The College of Arts and Letters honored its 2026 Faculty Award at the College of Arts and Letters Faculty and Staff Welcome Reception on Sept. 28 at the Kellogg Hotel and Conference Center.

The 2026 Faculty Award winners are:

• Zarena Aslami – Paul Varg Award
• Charlene Polio – Faculty Leadership Award
• Casey McArdle – Faculty Award for Innovation and Leadership
• Tim Conrad – Fixed-Term Faculty/Academic Specialist Leadership Excellence Award
• Jonathan Choti – Community Partner Award

These honorees were recognized for their outstanding leadership, teaching, innovation, mentorship, and community engagement, as well as the significant impact they have made in enhancing curriculum and student experiences.

Paul Varg Award

The Paul Varg Award is presented every year to the College of Arts and Letters faculty member who provides the highest quality education for students at Michigan State University. It recognizes a faculty member who challenges students intellectually, maintains a national reputation in their field, and provides service to the college, university, and community while being a consummate professional. The award is named for the first dean of the college who was a highly respected teacher, researcher, and administrator. 

Zarena Aslami, Associate Professor in the Department of English, is this year’s recipient. She has twice served as Associate Chair for Graduate Studies in the Department of English. She originated the department’s first courses in disability studies at both the graduate and undergraduate levels and collaborated with colleagues to develop graduate courses including Race, Gender, and the Human. In Fall 2024, she created a new Tier II writing course, Victorian Nature Writing where students read Victorian literary, life-writing, and scientific texts about plants and take field trips to the Beal Botanical Garden, the Clarence E. Lewis Landscape Arboretum, and the MSU Herbarium. Aslami has been named the next Chair of the Department of English and will star in that role in Ausgust 2027.

Ellen McCallum, Professor in the Department of English and Core Faculty in the Center for Gender in a Global Context, nominated Aslami for this award. McCallum wrote that “Professor Aslami is a highly respected scholar of Victorian literature and Empire studies, an intellectual leader challenging her field to take a more nuanced and complex view of race, empire, and colonialism. She has served with distinction (twice!) as Associate Chair for Graduate Studies in English, innovating curriculum and strategically improving time to degree. Moreover, she is a dynamic and compassionate teacher who leads groundbreaking, rigorous courses that bring the nineteenth century to life and vividly contextualize the present. In both her research and teaching, Professor Aslami unfailingly demonstrates how the Victorian period remains a vital site for understanding concerns that occupy us now.” 

The nomination letter also noted that students have described Aslami’s classes as “the ones that stuck with me and I feel like I have learnt a great deal from,” and consistently characterize them as “amazing.”

Faculty Leadership Award

This award is funded through an endowment created by former College of Arts and Letters Dean Karin Wurst and the Associate Deans. It rewards College of Arts and Letters faculty who demonstrate outstanding leadership — the kind who go beyond the performance of routine tasks, are generous in sharing insights, and provide the hard work and mentoring that creates vision and excellence in programs and departments. 

Charlene Polio, Professor in the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures and Director of the M.A. TESOL Program, is this year’s recipient. Polio joined MSU in 1992 and was one of the three original faculty members who designed the Second Language Studies Ph.D. Program. She spearheaded a collaboration with the Japan Center for Michigan Universities that allows students living in Japan to earn an MSU MA TESOL degree remotely, and in 2020 she established a Corpus Linguistics Lab. She served as Interim Chair of the department in 2024-25. She is the Co-Editor of TESOL Quarterly and has served as Editor of Annual Review of Applied Linguistics and Associate Editor of The Modern Language Journal.

Nominating Charlene for this honor was Yen-Hwei Lin, Chair of the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures. She wrote that “What makes Professor Polio a true leader is that she rolls up her sleeves and does the hard work. She is never afraid of change, nor of shying away from difficult conversations. While Professor Polio has an impressive scholarly and leadership record, plus outstanding teaching and mentoring engagement and achievements, she has always stayed humble. She is a quiet leader, who wants to see others succeed.” 

Lin also wrote that “The hallmark of Professor Polio’s leadership is tireless advocacy for faculty and students. She places a high value on teaching excellence and actively supports and mentors research.”

Faculty Award for Innovation and Leadership

The Faculty Award for Innovation and Leadership recognizes a faculty member who utilizes innovative practices in the classroom, finds engaging ways to integrate scholarship and teaching, and provides rich opportunities for experiential learning beyond the classroom setting.

Casey McArdle, Associate Professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures and Director of the Experience Architecture (XA) Program, is this year’s recipient. He teaches Experience Architecture and has several publications and conference presentations that focus on online interaction via academic, professional, and social spaces. His research interests examine experience architecture, learning experience design, generative artificial intelligence, online writing instruction, leadership, web development, user experience research, user experience design, and rhetorical theory.

Nominating McArdle for this honor was the Experience Architecture Curriculum Committee. In a letter written on the committee’s behalf by Ann Burke, Assistant Professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures, the committee wrote that “As the coordinator for the XA program, Dr. McArdle is well-known by his students and his colleagues for championing our interdisciplinary program and its brilliant students. Through his decade of leadership in the XA program, Dr. McArdle has actively built partnerships across MSU and with community leaders to provide innovative, student-centered opportunities for experiential learning in and beyond the classroom.” 

The letter included a comment from a student who wrote that “In his Introduction to Accessibility course, he begins lessons with videos, reading excerpts, or thought exercises to invite students to understand life through another’s shoes. He simultaneously teaches us course material and how to lead, just by setting an incredible example. Casey connects with each student in the room, remembering some fact or another about nearly every member of the XA program. He makes us feel important, known, and cared for.”

Fixed-Term Faculty/Academic Specialist Leadership Excellence Award

The Fixed-Term Faculty/Academic Specialist Leadership Excellence Award recognizes and rewards fixed-term faculty an academic specialists in the college who demonstrate leadership excellence as exhibited by those who, through the performance of their assigned duties, enhance the programmatic excellence of their college unit as a whole. These faculty members often mark the difference between a good program and an excellent one. 

Tim Conrad, Assistant Professor in the Department of English, is this year’s recipient. Conrad joined the Department of English in Fall 2021 and teaches creative writing and literature. His debut short story collection, The Machine We Trust, published by Cornerstone Press in April 2024, received a 2025 Midwest Book Award in the Fiction – Short Story/Anthology category.

Robin Silbergleid, Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of English, nominated Conrad for the award. Silbergleid wrote that “During his time at Michigan State, Dr. Conrad has been a model colleague, whose students rave about him, who drives important conversation about creative writing pedagogy and programming, and who has taken on leadership in co-curricular enterprises and as Interim Director of Creative Writing. In the five years he has been here, he has made significant impact on our students, as well as our intellectual and creative communities more broadly.”

Silbergleid noted that Conrad has taught the vast majority of students who have graduated from the Creative Writing Program since his appointment. The nomination letter included comments from students, including one who wrote that “Prof. Conrad was inspirational as a teacher and such a kind human being.” Another wrote that “The classes I have taken with Dr. Conrad have been engaging and interesting, always. I have rarely left class for the day without having had to challenge, analyze, or defend one of my preconceptions about writing or the creative process.”

Community Partner Award

The Community Partner Award recognizes a faculty member’s community contributions at the local, state, national, and/or global levels. It recognizes participation, student mentorship, and overall leadership as well as significant involvement as reflected in one or more community engagement activities. This award is linked to the college’s mission to “enrich community, economic, and family life.” 

Jonathan Choti, Associate Professor of African Languages and Cultures in the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures, is this year’s recipient. Felix Kwame Yeboah, Director of Partnerships for Sustainable Community Development and the Tanzania Partnership Program, nominated Choti for the award in recognition of his leadership of Sustainable Community Development in Tanzania, a six-week education abroad program developed in 2013 under MSU’s Tanzania Partnership Program (TPP). The program brings students, faculty, and community members together to address locally identified priorities in Naitolia Village in northern Tanzania.

Choti secured and implemented a 2022 Network for Global Civic Engagement Grant ($9,950) and a 2023 Creating Inclusive Excellence Grant ($12,000), which expanded program activities. Under his leadership, program initiatives have improved educational infrastructure and teacher development, strengthened food systems through agricultural innovation, advanced human and animal health, expanded access to safe water, and supported economic development through financial literacy and entrepreneurship, particularly for women and youth.

Yeboah wrote that “As Director of TPP, I can affirm that Choti’s 11 years of visionary leadership of the six-week education abroad program, Sustainable Community Development in Tanzania, have been exemplary and deeply deserving of this recognition…He has played a defining role in shaping the program’s philosophy, structure, and implementation…Under his leadership, initiatives have improved educational infrastructure and teacher development, strengthened food systems through agricultural innovation, advanced human and animal health, expanded access to safe water, and supported economic development through financial literacy and entrepreneurship—particularly for women and youth.” 

By Austin Curtis and Kim Popiolek