Liu and Manzella Earn Academic Innovation Awards

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Peng Liu and Abby Manzella are presented their Academic Innovation Awards from Tim Walston, interim executive vice president for academic affairs and provost.

Peng Liu, assistant professor of music, and Abby Manzella, assistant professor of English and creative writing, were the spring 2025 winners of the Truman Academic Innovation Award.

Liu received recognition for engaging students with community-centered assignments. MUSI 530/530G: Topics in Contemporary Music is a seminar, intended for senior and graduate music majors, that explores diverse musical traditions from Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe and the Americas. Since most students enrolled primarily study Western art music, the course’s global emphasis can seem disconnected from their immediate interests, hindering engagement. To address this, Liu designed six bi-weekly “discovery assignments” that enable students to actively engage with course themes through reading, writing, analyzing, interviewing, filming, dancing and teaching. Two assignments are community-centered, explicitly connecting global musical concepts to the local Kirksville community, substantially enhancing student engagement.

Manzella was recognized for bringing flash non/fiction and professionalism into a new creative writing course. This advanced level workshop, ENG 504/G: Writing Workshop in Flash Non/Fiction, is geared toward upper-level undergraduate and graduate students that want to add to their specialized knowledge as they consider their lives beyond Truman. Students learned the history and creative craft of short stories and essays while writing, workshopping and editing their own flash pieces in fiction and nonfiction. The course also included a professionalization component where students had the opportunity to briefly intern for one of the top journals in the field of flash writing, SmokeLong Quarterly This experience gave students firsthand insight into literary publishing, strengthened their analytical and creative skills, and even resulted in a class-published interview.
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