Spring Faculty and Staff Convocation celebrates teaching, discovery, and service
The College of Arts & Sciences is proud to honor the outstanding faculty and staff who make up its exceptional community of scholars.
Three professors received Dean’s Awards for Excellence in Teaching: Jo Ann Moran Cruz, Christine So, and Clay Shields. Two staff members received the Distinguished Service Staff Award: Karen Lautman and Leslie Byers. Rebecca Ryan received the Stevens Award and Patrick O’Malley received the Tosetti Award. Alison Mackey received the Condé Nast Award and Micah Sherr received the Farr Faculty Excellence Award.
“We are thrilled to celebrate the work and achievements of our esteemed faculty and staff,” said Interim Dean Andrew Sobanet. “The honorees for this year’s convocation are proof that the College of Arts & Sciences’ dedication to teaching, discovery, and service is thriving.”
Jo Ann Moran Cruz
Jo Ann Moran Cruz, the co-founder of the Medieval Studies program and a professor in the Department of History, received the Dean’s Awards for Excellence in Teaching.
Cruz has held key administrative roles, including Dean of Humanities and Natural Sciences at Loyola University, New Orleans, and former chair of the department at Georgetown. A leading scholar in late medieval education and literacy, she authored The Growth of English Schooling, 1340-1530, co-authored Medieval Worlds, and has published extensively on education, literacy, and religious history.
Her recent work includes studies on Dante, E.M. Forster, and Elizabethan family history, as well as an edited volume, The Cultural History of Education in the Middle Ages. She is currently working on her new book Gender and Power in Europe, 800-1600, for Routledge Press.
Christine So
Christine So, an associate professor in the Department of English, received the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Professor So, who joined Georgetown in 1998, is a specialist in Asian American Studies, Critical Race Studies, and literatures of the US empire. She authors the book Economic Citizens: A Narrative of Asian American Visibility, where she traces the logic of race, capital, and commensurate value in Asian American literature. She is currently at work on her book project, Unrecognizable Subjects: Reinventing Legal and Literary Epistemologies of Asian America, where she unpacks the law’s rigid and forceful ordering of what begins as a vague and indeterminate moment of Asian American emergence.
At Georgetown, she created and taught courses such as “Introduction to Asian American Studies,” “Introduction to Race and Ethnic Studies,” “Race, Law, and Literature,” and “Afterlives of US Empire.”
Clay Shields
Clay Shields, a professor in the Department of Computer Science, received a Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Shields, who has taught on the Hilltop for some 25 years, teaches programming, security, and computer systems while continuing to research in computer and network security. He was born in Washington, D.C, and spent much of his childhood living overseas as required by the career of his stepfather, who was a covert agent for the CIA.
Upon earning his undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia, Shields served as an infantry officer. He later attended the University of California at Santa Cruz and for his PHD dissertation in Computer Engineering. Before coming to Georgetown in 2001, he worked as an assistant professor at Purdue University.
Karen Lautman
Karen Lautman, who serves as the Department Administrator in the Department of English, received the Distinguished Service Staff Award.
This award is given to staff who have a record of extraordinary service within a department or program, and who have demonstrated selflessness as people for others, cura personalis, commitment to community in diversity, and creative leadership and service in support of academic excellence.
“Georgetown is a wonderful community. There are some very decent people on campus, and I am privileged to know many of them.”
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Lautman came to Georgetown in 1990 as part of the Lauinger Library administration team. After 4 years in the library, Lautman was offered a position in the College of Arts & Sciences Dean’s Office, where she remained for 6 years. In 2000 she was invited to become the Administrator of the English Department, where she has happily stayed for 24 years.
Before moving to Washington, Lautman was a professional singer and has sung with numerous ensembles in the area in a range of musical styles. She was the house soloist at St. Patrick’s Church in downtown Washington for 19 years.
Leslie Byers
Leslie Byers, a program coordinator in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, received a Distinguished Service Staff Award.
Byers, born in Germany, has lived and traveled worldwide. She studied physiological psychology at the University of Utah and holds a certificate in social work. Before Georgetown, she worked as a social worker, au pair coordinator, master gardener, and TV producer. After 32 years at Georgetown, she retires in June 2025, continuing her gardening and community work.
Reflecting on her time, Byers says, “I am very humbled to receive this award–I literally know a dozen other staff members who deserve it as much or more than I. It’s been a huge pleasure to work at Georgetown and serve so many fantastic and smart faculty, staff, and students over the years. I will miss it terribly.”
Rebecca Ryan
Rebecca Ryan, a professor in the Department of Psychology, received the Stevens Award.
The Stevens Faculty Excellence Award award honors excellent research, effective mentoring of student research, and innovation in a social sciences field.
Ryan researches how low income impacts parenting and child development. She focuses on parent-child interactions, resource investment, and interventions to enhance parental engagement. Her recent work includes a randomized trial using video chat to improve parenting and a field study on meal programs for low-income Latinx families. Her research has been continuously funded by both federal and private institutions, including the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development, the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the WT Grant Foundation.
Patrick O’Malley
Patrick O’Malley, a professor in the Department of English, received the Tosetti Award.
The Tosetti Faculty Award honors excellent research, effective mentoring of student research, and innovation in the humanities.
O’Malley has taught in the English Department at Georgetown for 25 years, with a focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and Irish literature, gothic novels, gender and sexuality studies, and critical theory. He has served as both Director of Undergraduate Studies and Director of Graduate Studies for the English Department. He’s the author of three award-winning books on Victorian and Irish literature.
A highlight of his teaching has been interdisciplinary co-teaching first-year undergraduate seminars with faculty from the History Department in the Liberal Arts Seminar and, more recently, in the “Ways of Knowing” seminars offered by the College of Arts & Sciences.
Alison Mackey
Alison Mackey, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and Chair of the Department of Linguistics, received the Condé Nast Award.
First awarded in 1966 by the College Student Council to honor the memory of the first President of the Yard, the Condé Nast Award is awarded annually by the College of Arts & Sciences to a faculty member who has served the College with distinguished teaching, research and service or leadership.
Mackey, a leading expert in second language learning and research methodology, is among the world’s top ten most-cited scholars in her field. She has published 100+ journal articles, 19 books, and received numerous awards, including the 2023 International TBLT Association’s Distinguished Achievement Award.
A Georgetown professor for 27 years, Mackey has served on key university committees and was Editor-in-Chief of the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics. She finds great joy in mentoring Ph.D. students and co-creating the Linguistics Department’s RULE class, which pairs undergraduates with advanced graduate researchers.
Micah Sherr
Micah Sherr, the Callahan Family Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science, received the Farr Faculty Excellence Award.
The Farr Faculty Excellence Award honors excellent faculty research, effective mentoring of student research and/or innovative dissemination of scientific knowledge in the natural sciences, computer science, mathematics and statistics and psychology.
Sherr’s academic interests include censorship and censorship-resistance, electronic voting, wiretap systems, and more broadly, privacy-preserving technologies. He participated in two large-scale studies of electronic voting machine systems, and helped to disclose architectural vulnerabilities in deployed U.S. election systems. His current research examines the methods used by many nation-states to restrict access to information online, and investigates new censorship-resistance technologies aimed at evading them. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award, and served as co-editor-in-chief of the Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies and associate chair of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.
by Jinlin Liu (C’28)
