Liberal Arts & Sciences faculty receive Excellence in Scholarship Award

At a recent meeting of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences faculty, Dean Laura Barrett presented Michelle Woods, associate professor of English, and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, associate professor of Geography, with the Excellence in Scholarship Award for their outstanding achievements in research, scholarship and creative activity.

Both nominated for the award by their department chairs, Woods and Engel-Di Mauro have proven themselves to be outstanding scholars.  They have consistent records of publication in books and professional journals and serve as editors for academic journals in their respective fields.

Woods, whose research interests include translation studies and twentieth-century comparative literature, published the book Kafka Translated: How Translators Have Shaped Our Reading of Kafka (Bloomsbury, 2013) and five articles in peer-reviewed venues over the past 18 months.  She also presented 10 papers at professional conferences and gave invited lectures at Princeton University and Butler University.

In her nomination letter, English Department Chair Nancy Johnson called Woods’s latest book “a work of exciting scholarship and engaging prose.”

“[Woods] urges us to think of the translator as an ‘embodied agent’ whose own cultural profile (including nationality, race, gender and education) permeates the translation. She also notes the importance of the culture that receives the translation: for whom is the translation written and why? Kafka Translated is an indication of the extent to which Dr. Woods is a scholar of note in translation studies,” Johnson wrote.

Woods is working on a fourth book, Looking at Kafka, and is co-editing a series on Literatures, Cultures and Translations for Bloomsbury press. She is also editor of the International Association for Translation and Cultural Studies yearbook on literary translation, Reading Translation (Routledge), and has two forthcoming articles.

Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro’s research interests include environment and political economy, gender and environment, and soil science. 2014 was a banner year for Engel-Di Mauro’s scholarship.  He completed a Fulbright Scholar Grant in Italy, published a new book and published several articles in peer-reviewed journals.

Engel-Di Mauro’s Fulbright project studied humans’ exposure to heavy metal contamination from eating food produced in Rome’s urban gardens. During his research, Engel-Di Mauro also delivered lectures, seminars and workshops to graduate students at the University of Rome La Spienza.

Engel-Di Mauro’s new book, Ecology, Soils and the Left (Palgrave-Macmillan), takes an ecosocial approach to soil degradation as both an occurring process and a political construct, and represents a “major theoretical contribution,” said Geography Department Chair John Sharp.

“In analyzing both the limitations of soil science in practice and its relationship to larger political-economic theory, the book succeeds, and it stands as a significant contribution to both the field of soil science and to the larger discourse on environmentalism,” noted Sharp in his nomination letter.

Other achievements include the publication of the co-authored article (with Karanja Carroll of Black Studies) “An African-Centered Approach to Land Education,” in Environmental Education Research and an invited article in the premier geography journal Antipode.

Engel Di-Mauro serves as editor-in-chief of Capitalism Nature Socialism and is also active on the editorial board of ACME:  An International e-Journal for Critical Geographies and Human Geography.

The Excellence in Scholarship Award winners will receive $500 in professional development funds and will make formal presentations of their scholarship in the next academic year. Their names will also be engraved on a plaque in the Jacobson Faculty Tower lobby.

Contributed by Despina Williams Parker