November
David Alexander, Education, published University Law, 2nd 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.