[English-undergrad] English Department Honorees 2024-2025

[Lidia Kos]

Congratulations to Prof. Berardino and all the amazing students for their
awards.

best

Lidia

On Tue, Jun 17, 2025 at 2:29 PM James Tobias <jtobias at ucr.edu> wrote:

> Dear All,
>
> Congratualtions to all of our English Department awards and honors
> recipients for 2024-2025.
>
> It’s a pleasure to congratulation all of the recipients, named below, and
> also in the attached awards slate (PDF) for this academic year.
>
> Warm congratulations! You make us all proud.
>
> James Tobias, Ph.D.
> Professor
> Chair, Department of English
> University of California
> Riverside CA 92521
> jtobias at ucr.edu
>
> https://ucr.zoom.us/j/95465985946?pwd=Z1A4Yk1UZDhBTjY5UkJ5R1VQTWUvQT09
>
> "We at UCR would like to respectfully acknowledge and recognize
> our responsibility to the original and current caretakers of this land,
> water, and air: the Cahuilla, Tongva, Luiseño, and Serrano peoples and all
> of their ancestors and descendants, past, present, and future. Today
> this meeting place is home to many Indigenous peoples from all over
> the world, including UCR faculty, students, and staff, and we are grateful
> to have the opportunity to live and work on these homelands.”
>
>
>
>
> *Department of English Awards and Recognitions *
>
> *2024-2025*
>
>
>
> *English Department Faculty Award Recipient*
>
>
>
> *Award for Faculty Excellence in Service to Undergraduate Education
> 2024-2025*
>
> *Dr. Christopher Seiji Berardino.* For the inaugural version of this
> award recognizing faculty contributions to undergraduate education in
> English, we are pleased to honor Dr. Berardino, in whose teaching and
> mentoring clarity meets care meets dedication. Nominated by three
> undergraduates, his students observe:
>
> “I am applying for grad school and Dr. Berardino was very insightful about
> things I should look into when it comes to this. These things were ideas I
> didn't even think about. He was also very helpful when it came to class
> work and feedback - there weren’t too many assignments where I felt lost,
> but if I did, he had no worries on breaking it down in multiple ways.”
>
> “Recognizing Dr. Berardino for their contributions to undergraduate
> education in the English department at UCR would not only be recognizing
> his ability to teach well but also his genuine care for students.
> Introducing myself to him early in the quarter, I shared with him my
> personal goals and current undertakings, which include two part-time jobs
> in addition to being a fill-time student. Dr. Berardino checked in with me
> throughout the quarter in hopes of facilitating any issues or problems I
> might be encountering. In addition to being conscious about my
> undertakings, he also contributed towards connecting students to resources,
> clubs, and events on campus such as the Academic Resource Center’s writing
> program and the English Majors Association at UCR.[….] Recently meeting
> with Dr. Berardino to gain insight into graduate programs, he happily
> shared his educational journey with me in addition to his ongoing research,
> cementing with me his sensible effort to help me further my studies and
> fulfill my goal of becoming an English teacher.”
>
> “Dr. Berardino is dedicated to his job, his students, and the quality of
> education.”
>
> Congratulations, Dr, Berardino!
>
>
>
>
>
> *English Undergraduate Scholars Awards Recipients*
>
> Our undergraduate awards recognize both high quality scholarly essays
> across topics and disciplines, as well as all-around performance in US
> literary and cultural studies recognized in the Emory Elliott Memorial
> Undergraduate Award. Congratulations to this year’s recipients!
>
>
>
> *Undergraduate Essay Award (Department of English)*
>
>
>
> *Diana Montes, “‘In Death Love Lives’: Unresolved Love and Feud in Edit
> Villarreal’s The Language of Flowers” *
>
>
>
> From the awards committee: “This essay examines two literary works that
> navigate the language and legacy of Shakespeare from the perspective of
> Chicanx and Indigenous linguistic and cultural traditions. These
> include “In Death Love Lives” (2024),  a bilingual sonnet in Shakespearean
> form composed by the author themselves, and a 1991 play that inspired the
> sonnet, Edit Villarreal’s *The Language of Flowers,* an adaptation of *Romeo
> and Julie*t set in a Mexican American community in Los Angeles during Día
> de los Muertos. The essay thus offers a creative, analytically exacting and
> sophisticated approach to literary composition *as *critical and cultural
> intervention. In the process, it argues for the political and artistic
> importance of grappling with colonial logics of “Shakespeare” in American
> culture and education.”
>
>
>
> Honorable mention:
>
>
>
> *Hannah LeBrun, "The Cost of Success in Akhil Sharma’s Family Life"*
>
>
>
> From the awards committee: “Through close and careful analysis, this essay
> argues for the tragic costs of neoliberal concepts of happiness and
> productivity in Akhil Sharma’s autobiographical novel, *Family Life *
> (2014).”
>
>
>
> *Kimberly Calderón, "An Exploration of Hawkins Fuller’s Dominant Nature
> in Fellow Travelers"*
>
>
>
> From the awards committee: “This well researched essay argues for the
> relationship of homophobia and trauma to the conspicuous performance of
> masculine dominance in the American television miniseries *Fellow
> Travelers *(2023, based on the novel by Thomas Mallon by the same name).”
>
>
>
> *Madison Zepeda, "Parts Sold Separately: Blazons and Gazes Reworked in
> Ryan Blackwell’s Film Adaptation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130"*
>
>
>
> From the awards committee: “Drawing on poetic theory, film theory, and
> strategies of close analysis, this essay argues that Ryan Blackwell's 2014
> film adaptation of Sonnet 130 "reworks Shakespeare's own answer to
> Petrarch's poetry." It does so by "inverting the logic of the male gaze" in
> Shakespeare's poem itself, imagining the *speaker* (rather than simply
> the speaker's beloved) as the embodied antithesis of the poetic ideal.”
>
>
>
>
>
> *Emory Elliott Memorial Undergraduate Award (Department of English)*
>
>
>
> *Anthony Alfaro*
>
> This award recognizes distinguished work in the study of US Literature
> and/or Culture.  The award committee looks at the overall record of
> achievement and GPA in US literature and culture courses, and considers
> specific recommendations from faculty. From this year’s awards committee:
> Anthony Alfaro “has been stellar” in US literature and culture courses, and
> we are “thrilled for him to be considered” for this award; further, Anthony
> “is an outstanding student.” And finally: Anthony’s writing “stands out to
> me as some of the very best writing I've seen from a student.”
>
>
>
>
>
> *Graduate Scholars Award and Honors Recipients*
>
> Our graduate scholars awards include recognition within and beyond the
> Graduate Program in English. We are especially grateful to the donors whose
> support makes the Lindon Barrett, Emory Elliott, and Community Service
> awards possible. To all of this year’s awards and honors recipients: your
> work makes clear that intellectual excellence, passion for innovation and
> discovery, and commitment to engaged scholarship is as strong as ever in
> the Graduate Program in English. Congratulations!
>
>
>
>
>
> *Lindon Barrett Black Studies Prize 2024-2025 (Department of English)*
>
>
>
> *Donald H. Zarate Jr., Department of Political Science, for **“Here and
> Now: Black Perspectives on Antiutopianism”*
>
>
>
> From the award committee: “The judges were impressed by the depth and
> breadth of research into Utopianism and utopian theories as they do and do
> not adequately describe such investments in Black literature. We
> appreciated that author’s ability to balance the wider implications and
> applications of utopian thought with the longstanding and enduring visions
> of utopia found and, importantly, rooted in Black folks’ traditions as
> these extend back more than one hundred years—in many ways predating the
> more familiar and, and the author notes, more recent understanding of
> Utopianism in current literary studies.”
>
>
>
>
>
> *Emory Elliott Graduate Essay Award **2024-2025** (Department of English)*
>
>
>
> *Carolina Hernandez-Bachman, for “**The Latina Spectrogothic in Beast
> Meridian and Painting their Portraits in Winter”*
>
>
>
> From the award committee: “Recognizing this essay, the award committee is
> impressed by the expertise with which the research identified and theorized
> an emergent genre within the growing field of Latinx speculative fiction.
> We appreciated the author’s ability to engage with but also to extend the
> cutting-edge scholarship on the uses of the Latinx gothic, by reflecting on
> how Vanessa Angélica Villarreal and Myriam Gurba mobilize the gothic by
> engaging with horror and with magical realist elements in the service of
> their critiques of U.S. colonialism. As such, this work is an exciting and
> lasting contribution to a developing subfield, one that will certainly help
> to shape it.”
>
>
>
>
>
> *Graduate Essay Awards **2024-2025** (Department of English)*
>
>
>
> *Kristen Lien, first place, for “**Animation from Cape Dorset"*
>
>
>
> From the award committee: “This essay on *Animation from Cape Dorset* is
> as much a pleasure to read as it is a pleasure to learn from. From the
> paper’s introduction, the essay strikes a delicate balance between the
> stakes of the research and thoughtful attention to the text, foregrounding
> the resistant potential that animation holds while underscoring its
> inherent capacity to foster play and levity. What is perhaps most
> interesting was the paper’s ability to move beyond the animation itself to
> reveal the intricate webs of social relations, power dynamics,
> environmental concerns, and Indigenous histories that underpin the very
> process of creation. The best essays are the ones that excite, inform, and
> demand you see for yourself. This essay does all three.”
>
>
>
> *Rhiannon Rogers, second place, for “**Amy Matilda Casey Album”*
>
>
>
> From the award committee: “This wonderful essay on the Amy Matilda Cassey
> friendship album is an excellent example of original archival research. We
> thoroughly enjoyed learning about Cassey’s ornate compendium of personal
> messages, sketches, and poetry and appreciated your ability to reformulate
> this text into a focused lens capable of surveying the intricate
> negotiations between private and public spheres in nineteenth-century Black
> social life. The argument is as interesting as it is incisive, penetrating
> the album’s glitzy leather trimming and embossed foliage to reveal its
> vital function as a record of intimacy, preserving networks of kinship
> vital to recovering the equally intricate contours of upper-middle-class
> Black Philadelphia. Within a paper of interest to scholars from several
> subfields of Black historical, literary, visual, and cultural studies, it
> elevates the less attended-to but significant archive of the friendship
> album as a site for Black collectivity and belonging in the nineteenth
> century.”
>
>
>
> *Sayeong Kim, third place, for “**Deconstructing Myths of Black Beauty” *
>
>
>
> From the award committee: “This paper on Black beauty politics takes
> seriously the under-considered terrain of digital beauty culture as a site
> of identity formation, subjectivity, and resistance to hegemonic ideologies
> of femininity, desirability, and value. The paper innovatively draws on an
> archive of Black women aesthetic laborers’ experiences of beauty culture
> from the Netflix documentary, *The Black Beauty Effect*. It provides a
> well-structured and thoroughly historized Black feminist analysis of
> contemporary Black women’s aesthetic practices, also giving needed
> attention to the complex, swiftly-changing digital contexts in which they
> continue to evolve.”
>
>
>
>
>
> *Community Service Awards 2024-2025 (Department of English)*
>
>
>
> *Jenna Wilson*
>
>
>
> Jenna is recognized with a Community Service Award 2025 for her work as a
> founding member of the “Bar None Collective,” which carries out letter
> writing events during which attendees reach out to, respond to, and share
> resources with people who are incarcerated in California state prisons. The
> Bar None Collective and our letter-writing attendees have written to people
> at over twelve different California state prisons and have responded to all
> of the people who have written back. In the future, we hope to build out a
> more robust pen pal program, create a guide to filing grievances in
> California state prisons, publish zines featuring the art, poetry, and
> other creative work of incarcerated people, and forge relationships with
> media partners with whom we can put people in contact if they want to share
> their story with the greater public.
>
>
>
> *Carolina Hernandez-Bachman*
>
>
>
> Carolina is recognized with a Community Service Award 2025 for her
> volunteer work at both Riverside City College and at UC Riverside. Carolina
> has been a Puente mentor to RCC students for two years, where she mentors
> students about the process of transferring to UC Riverside. Carolina also
> participates in ALAS, or the Association of Latinx faculty Advocating for
> Students, and LASSE, the LGBTQ+ club for faculty and students on the RCC
> campus. At UCR, Carolina has served as co-organizer of SALLAS, supplemented
> by the UC multi-campus initiative Global Latinidades which has been
> anchored at UCR by Dr. Richard Rodriguez, where, as co-organizer, Carolina
> works to create spaces for Latinx and first generation students to learn
> more about Latinx cultural traditions and literature.
>
>
>
>
>
> *Dissertation Program Fellowship (UCR Graduate Division, 2025-2026) *
>
>
>
> *Carolina Hernandez-Bachman, in support of the dissertation project
> “Weirding the World: Latina Gothic Expression.”*
>
>
>
>
>
> *Dissertation Completion Fellowships (UCR Graduate Division 2024-2025)*
>
>
>
> *Gabriela Almendarez (Ph.D. 2025)*
>
>
>
> *Abigail Uribe (Ph.D. 2025)*
>
>
>
> *Juan Valadez (Ph.D. 2025)*
>
>
>
>
>
> *Barricelli Memorial Grant for Graduate Research 2025 (Comparative
> Literature and Languages Department)*
>
>
>
> *Jovana Isevski*
>
>
>
> “Established in 1997 to honor Dr. Jean-Pierre Barricelli, the grant
> encourages highly motivated students to pursue comparative studies in
> literature and another discipline. Awardees receive research support for
> one quarter and the honor of delivering the Annual Barricelli Public
> Lecture in the Department of Comparative Literature and Languages.
> Historically, the selection committee has favored applications from
> students engaged in comparative studies between literature and the arts.
> However, it also welcomes applications from students doing
> interdisciplinary work with literature and the law, science, and other
> disciplines.” https://complitlang.ucr.edu/about/barricelli-award/
>
>
>
>
>
> *Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award 2024-2025 (Department of English,
> two awards for 2024-2025)*
>
>
>
> *Ashley Valle, ENGL 20A "Literature of the British Empire” W25*
>
>
>
> *Gabriela Almandarez, ENGL 20B “Introduction to American Literature and
> Cultural Studies,” F24*
>
>
>
>
>
> *Graduate Scholarship Publication Awards*
>
>
>
> *Amy Duong, recognized for: *
>
>
>
> Review
> <https://www.jprstudies.org/2024/12/review-romantic-escapes-post-millennial-trends-in-contemporary-popular-romance-fiction-ed-by-irene-perez-fernandez-and-carmen-perez-riu/>
>  of *Romantic Escapes: Post-Millennial Trends in Contemporary Popular
> Romance Fiction*, ed. I. Pérez Fernández and C. Pérez Ríu, *Journal of
> Popular Romance Studies* (December 2024).
>
>
>
> *Josie Holland, recognized for:*
>
>
>
> "Leading Towards the Queerest Insurrection: Queer Anarchism and Leadership
> Studies," <https://scholarship.richmond.edu/ijls/vol3/iss1/1/> *Interdisciplinary
> Journal of Leadership Studies*, volume 3, article 1 (2024).
>
>
>
> *Emily Mulvihill, recognized for:   *
>
>
>
> "'The Highway Between Oceans’ in James McCune Smith’s Nicaragua Articles,” *J19:
> The Journal of Nineteenth Century Americanists *(forthcoming).
>
>
>
> *Serafina Paladino, recognized for:*
>
>
>
> Review
> <https://thepolyphony.org/2025/05/09/book-review-autism-in-film-and-television/>
>  of *Autism in Film and Television: On the Island*, ed. M. Pomerance and
> R. B. Palmer, *The Polyphony: Conversations across the Medical Humanities* (May
> 2025).
>
>
>
> *K Persinger, recognized for:*
>
>
>
> “Consuming the Other: Necropolitics, White Violence, and Titan A.E” in *Science
> Fiction Film & Television*, vol. 18, no. 1 (March 2025)
>
>
>
> Review of Hannah Goodwin’s *Stardust: Cinematic Archives at the End of
> the World*, *Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies*, vol. 14, no.
> 1, (Forthcoming).
>
>
>
> *Drew Trinidad, recognized for:*
>
>
>
> Review of Jaya Keaney's *Making Gaybies: Queer Reproduction and
> Multiracial Feeling*, *QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking* (forthcoming Summer
> 2025).
>
>
>
> *Patrick Vincent, recognized for:*
>
>
>
> Review of Evan Brier's *Novel Competition: American Fiction and the
> Cultural Economy, 1965-1999, Western American Literature*, Issue 60.3
> (2025).
>
>
>
> Review of *Italian Science Fiction and the Environmental Humanities*, ed.
> D. A. Finch-Race, et al. *Modern Language Notes*, Issue 140 (2025).
>
>
>
> Co-authored with Lauren White. “Don DeLillo.” *Oxford Bibliographies* in
> “American Literature,” eds J. R. Bryer et al. Oxford University Press
> (2025).
>
>
>
>

-- 

*Lidia Kos*

*Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies*

*Professor of Biomedical Sciences*

951-827-0320 | lidia.kos at ucr.edu

University Office Building (UOB) Room 100

University of California, Riverside, CA 92521
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ucr.edu/pipermail/english-undergrad/attachments/20250617/b4e98b0c/attachment-0001.htm>