September

Biko Agozino, Sociology, published the following: the foreword to The Emerald International Handbook of Activist Criminology, ed. Victoria Canning, Greg Martin, and Steve Tombs (Bingley, United Kingdom: Emerald Publishing, 2023), pp. xxi-xxviii; “The Decolonization Paradigm in Criminology,” The Routledge Handbook on Decolonizing Justice, ed. Chris Cunneen et al. (London, United Kingdom: Routledge), pp. 437–47; and “From Genocidal Imperialist Despotism to Genocidal Neocolonial Dictatorship: Decolonizing Criminology and Criminal Justice with Indigenous Models of Democratisation,” Decolonizing the Criminal Question, ed. Ana Aliverti et al. (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press), pp. 71–85. In addition, he presented a keynote at the British Society of Criminology annual meeting, which took place June 27–30 in Lancashire, United Kingdom, and at the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control annual conference, which was held August 30 to September 1 in Turku, Finland.

Hannah Bayne, Education, was hired as Associate Professor.

Shannon Bell, Sociology, is serving as a Co-Principal Investigator on a $490,647 grant awarded recently to Virginia Tech from the Appalachian Regional Commission. The Principal Investigator is John Munsell, Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation, and the Co-PI is Katie Trozzo, Agricultural, Leadership, and Community Education. The planning grant project, “Accelerating Forest Farming in Central Appalachia: Strengthening Market Connections and Collaboration for Long-Term Sector Impact and Sustainability,” is a collaboration with 11 community-based organizations across Virginia, Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina, Ohio, and West Virginia. The grant was made through the Appalachian Regional Initiative for Stronger Economies (ARISE) funding opportunity.

Toni Calasanti, Sociology, published Retirement Migration and Precarity in Later Life, Ageing in a Global Context (Bristol, United Kingdom: Policy Press/Bristol University Press, 2023), with Marion Repetti.

Mauro Caraccioli, Political Science and ASPECT Core Faculty, was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute fellowship to participate in Revisiting Religion and Place in Light of Environmental, Legal, and Indigenous Studies, which took place June 5–23 at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and included 18 faculty and advanced graduate students from across the United States in religious studies and related fields.

The following CLAHS majors were selected for the inaugural cohort of the Defense Civilian Training Corps program: Cameron Alemand, Political Science; Andre Asarian, Public Health and Political Science; Glenn Coleman, Political Science; Avery Cowan, National Security and Foreign Affairs; Karina Gonzalez, Political Science; Brooke Griswold, Political Science; Maysia Mateos, Political Science; Nicholas McDermott, National Security and Foreign Affairs; Nicholas Ott, Criminology; Bray Sehnert, Political Science, Jay-Ani Thomas, Political Science; and Ilea Wesley, Political Science. The program, which is run by the Acquisition Innovation Research Center of the U.S. Department of Defense, provides students with defense-related coursework and internships and facilitates job placement within the Department of Defense upon graduation.

Virginia Tech is one of four universities selected to participate in the program, which provides students with full tuition and fees along with a monthly stipend.

David Delgado López, Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures, published “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Tortura institucional en el cine español de la Transición” (Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Institutional Torture in Spanish Transition’s Cinema), Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures 77.3 (2023): 171–85.

Two CLAHS faculty members are part of the two transdisciplinary research teams that earned Destination Area 2.0 Phase II awards. Julie Gerdes, English, is a Co-Principal Investigator for Pandemic Prediction and Prevention, and Todd Schenk, Public and International Affairs, serves as a Co-Principal Investigator for Invasive Species: Mitigating a Global Threat to Health, Economic, and Environmental Security. Destination Area 2.0 projects build upon the foundational work of the original Destination Areas; they target transdisciplinary discovery, learning, and outreach efforts that yield solutions to complex problems and that have a high likelihood of Virginia Tech sustaining or establishing an international leadership position in the area of interest.

Two CLAHS faculty were recognized with a Diggs Award in 2023. David Delgado López, Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures, received the VT Diggs Teaching Scholars Award. His Diggs Teaching Enhancement Project reconstructs memories from the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in order to better understand how the event has shaped our lives, educational goals, and relation to culture, memory, and spaces. Delgado’s students created a visual map of collective experiences during the early months of COVID-19 using the visual archives from cell phones and social media and described in a short essay in Spanish what the images and videos meant to them at the time and how they remembered them. Jessica Taylor, History, along with Jason Higgins and Aaron Purcell, received the Diggs Team Award. Their Diggs Teaching Enhancement Project uses oral history collections at Virginia and in the region in the production of student-informed, online exhibits accessible to undergraduate students that instructors across campus can use in their classes; it foregrounds oral histories resulting from authentic community collaborations in Appalachia. The team’s proposed program will produce student-informed, online exhibits accessible to undergraduate students that instructors across campus can use in their classes. Additional information about the winners and their work can be found here.

School of Education faculty members Sharrika Adams and Tonisha Lane published “Black Women Faculty Navigating a Pandemic amid an Epidemic” in the New Directions for Student Services special issue, “The State of Black Women in Higher Education: A Critical Perspective 20 Years Later,” 182 (Summer 2023): 81–92, with Ebony Perez.

Joseph Eska, English, published “Grounding Celtic Diachronic Phonology ii. 3. */j/ > /ð/ / ˈVr_V in Proto-Brittonic. 4. *-/nt^hL/- > -/θL/- in Old Welsh. 5. The Evolution of */lt^hr/ in Welsh,” Die Sprache 55 (2022/2023): 1–21.

ASPECT alumnus Jordan Fallon received the 2023 ASPECT Outstanding Dissertation award for his dissertation titled “Culinary Man.”

Maaz Gardezi, Sociology, was awarded $649,396 over three years under the United States Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture foundational program titled “Social Implications of Emerging Technologies.” The project aims to encourage innovators, researchers, practitioners, and policy makers to respond to the social and ethical challenges of big data and AI in agriculture and food systems and to generate insights and strategies that are more broadly applicable to a wider group of stakeholders with interests in soil health and water quality. Gardezi’s project has three primary objectives: map stakeholders’ perceptions and expectations about the societal implications of big data and AI; deploy digital serious games to understand stakeholder’s risk and information preferences in response to different levels of AI reliability and uncertainty, and preferences to forms of farm data ownership; and create opportunities for responsible innovation in PA through interdisciplinary education, policy recommendations, and a science museum exhibit at the Science Museum in Roanoke, Virginia. Among the members of Gardezi’s team is Sociology doctoral student Pablo Carcamo.

Justin Greene, English, published The Performative Representations of Masculinity in Quentin Tarantino’s Cinema: All the Auteur’s Men (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2023).

Marcus Johnson, Education, was appointed co-chair of the board of the National Consortium for Instruction and Cognition (NCIC), dedicated to conducting, publishing, and disseminating educational research, especially research related to the cognitive processes involved in instructional sequences. In addition, he was awarded Fellow status by the American Psychological Association (APA) beginning January 1, 2024. As stated on the APA Fellows website, “Fellow status is an honor bestowed upon APA members who have shown evidence of unusual and outstanding contributions or performance in the field of psychology” and “requires that a person’s work has had a national impact on the field of psychology beyond a local, state or regional level.”

ASPECT doctoral student Andreza Jorge presented “Feminismos Favelado” at the Latin American Studies Association Annual Conference, which took place May 24–27 in Vancouver, Canada.

Jeff Mann, English, published Loving Mountains, Loving Men: Memoirs of a Gay Appalachian,

second edition (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2023).

Rachel Midura, History, published “‘They Hide from Me, Like the Devil from the Cross’: Transalpine Postal Routes as Intelligence Work, 1555–1645,” History: The Journal of the Historical Association 108.381 (June 2023): 303–27.

Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures professors María del Carmen Caña Jiménez and Vinodh Venkatesh created a scholarship in honor of their late son. The Marcos Arvind Venkatesh-Caña Study Abroad Scholarship, an endowed scholarship, will fund study abroad trips for Spanish majors. Although it is not a requirement, the scholarship is geared toward underrepresented minorities and first-generation college students.

Carol Mullen, Education, published “Guiding Online Students in a Crisis: An Intervention for Mentoring Educational Leadership Doctoral Candidates,” Journal of Research on Leadership Education 18.3 (2023): 510–33.

Suchitra Samanta, retired Associate Collegiate Professor of Sociology, published the poem

“Angel in Blue Spandex, Met at the New Orleans Aquarium,” Artemis 30 (2023): 19.

Science, Technology, and Society faculty member Ashley Shew and doctoral student Hanna Herdegen published “Engineering Ethics and Narratives for Technological Imagination” on the National Academy of Engineering’s Perspectives Blog on August 1.

Ashley Shew, Science, Technology, and Society, served as guest editor for MIT Technology Review’s special issue for July/August 2023, “All Access.” Her individual contribution to the issue was the guest editor’s introduction, “The Future is Disabled.”

Jessica Taylor, History, published Plain Paths and Dividing Lines Navigating Native Land and Water in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake (Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 2023). The book is available via online open access.

Sophia Terazawa, English, published the following poems: “Spear Bearer,” “Softshell,” and “Leo,” Firmament (Sublunary Editions) 3.3 (2023): 28–30; “Closed Captioning,” “Penumbra,” “Web Between,” and “Treason,” Annulet 5, June 4, 2023, online; and “Palindrome” and “Kurobuta, Floating Organ, Torii,” Tyger Quarterly 5, May 30, 2023, online.

The following CLAHS faculty received funding for projects during the most recent cycle of the University Libraries Collaborative Research Grant; the partners in each case are from University Libraries, unless otherwise noted: Tom Ewing, Professor of History and Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Research, and Joseph Forte, “Bikecentennial: A Podcast Narrating 500+ Years of American History Along 500+ Miles of Bicycle Route 76 in Virginia”; Patti Fisher, Apparel, Housing, and Resource Management, and Yinlin Chen, “Leveraging Large Language Models to Understand the Financial Behavior of Women and Minority Groups”; and Jessica

Taylor, History, Corinne Guimont, and Jason Higgins, VT Publishing, “A New Model for Oral History Collections Publications.” Funding from mid-August 2023 to mid-May 2024 in the amount of $10,000 was awarded for each project.

Lee Vinsel, Science, Technology, and Society, contributed “Previous Tech Bubbles Offer Lessons for AI” to the article “How Will Artificial Intelligence Change Higher Ed,” which was published May 25 in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Peter Wallenstein, History, published the following: “Race, Representation, and Reconstruction: The Origins and Persistence of Black Electoral Power, 1865-1900,” Reconstruction Beyond 150: Reassessing the New Birth of Freedom, ed. Orville Vernon Burton and J. Brent Morris (Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 2023), pp. 83–104;

“Pioneer Black Legislators from Kentucky, 1860s–1960s,” New Perspectives on Civil War-Era Kentucky, ed. John David Smith (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2023), pp. 319–43; and “What ‘Era of Good Feelings’? An Exploration of the Phrase’s Lineage with a Reconsideration of Its Utility,” New England Journal of History 79.2 (Spring 2023): 88–108.

Kelly Wright, English, published “Bias in Automatic Speech Recognition: The Case of African American Language,” Applied Linguistics 44.4 (August 2023), pp. 613–30, with Joshua L. Martin.

Philip Yaure, Philosophy, published “The Contingency of Despair,” American Political Thought 12.3 (2023): 453–62.