Faculty Honors
National Awards
Casey Dué Hackney, Professor and Director of Classical Studies
2012 National Endowment of for the Humanities Enduring Questions Grant
Casey Dué Hackney, professor and director of Classical Studies, received an Enduring Questions: Pilot Course grant of $20,881. She will develop an undergraduate course on the question, ‘who owns the past?’ Dr. Dué Hackney’s grant will help her shape the curriculum of a course that explores the ethical debate surrounding antiquity holdings in museum collections. The course will be open to all students and offered as a small lecture and discussion class. It will count for credit towards majors in Liberal Studies and Art History and minors in Classical Studies and the Honor College’s Phronesis: Politics and Ethics program. The class will meet twice a week and will be structured around a series of case studies, which will combine the study of ancient objects with readings in primary sources, modern journalistic accounts, and background reading on current debates surrounding the ethics of cultural property.
Natalie M. Houston, Associate Professor of English
2012 National Endowment of for the Humanities Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant
Natalie Houston, associate professor of English, was awarded on a Digital Humanities Start-Up grant of $49,955. She will direct “Visual Page,” a book history project that seeks to identify and analyze visual features of books, such as margins, spacing and typeface. Dr. Houston will use the NEH funds to develop an open source computer program to do a digital analysis of the graphic elements specific to Victorian-era texts. She will start with a test case of approximately 60,000 page images from 300 books of poetry printed between 1860 and 1880. “Graphical aspects of the printed page convey information about the book’s historical period, genre, form, cost, audience, function, organization, scope, and design,” Dr. Houston wrote in the grant application.
Sandra Zalman, Assistant Professor of Art History
2012 American Council of Learned Societies Fellow
Sandra Zalman, assistant professor of art history in the School of Art has been named a 2012 American Council of Learned Societies Fellow. Her project, Surrealism and its Afterlife in American Art 1936-1986, project re-writes the history of twentieth-century American art through the lens of Surrealism. Moving beyond studies that have shown the impact of the Surrealists in exile on the burgeoning New York art world of the 1940s, this study demonstrates that Surrealism was embraced by American mass culture before its key members emigrated to the U.S., and continued to have a profound impact in the U.S. long after the movement had dissolved. Though Surrealism was ignored in dominant modernist narratives where Cubism and Abstract Expressionism reigned, it came to represent a major underlying force of American art well into the 1980s as artists, critics, and historians used Surrealism to guide ideological debates over the role of commercialism, museums, politics, and photography in contemporary art.
Tracey Ledoux, Assistant Professor, Department of Health and Human Performance
Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics 2012 Outstanding Dietetic Educator
Tracey Ledoux has been named the 2012 Outstanding Dietetic Educator by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. This award is given annually by the academy in recognition of the recipient’s achievements as a teacher, mentor and leader in dietetics education. This is the highest honor bestowed by the academy, which is the world's largest organization of food and nutrition professionals. Its goal is to improve the nation's health and advance the profession of dietetics through research, education and advocacy. In 2011, Dr. Ledoux received the Houston Area Dietetic Association’s (HADA) Outstand¬ing Dietetic Educator award. In January 2012, the Texas Dietetic Association named her the Texas Dietetic Educator of the Year.