Exceptional works of art, literature, and scholarship from our Liberal Arts community receive recognition on the global stage.
Assistant Professor of English Karisma Price has won the 2025 Whiting Award in Poetry, one of the most prestigious prizes recognizing emerging writers in the United States. Whiting Awards are presented annually to 10 exceptional emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama. Each winner receives $50,000 in recognition of early accomplishment and the promise of outstanding future work.
The selection committee writes about Price and her work, “The poems of Karisma Price are songs, howls, portraits, critiques; they move nimbly between the narrative and the lyric. Price bends form and time, bringing together unexpected interlocutors to make sense of what cannot make sense — but the effort is sanctifying. Her architecture surprises; full of rhythm and light, it houses steady compassion alongside flashes of violence. The reader feels the necessity of the work and, held by Price, rises to meet it.”
A native New Orleanian, Price is a poet, screenwriter, media artist, and the author of the debut collection I’m Always So Serious (Sarabande Books, 2023), a New York Times Editor’s Choice.
Anthropology Professor Christopher B. Rodning has received the 2025 Presidential Recognition Award for service to the Society for American Archaeology (SSA). The award recognizes Rodning’s work as a “highly responsive, effective, and forward-thinking” editor of the SAA Archaeological Record, which he has been editing since 2019; as the successful book review editor of American Antiquity since 2018; and as co-organizer of the President's Forum at SAA 2024; among other roles. The award will be presented at SSA's annual meeting in Denver at the end of April.
Assistant Professor of Economics Patrick Testa is the recipient of two highly competitive grants for his study entitled: “The Geography of Race and Ethnicity in the United States: Uncovering a Hidden History of Expulsion and Exclusion.” Patrick and co-authors won a National Science Foundation (NSF) and a Russell Sage Foundation (RSF) grant. The funding will support their research using cutting-edge techniques from large language models to identify episodes of local forced migration in U.S. history, between 1850 and 1950, including the individuals and groups affected by them.
French Professor Fayçal Falaky will join the National Humanities Center 2025 Residency, a program designed to provide scholarly resources and promote the knowledge and deeper understanding in all areas of the humanities. Falaky is a specialist in 18th-century French literature, culture, and politics.
Karrie Gaspard-Hogewood has won the 2025 Wilbur Award of Merit by the Religion Communicators Council for the podcast "Spirit & Power: Charismatics & Politics in American Life.” Gaspard-Hogewood is a Sociology Doctoral Fellow and Social Policy Adjunct Professor.
Lindsey Cliff (SLA ‘25), a fourth-year Honors student, has been selected to participate in the Spring Research Symposium at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at NYU — an honor granted to only 19 undergraduate students nationwide. As a double major in International Relations and Political Economy with a minor in Russian, Cliff will present her research on how Russian-led organizations shape narratives about the post-Soviet region, often marginalizing the voices of non-Russian communities.
Newcomb Dance Company members Madeline Lorio (SLA ‘25) and Amalia Nájera (SLA ‘25) performed their original piece Tethered at the American College Dance Association Mid-Atlantic Conference in March and were one of three pieces selected to be performed at the ACDA’s National College Dance Festival in May. This is the first time the high honor has been awarded to Tulane University dancers.
March 2025
Exceptional works of art, literature, and scholarship from our Liberal Arts community receive recognition on the global stage.
Brandon Davis, an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and the Murphy Institute, has received a $50,000 Institute for Human Studies Faculty Fellowship. Davis’ research focuses on American and Race politics and normative and empirical approaches to institutions, representation, and criminal justice. This sabbatical funding goes towards his project, Audemus Jura Nostra Defendere: We Dare Defend Our Rights Strategic Legal Mobilization and the Alabama Democratic Conference.
The Renaissance Society of America recently awarded Professor of Practice Alexis Culotta a 2025 RSA-Samuel H. Kress Research Fellowship in Renaissance Art History. One of only a few recipients for this highly competitive award, Culotta will use this fellowship to continue work on data collection and curation with a focus on work of artists active between the 16th and 17th centuries in the Viceroyalty of New Spain. This work is in relation to her larger digital humanities initiative to build the Artistic Network Toolkit (ANT) with Co-PI (and fellow Tulane faculty member) Aron Culotta and their research team.
Fan Zhang, assistant professor in the Newcomb Art Department & Asian Studies Program, has been awarded a Mellon Fellowship for Assistant Professors from the Institute of Advanced Study (IAS). With support form the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the School of Historical Studies at the IAS chooses three assistant professors per year to welcome as members to the institution and to grant a $40,000 stipend in support of their scholarly work. The fellowship was awarded for Zhang’s research project, A Center on the Border: Migrations, Identities, and Cross-Cultural Encounters in Fifth-Century North China, on the understudied scholarship of 5th century Chinese art.
A film by New Orleans-based stage director Natasha Ramer, with editing and cinematography by Department of Theatre & Dance Professor Antony Sandoval, and starring Tulane Theatre alum Erin Cessna, has been sweeping the festival circuit, winning awards and garnering glowing reviews. Oleksandra Basco’s A Non Fiction War adapts the real-time war diary of the Ukrainian writer into theatrical script for the stage and screen. It won 2024 Best Experimental Film at the London Women Film Festival, Berlin Women Film Festival, Santa Barbara International Movie Awards, Los Angeles Movie & Music Video Awards, and received many other awards.
Cheryl Narumi Naruse, an associate professor of English, received the 2025 Outstanding Achievement Book Award by the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) for her book Becoming Global Asia: Contemporary Genres of Postcolonial Capitalism in Singapore. Winner in the Literary Studies category, Naruse’s work explores the “soft power” and cultural capital of neoimperialist Singapore through a literary lens, as she examines the work in genres like literary anthologies, coming-of-career narratives, and princess fantasies. This is her first book.
Belinda Andrews-Smith, former Musical Theatre director and visiting assistant professor in the Theatre and Dance Department, won the 2024 American Prize in the Musical/Theatre division, for stage directing her production of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. A musical theatre adaptation of Dickens’ last and unfinished work, Andrews-Smith staged the play in the 2023 theatre season while at Tulane.
A composition by Music Professor Barbara Jazwinski has recently been selected by the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) for performance at the ISCM World New Music Days 2025 in Portugal. Jazwinski serves as the head of the Composition Program for the Newcomb Department of Music and is an internationally-recognized performer, conductor, and promoter of contemporary music. Her composition Soliloquy was chosen by an international jury, including composers and conductors from 18 countries. ICSM consists of members from more than 60 organizations in over 50 countries, and has been promoting and advancing contemporary music since 1922. This year’s festival will take place at the end of May in Lisbon and Porto.
AJ Golio, a doctoral candidate of Sociology in the City, Culture, and Community Program, received the 2025 Best Article in the Journal of Race, Ethnicity and the City Award for his paper ”What makes gentrification ‘white’? Theorizing the mutual construction of whiteness and gentrification in the urban US.” The annual award was selected from an array of international articles published in Volume 4 (2023) and Volume 5 (2024) of the journal, and the award recognizes an article for its particularly outstanding contribution to the field of urban affairs.
Nick Chapoy, PhD candidate in Biological Anthropology, along with Kathy Jack, professor of Anthropology and associate dean for Research and Graduate Programs, have been awarded a $30,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for Doctoral Dissertation Research: Vocal Communication and Dominance Rank in a Non-Human Primate. The doctoral research project combines behavioral observations, acoustic analyses, and hormone assays to asses the link between vocal communication, hormone levels, and social rank in non-human primates. Prior to joining the PhD program, Chapoy served as a field assistant for the Santa Rosa Primate Project, a long-term research site co-directed by Jack on the northwest coast of Costa Rica.