The Angie Warren Perkins Award is named for the first dean of women at UT. This award honors outstanding leadership in campus governance or administration at the level of department head, director, or below.
Margaret Lazarus Dean
Meteoric describes Margaret Lazarus Dean’s ascent to national recognition. Dean is the author of a widely praised novel, The Time It Takes to Fall, and her forthcoming book, Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight, has already been awarded the prestigious Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. In 2011 she gave an invited paper titled “Risk, Masculinity, and the Anxiety of Disaster in the Literature of Human Spaceflight” at a conference hosted by NASA in Washington, DC. Dean, an assistant professor of English, joined UT in 2008 as a member of the Creative Writing faculty. In her first year, she held a highly competitive National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. She co-organized the National Day of Writing, a series of campus writing events that garnered widespread participation, in 2009. Dean challenges students to go past the surface level of texts and inspires self-confidence in encouraging them to discover ideas on their own. In the words of one student, “She makes learning an adventure.” Last year, the College of Arts and Sciences honored her efforts in advising and mentoring students with an Outstanding Advising Award.