This year's Varg-Sullivan Endowed Graduate Award winners are Vadu Rodrigues, an MFA Candidate in Studio Art who is the 2025 Outstanding Achievement in the Arts recipient, and Hyun-Bin Hwang, who recently earned his Ph.D. in Second Language Studies and was named the 2025 Outstanding Achievement in the Letters recipient. The Varg-Sullivan Endowed Graduate Awards, presented by the College of Arts…
Shawn Loewen, Professor in the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures at Michigan State University, received a 2025 PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers (AAP) for his co-authored textbook, A Practical Guide to Second Language Teaching and Learning. The 2025 PROSE Awards recognize the very best professional and scholarly works published in 2024 in the United States in five areas of excellence.
Ryan Claytor is a trailblazer in comics education whose passion for teaching and talent as an award-winning comics artist and creator is fueled by his love of the expressive medium. Since joining Michigan State University’s Department of Art, Art History, and Design in 2008, Claytor has built a thriving academic and creative comics community at the university, having launched the first comics studio course in MSU’s history and later establishing the interdisciplinary Comic Art and Graphic Novels minor.
When the war in Ukraine altered the landscape of global politics, study abroad opportunities, and perceptions of Russian speakers, Shannon Donnally Quinn, Associate Professor of Russian in the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures at Michigan State University, saw an urgent need to rethink the way Russian is taught. Quinn's response was to create an open educational resource (OER) that…
An academic journal co-created by Kristin Mahoney, Associate Professor in the Department of English at Michigan State University, has received the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) Best New Journal Award. This prestigious award was presented on Jan. 5 at the 2024 Modern Language Association Annual Convention in Philadelphia.The journal, Cusp: Late 19th-/Early 20th-Century Cultures, focuses on field-defining scholarship…
Laura Yares has spent “years sitting in archives” researching a period of Jewish American education that historians have largely overlooked as insignificant, a period in which very little had been written about up until the release of Yares’ recently published book, Jewish Sunday Schools: Teaching Religion in Nineteenth-Century America. An Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies with a…
A research paper written by Heather Douglas, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University, is being recognized as one of the most influential to ever be published by the Philosophy of Science journal and was selected to be included in the journal’s 90th Anniversary Collection. Only 30 papers from the past 90 years were chosen to be part of…
Kristin Mahoney, Associate Professor in the Department of English at Michigan State University, has helped create a new journal that focuses on field-defining scholarship on the works, authors, artists, problems, and phenomena that defined the dynamic period from the late 19th century to the early 20th century. The journal, titled Cusp: Late 19th-/Early 20th-Century Cultures, aims to promote interdisciplinarity scholarship on the visual arts, cinema and…
As a member of the Boyer 2030 Commission, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English at Michigan State University, participated in the development of a national blueprint for undergraduate education at U.S. research universities. This new blueprint, created to address persistent equity gaps in undergraduate educational outcomes, recently was released by the Boyer 2030 Commission in an…
College of Arts & Letters graduate and biblical scholar Brandon Grafius loves a good horror movie and, at the same time, has long been interested in the study of religion. For his recently released book, Lurking Under the Surface: Horror, Religion, and the Questions That Haunt Us, he continues his career-long investigation into the intersection of horror and religion, two…