Five A&S Faculty Selected as Shannon Fellows
UVA's Shannon Center Mid-Career Fellowship Program recognizes outstanding mid-career tenured faculty members and provides support funds to advance their research, scholarship and special projects. Each fellow receives a $20,000 bonus in recognition of their accomplishments as well as a $50,000 research fund for use during their three-year terms as Shannon Fellows
The new 2026 class of Shannon Fellows includes five A&S faculty members:
Andrew Kahrl, Professor of History and African American and African Studies
Kahrl’s scholarship on race, taxation and land in the 20th-century United States has earned him a national audience beyond academia. His 2024 book, The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America won the Urban Affairs Association’s 2026 Best Book in Urban Affairs Award, the Association of American Law Schools’ 2026 Order of the Coif Book Award and the Urban History Association’s 2025 Lizabeth Cohen Prize for the best book on cities and political power. It also was a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, in the history category, and received an honorable mention for the Urban History Association’s 2025 Kenneth Jackson Award for Best Book in North. American Urban History.
Kahrl’s other published works since joining UVA in 2014 include nine peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, the 2022 government report African American Outdoor Recreation: A National Historic Landmarks Theme Study, and the 2018 book, Free the Beaches: The Story of Ned Coll and the Battle for America’s Most Exclusive Shoreline (Yale University Press). His course, “Race and Real Estate,” is among the most popular lecture courses in the College.
Emily Ogden, Professor of English
A leading scholar of 19th-century American literature and the essay form, Ogden has published five books, nine peer-reviewed articles and more than 15 op-ed columns and essays for publications ranging from The New York Times to The Yale Review and Liberties. Her 2018 book, Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism (University of Chicago Press), examined the spread and boom of a belief in mind control, spirit travel, clairvoyance and other forms of mesmerism in American culture up until the Civil War. It was a finalist for the American Academy of Religion Award for Best First Book in the history of religions category and a finalist for the Phillip J. Pauly Prize in the History of Science.
Her latest book, Darkness Becomes Bright: On the Brief Life and Immortal Art of Edgar Allan Poe is scheduled for publication this year by Viking Penguin and interweaves stories from Poe’s mysterious and tragic life with those of his most famous readers and translators. Ogden has been the recent recipient of several prestigious recognitions, including a 2024 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant and 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Oludamini Ogunnaike, Associate Professor of Religious Studies
A researcher of African religions who specializes in Sufism and Yoruba Orisa traditions, Ogunnaike is a field-defining scholar as well as a published poet who recently gave a reading at the Library of Congress for its “Conversations with African Poets” series. His published works since 2023 include 13 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters (with nine more in production), a podcast series titled “The Logic of the Birds: Exploring Sufi Poetry and Poetics,” as well as the 2024 book, The Book of Clouds (Fons Vitae Press) featuring translations and original poems. His forthcoming book, Curls in the Night of Meaning (SUNY Press) features original translations and close analysis of Sufi religious love poems.
Praised as an emerging major scholar of Sufism, Ogunnaike has received the 2025-26 Library of Arabic Literature Translation Grant, the UVA Center for Global Inquiry and Innovation’s 2024-25 Global Program of Distinction Grant, and the 2022-24 Art Seeking Understanding Grant from the Templeton Religion Trust. Ogunnaike also received the 2021 Outstanding First Book Prize of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) for his 2020 book, Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions (Penn State University Press).
Xin Cynthia Tong, Associate Professor of Psychology
Tong’s prolific and influential research exists at the intersection of quantitative methodology and data science. She is recognized as a leading voice in Bayesian and longitudinal data science, a field whose methods underpin empirical research across psychology, medicine, education and the social sciences. She has published 32 journal articles, eight book chapters, multiple software packages, and a planned textbook under contract. Her work has appeared in Psychological Methods, Structural Equation Modeling, Multivariate Behavioral Research, Behavior Research Methods and Child Development.
Tong was elected a fellow of the American Psychological Association in 2025 and received UVA's All-University Teaching Award in 2024. She also has been recognized as a Mead Honored Faculty member for excellence in student mentorship. As a principal investigator, she has secured nearly $800,000 in external funding for Bayesian longitudinal modeling in education sciences and an NSF award for robust Bayesian quantile analysis. She has been elected president of the International Society for Data Science and Analytics and serves as co-chair of the LIFE Program, a prestigious joint Ph.D. initiative of the Max Planck Institute, three European universities, the University of Michigan, and UVA.
Huiyuan Zhu, Associate Professor of Chemistry
Zhu’s early work established her as one of the most highly regarded early-career chemists in the country. As principal investigator of the Nano Energy and Environmental Catalysis Lab, she has built a research program focused on developing a greater understanding of how atomic structure governs catalyst performance, with direct applications to energy conversion and chemical transformation. In her three years at UVA, Zhu has authored 19 peer-reviewed publications, adding to a career total that now exceeds 65 publications, placing her among the most influential researchers in her field.
Zhu also holds a patent for multimetallic nanoparticle catalysts. In 2025, she filed a provisional patent for an electrochemically driven water denitrification process. Since coming to UVA, Zhu has received a 2022 NSF CAREER Award, a 2023 Sloan Research Fellowship, Kavli Fellowships in both 2024 and 2025, and the 2025 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award.