Juana Valdés, associate professor in the Department of Art, recently received a 2020 Anonymous Was A Woman Award, which recognizes “women-identifying artists over 40 years of age who have made significant contributions, while continuing to create new work, and who are each at a critical juncture in their practice.” Valdés is one of ten artists to receive the unrestricted award of $25,000 this year.

Over the summer, Joe Pater, professor and chair of the Department of Linguistics, decided to analyze local COVID-19 data when It became apparent there would need to be decisions made for his child regarding the upcoming school year. A resident of Northampton, Mass., he took raw data released by the state and began to chart new case rates for Hampshire County since the beginning of the pandemic. Alarmed by the steep increase in new cases this fall, and the lack of attention being paid to the data, Pater wrote an article entitled "Western Massachusetts counties now have their highest numbers of new Covid-19 cases since the spring (And why are you learning about that here?)."

Gabriel Bump '17MFA, an alumnus of the MFA for Poets and Writers in the Department of English, was recently named the 2020 winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and his novel, Everywhere You Don’t Belong was selected as one of the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2020.

Gretchen Gerzina, professor in the Department of English and Paul Murray Kendall Chair in Biography at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, will present a talk for Oxford University’s Nineteenth Century Research Seminar Series on November 30^th. Entitled “Sarah E. Farro: What a newly discovered African American writer can tell us about the British Victorian Novel,” the talk will explore Gerzina’s research on the forgotten nineteenth-century writer, whose work she uncovered in 2012 when she saw an announcement in an 1893 edition of London’s The Daily Telegraph proclaiming Farro to be “the first negro novelist” with the publication of her first novel.

The ADVANCE program has announced that three research teams are recipients of ADVANCE Collaborative Research Seed Grants for 2020-21. These competitive grants aim to foster the development of innovative and equitable collaborative research projects among faculty. Recognizing longstanding gender gaps in the academy, the National Science Foundation (NSF) funds universities to build institutional transformation programs in order to advance gender equity for faculty in science and engineering. Through the power of collaboration, ADVANCE cultivates faculty equity and inclusion—especially for women and minorities in science and engineering. Three winning teams demonstrated innovative research and well thought-out and equitable collaborations.

Our college is an academic and artistic community committed to advancing knowledge through rigorous scholarly debate that values diverse perspectives and experiences. In the three months that I have served as dean of the college, I have been energized by the passion, innovation and dedication I see in our students, staff, and faculty.