What is this award?
This award's purpose is to acknowledge the critical and central role honors faculty play in the experience our students have at the university and in the Honors Program.
Nominations
The University Honors Program will send out a call for nominations to students who are graduating. The nomination form will ask for the nominator's information, the nominee's information, and an explanation of why this instructor has proved exceptional in teaching honors students.
2024
Megan Gogerty is a playwright and comedian. A recipient of the Cloris Leachman Award for Outstanding Artistic Achievement, her solo show Lady Macbeth and Her Pal, Megan played the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and won the Audience Pick of the Fringe at the Cincinnati Fringe Festival. Her play FEAST. was named as a Critic’s Pick by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Her play Bad Panda (Theatre Without Borders, Beijing; Iron Crow Theatre Co.; WordBRIDGE Boomerang Playwright honoree) is published by Original Works Publishing and was translated into Spanish for a five-month run at Foro Lucerna del Teatro Milan in Mexico City. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution listed her solo show Hillary Clinton Got Me Pregnant in their yearly Top Ten Best Plays. Megan’s musical drama Love Jerry premiered at Actors Express in Atlanta and was produced in the New York Musical Theatre Festival where it won three Talkin’ Broadway Citations and four NYMF Excellence Awards including Excellence in Writing (Book). Her short play Super Hot Raven and Raven II: The Ravening is published in the anthology The Best American Short Plays of 2015 by Applause Books. Other plays include: Housebroken (Riverside Theatre, Hollins University); Save Me, Dolly Parton (Riverside Theatre, Synchronicity Theatre; named among Best Plays in Atlanta by Creative Loafing). Megan was a Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellow, a WordBRIDGE alum, and she earned her MFA in Playwriting from the University of Texas at Austin. She currently teaches playwriting and standup comedy at the University of Iowa Playwrights Workshop and is a regularly returning visiting faculty for the Playwright's Lab at Hollins University.
2023
Dr. Brian Lai
Brian Lai is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Political Science. He received his BA from Northwestern and PhD from Emory University. Brian’s research focuses on conflict between countries and within countries, focusing on the conditions that lead to the use of violence by non-state actors, the formation of military alliances, foreign policy and the role of regime type on international conflict. He teaches classes on American foreign policy, terrorism, consequences of war, and Diplomacy Labs, a class that Is a partnership with the US State Department. He also works with graduate and undergraduate students outside of the classroom, including research labs, student research projects, career mentoring, and alumni networking.
2022
Debra Trusty
Debra Trusty is a lecturer in the Department of Classics. She received her BA in Archaeology from the University of Evansville and MA and PhD in Classics from Florida State University. An archaeologist by trade, she spent a decade excavating at Mycenae (Greece) and wrote her dissertation on Bronze Age cooking vessels from Greece. Dr. Trusty came to UIowa in 2017 and enjoys teaching a wide range of courses, including Classical Mythology, Myth Makers of the Classical World, Greek Civilization, and Greek Archaeology and Ethnohistory. She also directs and leads summer study abroad programs in Greece for UIowa students (City of Athens and Greece: Ancient Perspectives, Modern Eyes), in addition to live-streaming video games based on Classics and Greco-Roman mythology on Twitch in the summer (https://www.twitch.tv/doctordebitage and https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd4dBeGtDa8nTTM5hsDOsMw).
2021
Dana Thomann
Dana Thomann is a first-generation University of Iowa graduate (’05) who benefited from the Belin-Blank Center as a young student growing up in rural Iowa. After college, Thomann completed a two-year commitment with Teach For America on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota.
In 2007, Thomann returned to the University of Iowa where she was employed by the Center for Diversity and Enrichment’s TRiO programs as a coordinator of academic services and, later, directed the Upward Bound Project, securing grants to continue the program on the University of Iowa campus. She currently works as a lecturer in the Department of Rhetoric, where she has served as the chair of the professional development program for new graduate teaching instructors.
Passionate about educational equity, Thomann partners with the University of Iowa’s Department of Academic Support and Retention to embed peer tutors in Rhetoric classrooms; called Success in Rhetoric (SiR), the program is intended to assist all Rhetoric students in their pursuit of academic success.
Thomann also holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University. She is working on a collection of linked short stories that focuses on the 1980s farm debt crisis.
2020
David Gould
Visiting Associate Professor
Public Policy Center
2019
Shaun Vecera
Professor
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences
2018
David Wilder
Professor
Biomedical Engineering, Occupational & Environmental Health
2017
The Department of Rhetoric
2016
Rachel Williams
Gender, Women's & Sexuality Studies
Art & Art History
2015
Ron McMullen
Ambassador in Residence
Political Science
2014
Chris Cheatum
Professor
Chemistry
2013
Donna Parsons
Lecturer
Music & Honors
2012
Not Awarded
2011
Paul Kleiber
Professor
Physics & Astronomy
2010
Dénes Gazsi
Professor
Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures
2009
Daniel Quinn
Professor
Chemistry
2008
Tom Rice
Professor
Political Science
2007
Kelly Kadera
Associate Professor
Political Science
