Recent achievements for the campus community were earned by Emily Bray, Paige Brophy, Brannon Evans, Parks Coble, Daniel Frey, Trevor Frost, Nickie King, Barney McCoy, Layla Montemayor, Logan Nelson, Zach Nienhauser, Will Stalder, Ng’ang’a Wahu-Machuri, Maggie Walker, Kaily Ziegler, Nebraska Public Media and Husker Venture Fund students.

Honors

• Emily Bray and Paige Brophy, Journalism and Mass Communications students, have been selected as scholarship winners by the American Advertising Federation Nebraska. They were chosen for their outstanding academics, personal excellence and AAF Nebraska engagement. Each will receive a $1,500 scholarship for the 2023-2024 academic year. Read more here.

• Brannon Evans, a senior theatre performance major in the Johnny Carson School of Theatre and Film, is one of two recipients nationally of the Charlene Gordon Arts Impact Award. The recipients of this award are selected from the ASPIRE Arts Leadership program with the sponsorship of the Kennedy Center’s American College Theatre Festival National Committee and the College of Fellows of the American Theatre. Evans was chosen to represent Region V of the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival in the national ASPIRE Arts Leadership Cohort and was in Washington, D.C. in April.

University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Crops Judging Team includes Will Stalder, (front row, from left), Maggie Walker, Kailey Zielgler, and Daniel Frey, Garrett Kuss, (back row, from left), Logan Nelson, Zach Nienhueser and Don Lee.

• The Crops Judging Team team tied for seventh place overall in the four-year university division at the national 2023 North American Colleges and Teachers of Agriculture Judging Conference, hosted by Modesto Junior College in Modesto, California, April 12-15. Thirteen teams from across the country competed in the four-year university division. Team members include junior plant and landscape systems majors Daniel Frey, Logan Nelson, Zach Nienhueser, Will Stalder and Kailey Ziegler, and sophomore Maggie Walker. Learn more here.

• Trevor Frost, a second-year doctoral student in wind band conducting with a related area in composition, has been accepted into the Composing in the Wilderness program in Alaska this June, where he will experience the inspiring backcountry of Lake Clark National Park and then compose a new band work to be performed around the country. Now in its 11th year, the unique Composing in the Wilderness program is led by adventurer-composer Stephen Lias and offered by the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival in collaboration with Alaska Geographic and the National Park Service. His music can be found on his SoundCloud and is published by C. Alan Publications and Trevor Frost Music.

• Husker Venture Fund students took third place out of 49 teams in the UNC-Chapel Hill Global Venture Capital Investment Competition Undergraduate Finals.

Husker Venture Fund students

• Nickie King, a junior communication sciences and disorders major from Fort Calhoun, was one of six juniors from nearly 350 colleges and universities across the country selected to receive a National Student Speech Language Hearing Association undergraduate scholarship for 2023-24.

• Barney McCoy, Gilbert and Martha Hitchcock Professor of Broadcasting, in partnership with Nebraska Public Media, received a grant from Humanities Nebraska. The grant will support the production of “Running Towards the Fire,” a World War II documentary about University of Nebraska graduate Barney Oldfield and Reuters News correspondent Robert Reuben.

• Layla Montemayor, a junior mathematics major from The Colony, Texas, will be participating in the SIAM-Simons Undergraduate Summer Research Program this summer. There are five research sites across the country. Montemayor and one other student will be working with two professors in mathematical oncology at the Moffitt Cancer Center at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida.

• Nebraska Public Media received three Prism awards for marketing excellence from the Lincoln Chapter of the American Marketing Association. The awards were announced during the 2023 Prism Awards Ceremony May 4 in Lincoln. The awards are given to the “best of the best” in the Lincoln marketing community and surrounding areas. The awards also celebrate action-based innovation with measurable goals.

Publications

• Parks Coble, James L. Sellers Professor in the Department of History, is the author of “The Collapse of Nationalist China: How Chiang Kai-shek Lost China’s Civil War,” which was published by Cambridge University Press. Coble’s research field is 20th century China with an emphasis on the political history of Republican China (1911-1949). In the book, Coble explores the end of World War II, when Chiang Kai-shek seemed at the height of his power as the leader of Nationalist China. But less than four years later, he lost the China’s civil war against the communists. Coble utilizes a chronological treatment of the years 1944–1949 to address why Chiang was unable to win the war and control hyperinflation and reveal the critical weakness of Chiang’s style of governing, the fundamental structural flaws in the Nationalist government, bitter personal rivalries and Chiang’s personal lack of interest in finance.

• Ng’ang’a Wahu-Muchiri, assistant professor in the Department of English, recently published his book, “Writing on the Soil: Land and Landscape in Literature from Eastern and Southern Africa,” with the University of Michigan Press. Wahu-Muchiri’s interests include African and African Diaspora literature written in Swahili, English and French. His book argues that representations of land and landscape perform significant metaphorical labor in African literatures, and this argument evolves across several geographical spaces.