Honors for Top Achievements
Three professors at the School of Arts and Sciences–Newark received distinguished honors for their work. Jordan Casteel (pictured), an associate professor in the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media, received a MacArthur “Genius” Grant, which recognizes individuals in any field for exceptional originality and dedication. Casteel’s oversized portraits of African Americans have been the subject of major exhibitions and have appeared on the covers of leading magazines. Time magazine named Cathy Park Hong, a professor in the M.F.A. in Creative Writing program, one of its “100 Most Influential People of 2021” for her book Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (One World, 2020), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. Alice Elliott Dark, an associate professor in the M.F.A. in Creative Writing program and an award-winning short-story writer, novelist, and essayist, received a coveted MacDowell Fellowship, her second, to work on a new novel and essays.