Accolades is an occasional News Center feature that highlights recent accomplishments of faculty and students at The University of Texas at Dallas. To submit items for consideration, contact your school’s communications manager.
Critical Media Studies Professor Earns Fellowship
Dr. Wendy Sung, assistant professor in the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication at UT Dallas, has been named a Career Enhancement Fellow by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars.
The Career Enhancement Fellowship, funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, seeks to increase the presence of underrepresented junior and other faculty members in the humanities, social sciences and arts by creating career development opportunities for selected fellows with promising research projects.
Sung has been awarded a stipend for a one-year sabbatical so that she can finalize her book, Violent Virality: Racial Violence and the Making of New Media. The book will examine the relationships among race, technology and media cultures through the phenomenon of watching anti-Black racial violence in 20th- and 21st-century American culture.
She is one of 16 faculty members from throughout the U.S. to receive the one-year fellowship. According to the institute, fellows represent unique perspectives within their disciplines and are committed to increasing diversity and inclusion on campus through service and research.
Sung’s research and teaching are centered on comparative racial formations, transmedia histories and technologies, and the dynamics of cultural memory and visuality.
“Critical media studies is very important to help students understand the ethical implications of their work,” she said. “This fellowship provides a wonderful opportunity to spotlight the kind of scholarship we’re doing in this area of study at UT Dallas.”
Professor’s Documentary Film Garners Awards
A film created by Dr. Paul Lester, professor of instruction in the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication at UT Dallas, has been named Best Documentary Feature Film by the Rome Movie Awards.
The Calendar is a two-hour film that is composed of clips from movies, television programs and YouTube videos in which characters, participants, textual overlays or dated objects reveal each day and month for an entire year.
Lester said the COVID-19 pandemic provided the time to work on the project.
“I started the project before the pandemic, but then this experimental film simply helped me get through a few months during the lockdown,” Lester said. “After positive feedback from friends, I applied to about 20 film festivals.”
Besides the film’s commendation from the Rome Movie Awards, it also won a best editing award by the Cannes World Film Festival and the Award of Prestige for best editing from the San Diego Movie Awards.
Lester’s research at UT Dallas focuses on mass media ethics, new communications technologies and visual communications. He said he plans to have a showing of the film on campus during the fall semester.
“I hope the work inspires my students to be passionate and to get obsessed about an idea they may have,” said Lester, an accomplished photojournalist. “For me, this film merged the two in a rewarding way.”