Graduating students identified UI employees who made a difference in their lives in and out of the classroom. The faculty and staff were identified by the UI Senior Exit Survey, and those who are mentioned by five or more students are listed in bold.

Professor Ashley Howard is the recipient of the 2024 James N. Murray Faculty Award, which honors an untenured faculty member who has demonstrated outstanding rapport with students and who creates an exemplary classroom atmosphere.

Damani Phillips, who serves as head of jazz studies and jointly appointed in African American Studies, is an accomplished performer, scholar, teacher, and composer. The Collegiate Scholar Award was inaugurated in 2008 to recognize mid-career faculty for exceptional achievement. The award carries a financial award to support the recipient's teaching and research initiatives.

The League of Women Voters Johnson County will co-host a documentary screening of “I, Too” followed by a facilitated discussion as part of the Film Scene Community.

Tara Bynum, Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English, has released a new book through the University of Illinois Press titled, "Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America."

Victor Ray wrote an article published in The Nation about Florida Governor Rick DeSantis's recent demand for information from college educators on “programs and initiatives” focused on “critical race theory” at Florida’s 12 public universities.

An historic coalition of attorneys, advocates, labor unions, and experts filed a series of amicus curiae briefs with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of the Biden Administration’s student debt relief program, including Assistant Professor of African American Studies, Dr. Louise Seamster.

T.J. Dedeaux-Norris is one of three Iowa City recipients of $10,000 grants from the Iowa Artist Fellowship Program. Less than a decade ago, Dedeaux-Norris made a film about life after hurricane Katrina and their life navigating three worlds: academia, art and their roots as “a girl from Mississippi.”

Victor Ray co-wrote an op-ed for the New York Times with Heather McGee: "Why do we have public schools? To make young people into educated, productive adults, of course. But public schools are also for making Americans. Thus, public education requires lessons about history — the American spirit and its civics — and also contact with and context about other Americans: who we are and what has made us."

Protests over George Floyd’s 2020 murder were the largest civil rights demonstrations in American history. The brutal footage of officer Derek Chauvin’s suffocating knee on George Floyd’s neck led many white Americans to, at least briefly, acknowledge the reality of structural racism in policing. In response, corporations questioned their policies, “defund the police” became an activist rallying cry, and books on anti-racism became unexpected bestsellers. A narrative arose that America experienced a “racial reckoning” that challenged white racism’s worst excesses.