College Honors and University Awards

Marc Olivier

Greg Stallings

Heather Belnap Jensen

Rob McFarland

Trent Hickman

Jamie Horrocks

Dee Gardner

Jill Terry Rudy

Kathryn Isaak

John R. Rosenberg

Humanities Center Fellow Heather Belnap Jensen is an associate professor of art history & curatorial studies in the Department of Comparative Arts & Letters. Her research focuses on women’s contributions to nineteenth-century European art and culture. She has co-edited two volumes that examine the intersections of art, gender, and space, and is currently completing a monograph on the emergence of the modern woman in post-Revolutionary Paris. Her next project will be an examination of representations of violence against women in Restoration France.

Humanities Center Fellow Rob McFarland is an associate professor and German section head in the Department of German and Russian. He has taught the Austrian/ German/Swiss cultural history class for returned missionaries almost constantly since he came to BYU in 2001. He also loves teaching critical theory, German and Scandinavian film, and GE Advanced Writing. Rob is the associate director of Sophie: A Digital Library of Works by GermanSpeaking Women, a collection of thousands of online texts, musical compositions, and art works. His latest book, Red Vienna, White Socialism and the Blues: Ann Tizia Leitich’s America will appear in September with Camden House. Blessings to the beloved friends and colleagues who recently helped him through a health crisis by cheerfully taking over his classes and responsibilities in his time of need.

Humanities Center Fellow Dee Gardner is a professor in the Department of Linguistics and English Language. As an applied linguist, his areas of expertise include English vocabulary acquisition, reading English as a second or foreign language, and applied corpus linguistics. Some of his key scholarship includes Exploring Vocabulary: Language in Action (Routledge, 2013), which is a research-based vocabulary textbook for language educators, A Frequency Dictionary of Contemporary American English (Routledge, 2010), and A New Academic Vocabulary List (Applied Linguistics, 2014), which has important implications for all stages of academic training. The latter two projects were collaborative efforts with Professor Mark Davies of the same department. Professor Gardner’s humanities fellowship will focus on the identification and frequency ranking of two types of phrases that cause major difficulties for learners of English and their teachers: English separable phrasal verbs (The coach chewed the whole team out; He ran the battery down, etc.), and English idioms (pop the question, beat around the bush, between a rock and a hard place, etc.).

Humanities Center Fellow Jill Terry Rudy is an associate professor of English. Her doctoral research and early publications in The Folklore Historian, Western Folklore, Journal of Folklore Research, and College English emphasized the intradisciplinary history of folklore, rhetoric, composition, and literary studies in English departments. She has also published on foodways, family folklore, and folk narrative. Her current collaborative research project Fairy Tale Teleography and Visualizations

(FTTV), with Jarom McDonald of the Office of Digital Humanities, is supported by a Mentored Environment Grant and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Partnership Development Grant. The FTTV project includes a searchable database of fairy tales on television, interactive visualizations, conference presentations, a blog, website, Facebook page, symposium, and educational events. More than an archival tool, the FTTV project is an educational forum that encourages and enables analyzing televised fairy-tale retellings since the 1940s. Its central research questions for 2015-2016 ask, “What can we learn from the multiple ways television employs the fairy tale?” and “How can students and scholars create and share their own inquiries based on the FTTV resources?”

James Barker Lectureship Tony Brown grew up in Denton, Texas, where his father taught music composition at University of North Texas and his mother taught flute at University of Texas at Arlington. From an early age, his study of classical music exposed him to many cultures, but Russian culture, in particular, especially resonated with him. After completing his freshman year at BYU, Tony traveled to Ukraine and Russia where he immersed himself in the language and culture of the people. His abiding interest in all things Russian ultimately contributed to his pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Russian at Southern Methodist University followed by advanced degrees at Bryn Mawr College. Since joining the faculty at BYU in 2004, Tony has published in the areas of language policy, Russian culture, and second language acquisition. He has published books with Georgetown University Press and Academic Studies Press and articles in venues such as Modern Language Journal, Foreign Language Annals, Slavic and East European Journal, Russian Language Journal, and Language Policy. He and his wife, Emily, and their four children live on a farm in northeast Provo.

P.A. Christensen Lectureship Mark Johnson has taught ancient and medieval art history at BYU since 1987. He has directed or co-directed 21 study abroad programs in that time, taking over 500 students to experience art and architecture on site in Europe, especially in Italy. His research focuses on the art and architecture of Late Antiquity and his publications include The Roman Imperial Mausoleum in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 2009) and The Byzantine Churches of Sardinia (Wiesbaden, 2013), and numerous articles. He is currently working on a book on the sixth-century church of San Vitale in Ravenna and related churches. He is the former chair of the Department of Visual Arts and a former Alcuin Fellow.

Washington Irving Professorship for Spanish & American Relations

Karl G. Maeser Research & Creative Arts Award Lance Larsen’s appointment as Utah poet laureate (2012-17) takes him throughout the state teaching writers of all ages and advocating for the arts. Author of four poetry collections, he has published over 230 poems and 35 essays in top venues including Paris Review, New York Review of Books, Brevity, and a forthcoming Norton anthology. With his artist wife, Jacqui, he’s currently collaborating on Three-Mile Radius, a project celebrating making art where you are. His national awards include a Pushcart Prize and an NEA fellowship. He regularly teaches poetry writing, American literature, the short story, and Shakespeare, and is thrilled when his one-on-one mentoring results in students landing work in literary magazines. He currently advises MFA students and has directed several study abroad programs in London and Madrid.

Karl G. Maeser Research & Creative Arts Award Mark Davies received a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in Hispanic linguistics in 1992. After teaching for 12 years at Illinois State University, he came to the Department of Linguistics and English Languages at BYU in 2003. His primary fields of research are corpus linguistics (using large, computerbased collections of text to analyze language), and language variation and change. He has received six large federal grants for projects related to corpus creation and use—four from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and two from the National Science Foundation (NSF)—and he is the author/ editor of six books and more than 70 (mostly singleauthored) articles. He has created several large corpora that are available from corpus.byu.edu. These corpora are used by more than 200,000 distinct researchers, teachers, and students from throughout the world each month, and data from these corpora are used for several hundred articles and books each year. More information at: davies-linguistics.byu.edu.

Abraham O. Smoot Citizenship Award Edward Cutler joined the English Department faculty in 1996. He’s fulfilled many assignments in the department and college, including two terms as department chair. Ed and his wife Mary Lynn, an adjunct faculty member in English, are dedicated to the ideals of a strong humanistic education. Their son Daniel recently graduated with a BA in French studies, and their daughter Sylvia is currently a double major in English and French studies. Ed remains a trusted university citizen and valued mentor for his colleagues and students. In fall of 2015 he begins an appointment as graduate coordinator for the English MA and MFA programs.

Adjunct Faculty Excellence Award Debbie Harrison has taught freshman composition and English language courses as an adjunct for the last 38 years. She taught 21 years at Whitworth College in Spokane, Washington, and 17 years at BYU. Since returning to BYU 14 years ago, she has mostly taught

Writing 150 for the Composition Department and Modern American Usage for the Linguistics and English Language Department. She loves teaching writing and watching her students evolve in both their thinking and writing abilities, and she loves teaching editing and the intellectual pursuit of helping writing to be clear, clean, and compelling. She strives to keep what she teaches relevant to the lives of her students. She graduated from BYU in 1976 with a double teaching major in English and Spanish, then earned her master’s in humanities from BYU in 1978 with an emphasis in nineteenth-century European literature and art. She is a World War II buff, a soccer lover, and a closet fantasy/adventure reader. She loves to camp, hike, and read, read, read. She enjoys lively discussions and finding connections from what she reads to her everyday life. She is married to Mark Harrison and has six children and seven grandchildren, and few things please her more than to spend time with them anywhere—particularly in the out-of-doors.

Douglas K. Christensen Teaching and Learning Fellowship Martha Moffitt Peacock is a professor of art history. During her 28 years teaching at BYU, she has advised over 60 MA theses and directed 12 study abroad programs. For the past four years she has served as associate director of the Center for the Study of Europe. Her publications focus on women artists and the relationship of art to the lives of women in the Dutch Republic. Recently, she acted as consultant for the BBC documentary, “The Story of Women and Art.” She also contributed to and edited two exhibition catalogs on the prints of Rembrandt and his circle. She has received several awards including Honors Professor of the Year, Alice Louise Reynolds Women-in-Scholarship Lecture Award, Women’s Research Institute Distinguished Research Award, Alcuin Award for Excellence in Research and Teaching, and Woodrow Wilson Research Grant in Women’s Studies.