We are delighted to announce prize winners for the CNY Humanities Corridor Outstanding Working Groups in 2025-26.

Launched in Fall 2025, this prize is part of a new initiative recognizing Working Groups and their Organizers for collaborative efforts in humanities research and pedagogy. Varied in their longevity, scale of activities, fields, and overall aims, the inaugural winning groups collectively excelled in their depth and forms of collaboration, sustained mentoring, scholarly momentum, and curricular or pedagogical impacts. In different ways, these groups exemplify the value of building regional networks and the benefits of mutual support and shared community. The Corridor Directors honor four Working Groups for their achievements during the 2025-26 academic year, in alphabetical order:

  • HF2: Language Program Vitality
  • HS15: Urban Natures
  • LLC39: War Ecologies
  • VAC3: Screen Cultures

Over the last six years, the HF2: Language Program Vitality working group built a robust scholarly community the Corridor is proud to recognize. Their March 2026 Signature Event conference in Hamilton, NY, Innovative Approaches to Language Teaching, was a testament to that work, drawing nearly 150 participants across 23 sessions and 2 keynotes, with attendees joining from 8 of the Corridor's 11 institutions and well beyond. In the group’s post-conference survey, participants described it as “one of the best conferences” they had attended in a long time, and we commend their use of data to measure success and reflect on their partnership with an eye to future plans. The group’s sustained focus on pedagogy and language education advances the humanities, specifically via languages and language education, across the region. We appreciate how HF2 members turned a shared interest in how AI threatens language learning into regional conference presentations focused on possible solutions to this timely and important question. Furthermore, Colgate is developing a new American Sign Language course proposal as a direct outgrowth of their conference's pedagogical sessions. With clear thinking already underway about how to broaden their impact and advocate for language programs, this group demonstrates how partnerships around teaching and scholarship not only strengthen community but also drive innovation in the consortium.

Across its four years of collaborating, the HS15: Urban Natures working group has demonstrated real strength in interdisciplinary exploration, relationship-building, and peer mentoring. In particular, we commend how they’ve prioritized nurturing scholarly community across career stages: for instance, the group’s activities this past year led to a new network across visual studies, architecture, animation, and sustainability, and pulled in participants from across New York state, extending their reach well beyond member institutions by bridging public and private schools and even connecting with a New York-based ornithologist, a connection has already led to planning future partnerships and publications. Their generous co-mentorship model underscores the immense importance of showing up for one another, being present, and advocating for colleagues in formal and informal ways. Truly interdisciplinary, spanning fields including anthropology, history, art history, geography, and environmental studies, the HS15 group's geographic reach from Buffalo to Colgate, Rochester to Cornell, and Syracuse to New York City, takes real logistical effort to sustain. We are proud to recognize their investment in peer mentoring and their case for why urban and animal studies belong in the humanities.

After three years as a working group, LLC39: War Ecologies has reached a level of shared scholarly productivity and cohesion, with at least four articles, three books, and several grants resulting, in some form, from the intellectual community they’ve built with each other. In addition to creating new work together, through writing retreats and other critical collaborations, the group takes time to celebrate one another’s work through successful book launch events open to the broader community. Their writing retreats are thoughtfully structured and have become invaluable annual rituals, generating both scholarship and the kind of relational trust that turns colleagues into genuine collaborators. That trust also extends outward with a roundtable leading to an invitation to join a book launch at the American Anthropological Association, and a collaborative proposal submitted to the Mellon Foundation. In addition, the group’s commitment to reciprocal teaching and pedagogy speaks to the kind of cross-campus networking that makes Corridor collaborations so generative. With members presenting everywhere from Central European University to Kings College London to a research trip in Kuwait, the LLC39 group pairs genuine international reach with a sustained commitment to mentoring across ranks, including graduate students, while enriching classrooms and scholarly communities here in Central New York.

Originally formed 13 years ago, VAC3: Screen Cultures re-emerged after a recent hiatus in stand-out fashion, focused on deepening scholarly community in the region in the new field of videographic criticism. As hosts of “Distinguished Visiting Collaborator” Catherine Grant for beginner and intermediate hands-on workshops in Syracuse and Rochester, the group drew an impressive number of applications from faculty and graduate students at 7 different Corridor institutions for these limited workshop spots. The group demonstrates real intellectual community and strong collaboration, bringing together film scholars, screenwriters, and visual studies critics and makers while drawing on unique strengths at each of their home institutions. Harnessing scholarly research as creative practice, their multimodal approach spans articles, conferences, and videographic criticism and is putting Central New York on the map for this emerging field, especially fitting given the region’s pivotal roots in film and visual culture. Screening video essays by participants from across different campuses, ranks, and skill levels captured the VAC3 group’s inclusive, collaborative spirit, one that they’ve already parlayed into roundtables at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, an interview with Catherine Grant for the oral history project Fieldnotes, and published video essays in journals like Fragments and Open Screens. With another visiting collaborator coming this fall and new video essay courses launching at the University of Rochester, Syracuse University, and Hamilton College, the group is translating an intensive year spent re-shaping their core aims and purpose into sustained curricular change and shared successes as scholars, telling a great story about how powerful it can be to recalibrate as a group with renewed energy and partnership.

The Corridor congratulates these Working Groups for embodying what’s possible in humanities collaborations and for helping to sustain the success of the CNY Humanities Corridor!

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HF2 Working Group Organizers receiving this prize are as follows:

  • G. Cory Duclos, Director of the Keck Center for Language Study, Colgate University
  • Franziska Merklin, Senior Lecturer of Italian, Colgate University
  • Angelika Kraemer, Director of the Language Resource Center, Cornell University
  • Claire Frances, Director of the Language Center, Hamilton College
  • Elena Rodriguez-Guridi, Associate Professor of Spanish, Le Moyne College
  • Juliane Wuensch, Assistant Professor of German, Skidmore College
  • Amanda Brown, Professor of Linguistics, Syracuse University
  • Lauren Surovi, Assistant Teaching Professor of Italian, Syracuse University
  • Megan Ferry, Professor of Chinese, Union College
  • Maria Teresa Valdez, Director of the Language Center, University of Rochester

HS15 Working Group Organizers receiving this prize:

  • Timur Hammond, Associate Professor of Geography, Syracuse University
  • Romita Ray, Associate Professor Art History, Syracuse University
  • Chloe Ahmann, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Cornell University
  • Esra Akcan, Professor of Architectural Theory, Cornell University
  • Richard Fadok, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Rochester Institute of Technology

LLC39 Working Group Organizers receiving this prize:

  • Azra Hromadžić, Professor of Anthropology, Syracuse University
  • Kristin Doughty, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Rochester
  • Saida Hodžić, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Cornell University
  • Conerly Casey, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Rochester Institute of Technology
  • Mona Bhan, Professor of Anthropology, Syracuse University

VAC3 Working Group Organizers receiving this prize:

  • Joel Burges, Associate Professor of English & Visual and Cultural Studies, University of Rochester
  • Roger Hallas, Professor of English, Syracuse University
  • Pavitra Sundar, Professor of Literature & Cinema and Media Studies, Hamilton College
  • Julie Grossman, Professor of English & Film, Le Moyne College

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Why This Matters

Collaboration is the core of what Working Groups do: it takes many forms and allows many to find intellectual community and a sense of professional fulfillment. Yet, collaboration in the humanities remains under-acknowledged in institutional and professional reward structures. We want to incentivize and recognize individual Organizers who are doing this collaborative work.

While the intellectual community made possible by annual Corridor Working Group funding is rewarding in its own right, this new prize program provides an additional way to celebrate humanities collaborations. It offers Working Groups and their Organizers a monetary reward and CV line item, making their shared work more legible at the institutional level. We anticipate consortium-wide prizes will help individuals be recognized for their collaborative work in their own tenure, promotion, and review processes. We also aim to gather more robust stories from Working Groups as they reflect on their group’s process and activities. By spotlighting a range of successful Working Groups, we will raise awareness about what’s possible within the Corridor and shine a light on how valuable humanities collaborations can be.

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The CNY Humanities Corridor is a dynamic humanities research consortium seeding collaboration throughout the region and linking scholars from 11 universities and colleges in New York. Our network helps to build and sustain intellectual community and cultivates innovative collaborative research, teaching, and programming.