2013-2014 Graduate Faculty Mentor Of The Year Award Recipients

ARHU faculty members receive prestigious Graduate Faculty Mentor of the Year Awards.

Two ARHU faculty members received 2013-2014 Graduate Faculty Mentor of the Year Awards.

Congratulations to ARHU’s Graduate Faculty Mentor of the Year Award recipients!

Outstanding faculty mentors are critical to graduate education and to creating a successful graduate student experience. On the recommendation of the Graduate Council and its Faculty Affairs Committee four years ago, the Graduate School inaugurated a campus wide Graduate Faculty Mentor of the Year Award. Such an award serves the dual purposes of recognizing outstanding mentoring provided by individual faculty and of reminding the university community of the importance of mentoring graduate studies.

ARHU Recipients:

Laura Demaria, Spanish and Portugese 

As not only a strong intellectual and a challenging teacher, but also a creative writer, according to her students, Associate Professor Demaria sees things from various perspectives.

"The diversity of our research...exemplifies the capacity that Dr. Demaria has to accommodate our interests, while still guiding us intellectually and going far beyond the minimum requirement of her position," students wrote about her in the nomination letter they submitted for the award.

Personally, Associate Professor Demaria is interested in the complex ways in which the nineteenth-century is re-inscribed in contemporary Southern Cone literature and concentrates primarily on Argentina. As a faculty members in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, her work intertwines different disciplinary discourses—literature, history, politics, philosophy and critical theory—to examine the complex ways in which cultural practices are articulated. 

Psyche Williams-Forson, American Studies

Photo Credit: DuBose/KmBd Studios

Associate Professor Williams-Forson uses advice she has received from others when working with students as an affiliate faculty member of the Women's Studies and African American Studies departments and the Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity. She is particularly interested in the areas of cultural studies, material culture, food and women's studies, and is the co-founder and co-director of the Material Culture/Visual Culture Working Group—an interdisciplinary group of faculty and graduate students engaged in research on objects and culture.

"Mentoring at all career levels can be invaluable," Williams-Forson said. "My own philosophy is to be honest with my students—graduate and undergraduate—about the challenges and benefits of our profession. I do not shy away from encouraging the ‘road less traveled’ or from straying off the path if, in fact, that might actually help a student find their way back to their center.