Nicole Gray, research assistant professor of English, and Kenneth Price, Hilligass University Professor of English and co-director of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, were awarded the Boydson Best Essay Prize for a two-year period by the Association for Documentary Editing. The winning essay, "The Letters in the Litter: Messy Boundaries and Other Conundrums in Editing Walt Whitman's Correspondence," was published in the 2016 issue of Scholarly Editing.
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José Ángel Maldonado, assistant professor of communication studies, won the Rhetoric Society of America's Dissertation Award for his dissertation, "Diana’s Confession: Precarious Rhetoric in Post-NAFTA Mexico." The annual award recognizes the best dissertation in rhetorical studies written by a student member of the society. Maldonado’s dissertation examines violence in Mexico within the context of larger geopolitical and economic shifts.
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Xiaoshan Xu, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, has received a 2018 Early Career Award from the U.S. Department of Energy. Xu is one of 84 researchers to receive the award, which supports untenured faculty who earned their doctorates within the past 10 years. The award will provide Xu with at least $150,000 in annual funding for the next five years. His research is exploring how combinations of atomically thin materials may be used to control electrons' spin: a property with two states, up and down, that can be manipulated and read by digital devices to help store more data.
