Academic News (News2Note)

News2Note, the academic newsletter of the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, is published monthly during the academic year by Debra Stoudt, associate dean for policy and faculty affairs. Academic news can be submitted to her directly at dstoudt@vt.edu.

Elisabeth Austin, Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures, coedited Adaptation and the Edge Effects of Latin American Cultures (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) with Elena Lahr-Vivaz. Her individual contributions to the volume were: “Introduction: Latin American Adaptations on the Edge” with Lahr-Vivaz and “Cosmopolitics and the Edges of Adaptation in Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s Las aventuras de la China Iron,” pp. 15–36 and 147–71, respectively. Included as well were contributions by: Catalina Andrango-Walker, Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures, “Adapting and Questioning History and the Historical Archive in La venganza de las cautivas [The Revenge of the Captives],” pp. 39-62, and Jacqueline Bixler, Alumni Distinguished Professor Emerita of Spanish, “Re/Made in Mexico: The Performance and Politics of Adaptation in the Theatre of Sabina Berman,” pp. 219–44.

It is with sadness that the College notes the death of former Virginia Tech student Nicolas “Nico” Braun, a Criminology major. Baugh was enrolled at Virginia Tech during the 2024–2025 academic year. In Spring 2025 he was an intern with the football equipment staff. A celebration of his life was held November 29 at First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church in Arlington, Massachusetts. Additional information can be found in the funeral home obituary and the Virginia Tech In memoriam.

David Brunsma, Sociology, coedited Arbiters of Race: Cultural Intermediaries, Racism, and Consumer Industries (Oxon, United Kingdom, and New York, New York: Routledge, 2025), with Erik T. Withers. His individual contribution to the volume was “Introduction: Arbiters of Race? Instilling Race Into Our Understandings of Cultural Intermediaries” with Withers, pp. 1–12. The eBook is available here.

Ralph Buehler, Public and International Affairs, gave three keynote addresses: “International Lessons for Promoting Walking, Cycling, and Public Transport” at the mobility zero emissions session of the IESE Business School and Autoritat del Transport Metropolità de Barcelona event titled Territori en Moviment (Territory in Motion), which took place October 29 in Barcelona, Spain; “Cycling for Sustainable Cities: An Overview on International Trends and Best Practice” at the Data Driven Approaches for Understanding and Advancing Urban Cycling Workshop, which was held November 7 at the Hertie School in Berlin, Germany; and the keynote for Making Cycling Irresistible: 25 Years of Progress in Europe and North America, which took place November 24 at Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto, Canada.

Joseph Eska, English, was one of three recipients of the 2025 Jacob A. Lutz III Award for Eminent Scholars. The award, established in 2024, is Virginia Tech’s first named university-level research award. It recognizes long-term, substantive contributions to research and creative scholarship in one of four disciplinary categories: science, engineering, and technology; health and life sciences; humanities and social sciences, and arts and design. A 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, Eska is a historical linguist whose scholarship explores how and why human languages evolve. He was recognized as a Jacob A. Lutz III Eminent Scholar for: his expertise on ancient Celtic languages of France and Italy; scholarship spanning Celtic, Latin, Greek, Germanic, and Native American languages; and integrating classical linguistic methods with contemporary theory. Award recipients were honored during the Office of Research and Innovation’s annual awards ceremony, Celebrating Scholarly Excellence, on November 6. Each received $10,000 in unrestricted funds to support professional or personal endeavors.

ASPECT doctoral student Elhom Gosink presented “Sites of Enclosure: The Contemporary University and the Commodity of Education” at the International Studies Association Northeast Region Annual Conference, which took place November 7–8 in Providence, Rhode Island.

Aarnes Gudmestad, Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures, published “The Development of Sociolinguistic Competence in Spanish: Insights From Study-Abroad Research, Journal of Spanish Language Teaching 12.2 (2025): 137–49.

ASPECT doctoral student Onur Karabicak presented “Theorizing Hyperreality and Visual Securitization: The Case of Turkish TV Series Resurrection Ertugrul and Payitaht Abdülhamid” and “Power as Visibility: Reframing the Ontology of Power in International Relations Theory” at the Northeastern Political Science Association conference, which was held November 6–8 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Rachelle Kuehl, Education, received the 2025 Early Career Scholar Award from the Children’s Literature Assembly of the National Council of Teachers of English. The award recognized Kuehl’s contributions to children’s literature scholarship during the past several years, with various publications exploring the intersections of race, geography, sexuality, and immigration status in middle grades realistic fiction as well as how teachers can use children’s literature in classrooms as a force for social justice.

Barbara Lockee, Professor of Instructional Design and Technology (IDT) in the School of Education and Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs, IDT alumna Rebecca Clark-Stallkamp, and Linda Wiley received the 2025 Outstanding Publication Award (Book Chapter) from the Culture Learning and Technology Division of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) for “Reading Between the Lines: A Herstory of Instructional Design and Technology,” AECT at 100: A Legacy of Leadership, ed. Christopher T. Miller et al., Leadership and Best Practices in Educational Technology Management 6 (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2023), pp. 36–72. The award was presented at the AECT annual conference, which took place October 20–24 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

ASPECT doctoral student Rebekah Mui Pei Ern presented “Speaking Into the Silence: Purity Culture and Sexual Abuse Among ‘Complementarian’ Mennonites” at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, which was held November 22–25 in Boston, Massachusetts.

Carol Mullen, Education, published “Elementary Principal Perceptions of Intraschool-Supported Teacher Peer Observation: No Silver Bullet Needed,” Journal of Research on Leadership Education 20.4 (December 2025): 374–98, with Educational Leadership and Policy Studies alumna Kelsey Pacer.

Corinne Noirot, Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures, and coauthors François Lecercle et al. were awarded the 2025 Association des Amis d’Agrippa d’Aubigné Book Prize for their edition of the plays of the La Taille brothers, Jean de La Taille et Jacques de La Taille: Théâtre complet (Paris, France: Classiques Garnier, 2024). The award is given in recognition of works dealing directly with d’Aubigné, more broadly with the period in which he lived, or the major issues addressed by him.

ASPECT doctoral student Shreya Hari Nurani presented “Temple as a Space for Narratives and Disputes” at the New York Conference on Asian Studies, which took place October 3–4 at SUNY Brockport in Brockport, New York; “Temples as Boundaries: Political Patronage and Spatial Negotiation at Mahakaleshwar in Ujjain” at the Southwest Conference on Asian Studies, which was held November 7–9 at Texas A&M in San Antonio, Texas; and “Temples as Thresholds: A Case Study of the Mahakaleshwar Temple in Ujjain” at the Mid-Atlantic Region Association for Asian Studies Conference, which was held November 15–17 at the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

ASPECT doctoral student Estefania “Nia” Perez-Vera, along with School of Visual Arts MFA student Daryl Norman Soh, and School of Performing Arts MFA student Nicole Bennett-Tuel, was awarded a grant from the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology to produce “The Anthropocene: The Time is NOW” an MFA student project in collaboration with Climate Change Theatre Action 2025. Perez-Vera served as scenic designer on the production, which was held November 8–9 in Theatre 101.

Dimitris Tsarouhas, Political Science, published “Path Dependence, Institutional (Non-)Change and Politicisation: The EU-Turkey Customs Union and the Evolution of German-Turkish Trade Ties,” German Politics 34.4 (2025): 752–75.

David Alexander, Education, published University Law, 2^nd edition, American Casebook Series (St. Paul, Minnesota: West Academic Publishing, 2025), with Kern Alexander and Klint W. Alexander.

Nataliya Brantly, Public and International Affairs, published “Biopolitics at the Nexus of Chronic and Infectious Diseases,” Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 22.3 (2025): 689–705; and “Global Implications of Diabetes Biomedicalization,” Social Theory & Health 23.1 (2025), Article 21.

School of Education faculty members Amy Price Azano, also Director of the Center for Rural Education, and Rachelle Kuehl published “Rural Teachers’ Experiences With a Place-Based Gifted Curriculum: A Case Study,” Theory & Practice in Rural Education 15.1 (2025): 89–122, with Curriculum and Instruction alumna Michelle Rasheed and Carolyn M. Callahan.

Sociology doctoral student Elvis Effah was named a 2025 Bill Anderson Fund (BAF) Fellow. Fellows are doctoral students specializing in hazards and disaster studies across a range of disciplines; they are promising scholars at academic institutions across the United States who are committed to producing rigorous, ethical research that has a positive societal impact in communities that suffer disproportionately from extreme events. The fund is named for William (Bill) Anderson, the nation’s first African-American sociologist of disaster and a preeminent scholar, whose 50-year career advanced the development of disaster studies.

Jason Higgins, History and University Libraries, was awarded the 2025 best book award from the Oral History Association for Prisoners After War: Veterans in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Amherst and Boston, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 2024). The book is available via open access. The award recognizes a published book that meets one or more of the following criteria: uses oral history to make a significant contribution to contemporary scholarship; significantly advances understanding of important theoretical issues in oral history; and is an outstanding example of sound oral history methodology.

ASPECT doctoral student Cory Higgs presented “Visual Futuritive Folklores of the Mothman: The Rhetorical Transmissions and Transfigurations of a Popular Culture Cryptid” at the Popular Culture and American Culture Association in the South Conference, which took place October 9–11 in Huntsville, Alabama.

Richard Hirsh, History, received the 2025 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) William and Joyce Middleton Electrical Engineering History Award for his book Powering American Farms: The Overlooked Origins of Rural Electrification (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022). The award recognizes “a book in the history of an IEEE-related technology that both exemplifies exceptional scholarship and reaches beyond academic communities toward a broad public audience.”

Two CLAHS faculty were among the five Principal Investigators whose projects were selected for funding as part of the 2025–2026 Institute for Society, Culture, and Environment (ISCE) Scholars Program. Caroline Hornburg, Human Development and Family Science, will lead “Understanding Children’s Constructions of Perpendicularity”; among the project collaborators is Human Development and Family Science doctoral student Maegan Colbert. The project titled “Climate Havens: The Cultural Geography of Safety and Danger in a Warming World” will be led by Andrew McCumber, Sociology. Each ISCE Scholar is awarded up to $30,000 to advance research and enable competition for funding from external agencies; there is the expectation that each research team will apply for external funding within six months of completing the program. This is the eighth cohort of the year-long ISCE Scholars Program.

ASPECT doctoral student Muhammet Furkan Küçükmeral published “A Poliheuristic Analysis of the Euphrates Shield Operation in Syria: Towards an Extended Framework,” Southeast European and Black Sea Studies. 

Neda Moayerian, Institute for Policy and Governance (IPG), Desirée Poets, Political Science and ASPECT Core Faculty, and Max Stephenson, Jr., Professor of Public and International Affairs and Director of the IPG, published “Countering Persistent Alterity: Fostering Advocacy and Agency,” Journal of Human Rights Practice 17.3 (November 2025), huaf024, with Vanessa Guerra and Henrique Gomes.

Neda Moayerian, Institute for Policy and Governance (IPG), and Max Stephenson, Jr., Professor of Public and International Affairs and Director of the IPG, published “Pluralism,” International Encyclopedia of Civil Society, ed. Regina A. List et al. (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2025).

Joseph Mukuni, Education, published “The Critical Role of Leadership in the Era of Industry 5.0,” Decarbonization of Transport Energy Installations in the Context of Sustainable Development Strategies, ed. Andrii Marchenko and Zbigniew Koruba (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2025), pp. 1–17, with Olena Lapuzina.

Shaily Patel, Religion and Culture, published Smoke and Mirrors: Discourses of Magic in Early Petrine Traditions (New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2025).

Political Science majors Isabella Bustamante-Velez and Nicolas Ramallo presented “The Effects of Industrial Agriculture in Southwest Virginia” at the student-led research summit titled “Beyond the Fields: Research and Community Voices in Southwest Virginia,” which took place October 25 in Newman Library. The research is part of a project of the same title led by Mauro Caraccioli, Political Science and ASPECT Core Faculty. A recording of the presentation can be found here.

Jamie Raczynski, a junior History major, was selected as a member of the 2025–2026 cohort of Newman Civic Fellows by Campus Compact, a national coalition of higher learning institutions committed to building democracy through civic engagement. The year-long fellowship recognizes students for their leadership potential and commitment to creative positive change in communities. Fellows are nominated by their campus president or chancellor. Raczynski is a student leader dedicated to addressing the root causes of social issues through community-based research for public history and public health; she has played a central role in Monuments Across Appalachian Virginia’s 23/54 Project, which honors Black parents from Pulaski County who in 1947 sued the school board for better educational facilities for their children. Her Newman Civic Fellows profile can be found here. This is the second consecutive year that a Virginia Tech student from the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences has been selected for a Newman Civic Fellowship.

Suchitra Samanta, Collegiate Associate Professor Emerita of Sociology, published the poem “Across the Seven Seas,” Artemis 32 (2025): 70; and “International Students: My Personal Experiences and Reflections on What We Contribute to American Higher Education,” Dear Higher Education. Letters from the Social Justice Mountain 2 (2025).

Paula Seniors, Religion and Culture, won the 2025 International Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society Book Award (IABA) for Mae Mallory, the Monroe Defense Committee, and World Revolutions: African American Women Radical Activists (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2024). She received the award at the IABA conference, which took place October 9–11 in North Charleston, South Carolina.

Richard Shryock, Mahan Professor of French in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures, published a critical edition of Gustave Kahn’s 1898 novel Le Conte de l’or et du silence (Tusson, France: Éditions du Lérot, France, 2025) with Samuel Kunkel.

ASPECT doctoral student Maria Siddiqui presented “Wazukhana, Worship, and the History of Dispute: The Making of Sacred Space in Benares” at the Princeton South Asia Graduate Conference 2025, which took place October 30–November 1 in Princeton, New Jersey.

Sean Sidky, Religion and Culture, published “How Did Jews Resist During the Holocaust?” and “Is It OK for Art, Films, or Novels to Depict the Holocaust?” in Judaism in 5 Minutes, ed. Sarah Imhof (Sheffield, United Kingdom: Equinox Publishing, 2025), pp. 171–73 and 177–79, respectively.

History master’s student Madison Smith presented “Law, Race, and the Production of Meaning in Chinese Exclusion” on September 22 as part of the Humanities Associates Seminar Series, which was sponsored by the Virginia Tech Center for Humanities.

Jessica Taylor, History, was awarded the largest grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities received to date by a Virginia Tech faculty member. The grant for $349,999 from the Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program of the NEH is for “Dangerous Harbor Implementation: Finding Escaped Unfree Laborers in the 17th-Century Chesapeake.”  The project consists of digitization, transcription, and digital analysis of 17th-century court records that detail escape attempts by enslaved and indentured people in Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina. The data will be shared on a public-facing website and on a site that aggregates data related to enslaved people; outreach efforts will include work with primary and secondary school educators, community organizations, and historic sites.

Curriculum and Instruction doctoral student Josh Thompson received the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) LGBTQIA+ Advocacy & Leadership Award. The award recognizes a member of the LGBTQIA+ community who has made a significant contribution to the NCTE, to the development of professional communities focused on literacy learning, and to advancing members of the LGBTQIA+ community. The award is bestowed only when the Award Selection Committee decides a nomination warrants presentation. Thompson’s teaching focuses on teacher education and place-based identity development in local and global contexts; his research examines rural queer and trans adolescent literacy and critical place-based study-abroad pedagogy. Thompson is an advocate for queer and trans communities in rural Southwest Virginia and has served as a member and a chair of NCTE committees.

Fabian Wendt, Political Science and PPE Core Faculty, published “The Practice Account of Political Authority,” Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 30.6 (October 2025): 915–40.

Anna Zeide, History, published “‘The Dignity of Invention’: Race, Intellectual Property, and Peanut Agriculture, 1900–1920,” Agricultural History 99.2 (2025): 162–86.

2025

Archive