2026 Awardees
The College of Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences, and Education announced the five recipients of the college-level 2026 Faculty Excellence Awards. Professors Jana McAuliffe, Michael Underwood, April Chatham-Carpenter, Lundon Pinneo, and Maureece Levin were named winners by the college’s Faculty Excellence Awards Selection Committee.
The college recipients will be recognized at the UA Little Rock Faculty Excellence Awards on Thursday, April 2, at 5 p.m. in the Stella Boyle Smith Concert Hall in the Fine Arts Building. A reception will be held prior to the ceremony and the university-level recipients will be announced.
Jana McAuliffe, Excellence in Teaching
Jana McAuliffe is an associate professor of philosophy in the School of Human Inquiry. She specializes in social-political philosophy. Her research integrates political analysis, legal analysis, and philosophical theory to understand current disputes in the United States pertaining to sexuality and gender, and her publications include work in Philosophy and Social Criticism, Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, and The Journal of Teaching Philosophy. Jana serves as coordinator for the Philosophy, Interdisciplinary Studies, and Gender Studies Programs, is a faculty senator representing CHASSE, and is on the University Core Council and the Donaghey Scholars Policy Council.
Jana teaches The Philosophical Life, upper-level seminars in Social and Political Philosophy, Feminist Theory, Philosophy of Law, and Philosophy of Race, and co-teaches History of Ideas III for the Donaghey Scholars Program. Her pedagogy focuses on helping students cultivate a unique intellectual voice. Because philosophy can be unsettling, she fosters open, warm discussions and assigns writing that encourages students to connect course concepts with their own perspectives.
To support original, high-quality work, she scaffolds major writing projects over several weeks and helps students choose the best genre to communicate their ideas. When addressing non-academic audiences, students have produced op-eds, speeches, pamphlets, works of art, and even a sermon. This approach helps students develop both a clear point of view and a distinctive voice.
Jana is the Faculty Sponsor for the Socratic Society, Rainbow Alliance, and Secular Student Alliance RSOs. She has mentored many students who obtained Signature Experience Grants, supporting them to pursue independent research in philosophy and interdisciplinary areas. She is on the advising board for the Public Philosophy Network, a national organization, and chairs its Events Committee. Jana is also the project director of the UA Little Rock Ethics and Philosophy Summer Academy, a week-long residential summer camp for high school students. The academy is a collaboration between philosophy faculty and teachers at Central High School. In Summer 2024 and 2025, high school students from across the state came to campus for a no-cost philosophical experience at due to grant funding secured by Jana. She is also the co-organizer for the Arkansas High School Ethics Bowl, a debate-style competition for high school students focused on crucial, current ethical issues. Through both of these projects, she works to bring philosophical community and education to young Arkansans.
Michael Underwood, Excellence in Research or Creative Endeavors
Dr. Michael Underwood began his tenure at the University of Arkansas Little Rock in 2006. He teaches low brass, music theory, composition, brass chamber music, and directs the jazz ensemble. He has led the UA Little Rock Jazz Ensemble since it inception in 2012. The band has been featured at the Dardanelle Jazz Festival and the Arkansas State Jazz Festival.
Dr. Underwood is a scholar of the American composer Ann Giffels. In 2025, he collaborated with Dr. Lorissa Mason for the premiere recording of her masters composition, “The Invisible Choir,” a piece for chorus, orchestra, and two vocal soloists, which had sat dormant since 1951. The ASO performed his orchestration of her “Fugue in D” in 2022, and he performed her “Fugue in Two Voices” at his faculty recital in 2021.
A prolific arranger, Dr. Underwood composed six jazz trombone études for the Arkansas All-State competition. His arrangements have been performed by the ASO, and at universities including UA Little Rock, Texas Tech University, and Stephen F. Austin State University. He has also published three trombone quartets of Claude Debussy’s piano music.
Dr. Underwood has served as principal trombonist of the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra since 2003. He was a featured soloist at the 2019 and 2024 International Trombone Festivals and with the ASO in 2019. He traveled to Xuzhou, China, as a guest jazz artist and performer at the Jiangsu Normal School. Other performance highlights include the Arkansas premiere of Christian Lindberg’s “Mandrake in the Corner” with the Little Rock Wind Symphony and a featured soloist with the Natural State Brass Band. The ASO has featured Dr. Underwood on its “River Rhapsodies” chamber music series and he has performed with symphonies across the country. He also served in the U.S. Air Force “Band of the Golden West,” at Travis Air Force Base, California.
A graduate of Lawrence University, Dr. Underwood earned two master’s degrees from Bowling Green State University and a D.M.A. from the University of North Texas. He is married to Karla Fournier, clarinetist in the ASO, and has a step-daughter, Kinsey, who teaches and works for Arts Plus, a non-profit in Charlotte, N.C. He enjoys traveling, exercising, reading presidential history, and is an avid fan of the Milwaukee Bucks.
April Chatham-Carpenter, Excellence in Service
Dr. April Chatham-Carpenter is a professor and the chair of the Department of Applied Communication at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. With a decade of dedicated service to the university, her work is deeply rooted in her department’s mission: to “co-create better social worlds through positive communication.” Dr. Chatham-Carpenter treats her academic service as “translational scholarship,” actively applying communication and conflict transformation theory to help individuals and communities engage in disagreement with dignity and solve problems collaboratively.
At both the national and local levels, Dr. Chatham-Carpenter is a recognized leader in civic bridge-building and depolarization. She serves in multiple volunteer leadership roles for Braver Angels, a national citizens’ movement aimed at reducing political polarization. Her extensive work with the organization includes facilitating over 25 national workshops, previously serving as Co-Director of National Field Operations, and co-chairing the national-level Event Development and Delivery Steering Team. Regionally, she co-hosts the On the Other Hand podcast for Braver Angels Arkansas and serves as State Coordinator for Arkansas, working to build civic communities across the state where civil dialogue can take place. The podcast, which translates complex communication theories into accessible public media, has garnered over 21,000 downloads across more than 130 episodes. Furthermore, she regularly brings her expertise directly to the local community, leading conflict management workshops for organizations such as the City of Little Rock, the Arkansas Food Bank, and the Arkansas Department of Transportation.
On campus, Dr. Chatham-Carpenter’s facilitative leadership shapes her administrative and teaching roles. She acts as the university’s Research Integrity Officer and chairs the CHASSE Undergraduate Curriculum Committee. She actively equips the next generation of civic leaders by developing and teaching coursework in Listening and Civil Dialogue.
Dr. Chatham-Carpenter holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in communication from the University of Oklahoma and a B.A. in Speech Communication from the University of Central Arkansas.
Lundon Pinneo, Excellence in Social Justice
Dr. Lundon Pinneo is an assistant professor in the School of Education and coordinator of the Middle Childhood Education Program at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Her work is anchored in a commitment to providing high-quality, evidence-based instruction for all students by equipping educators with the tools, structures, and support needed to transform their teaching. Dr. Pinneo leads efforts that expand access to rigorous instruction and high-demand learning opportunities both on campus and across the state. These initiatives directly impact students by improving instructional quality in gateway courses, strengthening teacher preparation, and enabling rural and underserved communities to access advanced coursework and concurrent credit pathways.
Central to this work is Dr. Pinneo’s leadership in the Mobile Summer Institutes on Scientific Teaching (MoSI) and the sustained Communities of Practice (CoPs) that followed. Through MoSI and CoPs, she supports faculty in redesigning courses using research-based, inclusive teaching practices that improve student engagement, persistence, and learning outcomes. This sustained faculty development model—moving beyond one-time workshops to long-term instructional change—led directly to her appointment as Chair of the Faculty Senate Ad Hoc Committee on Teaching Evaluation, where she advocated for a three-voice, evidence-based framework for evaluating teaching more fairly and effectively. Together, her grant-funded work, faculty development leadership, and institutional service reflect a coherent approach to educational change: strengthening teaching at scale so that students across disciplines and across Arkansas experience instruction that is rigorous, inclusive, and designed for their success.
Dr. Maureece Levin, Rising Faculty
Dr. Maureece Levin is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She is an archaeologist and archaeobotanist with interests in food production systems, historical ecology, niche construction, sociocultural change, and archaeological pedagogy. Her research methods focus on archaeobotany, but include a wide variety of archaeological materials, as well as ethnoarchaeology. Levin has worked on questions of ancient food cultivation strategies in Micronesia for close to two decades, and has recently developed and run a new field school program in Pohnpei, Micronesia in collaboration with the Institute for Field Research (IFR). Her current work also includes an ongoing historical archaeology project on the UA Little Rock campus, The Garden Site Archaeological Project, which has integrated with her Archaeological Investigations class, trained archaeological interns, and welcomed volunteers in the field and the lab. Currently, materials from the Garden Site Project are on exhibit on the first floor of Ottenheimer Library.
Dr. Levin teaches other anthropology courses, including Understanding Cultures, Archaeology, and Plants and People. She especially enjoys working with independent study students, three of whom have been awarded Signature Experience Grants for their mentored research, presenting their work at local and regional conferences. Her commitment to teaching led her to participate in the faculty Community of Practice (CoP) organized by the STEM Ed center in 2023 and 2024, and she served as a co-facilitator of the CoP in 2025. She is faculty advisor for the Anthropology Club, and was recently elected chair of the Sustainability Committee. Additionally, she served as vice-president of the Arkansas Association of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminology from 2023-2024 and president from 2024-2025.
Dr. Levin’s work has been published in several journals, including Archaeology in Oceania, New Phytologist, Frontiers in Plant Science, Quaternary International, Radiocarbon, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.
She completed a Ph.D. and M.A. in anthropology at the University of Oregon and a B.A. in anthropology at Whitman College. After completing her Ph.D., she completed postdoctoral work at Stanford University and taught at Valdosta State University before arriving at UA Little Rock.