Jepson Fellows Awarded from 2004-2019

*All faculty ranks indicated are from the time the individual was selected as a Jepson Fellow.


2022-2023 Academic Year

Swati Agrawal, Assistant Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, ” Characterization of cell death pathways in Kineotplastid parasites.”

Josephine Antwi, Assistant Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, “An assessment of insect pollinators and their associated pollen resources along an urbanization gradient.”

Bridget Brew, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, “Untangling Complexity in Confinement: A Content Analysis of Jail and Prison Websites in the U.S.”

Tyler Frankel, Assistant Professor, Department of Environmental Science, “Assessing the presence, concentrations, and impacts of toxic trace metals near coal ash repositories in Virginia.”

Kashef Majid, Associate Professor, College of Business, “Reducing Waste and Creating a Positive Impact in the Marketplace through Signaling.”

Melissa Wells, Assistant Professor, College of Education, “Preparing Preservice and Early-Career Elementary Teachers for Arts Integration.”

2021-2022 Academic Year

No Jepson Fellows awarded due to COVID

2020-2021 Academic Year (Delayed to 2021-22 due to COVID)

Brenta Blevins, Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication, “Composing in Augmented, Mixed, and Virtual Realities.”

Antonio Causarano, College of Education, “The Social Construction of Disability in Children’s Books. An Analysis of Autism Spectrum Disorders.”

Elizabeth Johnson-Young, Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication, “Birth, Trauma, and Communicating Maternal Health”

Melanie Szulczewski, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, “Metal Contamination in Virginia Soils: A Study of its Speciation, Bioavailability, and Bioaccumulation in Earthworms.”

Parrish Waters, Department of Biological Sciences, ““A Detailed Analysis of Hyperactivity in a Mouse Model of Human Depression.”

2019-2020 Academic Year

Jennifer Barry, Assistant Professor, Department of Classics, Philosophy, and Religion, “A Violence All Her Own: Fantasies of Gender Violence in Late Antiquity.”

Laura Bylenok, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication, “Mycopoeia: Long-form Poetic Sequence and the Figure of the Mycelial Network.”

Andrew Marshall, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, “Algorithm Development for the Formal Analysis of Cryptographic
Protocols and Security Algorithms.”

Ranjit Singh, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science and International Affairs, Landowners and Land Conservation in Stafford County: Research and Course Development.”

2018-2019 Academic Year

Nabil Al-Tikriti, Associate Professor, Department of History and American Studies, “Intellectual Origins of Ottoman Theology.” NOTE: Nabil Al-Tikriti elected to accept a Fulbright Fellowship and thus declined the Jepson Fellowship.

Belleh Asa’ah Fontem, Assistant Professor, College of Business, “Dynamic Learning and Pricing with Time-Inconsistent Customer Behavior”

Kate Haffey, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication, “Bloomsbury, Modernism, and the Ethics of Queer Friendship.

Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich, Assistant Professor, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, “Composing the Exiled Self: German and Austrian-Jewish Memoirs of Life under the Third Reich.”

Jon Pineda, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication, “Completion of a New Novel.” NOTE: Jon Pineda resigned from UMW prior to the start of his awarded Jepson Fellowship.

Sushma Subramanian, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication, “Elaine Morgan’s Aquatic Ape: How Storytelling Shapes Science.”

2017-2018 Academic Year

Shumona Dasgupta, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication, Locating Violence: The Partition in South Asian Literature, Culture and Film”

Daniel Hirshberg, Assistant Professor, Department of Classics, Philosophy, and Religion, Analyzing, Translating, and Teaching the Renowned Testament of the Lotus-Born from Tibet.

Davis Oldham, Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry, Development of a method for the enzymatic separation of chiral esters”

Jason Sellers, Assistant Professor, Department of History and American Studies (History, College of Arts and Sciences), Embodied Landscapes: Lenape Indians and the Origins of Race in Colonial America”

Jennifer Walker, Assistant Professor, College of Education, “The Impact of a Critical Friends Group Professional Development Model on Pre-Service Teachers’ Development of Functional Behavior Assessments and Behavior Intervention Plans”

Ping Yin, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, “Using Geographic Information System (GIS) to Analyze the Spatial Accessibility and Utilization of Prenatal Care in Georgia, U.S.A”

2016-2017 Academic Year

Maria Laura Bocaz Leiva, Assistant Professor, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Jose Donoso: the Writer Behind The Obscene Bird of Night”

Antonia Delgado-Poust, Assistant Professor, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Redrafting Literary Feminism in Spain: Recurring Missteps, Fissured Memories, and Maternal Legacies in the Contemporary Peninsular Novel

Caitlin Finlayson, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, The Geography and Environmental Impacts of Consumer Food Preferences”

Ian Finlayson, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, Development of a Programming Language for Teaching Parallel Computing”

Jon McMillan, Assistant Professor, Department of Art and Art History, Sustainable Ceramic Kiln Design, Construction and Firing”

Laura Mentore, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Still Searching for “El Dorado”: Conservation, Mining, and the Quest to Extract Value from Amazonian Peoples and Environments

Victoria Russell, Assistant Professor, College of Education, Questing to Inclusive Practice: Using Gaming Mechanics and Structures to Support Development of Inclusive Practices in General Education Pre-Service Teachers

2015-2016 Academic Year

Eric Bonds, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, U.S. Think Tanks and National Climate Change Policy”

Janine Davis, Assistant Professor, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, I Never Thought of it Like That”: Preservice Teachers and Professional Identity Development via Twitter

Mindy Erchull, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, Empowering Woman and Girls: A New Psychology of Women Textbook”

Nora Kim, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Immigration and East Asian nation-States: A Comparative Study of Ethnic and National Boundary Making in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea”

Janie Lee, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication, Ideology of Moral Citizenship in U.S. Naturalization Documents”

Will Mackintosh, Assistant Professor, Department of History and American Studies,  Selling the Sights:Tourism and the Commodification of Experience in the Nineteenth Century

2014-2015 Academic Year

Courtney Clayton, Assistant Professor, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, “Using Action Research to Improve Instruction for English Language Learners”

Wei Chen, Assistant Professor, College of Business, “The First Two Years of Nascent Entrepreneurs”

Chris Garcia, Assistant Professor, College of Business,  “Segmentation and Factor Models for Enhancing Social Media Impact”

Hai Nguyen, Assistant Professor, Department of Physics,  “Exploring the Off Resonant Faraday Effect to Slow Light Down”

Xiaofeng Zhao, Associate Professor, College of Business, “Applying the theory of constraints to lean supply chain integration”

2013-2014 Academic Year

Theresa Grana, Assistant Professor, Department of Biological Sciences,  Characterizing New Nematodes and Extending Opportunities for UMW Students to Experience Science and Find New Species”

Maria-Isabel Martinez-Mira, Assistant Professor, Department of Modern Foreign Languages, Language, Gender, Law and Women’s Authority in Spain

Zach Whalen, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication,  A is for Atari: A Critical History of Videogame Textuality”

2012-2013 Academic Year

Janet Asper, Associate Professor, Department of Chemistry,  Development of Super-absorbing Organic Gellants for Crude Oil, and a Polymer Themed Organic Chemistry Laboratory Curriculum”

Julius N. Esunge, Assistant Professor Professor, Department of Mathematics,  Minimizing Insurance Company Risk in a Random Framework”

Ben LaBreche, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication ,  “Liberty Agonistes: The Problem of Freedom in the Age of Milton”

 Jangwoon (Leo) Lee, Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics, A Domain Decomposition Method for Mathematical Models with Random Input Data”

Jason Matzke, Assistant Professor, Department of Classics, Philosophy, and Religion, Between Civil Disobedience and Burning Rage: Reframing Radical Environmental Activism within Deliberative Democracy”

Colin Rafferty, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication, Beyond Truth: A False Memoir in Literature and Culture”

2011-2012 Academic Year

Surupa Gupta, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science and International Affairs, “Anticipating globalization: the politics and economics of farm sector restructuring in India” 

Jason James, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, “Between Monument Avenue and Lumpkin’s Jail: Slavery and Race in Richmond’s Commemorative Landscape” 

 Mary Elizabeth Mathews, Associate Professor, Department of Classics, Philosophy, and Religion, “’Every Grace That Brings You Nigh’: African Americans, Fundamentalists, and the Great Migration” 

Gary N. Richards, Associate Professor, Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication,  “A Queer Quarter: Literary Imaginings of Gay New Orleans” 

Jess M. Rigelhaupt, Assistant Professor, Department of History and American Studies,  “Building A Popular Front: Civil Rights, Unions, and Workers’ Education in the Mid-Twentieth Century (And How the San Francisco Bay Area Got to Be the Way It Is)

2010-2011 Academic Year

Ben Odhiambo Kisila, Associate Professor, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, “Isotopic analysis of soil erosion, sediment yields and potential pollutants pathways in the Rappahannock River basin, a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay system 

Jeremy Larochelle, Assistant Professor, Department of Modern Foreign Languages, Antologia de poesia amazonica reciente: del pensamiento amazonico a la ecologia/Critical Anthology of Recent Amazonian Poetry: From Amazonian Thought to Ecology” 

Emile Lester, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science and International Affairs, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and Liberal Regime Analysis

Jessica Locke, Assistant Professor, Department of Modern Foreign Languages, The Mary/Eve Dichotomy in Contemporary Mexican Literature

Maya Mathur, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication, From the Elizabethan Clown to the Jacobean Wit: Comic Economies in Early Modern England

Charles Sharpless, Associate Professor, Department of Chemistry, Applying the Undoing Hypothesis to the Cognitive Domain

2009-2010 Academic Year

Robert Barr, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science and International Affairs, Understanding Populism”

Antonio Barrenechea, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication, America Unbound: Hemispheric Legacies in the Postwar Novel

 Stephen Davies, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, Modeling Subjectivity in Database Exploration

Steven E. Harris, Assistant Professor, Department of History and American Studies, “Moving to the Separate Apartment: Mass Housing and the Crisis of Rising Expectations in Soviet Russia Under Khrushchev and Brezhnev”

H. Nicole Myers, Associate Professor of Education (CGPS), The University of Mary Washington Autism Clinic: Creating a Collaborative Authentic Learning Experience to Benefit Community, Colleagues, and Children

Holly Schiffrin, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Applying the Undoing Hypothesis to the Cognitive Domain

2008-2009 Academic Year

Paul D. Fallon, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Linguistics, and Speech, Reduplication in the Blin Language”

Randall D. Helmstuttler, Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics, Topology from the Categorical Point of View

Craig T. Naylor, Associate Professor, Department of Music, “Chickadee Symphony: An Ethological Approach to Composition”

Marcel P. Rotter, Assistant Professor, Department of Modern Foreign Languages, If you Can’t Enlist–Invest:’ Visual Strategies of Germany, Austria, Great Britain, and the United States in the War Bond Campaigns of World Wars I and II

Farhang Rouhani, Associate Professor, Department of Geography, “Geographies of exile: Media, mobility, and home among Iranians in the United States”

Dorothy C. Suskind, Assistant Professor, Department of Education, Gifted Education in the Regular Classroom: A Social Studies Research Unit in a Low-Income, Third Grade Classroom” NOTE: Dorothy Suskind resigned from UMW in July 2008.

  2007-2008 Academic Year

Karen Anewalt Cockrell, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, “Connecting the Dots: Developing Interdisciplinary Project Modules for Computer Science Courses”

Suzanne de Janasz, Associate Professor of Leadership and Management, Integrating Service Learning into Business Education to Develop Leadership, Social Responsibility, and Communities”

Thomas D. Fallace, Assistant Professor, Department of Education, “John Dewey in the Educational Imagination”

Susan Fernsebner, Assistant Professor, Department of History and American Studies, “Material Choreographies: China’s Participation in World’s Fairs and Expositions”

Scott M. Powers, Assistant Professor, Department of Modern Foreign Languages, “The Secularization of Evil in Modern French Literature”

Federico Schneider, Assistant Professor, Department of Modern Foreign Languages,  “The Healing Agenda in Literature and the Arts”

2006-2007 Academic Year

Christofer C. Foss, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Linguistics, and Speech, “A New Edition of Toru Dutt’s Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan”

Elizabeth Franklin Lewis, Associate Professor, Department of Modern Foreign Languages, “The Concept of Caridad in the Literature of Spain: Origins, Expressions, and Applications”

Keith Mellinger, Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics, “New Classes of Optical Orthogonal Codes from Finite Geometry”

Jennifer A. Polack Wahl, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, “Designing Computer Technology Learning Modules in the K-12 Curriculum”

NOTE: Stephen J. Farnsworth, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science and International Affairs, was selected for a Jepson Fellowship in 2006-2007 but will instead serve as a Fulbright Fellow for the full academic year.

2005-2006 Academic Year

Alejandro Cervantes-Carson, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, “Sexuality, Human Rights, and the Decentering of Heterosexuality: A Book Project”

Jason W. Davidson, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science and International Affairs, “Signaling Resolve in Contemporary American Foreign Policy”

Jeff Edmunds, Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics, “New Mathematical Models in the Study of Competing Species”

Li-Hsiang Lisa Rosenlee, Assistant Professor, Department of Classics, Philosophy, and Religion, “Confucian Feminism – A Feminist Ethic in the Making” NOTE: Lisa Rosenlee resigned from UMW in July 2006.

 2004-2005 Academic Year

Dawn S. Bowen, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, “Residential Segregation in an African-American Community: An Examination of the Jackson Ward Neighborhood in Richmond, Virginia, 1900-1930”

Andrew Dolby, Assistant Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, “Extra Pair Mating and the Reproductive Biology of the Gray Catbird (Dumetella carolinensis)”

Christina Kakavá, Associate Professor, Department of English, Linguistics, and Speech, “Power, Ideology, and Identity in Conflict Talk”

Susan C. Matts, Assistant Professor, Department of Physics, “Understanding Electronic Conduction in Microelectronic Conductors”

Debra Schleef, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, “Latinos in Dixie: Assimilation and Ethnic Identity in Richmond”