Staff Award for Innovation

Jason White
Digital Media Specialist
Digital Media Practices, Music, and Art

Jason White, digital media specialist for Digital Media Practices (DMP), Music, and Art, has been honored with the Staff Award for Innovation. Jason has transformed the equipment management and distribution systems for photography and DMP, revolutionizing how resources are accessed across both units. He completed reorganization of the equipment room, including new shelving installation and an improved organization system, and has made resources more accessible and easier to track. He created exemplary budgets for two massive grants, including a three-year $700,000 Entertainment Development Fund grant that was funded. He has been instrumental in the planning for the 4th floor of Newcomb Hall, representing Music and DMP in multiple meetings, and serving as a bridge between these academic units, the administration, and the architects. Jason is a digital renaissance man who can seemingly fix any technical or equipment problem, coming up with creative solutions that save the school time and money.

Outstanding Faculty Service Award

Allison Truitt
Chair, Director, and Professor 
Anthropology and Asian Studies

Allison Truitt is the recipient of the Outstanding Faculty Service Award. As chair of Anthropology since 2023 and director of Asian Studies since 2020, leads through “thoughtful vision, effective governance, and inclusive mentorship,” often nominating colleagues for awards so their hard work can receive the proper recognition. In Anthropology, she holds one-on-one meetings with assistant and associate professors to help chart a clear path to promotion and to mentor them, with an office door that remains “perpetually open to colleagues.” She led the Anthropology department in updating its bylaws and helped streamline core processes, including PhD admissions and in rethinking the structure of the major and minor.

In Asian Studies, she has led faculty and postdoc searches and built a program-wide discussion about works in progress. In bridging the program to the city, she stewarded a project to engage Asian Studies with the broader New Orleans community.

April Brayfield Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award

Michael Plante
Associate Professor
Art

Michael Plante, associate professor of Art History, was honored for his 32-year career at Tulane with the April Brayfield Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award. He has taught and influenced hundreds of students — many of whom went on to become artists, art historians, gallerists, and curators — in New Orleans, New York, and across the country. His lecture courses have always been tremendously popular with undergraduates, focusing on American art, with particular emphasis on postwar painterly abstraction and pop art. During his career, he has served on numerous MFA committees, supporting student work and research.

In spring 2018, Michael developed a new donor-supported seminar — “How to Acquire a Work of Art” — as an introduction to how museums, auction houses, and galleries operate. Sandy Heller (A&S ’94), founder of the New York City and Paris-based arts advisory Heller Group, writes: “I would simply say that he’s been academically and professionally the most important and brightest of all guiding lights that I’ve encountered in my career as a student and teacher.”

April Brayfield Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award

Lin Zhu
Director of Chinese Language Program
Professor of Practice
Asian Studies

Lin Zhu, director of the Chinese Language Program and professor of practice in Asian Studies, has received the April Brayfield Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award. Zhu has evaluations that consistently range between 4.8 and 5.0 with students praising her dedication and accessibility. She employs a model that emphasizes a flipped classroom and a project- and task-based curriculum that stresses intercultural competence.

The success of the program is evident in the numbers: the program has grown from 156 students in 2021 to more than 240 students in 2024. She has developed a multi-media curriculum, so students learn Chinese while performing real-world tasks, such as renting an apartment or looking for a job. One student writes: “Professor Zhu has created a class that utilizes resources we will have access to beyond the university. This way of teaching Chinese will allow us to keep studying and learning when we do not have a structured classroom in our lives anymore.” Additionally, Zhu offered the first service-learning class in Asian Studies, where Tulane students participate in an after-school Chinese language program at Willow Charter School.

Community Award

Nghana Lewis
Associate Professor
English and Africana Studies

Nghana Lewis, associate professor of English and Africana Studies, is the recipient of the Community Award. Her community-focused scholarship appears not only in journals dedicated to literary studies, cultural studies, Black studies, and American studies, but also in law journals, music journals, history journals, and Black media studies anthologies. She is a public intellectual; a thinker whose academic scholarship and community engagement mutually inform and strengthen one another.

Lewis organizes the Annual Political Economy and Access to Justice Judicial Education Seminar for judges, which builds knowledge at the intersection of theories of political economy and access to justice issues that inform the day-to-day work of the judiciary. She regularly teaches service-learning courses, oversees public service internships, and teaches courses in social innovation and social entrepreneurship. Her emphasis as a teacher on connecting the classroom with practical, meaningful impacts in the community is continuous with her abovementioned dedication as a researcher to public-facing, impactful scholarship.

Outstanding Staff Award

Doris Parker
Senior Executive Secretary
Dean’s Office

Doris Parker, senior executive secretary in the Dean’s office, has been honored with the Outstanding Staff Award. Working in the Dean’s office since 2019, she is the literal face of the Dean’s office, providing a welcoming and bright smile and enthusiastic energy to everyone who walks in. She makes everything run smoothly — from events to the day-to-day flow of people in and out needing things.

Parker is always eager and ready to help, even when that sometimes means getting out of her comfort zone. She will take ownership of a task and find a way to do it, even if it’s something she has never done before. She will figure out a way to make it happen and get it done correctly. In addition to her work at the Dean’s office, she has filled in at various departments across the school when they had a staff administrative vacancy — including Theatre & Dance, Philosophy, German & Slavic, Political Science, and the Tulane University Marching Band.

Parker is integral to several big events that the school holds each year, including academic open house, homecoming, and the Great Writers Series. Last year, she also played a crucial role in helping the Dean’s office move seamlessly from Newcomb Hall to Caroline Richardson and University Square.

Outstanding Faculty Research or Creative Activities Award

John Verano
Professor
Anthropology

John Verano, professor of Anthropology, has received the Outstanding Faculty Research or Creative Activities Award for his career accomplishments. The director of Harvard Peabody’s Museum regards Professor Verano as the preeminent biological archaeologist of ancient Peru. His research focuses on the study of health, disease, and mortuary practices, with a special emphasis on ritual violence through the study of ancient remains in coastal and highland Peru. His publication record is exceptionally strong. He has published a monograph, Holes in the Head: The Art and Archaeology of Trepanation in Ancient Peru (Dumbarton Oaks 2016), and co-authored two other books, Disease and Demography in the Americas (Smithsonian 1992) and Embattled Bodies, Embattled Places: War in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and the Andes (Dumbarton Oaks 2014). He has authored or co-authored more than one hundred peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters in edited volumes.

Verano is the globally recognized expert on trepanation (also spelled trephination), the world’s oldest-known surgical procedure, dating back more than 5,000 years. He has been recognized as an Honorary Member, Colegio Nacional de Antropólogos Profesionales del Peru, Region Norte (2018) and as a fellow in the Anthropology Section of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences (2010-present).

Outstanding Faculty Research or Creative Activities Award

Brandon Davis
Assistant Professor
Political Science

Brandon Davis, assistant professor in Political Science, was honored with the Outstanding Faculty Research or Creative Activities Award for his early career accomplishments. He has published eight single-authored peer-reviewed journal articles, 2 book chapters, and is currently working on a single-authored book manuscript (supported by his NSF career grant). The manuscript focuses on the Alabama Democratic Conference (1965–1989), which, in contrast to other similar organizations, achieved legal mobilization in the service of enforcing voter rights.

Additionally, he was part of a $20 million grant awarded to the University of Kansas for a project on Adaptive and Resilient Infrastructure driven by Social Equity. Davis was recognized as a University of Alabama Centennial Scholar, naming his as one of 100 of its outstanding recipients of graduate degrees.