Alumni Award Recipients

Kathleen Washburn
Faculty Teaching Award, 2012

Kathleen Washburn completed her Ph.D. in English at UCLA. Her research focuses on Native American literatures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including boarding school narratives, early novels, and Native periodicals. Her publications include "Writing the Indigenous West" for A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West (2011) and the forthcoming "New Indians and Indigenous Archives" for a PMLA special section on "The Ethnic Archive." Her current project rethinks new forms of Native writing in relation to discourses of indigenous absence and presence in the assimilation era. Her teaching interests include modern American and Native American fiction and poetry, cultural and gender studies, and southwestern literature.

Dr. Washburn continues to seek ways to support her students at UNM. At North Carolina State University, Dr. Washburn received the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award in 1996. In 2008 she received the UCLA Chancellor's Service Award, which goes to a graduate student who has made significant contributions to the community. Dr. Washburn received this award for working with several programs to recruit nontraditional students to UCLA; she also worked for three years with the Community Activities Committee (CAC) of the Program Activities Board. Made up of graduate students and one staff member, the CAC allocated funding to student groups (mostly undergraduate) who provided services to the community, including tutoring, mentoring, and even legal advice. This board also supervised said activities.