Inaugural Class of Dean's Research Fellows Announced
A new program designed to recognize exceptional mid-career scholars in the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences has named its first class of faculty fellows.
Six A&S faculty members, identified for their innovative and field-shaping research, scholarship and creative activity, as well as superb records of teaching and service to their departments, the College and the broader community, have been selected for the first cohort of Dean’s Research Fellows.
Appointed for two-year terms, these inaugural Fellows were selected from among the tenured and tenure-track faculty promoted in the last three years (2022–2024):
- Ilse Cleeves (Astronomy)
- Justene Hill Edwards (History)
- Fiona Greenland (Sociology)
- Carmen Lamas (English/American Studies)
- Noel Lobley (Music)
- Marcos Pires (Chemistry)
Ilse Cleeves, Astronomy
An affiliated faculty member in the Department of Chemistry, Ilse Cleeves researches planet formation. This involves studying the physical and chemical structures of protoplanetary disks and the role of nearby stars in these processes. She has led international teams on observational projects for both the ALMA and James Webb Space Telescopes and has successfully applied for highly competitive observation time at both. The winner of a Packard Fellowship, a Cottrell Fellowship, and two UVA Research awards, she is widely regarded as among the very best in her field. Her service record includes using pilot funding from her Cottrell Fellowship to develop a “bridge to the bachelors” program for first-year students; and she co-directs the Girls Exploring the Universe Summer Camp.
Justene Hill Edwards, History
Exploring the intersection of African American history, American economic history, and the history of American slavery, Justene Hill Edwards looks at slavery’s influence on the evolution of African American economic life. She has written two books, including the recently published Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman's Bank (W.W. Norton). It chronicles the rise and fall of the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company and connects the bank's failure to the racial wealth gap and other modern issues. Edwards is also working on A Short History of Inequality, which will interrogate the ways in which inequality has pervaded and structured American life. Her research is supported by a Carnegie Fellowship and a Mellon New Directions Fellowship. A sought after undergraduate and graduate mentor, Edwards serves as a faculty advisor to the Bridge to the Doctorate Program and a leader in the Department of History’s Civil War Seminar. Edwards also serves on the Rotunda Advisory Board of the University of Virginia Press, reviews for journals and presses, and has given many public lectures.
Fiona Greenland, Sociology
A sociologist of culture with interests in interests in nationalism, conflict and cultural policy, Fiona Greenland examined Italy’s centuries-long quest to restitute stolen artworks in her award-winning book, Ruling Culture: Art Police, Tomb Raiders, and the Rise of Cultural Power in Italy. In 2017 and 2020 she received National Science Foundation grants for work on surveillance technology, art theft and the destruction of antiquities. In 2019, she founded the Cultural Resilience Informatics and Analysis Lab (CURIA), where she works with a dynamic interdisciplinary team of faculty and students. Currently, she is studying Ukraine during the full-scale war launched by Russia, with support from the U.S. State Department’s Conflict Observatory. Conducting fieldwork in Ukraine, Greenland has interviewed artists, writers, museum administrators, public officials and everyday Ukrainians in her first experience studying an active war zone. “One of my aims is to learn how community-level practices preserve a sense of shared cultural identity in the midst of onslaught,” Greenland said. “The Dean’s Research Fellowship is critical to the endeavor. It will allow me to hire a research assistant and interpreter, conduct fieldwork for as long as it’s safe to do so, and publish scholarly research and investigative reports.”
Carmen Lamas, English/American Studies
Her 2021 book, The Latino Continuum and the Nineteenth-Century Americas: Literature, Translation and Historiography, was widely acknowledged as the best monograph of the year in Latinx studies and won the 2022 Latin American Studies Association Latinx Studies Section Book Award as well as the 2023 MLA Book Prize in Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies. Lamas won the All-University Teaching Award in 2022 and co-founded the Latinx Studies Association (an academic organization that brings together scholars, students and activists in the study of Latinx concerns). She also co-founded and is co-editing the new open-access journal Pasados: Recovering Histories, Imagining Latinidad and is the co-editor with Miguel Valladares-Llata of the book series Biblioteca Trasatlántica published by Calambur Editorial.
Noel Lobley, Music
As an ethnomusicologist, sound curator and artist, Noel Lobley works across the disciplines of music, anthropology, sound art and composition to develop a series of intrenational platforms for collaborative curation. Lobley has worked with artists, DJs, choreographers, actors and composers in South Africa, the United Kingdom and throughout Europe and the United States to create work in spaces ranging from art galleries, festivals and museums, to schools, rainforests and township street corners. He is the author of Sound Fragments: From Field Recording to African Electronic Stories (Wesleyan University Press, Spring 2022), winner of the Bruno Nettl Prize and Ruth Stone Prize, both awarded by the Society for Ethnomusicology, and the most significant award in his field, the International Association for the Study of Popular Music Book prize. “The award will provide invaluable support for professional production of sound curation platforms working with a remarkable alliance of artists in South Africa, Europe, the U.S. and Australia,” Lobley said. “Design field trips are already being planned for the next five years to develop internationally distributed art commissions. Sound curation is designed to create spaces for solution-oriented dialogues in which new audiences can listen to landscapes, histories and communities."
Marcos Pires, Chemistry
A leader in the field of bacterial chemical biology, Marcos Pires has tackled the problem of how drugs get to and through the cell wall of bacteria. His laboratory develops chemical probes that insert into cell walls during bacterial synthesis that can then be used as direct targets. Promising implications of his work involve the treatment of Lyme disease and Gram-negative bacteria like Salmonella and M. tuberculosis . Pires also serves as the Department of Chemistry’ director of graduate studies and director for the Bridge to the Doctorate program, while serving on NIH study sections and reviewing NSF grants. “On behalf of my lab and my research partners, we are delighted to be the recipient of this award. We anticipate that the funds from this award will catalyze the development of libraries of antibiotics,” Pires said. “This is a critical piece in the platform we are building in the quest to inform the development of next generation antibiotics against drug-resistant bacterial pathogens.”