Above: UNL's speech and debate team collected its fourth-straight Big Ten Conference title. The team will compete in national tournaments in April.
Recent awards and honors earned by the Arts and Sciences community:
The UNL speech team earned its fourth-straight Big Ten championship at the Conference Challenge Tournament, Jan. 31 to Feb. 1 at Northwestern University.
UNL led the field with a two-day point total of 165 points, ahead of second-place finisher Northwestern's 101 points.
In addition to clinching a fourth team championship, UNL students captured six separate event titles. Senior Josiah BeDunnah of Lexington led the way with individual event wins in Dramatic Interpretation, Program Oral Interpretation and Prose Interpretation.
“This was the toughest conference tournament yet,” BeDunnah said. “I feel lucky to have had a great showing and I am so proud of our team.”
BeDunnah also placed first in Duo Interpretation with his partner, fellow senior Toni Karaus of Omaha. Karaus also had an individual success in Poetry Interpretation. Junior Grace Solem-Pfeifer of Omaha won the Impromptu Speaking event.
"I am extremely proud of our students’ performance this weekend,” said Aaron Duncan, UNL's director of speech and debate. “Despite a blizzard raging outside our students remained focus on the task at hand and delivered great performances all weekend."
The students of the both the speech and debate teams have been competing since September and are preparing for national tournaments in April, which will be held in Portland, Oregon, and Athens, Ohio.
UNL's speech and debate program is part of the Department of Communication Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences.
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Bryan Howard, a senior English, theatre arts and human behavior major in the Johnny Carson School of Theatre and Film from Howell, New Jersey, won first place in the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas/Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival Student Dramaturgy competition at the Region V festival in Minnesota in January.
His entry will be reviewed alongside the seven other regional winners from across the country by a panel of professional dramaturgs to compete for four spots in the national competition in Washington, D.C., in April. Those results will be announced in mid-March.
A dramaturg is a professional position within a theatre or opera company that deals with research and development of plays or operas and works on the historical and cultural research into the play or opera and its setting.
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Will Preachuk, a computer science major, was among winners of Topplers' 2014-2015 Domino Award for Computer Science.
More than 100 students from 44 schools participated in the national essay competition. Essays honored Richard Stallman, a pioneer in the open source movement; Paul Baran, a pioneer in the development of computer networks; and Barbara Liskov, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose work designing programming languages led to a development of object oriented programming.
Preachuk wrote about Stallman.
Winners receive an all-expenses-paid trip to see technology innovation at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in the spring.
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This was adapted from the UNL Today Achievements story here.
