2021 Faculty and Staff Awards

Staff Award for Innovation

Alayna Hoffman, Staff Award for Innovation

Alayna Hoffman is the inaugural winner of the Staff Award for Innovation. Since joining the School of Liberal Arts Dean’s Office in 2019, she has refined several of the school’s budget processes – including for computer and award expenses. Alayna wrote two sets of step-by-step instructions for running, modifying and understanding the various reports in Cognos. She created a “Tulane Accounting Systems & Reporting Information” document for staff that gives overviews of the approval flows and posting dates in various Tulane systems. Alayna worked with Anna Charles to create a “Master Payroll” file that serves as a point of reference for Liberal Arts Dean's Office end users when they need to know about hiring packages, resignations, sabbatical detail and much more.

Outstanding Staff Award

Brandy Perry, Outstanding Staff Award

Brandy Perry is the winner of the 2021 SLA Outstanding Staff Award. She has been essential to the growth of the Department of Jewish Studies and to the launch of the Grant Center for the American Jewish Experience. Brandy’s strengths are clearly evident—she excels in terms of customer focus, innovation, flexibility, and initiative. There is a deliberate accuracy in execution—she humanizes many of these practical tasks through her ability to communicate before, during and after the task. Brandy is now working with more complex budgeting because of new endowments and grant reporting requirements, as well as the creation of the Grant Center. Chair of Jewish Studies Michael Cohen says, “We rely upon Brandy to smoothly operate the department and launch the Center. She wears many hats and wears them well.”

The April Brayfield Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award

Sean Fader, The April Brayfield Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award

Sean Fader Since his arrival at Tulane in 2018, Sean has helped to rewrite curriculum in the photo area, separating darkroom and digital practices; he has also overhauled the digital and darkroom spaces, enhancing usability and access. His courses are always overenrolled and his teaching evaluations are superlative. Here are some examples of his student evaluations: “Sean is extremely supportive and knowledgeable about what he teaches. He makes material exciting, engaging, and relevant.“, and “He is Thanos with all the infinity stones.”

Art Chair Stephanie Porras says, “I would particularly like to praise Sean for making adjustments to his teaching this year – not only folding in the switch to hybrid teaching, but also readjusting all his syllabi to center BIPOC scholars and artists. By overhauling his syllabi in this way, Sean modelled what it means to decenter and question the artistic canon. He shared resources with other faculty in the department and encouraged all of us to revisit the readings and artists we use to teach the history, theory and practice of art.”

Outstanding Faculty Service Award

Laura Rosanne Adderley, Outstanding Faculty Service Award

Laura Rosanne Adderley is the 2021 winner of the Outstanding Faculty Service Award. History Department Chair Tom Luongo says, “My colleagues in the History Department and I can think of no one else who dedicates as much energy, time, and thought to improving and investing in the Tulane community. And we can think of no one else who matches Rosanne’s commitment to service as a broader intellectual project, along with other universities and engaging public intellectuals and community activists.”

Rosanne was Director of Africana Studies for seven years, during which time she coordinated the program’s name change, co-organized (with the Office of Multi-Cultural Affairs) a series of campus events in connection with the 50th Anniversary of Tulane’s desegregation, built an effective hiring agenda for Africana Studies while engaging with various departments across campus to rebuild the joint faculty, and supported and organized annual Africana Studies faculty events to build community among faculty and a biennial faculty retreat to organize yearly program goals.

Rosanne’s formal service at Tulane and beyond has also included membership on the Commission on Race and Tulane Values since 2016, in which capacity she led the effort to add the “race and inclusion” requirement to the NTC Core Requirements. Additionally, she was Co-Chair of the Tulane Race Commission Sub-Committee on Campus Recognition from 2018-2019, during which time she chaired a university-wide process to solicit names of historically under-represented individuals who should be honored on Tulane’s campus.

Andrew W. Mellon Junior Professor in the Humanities

Mélanie Lamotte, Mellon Assistant Professor in the Humanities

Mélanie Lamotte is a historian of race, ethnicity, and colonialism in the Early Modern period and examines the French colonial world, with a concentration on Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, French Louisiana, and Île Bourbon in the South-West Indian Ocean. She has written articles on color prejudice in the French Caribbean, race and métissage in the French Atlantic and Indian Oceans, the historiography of French Colonial History, and the archives available to historians of French Louisiana. She is currently writing a monograph to be reviewed by Oxford University Press, entitled Making Race: French Colonial Encounters in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, c. 1608-1789. Her work has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom, the Library of Congress, the Center for History and Economics at Harvard and Cambridge, the Newton Trust, the John Carter Brown Library and the Humanities Research Center of the Australia National University. This past year Mélanie received two prestigious outside fellowships from the Newberry Library and the Radcliffe Institute. She will spend the next year as a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard working on her next book project “Freedom in Chains: The Material Life of Slaves in the French Atlantic and Indian Oceans, 1635–1756.”

Outstanding Faculty Research Award

Elizabeth Boone, Outstanding faculty research or creative activities award

Elizabeth Hill Boone

Since 1994, Elizabeth has served as the Martha and Donald Robertson Chair in Latin American Art. Author of six monographs, co-author of another two books, and editor or co-editor of fourteen other volumes, her work has been influential not only in art history, but in the related fields of history, anthropology and literary theory. In 2018, she was named the College Art Association’s Distinguished Scholar, the first Latin Americanist art historian to receive this honor since its founding in 2001. She was also the first Latin Americanist to hold the Andrew Mellon Professorship at the National Gallery of Art in 2006-8. In 2010 she was Professor invitée at the École Pratique de Hautes Etudes, at the Sorbonne. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Academia Mexicana de la Historia and recipient of the government of Mexico's Order of the Aztec Eagle for her contributions to Aztec scholarship. Her latest monograph book, Descendants of Aztec Pictography: The Cultural Encyclopedias of Sixteenth-Century Mexico (University of Texas Press, 2021), is the first synthetic analysis of the pictorial encyclopedias of Aztec culture created in the decades after the Spanish conquest. After 27 years at Tulane, Elizabeth is retiring at the end of this academic year. Her career at Tulane University has been extraordinary, to say the least, and we can think of no better tribute than to offer her the Research Award.