2024 Michael K. Harless Faculty Excellence Award
The Michael K. Harless Faculty Excellence Award recognizes a tenure-track faculty member within the College of Arts & Sciences who has made outstanding contributions in teaching, scholarship, service and community outreach. Awardees will be in the first five years of a tenure-track position and not yet achieved tenure. Nominations are made by the Chairs and faculty of the College of Arts & Sciences. A selection committee is appointed by the Dean and the selection of the recipient is coordinated by the Dean's office. The award consists of a plaque and a monetary payment.
J. Elliott Casal, Department of English
Casal joined the Department of English as an Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics
in 2022 after completing a postdoc in the Cognitive Science Department at Case Western
Reserve University and earning his PhD in Applied Linguistics at the Pennsylvania
State University. He is a faculty affiliate with the Institute for Intelligent Systems
and leads the Corpus Linguistics & Disciplinary Literacies research lab.
His research draws on corpus linguistics and discourse analysis to address questions related to second language learning and teaching, discipline-specific and multilingual writing, genre-based language pedagogy, and computer-assisted language learning. At the start of his third year as an Assistant Professor, he has over 30 papers and book chapters in prominent publications, has co-authored one book on graduate student success, and has two other books under contract: a monograph on Concept-Based Language Instruction and Genre with Multilingual Matters and a co-edited volume on multimodal literacies with Routledge. Casal has also given over 50 invited and or/peer-reviewed conference presentations at major national and international conferences. In addition, he has worked as co-investigator on over $4.1 million dollars of externally funded research and over $126,000 of internally funded research as PI or Co-PI.
Casal has taken on a number of service roles already and serves as an active doctoral chair/co-chair in Applied Linguistics. He participates in engaged community scholarship activities, such as the CDC Workforce Pipeline Experiential Learning Program (Research Writing Coordinator, 2023) and the Deb Talbot Summer Institute professional development workshop for Shelby County high school English teachers (instructor/organizer, 2023, 2024). He is also Strand Co-coordinator of the American Association of Applied Linguistics conference Language and Technology strand (2023, 2024), serves on the editorial boards of journals TESOL Quarterly, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, and Ampersand, and serves on the advisory board for Applied Linguistics Press.