Albert Christ-Janer Award – Research Awards

Rielle Navitski

akatki on March 19, 2025

Albert Christ-Janer Creative Research Award 2025

Rielle Navitski, associate professor in the Franklin College Department of Theatre and Film Studies, is a leading scholar in Latin American film and media studies. Her research explores the intersections of cinema and transnational exchange, challenging conventional narratives in film history. She has authored two influential monographs: “Public Spectacles of Violence,” which examines sensational cinema and journalism in early 20th-century Mexico and Brazil, and “Transatlantic Cinephilia,” which investigates networks of film culture between Latin America and France during the mid-20th century. Navitski’s scholarship, based on extensive archival research across multiple countries, has reshaped understandings of Latin American film’s role in global media history. She also has co-edited an open-access textbook on Latinx media and an anthology titled “Cosmopolitan Film Cultures in Latin America, 1896-1960.” Recognized with prestigious fellowships and awards, Navitski’s work continues to advance the fields of film history, cultural studies, and Latin American studies, making a lasting impact on those disciplines.

J. Derrick Lemons

akatki on March 13, 2024

Albert Christ-Janer Creative Research Award

J. Derrick Lemons, associate professor in the Department of Religion, has played a central role in establishing, advancing, and naming a new interdisciplinary sub-field of research: theologically engaged anthropology. A recipient of two major John Templeton Foundation grants, he asserts that theological knowledge can enhance anthropological work on religion, and cultural anthropology can influence theology. His edited book, “Theologically Engaged Anthropology” (Oxford University Press, 2018), is a foundational volume of 20 chapters, many of them authored by senior scholars. This innovative volume places the development of theologically engaged anthropology in an intellectual context and offers a roadmap for developing it. His field-defining success has made him a leading, internationally known mid-career scholar in the humanities and the social sciences. In a new research project, Lemons is developing an ethnographic study exploring relationships between religion and politics in the contemporary world.

Jed Rasula

slquinlan on April 5, 2023

Albert Christ-Janer Creative Research Award 2023

Jed Rasula, scholar, poet, and translator, is Helen S. Lanier Distinguished Professor of English. He is a preeminent scholar of modernism across the arts, and is also widely known as a jazz historian, for which he was awarded a research fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin. His research has been recognized with the prestigious Matei Calinsecu Award from the Modern Language Association for History of a Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernism. He has authored 10 scholarly books, two large anthologies, three poetry collections, and over 150 articles in books and journals. He has delivered more than 70 keynote and invited lectures around the world. His work has been translated into Japanese, German, Spanish, Rumanian and Serbian. His writing is distinguished by the remarkable erudition of his interdisciplinary expertise and a lively jargon-free style, encompassing poetry, prose, art, music, architecture, dance and film, spanning periods from pre-history to the present.

David Starkweather

jennbryant on April 11, 2022

Albert Christ-Janer Creative Research Award 2022

David Starkweather, professor of cello in the Hugh Hodgson School of Music since 1983, has profoundly affected the cello world. He is internationally known as a consummate interpreter of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Six Suites for Violoncello Solo, a keystone of the cello repertoire. Most likely written in 1720, the original manuscript in Bach’s hand is lost. The lack of a clear primary source is an interpretive challenge for cellists. Over three decades, Starkweather has researched, edited and published innovative editions of the Bach suites, culminating in a comprehensive 614-page edition which vertically aligns the various sources line by line. The pdf (optimized for iPad) is navigated with a system of hyperlinks. He meticulously marks all differences in pitch, rhythm, slurs and articulations, allowing performers to make informed choices when grappling with interpretive decisions. This career-capping work seamlessly combines the best of two worlds: meticulous research and practical performance.

Rachel Gabara

ovprweb on April 16, 2021

Albert Christ-Janer Creative Research Award 2021

University of Georgia researcher Rachel Gabara

Rachel Gabara, associate professor of French in the Department of Romance Languages, works at the intersection of cinema studies, African studies and French and Francophone studies. She has expanded our understanding of literature and film from Africa and Europe in rigorous scholarship grounded in extensive archival research supported by the Fulbright Scholar Program and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In a book and a number of essays on autobiographical narrative, transnational modes of nonfiction film, and African cinema in a global context, Gabara has examined the complex connections between the two continents during the colonial and postcolonial eras. She is currently completing a second book, “Reclaiming Realism,” the first comprehensive study of documentary filmmaking in West and Central Africa. Gabara serves as film review editor for the African Studies Review and has organized and facilitated a wide variety of events with African filmmakers and about African cinema.

Richard Menke

ovprweb on April 3, 2020

Albert Christ-Janer Creative Research Award 2020

Richard Menke, associate professor of English, is an innovative scholar of Victorian media studies, creatively crossing traditional disciplinary boundaries between literature and technology. He has transformed how scholars think about relationships between the realist Victorian novel and the era’s emerging media and communication technologies, such as the electric telegraph and wireless telegraphy. These advanced methods and tools presented competition to the written word, not by displacing print but by integrating various literary and technological forms. This new, media-rich world became an important element of storylines and themes in Victorian fiction, shaping forms and content of imaginative writing. By the late 19th century, writers began viewing print as only one media among many. Menke illuminates how these changes were continual, rearranging and rebalancing diverse technologies in an expanding system of media. His body of work demonstrates original and substantive contributions to the study of Victorian literature.

Andrew Zawacki

ovprweb on April 2, 2018

Distinguished Research Professor 2021

Andrew Zawacki, professor in the Department of English, has gained distinction as a poet, translator, editor and critic. He has published five celebrated books of poetry, numerous chapbooks and limited-edition books, and critical essays in prestigious literary journals and a highly visible Poetry Foundation blog. Four of his poetry books have appeared in France in French translation, and another is forthcoming. For many years, he served as co-editor of the international journal Verse, arguably the most important poetry magazine of the last decade. He has edited and translated several volumes of contemporary French and Slovenian poetry. Awarded a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship, a Howard Foundation poetry fellowship and many other honors, he has secured a reputation for his wide knowledge of European history and poetic forms. He continues to innovate, including new explorations of text and image, as photography has become a significant part of his creative practice.

Previous Award

Albert Christ-Janer Creative Research Award 2018

Elizabeth Wright

ovprweb on April 14, 2017

Distinguished Research Professor 2020

Elizabeth Wright, professor of Spanish, is an internationally recognized scholar of Spanish “Golden Age” literature and culture. With more than two decades of energetic, influential and innovative scholarship, she has cast a new light on how Spanish empire building after 1492 transformed the writing practices and literary genres with which individuals and communities made sense of a rapidly changing world. Her current book project, Stages of Servitude: Scenes from the Atlantic Slave Trade, examines how slave trafficking was made socially and economically acceptable in the Spanish world even as rulers and the public acknowledged its cruelty and illegality. But the study also explores how both enslaved and free blacks negotiated economic advancement and even claimed artistic validation. She is also editor of the Bulletin of the Comediantes, the premier scholarly journal devoted to the study of Spain’s Golden Age theater and 2019 winner for Best Journal Design given by the Council for Editors of Learned Journals.

Previous Awards

Albert Christ-Janer Creative Research Award 2019
Creative Research Medal 2017

Ed Pavlić

ovprweb on March 22, 2016

Poet Ed Pavlic standing in front of building

Distinguished Research Professor 2016
Creative Research Award 2016

Ed Pavlić, professor of English and creative writing, is an extraordinarily productive researcher and a gifted poet. Capping an unprecedented decade of creative and scholarly activity, his monograph on the great African-American writer and social critic James Baldwin titled Who Can Afford to Improvise? was published in 2015 by Fordham University Press. In it, Pavlić examines the life, writings and legacy of Baldwin and their relationship to the lyric tradition of black music, from gospel and blues to jazz and R&B. Pavlić also recently published his latest collection of poetry, Let’s Let That Are Not Yet: Inferno, a winner of the prestigious National Poetry Series open competition. This is the fifth title of poetry he has published since joining the faculty at the University of Georgia in 2006. During the same period, he has published more than a dozen scholarly articles and had several earlier essays reprinted in scholarly compendia.

Noel Fallows

on March 2, 2016

Distinguished Research Professor 2015

Noel Fallows is Associate Dean of International and Multidisciplinary Programs and the senior Professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages. Literary critic, historian, translator, and editor, Fallows is one of the foremost authorities in the world in the field of Medieval and Renaissance chivalric culture. His work focuses on Western Europe, with particular emphasis on the Iberian Peninsula. He has published a large number of influential books and articles on topics as varied as jousts, tournaments, military medicine, early equine medicine, knightly cults of wounds, propaganda campaigns, psychological warfare, mounted combat and riding techniques and arms and armor. The clear and accessible style of his books and articles offers a wide range of readers the opportunity to consider social and political questions from the past that remain powerfully resonant today, including questions of war and peace as well as the complexities of relations between Christians and Muslims. His research publications have garnered numerous international awards, and have been widely acclaimed for their innovative interdisciplinary research, meticulous textual analysis, and thorough cultural contextualization.