anywhere—particularly in the out-of-doors.

COLLEGE OF HUMANITIES LECTURESHIPS

Greg Clark, James Barker Lectureship Greg Clark is University Professor of English and associate dean of the College of Humanities. He has taught at BYU since 1985—now courses in rhetorical theory and criticism and, recently, leadership as rhetorical practice. He designs each course around a pressing question. Students use assigned readings, class discussions, and research to develop collective as well as individual answers to that question, sharing their progress with each other along the way.

His research and writing explores places in American culture where rhetoric and aesthetic experience meet, including visual art, encounters with symbolic landscapes, and music. That work is informed by the thinking of important American cultural theorists John Dewey and Kenneth Burke, and represented by Rhetorical Landscapes in America (2004), Trained Capacities: John Dewey, Rhetoric, and Democratic Practice (coedited with Brian Jackson, 2014), and Civic Jazz: American Music, Kenneth Burke, and the Art of Getting Along (forthcoming 2015). At BYU Clark has directed the University Writing and American Studies programs, chaired the English Department, and works closely with the BYU Public School Partnership and the Center for the Improvement of Teacher Education and Schooling. Beyond BYU, he is president-elect of the Rhetoric Society of America, having served that organization previously as executive director and editor of its journal, Rhetoric Society Quarterly. He also teaches occasionally in the Rhetoric and Composition PhD program at the University of Utah.

He and his wife Linda live in the foothills east of campus.

Dan Graham, P.A. Christensen Lectureship Daniel W. Graham is A. O. Smoot Professor of Philosophy at Brigham Young University. A student of ancient Greek philosophy and science, he is the author of Aristotle’s Two Systems (1987); the editor of the previously uncollected kleine Schriften of Gregory Vlastos, Studies in Greek Philosophy (2 vols., 1995); translator and commentator of Aristotle, Physics VIII in the Clarendon Aristotle Series (1999); co-editor with Victor Caston of a Festscrift for his mentor, Presocratic Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Alexander Mourelatos (2002); author of Explaining the Cosmos: the Ionian Tradition of Scientific Philosophy (2006); co-editor with

Patricia Curd of The Oxford Handbook of Presocratic Philosophy (2008); and the editor and translator of The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy (2 vols., 2010). His Science Before Socrates: Parmenides, Anaxagoras, and the New Astronomy is forthcoming. He previously taught at Grinnell College in Iowa and at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He has been a visiting professor at Yale University and a visiting fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge. He has been the recipient of two NEH fellowships.

UNIVERSITY AWARDS

Sirpa Grierson, Religion Transfer Faculty Award Sirpa Grierson, an associate professor of English, specializes in English education and critical reading. She is also a transfer professor for the College of Religious Education, teaching the Doctrine and Covenants. Her major research interests include “the margins”—the field of interplay between reading, the reader, and the text; multigenre research; and classroom-based field studies in literacy. Prior to joining the BYU faculty in 1997, Dr. Grierson taught education courses at UVU and worked with the Utah Office of Education as a reading consultant. She has served on the Legislative Action Team and as a member of the Government Relations and By-Laws committees for the International Reading Association. She is the past president of the Utah Teachers of English Language (UCTE), the Utah Council of the International Reading Association (UCIRA), and currently serves as the UCIRA State Coordinator. At the age of four Dr. Grierson immigrated to Vancouver, Canada from Helsinki, Finland. She and her husband, Lorne, now reside in Orem. Her favorite pastimes include yoga, music, hiking and traveling with family and friends, and of course, reading.

Kirk Belnap, Creative Works Award Kirk Belnap is director of the National Middle East Language Resource Center, a Title VI LRC that brings together language experts from more than twenty universities. He is also co-PI with Robert Blake (UC-Davis) on the award-winning website Arabic without Walls and director of BYU’s Startalk summer Arabic high school camps. His academic interests include teaching of Arabic as a second language, language policy and planning, sociolinguistics, the history of Arabic, and L1 and L2 literacy.

Brian Jackson, Alcuin Award Brian Jackson specializes in rhetorical theory and criticism, persuasive writing, and religious rhetoric. He currently serves as coordinator of University Writing. Brian graduated with an MA from BYU in 2003 and a PhD in Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English from the University of Arizona in 2007.

Nate Kramer, Alcuin Award Nate Kramer is an associate professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities and has taught at BYU since 2004. He received his PhD from UCLA in Germanic Languages and Literatures, with an emphasis in Scandinavian Languages and Literatures and has been devoted to General Education at BYU since his arrival, playing a key role in a recent revamping of both the curriculum in Interdisciplinary Humanities and in the design of the IHUM 201/202 sequence. He also recently designed the department first ever online version of the civilization survey. This past summer he completed BYU’s first study abroad to Denmark. His scholarship focuses on the works of several prominent Danish authors, including Søren Kierkegaard, Villy Sørensen, and H.C. Andersen.