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 Mason's Office of University Branding).
Awards
Kudos to graduate research assistant and PhD candidate Tom Seabrook, Department of History and Art History, on receiving the 2026 Virginia Forum Graduate Paper Award. Seabrook received the award after presenting his paper, “Building the Backlash: Space, Race, and Memory in Charlottesville from Emancipation to Disfranchisement,” at the Virginia Forum at Shenandoah University. Learn more.
Congrats to professor Christopher Koper, Department of Criminology, Law and Society, on receiving an alumni excellence award from the University of Maryland Alumni Association. Koper was recognized within the "Forward for Stronger Communities" category, which celebrates alums who embody the spirit of connection, civic responsibility, and creative impact, and who are uniting communities, inspiring action, and driving meaningful change on campus and around the world. Learn more.
Research
Congrats to graduate research assistant Jayme Kurland, a PhD candidate in the Department of History and Art History, who will conduct research at the Smithsonian Museum of American History as part of her predoctoral fellowship. Her dissertation research investigates the roles women have played in the early history of the Fender Electric Instruments Company.
Shout out to Alexandra Miller, who received an Urban Communication Foundation Research Assistance Grant a grant to support her project, “You Can’t Do That Here: Misuse of Space in New York at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” Miller, also a graduate research assistant and PhD candidate in the Department of History and Art History, researches green spaces, most recently urban parks and playgrounds in the American Progressive Era.
Congrats to graduate teaching assistant and PhD candidate Ashleigh Williams, Department of History and Art History, on receiving a Fulbright Award and the Berlin Program Dissertation Fellowship. This September, Williams, a historian of race, visual culture, and socialist internationalism, will travel to Germany to conduct research for her dissertation on the racial politics of the German Democratic Republic between 1961 and 1996.
Shout out to Professor Esperanza Román-Mendoza, Department of Modern and Classical Languages, on participating in the 36th Summer School at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in Spain, where she addressed the impact of artificial intelligence on creativity, language learning, and education in July. She he also took part in a roundtable discussion on the future of language education. Her participation and perspectives on the potential of generative AI to affect creativity and reinforce commercial interests were featured by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Learn more.
Kudos to the Department of Modern and Classical Languages on recently co-sponsoring the 2026 ACCL Biennial Meeting, the leading professional conference in the world in the field of Chinese and Comparative Literature. The conference was held at the National University of Singapore (NUS), the leading university in Asia, in late June, attracting more than 1,600 applicants, with some 450 accepted participants joining in person at NUS from all over the world, including a group of featured speakers from the Departments of MCL and English at George Mason.