Michael F. Adams Early Career Scholar

Joseph Kellner

akatki on March 19, 2025

Michael F. Adams Early Career Scholar Award 2025

Joseph Kellner, assistant professor in the Franklin College Department of History, is a historian of the Soviet Union whose research examines the intersection of ideology, belief, and historical change. His forthcoming book, “The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse” (Cornell University Press, June 2025), offers a groundbreaking analysis of the Soviet Union’s collapse, focused on a flourishing of new and radical worldviews that defined the period’s culture. Based on extensive oral history interviews, the book reappraises late Soviet culture and the Soviet legacy in post-Soviet Russia. Kellner is also co-editor of “Red Against Empire: Bolshevik Historians and the Anti-colonial Critique” (University of Toronto Press, expected 2026), which recovers and interprets early Soviet anti-colonial scholarship. A recipient of the Willson Center Research Fellowship and the Virginia Mary Macagnoni Prize for Innovative Research, Kellner is making significant contributions to scholarly debates on Soviet history, cultural identity, and intellectual history.

James Naigus

akatki on March 18, 2024

Michael F. Adams Early Career Scholar Award

James Naigus, assistant professor of horn in the Hugh Hodgson School of Music, seeks to inspire the next generation of musicians and creative thinkers through artistic empowerment and enthusiastic innovation. He continues to impress the international music community as a performer and a prolific composer, with a catalog of over 80 published works. His performances show great attention to detail, musicianship, and the highest standards of his discipline. Naigus’ compositions are performed around the world, providing challenging repertoire for players and engaging experiences for the audience, with more than 350 performances of his works over the past five years by distinguished musicians at venues of note, including the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, widely considered the most prestigious in the United States. His music is audibly appealing and virtuosic while approachable to musicians of varied abilities. Naigus is one of the finest horn instructors in higher education, sought after as a clinician and guest artist/educator at universities and music conferences.

Nora C. Benedict

slquinlan on April 6, 2023

Michael F. Adams Early Career Scholar Award

Nora C. Benedict, assistant professor of Spanish and Digital Humanities, has attained prominence as a scholar of Latin American literature and culture while developing methodologies and tools for digital humanities research. Soon after arriving at UGA in 2019, she launched a digital humanities project to situate Latin American cultural production in an international context beyond the “southern cone” (Argentina, Chile, Uruguay). Her monograph, Borges and the Literary Marketplace: How Editorial Practices Shaped Cosmopolitan Reading, broadens understanding of one of the most intriguing literary creators of the twentieth century, Jorge Luis Borges. Her book charts new ground by delving deeper into his work in the publishing industry of Buenos Aires as a Spanish-language hub for print culture. Currently, she is coediting the Oxford Handbook of Jorge Luis Borges and working on her second single-authored book, Taking a Page from Their Books: Latin American Editors and Global Publishing Trends, which expands understanding of global literary markets.

Emily Koh

jennbryant on April 11, 2022

Michael F. Adams Early Career Scholar Award

Emily Koh, assistant professor of composition in the Hugh Hodgson School of Music, is one of the most active composers of her generation. She has created more than 50 new musical works receiving more than 125 public performances since she arrived at UGA in 2017. Concerts featuring her music have been presented in prestigious venues, including Carnegie Hall, the Juilliard School and the Center for New Music in San Francisco. She recently received a commission from Guerilla Opera, supported by the Opera America Toulmin Commissioning Grant, which will result in a concert-length opera to be premiered in New York and Boston in 2023-2024. Her compositions have appeared on six commercial recordings on important labels including Centaur, ACA Digital and Ravello Records, often featuring world-renowned artists. While her primary focus is composition, her music benefits from her abilities as a professional contrabass player, and she continues to perform throughout the U.S.

Demi Thomloudis

ovprweb on April 16, 2021

Michael F. Adams Early Career Scholar Award 2021

University of Georgia researcher Demi Thomloudis

Demi Thomloudis, assistant professor in the Lamar Dodd School of Art, is an accomplished researcher in the small, intensely competitive field of contemporary jewelry. Her investigation of the human body and its relationship to jewelry have manifested in consistently strong works of art that challenge our assumptions about jewelry and its meaning, power and value. Her research, which explores jewelry’s capacity to express the interrelationship of person and place, has earned her an international reputation in the field, as well as numerous accolades and invitations to participate in prestigious exhibitions and residencies. Over the last five years, she has had four two-person exhibitions and one solo exhibition; invitations to exhibit in 20 internationally recognized group and juried exhibitions; 28 nationally recognized exhibits; and was included in dozens of books, articles, exhibition catalogues, newspapers and online media that have reviewed or reproduced images of her work.

Peter Van Zandt Lane

ovprweb on April 3, 2020

Michael F. Adams Early Career Scholar Award 2020

Peter Van Zandt Lane, assistant professor of music composition in the Hugh Hodgson School of Music, is an internationally recognized composer with impressive accomplishments in concert music, with an emphasis on music for wind ensembles and electroacoustic music. The American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the prestigious Charles Ives Fellowship, noting “at every turn, his propulsive, incisive work is beautifully and confidently made. . . Lane’s music is as inviting as it is sophisticated.” His compositions have appeared on eight commercial recordings by top contemporary classical labels, most recently including soloists with the Atlanta Symphony and New York Philharmonic. His music has been performed at top venues including Carnegie Hall, National Sawdust, the Netherland’s Tivoli Hall and Atlanta’s Woodruff Arts Center. Despite the volume of his creative work, he is a dedicated pedagogue who is fully invested in the success of his students.

Liza Stepanova

ovprweb on March 21, 2019

Creative Research Medal 2021

Liza Stepanova, associate professor of piano in the Hugh Hodgson School of Music, conceived a project in 2017 to respond to anti-immigrant sentiment. After meticulous research including a newly commissioned work, Stepanova gathered works by nine living composers with immigrant backgrounds living and working in the United States. Three years later, the result was her 2020 album E. Pluribus Unum, released on Navona Records, featuring piano works by well-known and established composers plus up-and-coming young artists. As an immigrant herself, she has brought together compositions that address and reflect composers’ origins, immigrant experiences and distinct contributions to American musical life. The album has been praised and reviewed in significant national and international outlets, including all three of the top classical musical journals in the United Kingdom. In this project and others, she reveals a penetrating intellect, a deep sense of purpose, and a commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.

Previous Award

Michael F. Adams Early Career Scholar Award 2019

Emily Sahakian

ovprweb on April 2, 2018

Michael F. Adams Early Career Scholar Award 2018

Emily Sahakian, assistant professor in the Departments of Romance Languages and Theatre and Film Studies, has developed a reputation as one of the foremost experts of French Caribbean theater and is a leading specialist of Francophone theatre. Her book, Staging Creolization: Women’s Theater and Performance from the French Caribbean, illuminates previously neglected Francophone Caribbean women writers who can be considered among the best playwrights of their generation and draws from original research to document the history of their plays’ international production and reception. While scholars have generally framed “creolization” as a linguistic phenomenon, Sahakian theorizes it as a performance-based practice of reinventing meaning and resisting the status quo. Her numerous articles, invited book chapters and conference presentations contribute to the understanding of French Atlantic theatre and the cultural similarities and differences among work by artists from Africa, what is now known as “black France,” the United States, and the Caribbean.

Jamie Kreiner

ovprweb on April 14, 2017

Michael F. Adams Early Career Scholar Award 2017

Jamie Kreiner, assistant professor of history, is an accomplished historian of the early Middle Ages. Her research focuses on the mechanics of culture, including how medieval communities thought that knowledge and commitments were communicated, adopted and affected by other forms of power. Kreiner’s first book, The Social Life of Hagiography, was published in 2014 by Cambridge University Press, the most distinguished press in medieval European history. The book introduces a new way to read a 2,000-year-old literary genre, reshapes our understanding of society in medieval Europe, and shines fresh light on the development of law, finance and ethics in Europe, exposing the very foundations of Europe’s intellectual inheritance. Kreiner has already established an international reputation, and her scholarship has been praised as “pathbreaking” by noted European and American historians for its inspired use of anthropology, narratology and cognitive science to draw new insights from old sources.

Cody Marrs

ovprweb on March 22, 2016

Michael F. Adams Early Career Scholar Award 2016

Cody Marrs, assistant professor of English, is an accomplished junior scholar and author of the recently published book Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil War. In it, Marrs analyzes the writings of four major authors—Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson—whose careers spanned both sides of the conflict. He argues against the traditional division of 19th century literature into either antebellum or postbellum categories, describing these authors as “transbellum.” Marrs is currently working on several related projects, including a second book titled The Civil War: A Literary History. This wide-ranging book is about the war’s cultural afterlife, from the 19th century to the 21st. He is editing a special issue of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies on Melville’s late works. He is also co-editing Timelines of American Literature, a collection of essays that seek to reimagine American literature.