Northeastern University professors Oliver Ayers, K.J. Rawson and Kirsten Saxton received the award in recognition of how they’ve expanded experiential learning beyond the bounds of place.
Three Northeastern University professors have received Global Network Accelerator Awards, recognizing how they have expanded experiential learning beyond any single place, bringing it to students around the world.
The awards went to Oliver Ayers, professor of history; K.J. Rawson, professor of English and women’s, gender and sexuality studies; and Kirsten Saxton, professor of English.
But this is also a story of how one center’s leadership, operating thousands of miles apart, came together to catalyze “collaborative humanities research and programming across Northeastern’s global network,” according to Saxton.
Each recipient of this year’s award is a director of the Northeastern University Humanities Center, operating out of three different campuses in the Northeastern global network: Boston, London and Oakland. The award recipients’ work spans disciplines, colleges, campuses and countries, all with an eye toward making measurable change.
Ayers is director of the Humanities Center at Northeastern University London. His work focuses on race, urban spaces and digital historical analysis. Recently, his Mapping Black London project collected over 3,000 records to tell the often untold stories of Black Londoners from 1560 to 1840.
“I am delighted to receive this award recognizing the exciting work I’ve led alongside with Kirsten and K.J. to build connections between Northeastern’s campuses,” Ayers wrote in an emailed comment. “From my perspective in London, this is just the start of an exciting future where experiential humanities research thrives not just at each of our campus locations, but across the whole global university.”
Experiential research, he continued, that is powered by “collaborations between faculty, students and community partners.”
Rawson’s research looks at the rhetorical strategies of the LGBTQ+ community as recorded in archival collections. Rawson founded and now directs the Digital Transgender Archive and serves on the editorial board of the Homosaurus, a linked data vocabulary of queer terms. Rawson is also the director of the Humanities Center on Northeastern University’s Boston campus.
The award, he wrote, “recognizes the successful ways that the Humanities Center has begun leveraging the NU global campus network to advance humanities scholarship.” The global network has led to both “new opportunities for my research” and opportunities for other faculty, he continued.
Further, Rawson noted that Northeastern’s global reach has allowed for the “incredibly rewarding” “ability to work in close partnership” with the other two recipients of the Global Network Accelerator Award, Ayers and Saxton.
Saxton is director of the Humanities Center at Northeastern University Oakland. Saxton’s research focuses on how contemporary readings of older texts can provide new avenues for thought — she specializes in 18th- and 19th-century literature read through anti-racist, feminist and queer theoretical frameworks.
Saxton noted that it was a collective honor for each of these three Humanities Center directors to receive the award. Personally, she wrote, “I am deeply grateful for the chance to work so closely with K.J. and Olly, as well as faculty and administrators across the network, as we navigate the rewards and challenges of transnational thinking and doing.
“As a scholar and a teacher committed to community connections, from public scholarship to co-authorship, it means a great deal to me to see our humanities work recognized,” she concluded, “particularly in a moment when such work and such connections are more necessary than ever.”
Ayers, Rawson and Saxton were honored during the Academic Honors Convocation on April 16.