2026 Winners of the King, Nolan and OMNI Faculty Awards Announced

The Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the U of A has selected the 2026 recipients of several of its most prestigious endowed faculty awards, including:

• Ryan Neville-Shepard, associate professor and vice chair of the Department of Communication, who received the John E. King Award for Outstanding Service
• Lisa Corrigan, professor in the Department of Communication, who received the Nolan Award for Outstanding Contribution to Graduate Education
• Janine Sytsma, associate professor in the School of Art, who received the OMNI Center for World Peace and Justice Faculty Award
• Linyin Cheng, associate professor in the Department of Geosciences, who received the OMNI Keeling/Hansen Climate Science Award

"Fulbright College exists to serve the public good, and these awards recognize what that looks like in practice," said Brian Raines, dean of Fulbright College. "We measure our value not by rankings alone, but by the difference our work makes for our students, for Arkansas and for the world. Ryan, Lisa, Janine and Linyin make that difference every day in the classroom, in their research and in our communities."

"Honoring them is how we show our students and colleagues what we value most," he added. "Congratulations to all four."

John E. King Award

The John E. King Award for Outstanding Service was created and endowed by Fulbright College faculty members to recognize colleagues who exhibit exemplary service to the campus and community. They named the award for King, a professor of social work, as a tribute to his "leadership and extraordinary ethic and record of good deeds."

Recipient Ryan Neville-Shepard is an associate professor and vice chair of the Department of Communication, where he has taught since 2016. His research examines political rhetoric — from third-party presidential campaigns to the conspiracy theories that have moved from the fringe into mainstream American politics.

From 2019 to 2024, he served as the department's director of graduate studies, overseeing a new capstone option for the M.A. program, reintroducing the exam option during the COVID-19 pandemic and helping lead the push to nominate students for national awards. The department's students have won a top thesis award every year since 2017.

Neville-Shepard has served on nearly every departmental committee and on seven search committees since 2018. Beyond the department, he chairs fellowship interview committees for incoming Honors College students and serves on the Fulbright College Promotion and Tenure Committee.

In 2025, he became editor of Communication and Democracy, a journal of the National Communication Association. He has also served on the editorial boards of 10 journals and on the board of directors of Fayetteville's Clinton House Museum from 2017 to 2023.

In addition to the King Award, Neville-Shepard has received the Fulbright College Outstanding Researcher Award, Nolan Faculty Award, five Outstanding Mentor Awards from the U of A Office of Nationally Competitive Awards and the J. Donald Ragsdale Award for Mentoring from the Southern States Communication Association.

The Nolan Faculty Award

The Nolan Faculty Award was endowed by the William C. and Theodosia Murphy Nolan Foundation to support the career advancement of faculty members who provide the highest quality teaching, research and service to the college.

Recipient Lisa Corrigan is a professor of communication and a rhetorical historian whose archival research connects social movements, prisons and the Cold War. She joined the U of A in 2007.

She is the author of Prison Power: How Prison Influenced the Movement for Black Liberation (CHECK title), which won the National Communication Association's 2017 Diamond Anniversary Book Award and the 2017 Outstanding Book Award from the African American Communication and Culture Division, and Black Feelings: Race and Affect in the Long Sixties, which was awarded the 2020 Honorable Mention for Outstanding Monograph in Public Address Scholarship from the National Communication Association. She is finishing a third book, Intimacy Regimes: Race, Sex, and Surveillance at Midcentury, and is the editor of #MeToo: A Rhetorical Zeitgeist (Routledge, 2021).

In addition to the Nolan Award, Corrigan has received the U of A Master Researcher Award, a Faculty Gold Medal from the Office of Nationally Competitive Awards, an OMNI Center Faculty Award and the Graduate Student Congress' inaugural Faculty Mentor of the Year award.

OMNI Center for World Peace and Justice Faculty Award

The OMNI Center for World Peace and Justice Faculty Award was created to "recognize exceptional research, teaching and service by faculty who promote the studying and teaching of peace and justice and the practice of nonviolence, conflict resolution and diplomacy."

Recipient Janine Sytsma is an associate professor of art history who joined the School of Art as an assistant professor in 2018. Her research centers on the contemporary arts of global Africa, exploring the intersections of coloniality, global geopolitics and indigeneity.

With ceramics faculty member Adam Posnak, she has co-led two study abroad courses to Ghana. There, U of A students toured Red Clay in Tamale with artist Ibrahim Mahama; visited the studios of artists including Ablade Glover, Zohra Opoku, Serge Attukwei Clottey, Rita Mawuena Benissan and Theresa Ankomah; and toured the Nkyinkyim Museum with artist Kwame Akoto-Bamfo. Sytsma also arranged a day at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, where the students traded ideas about research and artistic practice with the university's faculty and students.

She has also brought African and African diaspora artists to Fayetteville, in person and virtually. In 2023, Ghanaian artist Jacob Tetteh-Ashong built a "proverbial coffin" in the Ga funerary tradition at the School of Art, and faculty and students carried it in a procession down the Razorback Greenway. In 2025, artist Peju Layiwola led a series of resist-dye workshops in the Yorùbá tradition of àdìrẹ that culminated in a fashion show.

In 2026, Nigerian artist Jelili Atiku organized My Orí Is Kótùbà Kótùṣẹ, a performance held at the same time in Lagos, Nigeria, and Fayetteville, with each event livestreamed to the other city.

This year, she curated 1922 Revisited: Live Arts Program, a live arts series at the Venice Biennale. The 1922 Biennale included the exhibition's first showing of African sculpture but also reflected the colonial worldviews of its time; Sytsma's program brought together performance artists from across Africa and its diaspora to answer that history.

Her book The Decolonial Project: Contemporary Art in the Ife Art School is under contract with Routledge, and her articles have appeared in African Arts. The OMNI award will support her next book, on African participation at the Venice Biennale. After nearly a decade of research in Venice, she will travel to several African countries to engage directly with arts communities there and the role the Biennale plays in them.

Her previous honors include a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship for dissertation research in Nigeria and a Smithsonian Institution Fellowship at the National Museum of African Art. This academic year, she holds fellowships at the University of Cape Town and in Copenhagen, Denmark.

OMNI Keeling/Hansen Climate Science Award

The OMNI Keeling/Hansen Climate Science Award was created to "promote cutting-edge climate science research conducted by Fulbright College faculty and students in developing knowledge of the causes and impacts of global climate change, in developing tangible solutions to mitigate global climate change and its deleterious effects on humanity and global ecosystems, and in communicating the urgency of the climate catastrophe."

Recipient Linyin Cheng is an associate professor of geosciences who studies climate extremes — droughts, heat waves and heavy rainfall — with a particular focus on what happens when these extremes occur simultaneously or rapidly transition from one to another. Her research examines how these compound climate extremes affect agricultural productivity and water quality in rivers and lakes across the United States.

Cheng's current research focuses on drought–flood volatility: the rapid swings between extreme dry and wet conditions that are becoming more important in a changing climate. The work examines how drought–pluvial transitions affect agriculture, how impacts vary with timing, transition direction and regional characteristics, and whether effects persist beyond the event year. The research has applications for agricultural management, water resources and hazard planning. This work has recently been accepted for publication in Nature Communications. The OMNI award will support conference travel and publication costs for the project.

Before joining the U of A in 2018, Cheng was a research scientist with the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. That work examined how human-induced climate change has affected drought in California and extreme rainfall across the United States. Cheng also developed the Non-stationary Extreme Value Analysis (NEVA) toolbox, software that helps researchers and engineers account for a changing climate when estimating extreme rainfall and temperatures.

At the U of A, Cheng teaches Earth Science, Climatology and Climate Research Synergy and is co-principal investigator on a $1.5 million National Science Foundation grant, running through 2029, that builds international research networks on the resilience of U.S. cities.

Cheng's previous honors include a Best Paper Award from the International Association of Hydrological Sciences' Commission on Statistical Hydrology and a Connor Endowed Faculty Fellowship from Fulbright College.