College of Liberal Arts and Sciences names Buckley, Heitzman, Shaw as Dean's Scholars

Thursday, April 4, 2019

The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has named three faculty members to the honor of Dean’s Scholar. Dean’s Scholar awards recognize faculty for excellence as evidenced in their promotion record at the time of their candidacy for tenure. The 2019-21 Dean’s Scholars are Jennifer Buckley of the Department of English, Kendall Heitzman of the Department of Asian and Slavic Languages and Literatures; and Scott Shaw of the Department of Chemistry.

Joe Kearney, interim dean of the college, said the three new Dean's Scholars are outstanding teachers and researchers.

"I am delighted that the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is recognizing Professors Buckley, Heitzman, and Shaw as Dean's Scholars," Kearney said. "Their achievements are extraordinary, and I look forward to hearing of their further accomplishments."

Jen BuckleyDean's Scholar Jennifer Buckley, who joined the Department of English faculty in 2011, teaches, researches, and writes about modern and contemporary drama, theater, and performance art in Europe, the U.K., and the U.S. In her first book, Beyond Text: Theater and Performance in Print after 1900 (University of Michigan Press, 2019), Buckley details the complex relationship between text and performance within and among the avant-gardes. In her second book manuscript, Act Without Words: Speechless Performance on Modern Stages, she examines why and how the concept of a “language” of gesture has attracted theater artists, writers, and theorists disenchanted with the capacity of spoken and written language to represent human experience. Her published articles and essays range in subject from Bernard Shaw’s comedies to Forced Entertainment’s digital performances. A Collegiate Teaching Award recipient in 2018, Buckley earned the PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 2011.

Kendall HeitzmanDean's Scholar Kendall Heitzman joined the Department of Asian and Slavic Languages and Literatures—a unit of the Division of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures—in 2012, the same year he earned the PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures from Yale University. His forthcoming book Enduring Postwar: Yasuoka Shōtarō and Literary Memory in Japan (Vanderbilt University Press, 2019) examines the postwar writer Yasuoka Shōtarō (1920-2013) and the individual writer’s relationship to history and collective memory through the lens of memory studies. He is currently researching two projects: one on second-generation war narratives—the vast body of written and visual texts that continue to be produced in surprising numbers even today by people with no direct memory of World War II or the early postwar period—and another on the history of Japanese writers in the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. His translations and articles on contemporary Japanese literature have appeared in the US-Japan Women’s Journal, Mechademia, Introducing Japanese Popular Culture (Routledge, 2018), and the Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature (2016). He is a co-PI for the university's Institutional Project Support (IPS) grant from the Japan Foundation, which has funded an array of Japan-related programming and research at the UI over the past three years. 

Scott ShawDean's Scholar Scott K. Shaw earned his PhD in 2008 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He later held two Marie Curie research positions in the United Kingdom, and was awarded a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship, which he spent at the University of Arizona. He joined the Department of Chemistry faculty at Iowa in 2012. In addition to teaching analytical chemistry courses, Shaw leads a research group that includes ten graduate students and four undergraduate students, investigating the structures and functions of chemical interfaces and thin films using spectroscopy, (probe) microscopy, electrochemistry, and many other analytical techniques. Major current projects include measuring the structure and properties of ionic liquid interfaces, developing chemical systems for CO2 recycling, and linking the architectures of environmental interfaces to roles in mediating fate and transport of persistent organic pollutants. These projects are currently supported by the National Science Foundation, American Chemical Society, Research Corporation for Science Advancement, and the Department of Defense. Shaw also leads the Rural Scholar’s program at Iowa, which introduces several first-year students to STEM research each year by guiding them in genuine laboratory investigations of their own design. He received the Cottrell Scholar Award from Research Corporation for Science Advancement in 2016, and a National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2017.

 


The University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences offers about 70 majors across the humanities; fine, performing and literary arts; natural and mathematical sciences; social and behavioral sciences; and communication disciplines. About 15,000 undergraduate and nearly 2,000 graduate students study each year in the college’s 37 departments, led by faculty at the forefront of teaching and research in their disciplines. The college teaches all Iowa undergraduates through the college's general education program, CLAS CORE. About 80 percent of all Iowa undergraduates begin their academic journey in CLAS. The college confers about 60 percent of the university's bachelor's degrees each academic year.