Month: May 2022

The Office of Research and Creative Scholarship is pleased to announce the recipients of this year’s Norman and Irma Mann Stearns Distinguished Faculty Award: Communication Sciences and Disorders professor Ruth Grossman and Visual and Media Arts assistant professor Julia Halperin.

A professor and former Chair of the Department of Communication Sciences & Disorders, Dr. Ruth Grossman‘s research is focused on various aspects of face-to-face communication in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). She is specifically interested in how children with ASD integrate and produce verbal and nonverbal information, such as facial expressions and prosody. She will use the Mann Stearns Award to establish an international network of autism research labs to lay the foundation for multi lingual/multi-cultural research, which will include the University of Aarhus in Denmark and the University of Fribourg, Switzerland.

Julia Halperin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual and Media Arts, and a filmmaker who works in multiple formats. Her cinematic interests include twisting and elevating genre, using landscape to externalize character, and disrupting narrative expectations. Her feature films have been premiered at the SXSW Film Festival and the Film Festival Rotterdman, have been nominated for several awards, and included in several critics’ best-of lists. With the Mann Stearns Award, she will submit her newest feature, Crookedfinger, for screening at a premier-class film festival and work to secure broader distribution.

About the Mann Stearns Award: Several years ago, the late Dr. Norman Stearns and Emerson alumna Irma Mann Stearns ’67 established a distinguished faculty award to honor a full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty member in recognition of outstanding scholarly or creative achievement. A $3,000 award is presented annually to at least one applicant. This funding may be used to enhance an ongoing project or for the development of a new scholarly or creative endeavor. Travel is strongly encouraged to be a part of the project activity.