Congratulations to our 2026 Research Excellence Awards winners Dr. Paul Knapp and Dr. Heather Adams.
Dr. Heather Adams, associate professor of English, receives the Early Career Research Excellence Award for her groundbreaking scholarship in rhetoric, composition, and writing studies, with interdisciplinary specializations spanning feminist theory, feminist historiography, gendered health studies, reproduction studies, and public emotion.
Peers describe Adams as a preeminent early-career scholar in her field and one of her generation’s most prominent voices in feminist rhetorical studies. In her 9 years at UNCG, she has authored or coauthored an outstanding 17 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters as well as a book and a co-edited collection of scholarly essays — a level of scholarly activity one would expect from a full professor rather than an early career faculty member.
Adams’s work is published with top-tier publishers and journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Speech, which has a 6% acceptance rate, and Rhetoric Review, which has a 15% acceptance rate.
Her 2022 book, Enduring Shame: A Recent History of Unwed Pregnancy and Righteous Reproduction — which examines the raced and classed experiences of unwed mothers since the mid-twentieth century and traces a culture of shaming and blaming women into the present — won the highly competitive Horner Outstanding Book Award from the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition. Her 2024 co-edited collection, Inclusive Aims: Rhetoric’s Role in Reproductive Justice, was released by the award-winning Parlor Press, which publishes some of writing studies’ most distinguished scholars.
Dr. Paul Knapp, professor of geography, environment, and sustainability, receives the Senior Research Excellence Award for his innovative work in biogeography and climatology using dendroecological techniques.
Dr. Paul Knapp, professor of geography, environment, and sustainability, receives the Senior Research Excellence Award for his innovative work in biogeography and climatology using dendroecological techniques.
In the field and at his Carolina Tree-Ring Science Laboratory, Knapp uses tree-ring data to reconstruct centuries of environmental conditions and help scientists better understand complex atmospheric and forest ecological dynamics. His work explores how human activities affect environments and how climate affects human well-being.
Knapp is known by his peers for innovative work advancing the frontiers of biogeography, climatology, and dendrochronology and impacting environmental understanding and climate science, locally, nationally, and internationally. The important research has drawn over $1.3 million in funding over his career, from organizations including the NSF, USDA, Bureau of Land Management, and the NC Policy Collaboratory.
He has published over 92 peer-reviewed articles over his career — 62 in his 21 years at UNCG — and amassed nearly 3,000 citations. Over the last 15 years, he has published three to six papers a year. His research appears in top-tier disciplinary journals such as Global Change Biology, Global Environmental Change, and Annals of the American Association of Geographers, which is one of geography’s flagship journals — as well as in prestigious interdisciplinary outlets.
The diversity of journals in which Knapp’s publications appear reflects the wide, multidisciplinary impact of his research explorations.
Announcement by Sangeetha Shivaji
Feature photo by Sean Norona
