Welcome to our monthly compilation of good news, gathered from the college's faculty and staff! Would you like to include your own news or a colleague's? Send us your details on the CHSS Brag Points form (which also collects information we can share with George Mason's Office of University Branding).
Congratulations to Sheila ffolliott, Emeritus Faculty in the Department of Art History, for receiving the 2025 Paul Oskar Kristeller Award from the Renaissance Society of America. The award honors a lifetime of uncompromising devotion to the highest standard of scholarship, accompanied by exceptional achievement in Renaissance studies, and ffolliott embodies the true sense of the award, both in terms of her intellectual accomplishments and her generosity as a mentor.
Congratulations to the Center for Mason Legacies' third annual Black Lives Next Door Symposium presenters: Shemika Curvey, integrative studies major and CHSS Outstanding Student honoree; Andrew Snowman, history major and recipient of George Mason Memorial Society Endowed Scholarship; Tom Seabrook, graduate research assistant in the Department of History and Art History and Center for Mason Legacies; and Annabelle Spencer, graduate research assistant in the Department of History and Art History. LaNitra Berger, associate professor of history and art history and director of African and African American Studies, noted that the symposium served as a fitting close to Black History Month, "By creating a 'mentoring web' of faculty, graduate and undergraduate students who work together to engage in rigorous academic study of the Black experience in Northern Virginia—and why that matters today.”
A shout out to Center for Mason Legacies scholar and award-winning adjunct faculty member, Sheri Huerta, who spoke at historic Oatlands Plantation in Leesburg on how the Revolutionary War's upheaval affected lives and choices of enslaved and free Black people in Loudoun County, including the varied ways enslaved Virginians, in the war's turmoil, found new ways to define liberty. View the archived presentation here, which showcases previously "unknown" Virginians found through Huerta's enterprising biographical research.
Kudos to Lauren B Cattaneo, associate professor in the Department of Psychology, and Wendi N. Manuel-Scott, Mason Legacies co-founder and professor of integrative studies and history, for having their article published in the Harvard Educational Review. In the article, “Martin Luther King Jr.’s Call for Creative Maladjustment Has Much to Offer Educators in the Modern Battleground," Manuel-Scott and Cattaneo question the idea of "disciplinary" norms in accordance with King's 1967 challenge to academics.
Art Taylor, professor of English, won the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer Award for Lifetime Achievement, on the same day that his former student, Anna Stolley Persky, won the Robert L. Fish Award for best first mystery story at the Edgar Awards. Congratulations to both Art and Anna on this achievement!
Shout out to Ayman Habib, undergraduate assistant with the Institute for Immigration Research, on attending the South Asian Youth Initiative (SAYI) conference at Yale University. SAYI is meant to serve as a powerful platform for activism, dialogue, and solidarity, with a mission to cultivate community among young South Asians and South Asian-Americans across the U.S.
Peiyu Yang, assistant professor in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, will receive $45,000 from the American Council of Learned Societies for the “State and Popular Voices in China-Arab Solidarity Building from 1949 to 1969: A Digital Humanities Project.” The project will focus specifically on how solidarity between China and the Arab world was framed and championed in both state-sponsored/official publications and popular/unofficial publications in Arabic, Chinese, and European languages. Congratulations!
May 08, 2025