College of Humanities Faculty Honored for Exemplary Service, Teaching, Research
Distinguished Faculty Service Award – Mark Bergstrom
This award honors a COH faculty member who has demonstrated a sustained service commitment to the University and/or community service.
It is our pleasure to recognize Mark Bergstrom, associate professor of Communication
and Director of the Taft-Nicholson Center, for this award. Mark Bergstrom joined the
Communication department in 1995. Since 2004 when he was first appointed associate
dean, Mark has served the college in various capacities: as associate dean, on two
occasions as Acting Dean, as co-Chair of the Department of Communication, and currently
serving as the Director of the Taft-Nicholson Center. Mark has served the college
with energy, ingenuity and generosity.
Mark’s record of service has had a profound impact on our college. From leading the establishment of the Environmental Humanities Program, to serving as University Project Coordinator for the development of the Carolyn Tanner Irish Humanities Building, to directing the Taft-Nicholson Center, he has truly changed the shape of Humanities at the University of Utah.
Kent Ono, professor of Communication, notes, “Mark’s ability and willingness to do it all is what separates his service contributions from all the rest. It is what makes him worthy of this award …. this is the extraordinary nature of his contributions, the longevity (and continuity) of them. By taking on both official service appointments and all of the behind-the-scenes, mundane, tedious work throughout the various stages of the College’s history, Mark has been the glue that has kept the College together. The depth of his service commitment—which extends through three decades with the Department and dates to 1995—is immutable, exemplary, and a high bar by which the standards of the Department and the College have been raised.”
Distinguished Scholar in the Humanities Award – Danielle Endres
The Distinguished Scholar in the Humanities award recognizes significant scholarly accomplishments and research contributions by College of Humanities tenured faculty.
Danielle is a professor in the Department of Communication and Director of the Environmental
Humanities Graduate Program. She joined the Department of Communication as an assistant
professor in 2005 and was promoted to full professor in 2017. Danielle’s has a remarkably
productive record of scholarship in her disciplinary field, which include: (1) environmental
communication/rhetoric; (2) nuclear colonization and nuclear decolonization of Indigenous
lands; (3) domestic and international energy transitions in marginalized communities;
(4) ecological restoration of Indigenous lands; and (5) environmental justice. Dr.
Endres has published 2 books, 3 edited books, 1 textbook, 29 peer-reviewed authored
or co-authored articles, and 28 peer-reviewed authored or co-authored book chapters,
6 popular-press articles, and 3 publicly oriented products.
Danielle has also been very successful in securing funding for her research. She has been awarded four National Science Foundation grants and one grant from the Department of Energy. Brett Clark, professor of Sociology and faculty in the Environmental Humanities Graduate Program, notes that: “Such awards are generally unusual for a rhetorical scholar. Her most recent grants from the National Science Foundation support her ongoing work in Puerto Rico examining avenues for advancing energy transition and in northern Utah studying the ecological restoration efforts of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation on the Bear River Massacre site.” She has also been awarded two dozen intramural grants and fellowships. She has received six awards, including the Stephen P. Depoe Book Chapter Award in Environmental Communication (2017), Outstanding Book of the Year Award (2016), Faculty Research Award (2016), Christine L. Oravec Award (2010 and 2015), and B. Aubrey Fisher Award (2012).
And she has done all this while doing service in the college: She served as Chair of Communication from 2017-2019, Provost Office Faculty Fellow from 2022-2023, and Director of the Environmental Humanities Graduate Program from 2023 to the present.
Rising Star in the Humanities Award – Leandra Hernández
The Rising Star in the Humanities award recognizes significant scholarly accomplishments and research contributions by College of Humanities junior faculty.
Leandra joined the faculty as an assistant professor of Communication just this past
year having started her career at Utah Valley University. She has published five books,
two co-edited books, and 17 journal articles, as well as received awards for her writing,
notably, The Fall 2023 NCA Latina/o Communication Studies Division Outstanding Chapter
Award, and the Fall 2023 OSCLG Anita Taylor Outstanding Article Award. She gave her
first keynote speech, “Gender, Identity, and Reproductive Justice in a post-Roe World,”
at the 10th annual Wichita State University Gender & Sexuality Conference. She was
also one of two faculty who were selected to go to the one-month fellowship at the
National Humanities Center in North Carolina.
Robin Jensen, professor of Communication, comments that “Dr. Hernández is the epitome of a Rising Star in the Humanities because she has an innovative, significant research program and she is using that program to change the field of communication as whole. Dr. Hernández’s program is one that combines journalism, health communication, gender and sexuality studies, and race. She asks foundational questions in her research such as how those representing traditional underserved, intersectional positionalities are represented in journalism and the media, what the implications of those representations are for individual and public health, and what can be done to foster better, more nuanced and representative characterizations of underserved individuals in the media.” She continues: “Dr. Hernández is exceptionally early on in her career to already be creating a path for scholars of every level to reconceptualize how media scholarship can and should be done. …… It is safe to say that her research is setting an agenda for the field as a whole and that her name will be lauded for doing this work for many years to come.”
Robert A. Goldberg Endowed Faculty Prize in the Humanities - Christie Toth
Robert A. Goldberg Endowed Faculty Prize in Humanities recognizes faculty whose record in teaching and research reflects high merit and provides a stipend to support the faculty member’s ongoing projects.
Christie Toth, associate professor, joined the Department of Writing and Rhetoric
Studies in 2014 and has made significant contributions to the department, college,
and university. Christie is currently working on two projects, described in her nomination
letter by her former department chair, LuMing Mao (professor in Writing and Rhetoric
Studies and affiliate faculty at the Asia Center): “One focuses on the history, current
status, and possible futures of graduate education for aspiring community college
literacy instructors. The other is an experiment in using collaborative speculative
writing to imagine possibilities for more accessible, equitable, and just lifelong
literacy learning. Both projects involve extensive collaboration with Salt Lake Community
College transfer students, SLCC faculty colleagues, and two-year college faculty across
the United States.
Toth is the author of Transfer in an Urban Writing Ecology: Reimagining Community College-University Relations in Writing Studies, which is a culmination of her groundbreaking work on the interrelations between two-year and four-year institutions of higher learning, and on the ways in which these relationships can facilitate and/or complicate the experiences of students who transfer between the institutions. It encapsulates many of the themes and theories that have been developed and advanced in her other wide-ranging and robust publications.
She is also a co-editor of Teaching Composition at the Two-Year College: Background Readings and Writing Placement in Two-Year Colleges: The Pursuit of Equity in Postsecondary Education, the latter of which won the Council of Writing Program Administrators Best Book Award in June 2023. She is author or co-author of many journal articles and book chapters. Her scholarly output, in my view, is exemplary and her work is qualitatively unique — and of immense value — within the field of writing and rhetoric.”