Faculty in Native American Studies, Psychology and English Take Top Awards

Jessica Bissett Perea, an assistant professor in the Department of Native American Studies, has won a 2016 Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty. The award of $30,000 is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and administered by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

perea
Jessica Perea

Its goal is to increase the presence of minority and other faculty members who are committed to eradicating racial disparities and breaking down stereotypes and promoting cross-racial understanding in core fields in the arts and sciences. The yearlong fellowship allows exceptional junior faculty to work on their research in pursuit of tenure. Perea, who has been at UC Davis since 2013, will use the support to complete her first book, Sound Relations: A History of Music, Media, and Indigenous Self-Determination in Alaska.

She is one of only 10 scholars to receive the fellowship and the first from UC Davis. Perea holds a Ph.D. in musicology from UCLA. She has been awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley and support from the Hellman Fellows Program, the UC Institute for Research in the Arts, the UC Center for New Racial Studies and the UC Davis Humanities Institute.

 A native of Alaska, she is a registered member of the Knik Tribe.

Wiebke Bleidorn
Wiebke Bleidorn

Wiebke Bleidorn, an assistant professor of psychology, has been named a 2016 SAGE Young Scholar.

The $5,000 award is given by the Foundation for Personality and Social Psychology, in collaboration with SAGE Publications, to outstanding young researchers in personality and social psychology.

Bleidorn, who joined the UC Davis faculty this academic year, researches the conditions, mechanisms and consequences of personality change. She talks about her research in a Society for Personality and Social Psychology interview. In 2015, she was recognized as Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science. 

Lucy Corin, professor of English and director of the creative writing program, has received a $25,000 creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She was one of 37 fiction and creative non-fiction writers selected for the award from 1,700 applicants. 

Lucy Corin
Lucy Corin

“To write in a way that tries so hard to be unafraid, and be recognized by this organization is very moving to me, and I'm incredibly grateful,” Corin said. “The NEA provides the one way our government directly supports individual writers in their artistic work.”

Corin is author of two short story collections, One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses and The Entire Predicament, and the novel Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls. Her work has appeared in journals including American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Conjunctions and Tin House Magazine, and in anthologies such as New American Stories. She has been the Walter E. Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Margaret Bridgman Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the American Academy of Arts and Letters John Guare Writers Fund Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.

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