Our own Dr.s Ezgi Sertler and Leslie Simon have been awarded the 2023 Dean's Award of Inclusion and Excellence in Scholarship, respectively!
Dr. Sertler's commitment to inclusion is deep. She has built her scholarly career around the ethics and epistemology of immigration. Here at UVU, her service is also geared toward issues of inclusion. She is a member of the executive committee for the UVU Refugee Initiative Task Force (working with the Multicultural center); was the lead facilitator for the Foundations of Inclusion Gender Workshop in fall of 2022; is a member of the Peace and Justice Studies Executive Committee, the CHSS Inclusion Committee, and coordinates the Gender Studies program.
Dr. Sertler attained a CHSS inclusion grant to support the Inclusive Knowledge Series, bringing Dr. Ayanna Spencer’s expertise on Black Girl Survivors and Dr. Youjin Kong’s expertise on artificial intelligence and social justice. She also attained a Civic Thought and Leadership grant to organize a panel of four refugee organizations from Utah. Because of this panel, a UVU student secured an internship with the International Rescue committee, and a college readiness program for UVU refugee students is in progress because of this panel. Finally, through the Civic Thought and Leadership Grant, UVU students had the honor of attending a public lecture on Ethics and Global Refugee Crisis with Dr. Serena Parekh.
As for Dr. Simon, over the past year she has continued work on several major scholarly works, most notably an article solicited by the prominent journal Dickens Studies Annual, entitled “Orphaned Objects: Little Dorrit and The Rise of Pure Mathematics” and her book-length manuscript Heaps: On Dickens and Modern Mathematics.
In addition to her own work, Dr. Simon also worked extensively with students on two major projects. She completed final revisions of an extensive (87-page) journal article, “Recent Dickens Studies: 2020" published in Dickens Studies Annual, v. 53. Those students are: Sara White, Anna Blaser, Jodie Chadwick, Mattie Morrison, Katrina DeKarver, Collin McNeal, William Green, Claire Hunsaker, Sydney Creer, and other members of the Fall 2021 "Filthy Victorians" seminar. Of the project, she writes:
I had an article due to a journal—a review of all Dickens scholarship published in 2020—that I sought students' help with. Together, we read, annotated, and reviewed around 170 scholarly articles, books, and online resources; and with the students' help, I published a nearly 100-paged article in the Dickens Studies Annual . Working with students on this paper proved to be one of the most beneficial and enjoyable teaching experiences of my career, and it has charted a new course for my upper-level teaching: why not always set a collaborative research project as our course goal? The students universally remarked that they learned more in our three intensive weeks of research/writing together than they had in many semesters of writing in other classes. So did I, and my teaching moving forward will take note.
The other project is in two parts. One is a paper on Great Expectations that was written collaboratively in the Narrative Studies class in Fall 2022, “Pip in Purgatory,” a narratological reading of the novel; and the other is on the experience of writing a collaborative research paper in the undergraduate classroom, “Writing About Pip.” Dr. Simon is still working with Collin McNeal, Anna Blaser, Victoria Morrison, and Gracen Breeze on both projects, to be presented at the Dickens Symposium in Rochester this summer, and hopefully published thereafter.
Congratulations, Ezgi and Leslie!