Reynolds CC, UR professors receive state Outstanding Faculty Award

The State Council of Higher Education for Virginia and Dominion Energy announced the 11 recipients (including two from local schools) of the 2024 Outstanding Faculty Awards on March 5. The annual awards recognize faculty members at Virginia's public and private colleges and universities who "exemplify the highest standards of teaching, scholarship, and service."

Carrie Humphrey, a full-time instructor and the head of the American Sign Language & Interpreter Education program at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College, and Elizabeth Outka, the Tucker-Boatwright Professor of Humanities and and an English professor at the University of Richmond, were among them.

Humphrey is the president of the Virginia Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf and has served in various positions on their board since 2009. She has been a nationally-certified ASL interpreter for 18 years and is currently pursuing her doctorate in translation and interpreting studies with a focus on ASL-English interpretation at Gallaudet University.

Outka is an internationally recognized writer and speaker on 20th-century literature. Her first book, Consuming Traditions inaugurated Oxford’s Modernist Literature and Culture series. Her latest monograph, Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature, won the Transatlantic Studies Association-Cambridge University Press Book Prize, the South Atlantic MLA Book Award and was short-listed for the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize.

Other recipients included faculty members from Virginia Tech, Christopher Newport University, and other two- and four-year institutions whose expertise ranged from chemistry to veterinary medicine to neuroscience. All award recipients will receive $7,500 from the Dominion Energy Charitable Foundation.

This year, 87 nominees were selected by the institutions, reviewed by a panel of peers and chosen by a committee of leaders from the public and private sectors. This group was narrowed to a field of 25 finalists and then to the 11 recipients.

“The faculty we recognize today are transforming lives with their research and work, and most importantly through their teaching,” said Alan Edwards, interim director of SCHEV. “They are helping to create Virginia’s workforce of the future.”