Faculty Awards

Felicia Ishino – 2023

Felicia Ishino is the Executive Director of Sankofa Impact, a Seattle-based nonprofit dedicated to confronting racism and resistance through place-based learning experiences. She has over 20 years of experience in educational settings ranging from elementary schools to higher education. With her passions for history, immersive learning and social justice, Ishino empowered students to become agents of change in their communities.

Ishino’s Spring 2023 Honors course, Locating Racism and Resistance, raised awareness of historical events impacting systems of racism and oppression in the United States.

More About Felicia Ishino

Ariana Cantu – 2022

Ariana Cantu is a popular lecturer in UW’s School of Social Work with an MSW in Social Work and Administration. She has extensive experience teaching and counseling diverse populations and facilitating anti-racism and equity-centered practices. Cantu is committed to intersectional social justice and used her award teach and develop new curriculum that grounds students in grassroots community activism. Cantu teaches students from all backgrounds how to communicate research and recommendations using a hands-on, project-based approach. Her Honors seminar, Community Inclusion and Equity in the Changing Public Realm, critically examined changes in local neighborhoods in an effort to support collaborative equity and inclusion efforts in Seattle and King County.

Velma Veloria – 2019-2021

Velma Veloria, Director of Advocacy and Mobilization for the Equity in Education Coalition, joined the Honors Program in 2019 as our first Curriculum and Community Innovation Scholar.

As the first Asian-American woman to be elected to the Washington State Legislature, Veloria contributed her a rich history of grassroots leadership and advocacy expertise. During her two-year appointment, Veloria created courses about civic activism and human trafficking, engaged students in cultural exploration of Seattle’s International District, and lead conversations around to get involved and make change.

Daniel Bessner – U.S. Foreign Affairs – 2020-2022

Daniel Bessner is an associate professor in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies and was previously the Anne H.H. and Kenneth B. Pyle Professor in American Foreign Policy.  He is also a non-resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and a Contributing Editor at Jacobin. Bessner’s Hanauer appointment reflected his intellectual leadership, energetic and innovative teaching style, and impressive commitment to improving popular understanding of the history, challenges and opportunities of U.S. foreign policy. Bessner’s continual desire to create an intelligent, compassionate world where all people are treated equally guides his contributions to scholarship and public discourse. His impressive library of published works, which have appeared in venues such as The New York Times, Washington Post, and Guardian, may be found on his website.

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María Elena García – CHID; Anthropology – 2018-2020

María Elena García is associate professor in the Comparative History of Ideas program and the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. She received her PhD in Anthropology at Brown University and has been a Mellon Fellow at Wesleyan University and Tufts University. Her first book, Making Indigenous Citizens: Identities, Development, and Multicultural Activism in Peru (Stanford, 2005) explores Indigenous and intercultural politics in the Andes. Her second book, Culinary Spectacles: Gastro-Politics, and Other Tales of Race and Species in Peru (under contract with the University of California Press), examines the intersections of race, species, and capital in contemporary Peru. 

More About María Elena García

Bill Talbott – Philosophy – 2016-2018

Bill Talbott has taught philosophy at the University of Washington since 1989. He focuses on moral and political philosophy, especially the philosophy of human rights, and epistemology.

In 2011, Talbott won the UW Distinguished Teaching Award. He has been a member of the Steering Committee for the UW Center for Human Rights since the Center’s founding in 2009 and he is a co-founder and co-principal investigator of the tri-campus research cluster on Human Interactions and Normative Innovation (HI-NORM), which is part of an international network of scholars doing research related to human rights.

Robin Stacey – History – 2014-2016

Robin Chapman Stacey (ret.) is a specialist in medieval history and law, particularly of early Ireland and Wales. She has been at the University of Washington since 1988, and is the author of a variety of books and articles on topics pertaining to Celtic studies. Her research has been supported by grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies, and she is a past winner of the UW’s Distinguished Teaching Award.

Her most popular classes included “Myths and Mysteries of the Middle Ages;” “Celtic Civilizations;” “Medieval Women,” and “Reading Tolkien,” a class that she developed originally for Honors students.

José Antonio Lucero – Jackson School of International Studies – 2012-2014

José Antonio (Tony) Lucero is Chair of Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the principal organizer of the 2012-13 John E. Sawyer Seminar in Comparative Culture at the University of Washington, funded by the Mellon Foundation. A graduate of Stanford (BA, Political Science) and Princeton (MA/PhD, Politics) Lucero has also studied at the Universitá di Firenze and the Colegio de México. He teaches courses on international political economy, cultural interactions, social movements, Latin American politics, and borderlands.

Located at the intersections of political and cultural analysis, his research examines the encounters between Western and Indigenous political projects in the Americas and has been supported by external grants from funders including the National Science Foundation, Fulbright, the Ford Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. Lucero is the author of Struggles of Voice: The Politics of Indigenous Representation in the Andes, a work that puts canonical Western theories of political order (including those of Hobbes, Burke, Gramsci, and Foucault) in dialogue with the praxis of indigenous social movements.

He is currently working on research projects on the cultural politics of (1) conflicts between Awajún/Wampis Indigenous communities and the filmmaker Werner Herzog in Peru (2) human rights activism, religion, and Indigenous politics on the Mexico-US border. He is co-editor of theOxford Handbook of Indigenous Peoples Politics (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) and co-author of several works with fellow UW Professor María Elena García (CHID), the most recent of which is their son José Antonio Simón Lucero-García (future UW Class of 2033). 

Ken Clatterbaugh – Philosophy – 2010-2012

Professor Ken Clatterbaugh has served as Chairman of the Department of Philosophy since 1996. His current scholarly interests include: the development of philosophical ideas about causation, especially at the beginning of modern science; how social movements come into being and why they fade away; and the interaction between religion and civil society.

His books include: The Causation Debate in Modern Philosophy 1637-1739; and, Contemporary Perspectives on Masculinity, Men, Women, and Politics in Modern Society. He is currently at work on a satirical book about religion. Conversations with undergraduate students are the favorite parts of his day. He will be serving as the Joff Hanauer Professor in Western Civilization for 2010-2012. 

Leroy Searle – English; Comparative Literature – 2008-2010

The first holder of the Joff Hanauer Honors Professorship in Western Civilization is Leroy Searle, a professor in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature. Professor Searle’s areas of specialization include American Literature, Computer Aided Instruction, and Literary Criticism and Theory. Like Heracles at the crossroad in Greek mythology, Leroy had to make a choice after college: the study of genome science or English literature. Although he chose the latter, his breadth of interests, including science, computer programming, the arranging and performance of music, not to mention motorcycle maintenance, makes him a great model for thinking across and beyond academic disciplines. He offered his inaugural course in Honors, “Traditions of Justice,” in spring of 2009 and focused on the central place accorded to the idea of justice in the intellectual and cultural traditions of the West, with attention paid to justice as an ethical and religious concept, as the foundation for the rule of law, and as reflected in literature and art.

• 2017-18
  Joel Walker
  History
• 2016-17
  Jon Herron
  Biology
• 2015-16
  Clare Bright
  Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies
• 2014-15
  Theo Myhre
  School of Law
• 2013-14
  Jon Herron
  Biology
• 2012-13
  Frances McCue
  English
• 2011-12
  Andrew Loveless
  Mathematics
• 2010-11
  Zev Handel
  Asian Languages & Literature
• 2009-10
  Lisa Schultz
  Art History
• 2008-09
  Eugene Edgar
  Education
• 2007-08
  Stewart Tolnay
  Sociology
• 2006-07
  James Allen Morrow
  Mathematics
• 2005-06
  Mary Pat Wenderoth
  Biology
• 2004-05
  Bob Dumas
  Philosophy
• 2003-04
  Steven Herbert
  Law, Societies, and Justice
• 2002-03
  Jon Herron
  Zoology
• 2001-02
  Clarke Speed
  Anthropology