Nine Faculty Honored With Dean's Scholarly Achievement Awards
The following awards recognize individual accomplishment and reflect a richness and depth of scholarship and creative activity across the faculty:
- Ann Owen, the Henry Platt Bristol Chair, Public Policy and professor of economics, received the Career Achievement Award.
- Jose Ceniceros (mathematics and statistics) and Rachel White (psychology) were honored for Early Career Achievement.
- Notable Year Achievement awards went to Naomi Guttman (literature and creative writing), Emily K. Harrison (theatre), Amy Koenig (classics), Heather Kropp (environmental studies), Jack Martínez Arias (Hispanic studies), and Alex Plakias (philosophy).
Award descriptions and a list of previous recipients may be found on the Dean of Faculty site.
Career Achievement Award
In announcing Ann Owen as the recipient of the Career Achievement Award, Munemo said that the economist is “known for her phenomenal scholarly output, purposeful mentoring of junior colleagues, ability to explain complex financial issues simply and succinctly, and advising, mentoring, and working with students. One colleague observed that her current CV lists 63 publications.”
Quoting a nomination, Munemo said Owen “worked with the department to redesign the curriculum to be more inclusive and welcoming to female and minority students long underrepresented in economics.”
Owen’s nominators also cited her work with the media. Said one, she “is constantly being cited in the popular press, both for her original research and … as an expert on monetary policy and macroeconomics in general, and is considered a ‘go-to’ expert when media outlets have questions about the actions of the Federal Reserve. You will often hear her on NPR while driving to campus in the morning or home at night.”
Munemo noted that Owen has served on numerous College committees since joining the faculty in 1997, often focusing on budget, planning, teaching, appointments, and advising. She was a Posse mentor from 2013 to 2017 and also served as director of the Levitt Center on two occasions and as faculty chair in 2016-17.
“When considering [Owen] for the award,” a colleague wrote, “this seems like a no-brainer to me, and I think this is not a question of ‘if’ but merely a question of ‘when.
Early Career Achievement Award
Colleagues call Ceniceros “an enormously popular teacher, a prolific researcher, and the successful developer of an undergraduate research program.” One nominator cited his publishing success: 11 research papers since 2021, bringing his total since coming to Hamilton to 14. “This … rate would be rare even at an R1 institution, but for a mathematician at a small liberal arts college it is almost unheard of,” Munemo read.
Also of note, Ceniceros has created a “research program that provides undergraduates with meaningful opportunities for collaboration and scholarly work.” According to a nominator: “Successful research with undergraduate students is not an easy thing to pull off in pure mathematics; it’s not a discipline … where students can assist faculty in their research by carrying out work in the lab. In the past, only a handful of faculty in our department have successfully involved Hamilton students in their research, and even fewer have succeeded in publishing their work. … Ceniceros has almost single-handedly turned this around, making research with mathematics students at Hamilton much more common and opening the door for our junior faculty, who now routinely involve summer students in their projects.”
Another department colleague said Ceniceros’ “students have been published in top-tier international mathematics journals … and many of [his] students have managed to leverage their research experiences with him to gain acceptance into top graduate programs. [He] has put Hamilton on the map of the very best liberal arts math programs.”
Colleagues noted White’s “extraordinary record of scholarship, which has been distinguished both by how prolific she has been … and by the seminal impact her work has had on our understanding of cognitive development during early childhood.”
Since she joined the faculty in 2016, White has published 11 peer-reviewed papers in well-respected journals — five of which she appeared as first author, Munemo said. Another paper is under review and three more are in preparation. White has also been a co-PI on two grants during the past six years, presented at 15 conferences, and been invited to deliver seven talks, including one keynote.
Munemo quoted an external reviewer of White’s tenure file, who wrote “in my mind she is … a scientist with an impeccable scholarly reputation, and I would put her in the top-tier of early career cognitive developmentalists. More important … is that the quality of the work is very high, a point that is underscored by the fact that she consistently appears in top journals. She is a recognized leader in her area of specialization.”
Another external reviewer called White’s first-authored paper on the Batman Effect “a developmental classic, frequently assigned in core developmental courses for both undergraduates and graduates.”
A department colleague said White “has instilled a passion for scientific inquiry in numerous students (many of whom have gone on to prestigious post-graduate positions), [and] is a wonderful model for all of us in the faculty.
Notable Year Achievement Award
Munemo noted that Guttman is a creative writer receiving recognition for her award-winning work in a different genre. With funding from a Dietrich Inchworm Grant, which supports Hamilton faculty members “who wish to explore something new, attempt pioneering projects, or push disciplinary boundaries,” Guttman spent more than 10 years producing a documentary about her parents’ marriage titled More Than You Can Know: A Marriage Story.
Guttman enlisted the support of students and took her first film course from Hamilton Professor Ella Gant, who taught her about videography. “The result is a 30-minute film that won Best Documentary at the Toronto Indie Shorts Festival in October,” he said. It was also short-listed for the Canada Shorts festival in Vancouver and nominated for awards at both the Toronto International Women Film Festival and the Toronto Film and Script Awards.
Munemo quoted a film critic who said “[it]reveals how complex even a seemingly stable marriage is and how much pain and doubt can be woven in with love and happiness.
In honoring Harrison, Munemo quoted a department colleague who said she had “an extremely productive year for anyone in the arts, in fact the best I’ve ever seen!”
A nominator said Harrison’s year began with her performing her work at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which was followed by acting at the Buntport Theatre Company, directing a play at LSU, co-producing Telegraph Valley, presenting at two conferences, being nominated for a Stage Directors Award, writing six grants — three of which were successful — and completing her certification as a teacher of movement with a New York theatre company.
EYES UP, MOUTH AGAPE, a play she co-created, designed, staged, and in which she performed as the Sears Tower, was called “imaginative,” “strangely captivating,” and “sharply funny.” It was awarded multiple OnStage Colorado Awards for Theatrical Excellence, including for Original Play or Musical and Best Comedy.
The world premiere at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival of THINGS WE WILL MISS, a personal meditation on the climate crisis, featured collaborations with a number of current and former students and a Hamilton faculty colleague, Munemo noted.
A nominator for Koenig said her 2024 achievements alone would meet or exceed the department’s scholarly requirements for tenure. The most notable “was the publication of a monograph on silence in Latin literature” and that “finishing this book before reappointment and research leave … stands as a testament to Koenig’s scholarly acumen and productivity.” Koenig has already begun work on a second book.
Quoting from a nominator, Munemo said: “Stemming from her prestigious fellowship at the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae in Munich (THE go-to reference tool for Latinists around the globe), [she] saw four of her entries come to fruition in 2024. I emphasize that this monumental project is painstaking and slow-going, in that each entry involves tracing every extant instance of the word from antiquity through the Middle Ages, often contending with multiple and/or disputed definitions and uses. … Four entries in one year by a single scholar is a major achievement.”
Koenig also won a Margo Tytus Visiting Scholar Award to work at … one of the most esteemed libraries in her discipline.
Munemo said Kropp “has been producing scholarship at an astonishing rate since joining Hamilton in 2020 — in fact, she has more than 25 peer-reviewed publications that have been cited over 850 times, according to her nominators.” Her articles have appeared in journals such as Environmental Research Letters, Nature Communications, the Journal of Geophysical Research, and Environmental Management.
Kropp was called “a consummate mentor,” by colleagues, who cite her field work with Hamilton students last summer in Alaska and her advising to students who give presentations at major international conferences of the American Geophysical Union.
Her nominators say that “Beyond her impressive ability to combine a wide variety of methods in her research, her scholarly achievements are even more impressive because she is also a superlative leader in advancing the pedagogy of environmental data science. She has created multiple fully new courses in this emerging discipline and produced an entirely new groundbreaking set of open-source textbooks … that include original problems and materials that blend teaching statistics, spatial analysis, coding literacy, and environmental science fundamentals.”
“As more and more institutions develop new academic programs and hire new faculty at the intersection of environmental science and data analysis,” her nominators wrote, “[Kropp] has already become one of the leading thinkers nationally in how to teach environmental data science.”
Munemo noted that Martínez Arias continued to develop scholarship in his area of expertise, as well as his creative writing portfolio. His third novel, Te he seguido (Dedndro 2024), aligns with his research on migration patterns and the barriers migrants face in Latin America. The book tells the story of two adolescents who migrate to the outskirts of Lima and confront urban violence, poverty, and discrimination.
Martínez Arias also published an article titled “Medioambiente y transculturación en El abrazo de la serpiente (2015)” in the peer-reviewed journal Brújula: revista interdisciplinaria de estudios latinoamericanos.
In addition, he completed a critical edition and introduction of Junín, which is forthcoming this year, and an article on extractivism in the Andes, to be published in Critical Humanities. In the past year Martínez Arias served as a referee for numerous academic journals from six different countries, collaborated as a researcher on the Manuel Scorza Archive Project at the University of Poitiers, France, and frequently contributed articles and columns to Latin American mass media.
“Beyond his accomplishments in 2024,” a nominator wrote, “his students adore him, and our department is lucky to have him!”
“Our next recipient, a member of the faculty since 2014, graduated in 2002 from one of the finest — our president might say ‘one of the most important’ — liberal arts colleges in the world,” Munemo said. “Expertly prepared by this esteemed faculty, [Plakias] had her monograph, titled Awkwardness: A Theory, published by Oxford University Press.”
According to the Press, it joins philosophy with moral psychology to analyze the “normative significance of awkwardness for contemporary ethical issues.” One endorsement for the book said, “We naturally want to avoid awkwardness and turn away in its presence. Plakias stares at it with intense and generous attention. ... In exploring its every aspect, she gives us a book that is philosophically rich, original, and ethically wise.”
Another reviewer called the book a “brilliant and timely investigation of an under-investigated topic, [that] is as thoughtful as it is graceful. … [T]his book is a must-read for anyone interested in moral psychology as well as social and political philosophy.”
A nominator for this award added, “I am always impressed when a colleague in the humanities publishes a monograph, especially a groundbreaking one with such an impressive press.”
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Harrison Awarded Theatre Honors
Assistant Professor of Theatre Emily K. Harrison was recently awarded four 2024 OnStage Colorado Awards for Theatrical Excellence for her collaborative contributions on the World Premiere of EYES UP, MOUTH AGAPE, produced by Buntport Theater Company (Denver).
Two Faculty Members Awarded Tenure
Assistant professors Viva Horowitz (physics) and Wei Zhan (economics) were approved for tenure at the March meeting of the Board of Trustees.
