Norman and Irma Mann Stearns Distinguished Faculty Award: 2025-26 Recipients

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. Established by the late Dr. Norman Stearns and Emerson alumna Irma Mann Stearns ’67, this award honors 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. 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.

Leah Vonderheide is an Assistant Professor in the department of Visual and Media Arts. She is is a scholar of global film and media whose teaching and research interests include Indigenous-made media, feminist film theory, and strategies of resistance across fiction, documentary, and experimental film. Her project entitled “Merata Mita: Decolonizing the Screen” is a book about the cinema of Merata Mita, an indigenous Māori filmmaker who was a leader in the film and television industry of Aotearoa New Zealand (and beyond) for over three decades. She will use the Mann Stearns Award to spend three months of research at the the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand to complete her book manuscript.

Mary Anne Taylor is an Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director in the department of Communication Studies. As a rhetoric and gender scholar, Professor Taylor’s research investigates and often challenges dominant discourses of power in the public spheres of American politics, health, and sports communication. Her project “Queering Leadership: Profiles of LGBTQ+ Leaders Across Industries” is a co-authored book project that profiles a set of diverse leaders in the LGBTQ+ community in a variety of professions, and across industries, and the first critical analysis of queer leadership and management styles alongside queer identity and struggle. She will use the Mann Stearns Award to travel to Sydney, Australia this summer to conduct comprehensive
qualitative interviews of seven LGBTQ+ leaders.