In 1976, The University of Alabama National Alumni Association began an innovative program designed to annually recognize four faculty members at the Capstone who demonstrate “Outstanding Commitment to Teaching.” The awards are based on the faculty members’ commitment to teaching and the impact they have had on students through the teaching and learning process. An attractive plaque and a cash stipend are presented to the recipients. All full-time faculty are eligible. Nominations are accepted from alumni, faculty and students, with the selection committee composed of the same. Presentation of the awards is made at the Fall General Faculty Meeting.
2023 Outstanding Commitment to Teaching Awards Recipients
Dr. Ana Corbalan
Dr. Ana Corbalán is a professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Classics, where she teaches Spanish literature and film. After earning a PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she joined The University of Alabama in 2006.
Corbalán’s research ranges from the question of borders and representations of alterity to topics of television studies and gender studies, nostalgia, literature, marginalities, metafiction, world cinema, visual arts, social justice, historical memory, trauma, migration and dictatorships. She emphasizes critical thinking and the need to understand the humanities within their
larger social, cultural and historical contexts. Corbalán has published three single-authored books, six co-edited volumes and over 50 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. She has also presented her work in more
than 70 national and international conferences.
EDUCATION: Corbalán completed her BA in English philology from the University of Murcia in Spain, her MA in Spanish from the University of Florida and her PhD in Romance Languages from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
RECOGNITION: She has been awarded the Distinguished Teaching Fellow from the College of Arts and Sciences and the Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry
of Education and U.S. Universities. She has also been the recipient of a Mellon Foundation Award and an Erasmus scholarship to study in the UK for a year.
COURSES: New and Old Borders: National Identity, Gender and Immigration in Spain; Representations of the Spanish Civil War; History and Trauma in Spanish Literature; Representing Marginalities in Spanish Literature and Film; Multiculturalism and Global Encounters in Spain; Narratives of the Crisis in Spain; Women Authors in Contemporary Spain; Alterity and Migration in Spain; A Century in Motion: Spanish Film and Theater; the GenX Writers in Spain; and Spanish Culture through Film.
SERVICE: Corbalán has been an active member
of numerous departmental and university-wide committees. She served on the Executive Committee
on 20th-Century Spanish literature of the Modern Language Association of America and in the Delegate Assembly of the South. She also serves on the board of directors for several organizations, such as the Hispanic Association of Humanities, the Association of Hispanic Women Writers, and the Association of Hispanic Feminists. She was appointed as the Associate Editor of the Journal
of Gender Studies, a member of the editorial board of many academic journals, the Assessor for Insight Grants of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of the Government of Canada and the book review editor of the prestigious journal Hispanófila.
Dr. Lucy Kaufman
Dr. Lucy Kaufman is an assistant professor in the Department of History. Before coming to UA in fall 2017, she was an Early Career Development Fellow at the University of Oxford and a visiting assistant professor
at Clark University. Kaufman’s research focuses on early modern Britain, particularly the social, religious and popular political history of Elizabethan England. She is interested in the lives of everyday people experiencing seismic change, examining the ways in which major historical shifts—the Reformation, the beginnings of the British empire, economic revolutions, state formation—were profoundly influenced by the English people. Her first book, A People’s Reformation: Building the English Church in the Elizabethan Parish, came out in April.
Kaufman believes that teaching and research are inextricably linked, and she treats her students as active historians. To that end, she focuses on student research and inquiry, always pushing students to ask ‘why’ and to think of themselves as part of the historical narrative. In the past five years she has supervised or served on committees for more than 60 student research projects, including BA capstones and honors theses, MA theses, and PhD dissertations.
EDUCATION: Kaufman received her BA in Renaissance Studies from Yale University in 2004, her MPhil in Early Modern History from the University of Cambridge in 2007, and her PhD in History from Yale University in 2014.
RECOGNITION: Kaufman was recently named a Fellow
of the Royal Historical Society in recognition of her original contribution to scholarship. Since arriving at Alabama,
she has been awarded the Durham University Research Visiting Fellowship; two UA College Academy for Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity Grants; and a grant- in-aid from the Folger Library. In Oxford, she received
the Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Public Engagement with Research for her work with the National Trust, and her dissertation was awarded the university-wide Field Prize by Yale University.
COURSES: Civil Wars in Oxford; England under the Stuarts; England under the Tudors; History of London; Reformation and Counter-Reformation; Western Civilization to 1648; Graduate Historiography and Methods; Graduate Pro-seminar in Early Modern English Social History.
SERVICE: In August, Kaufman was appointed as the director of external scholarships and fellowships at the University, after serving as the campus advisor for the Marshall Scholarship and serving on multiple award committees. She has advised recent winners of the Rhodes, Marshall, Fulbright, and Obama Voyager Scholarships, and has worked to broaden and deepen the reach of the ESF Office on campus. Kaufman is also the director of undergraduate studies for the Department of History.
Dr. Yolanda Manora
Dr. Yolanda M. Manora is an associate professor in the Department of English, a Senior Fellow in the Blount Scholars Program and Affiliate Faculty for African American Studies and Women’s Studies. She taught in the Department of American Studies for several years.
Manora’s research focuses on issues related to race, class, gender, sexuality, and subjectivity in 20th and 21st century African American/BIPOC women’s literature, film and expressive arts. She is currently studying experimental forms in contemporary women’s memoir.
In addition to her teaching and research roles, she is also the two-time director of undergraduate studies for the Department of English. Manora is also a creative nonfiction writer working with lyric prose, prose poetry and fragmented forms. She is completing revisions of The Unsinging, a collection of personal memoir and cultural reflection exploring Southern black girlhood/womanhood. As a librettist, she is currently working with a creative team on a NEA grant supported musical theatre project.
EDUCATION: Manora completed her BA in English and Magazine Journalism at The University of Alabama in 1990. After receiving an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Goucher College in 2020, she earned her PhD in English from Emory University in 2002.
RECOGNITION: Manora was selected as the Vivian Malone Jones Scholar of her class as an undergraduate
at UA and as a Mellon Foundation Fellow as a graduate student at Emory University. UA’s NAACP chapter voted her Professor of the Year in 2006. In 2022, Manora was selected as a Collaborative Arts Initiative Fellow for 2022- 2024, and she is the co-recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant for a musical theatre project currently in development.
COURSES: Advanced Studies in American Literature, Advanced Studies in African American Literature, Special Topics in African American Literature, Blount Seminars; Surveys in African American Literature I and II, Honors Surveys in American Literature, Honors Surveys in African American Literature, Introduction to African American Studies, and Introduction to American Studies.
SERVICE: Manora is a member of the Editorial Board
for The University of Alabama Press. She has served
on the College of Arts & Sciences Undergraduate Research Committee and the Provost’s Advisory Panel on the Foster Auditorium Project. Manora served for a decade as the faculty advisor for UA’s award-winning chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the International English Honor Society, guiding the launch of the chapter’s now award-winning literary magazine, Dewpoint. She has been the coordinator of the Robert Milton Young Memorial Lecture in African American Literary and Cultural Theory since 2010.
Dr. Jonathan Wingo
Dr. Jonathan Wingo is a professor and department head of Kinesiology, where he teaches exercise science courses and directs the Exercise Physiology Laboratory. He began teaching at the University in 2009 after completing a postdoctoral fellowship in integrative physiology jointly appointed at the Institute for Exercise and Environmental Medicine at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas and The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.
Wingo’s research focuses on human cardiovascular, metabolic, and thermoregulatory responses to exercise and physical activity in hot ambient conditions. He is also interested in physical/work performance optimization and work capacity limitations in environmentally stressful conditions. Graduate and undergraduate students are crucial for the work in his lab, which prepares them for work opportunities in exercise science and related areas.
EDUCATION: Wingo completed his BS in Health and Physical Education with a concentration in exercise science from Berry College in 1999, his MA in Exercise and Sport Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2002, and his PhD in Exercise Science from the University of Georgia in 2006. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Exercise and Environmental Medicine and UT Southwestern Medical Center from 2006–2009.
RECOGNITION: Wingo became a Fellow of the American College of Sports Medicine in 2013. He was elected president of the Southeast Chapter of the American College of Sports Medicine in 2022. He has received eight invitations to present his work nationally and internationally, one of which was in Doha, Qatar. Additionally, Wingo has served on two invited scientific roundtable meetings. Perhaps most notable, several of his students have won awards for their research presentations at local and regional conferences, and now some of his former doctoral students are tenured professors with their
own student mentees.
COURSES: Fitness Appraisal and Exercise Prescription, Physiology of Exercise
SERVICE: Wingo has served as department head
of Kinesiology since 2016. He has served on or chaired
over 30 dissertation committees and five thesis committees during his time at UA, along with serving on several college and university committees. From 2017-2019 he was an undergraduate research mentor for the Randall Research Scholars Program, and during much of his tenure at UA he has been an undergraduate research mentor for the Emerging Scholars Program. He is serving a three-year term as president of the Southeast Chapter of the American College of Sports Medicine, and he has served on the Medical and Science advisory board for the Korey Stringer Institute at the University of Connecticut since 2017.