Meï Receives 2024-25 UMass Lilly Teaching Fellowship, Mutual Mentoring Grant

Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) Teaching Faculty Siobhan Meï has been selected as a 2024–2025 UMass Amherst Lilly Teaching Fellow. The program enables promising early-career faculty to develop and expand their expertise in undergraduate teaching while pursuing outside scholarly activity.  

Each year, UMass selects eight fellows from a large pool of nominees, focusing on those who "demonstrate considerable promise in teaching and scholarship, an understanding of student perspectives in teaching, strong interest in undergraduate student success, and a commitment to developing high-impact teaching practices." Selected fellows receive support from the UMass Center for Teaching and Learning in developing or redesigning an undergraduate course.   

During their fellowship year, participants attend regular seminars on pedagogy and complete a teaching portfolio that includes work with mentors. Following their fellowship, faculty demonstrate leadership in teaching by participating in teaching-related workshops, collaborating on teaching evaluation projects, or engaging in other teaching-related roles and functions on campus.  

Leveraging the strengths of the current program, Meï will develop two new Junior-Year Writing courses for CICS during her fellowship. "One of these courses will target students who are particularly interested in developing writing skills in the context of research communication, and the other course will emphasize the historical (and ongoing!) relationship between writing and social advocacy and activism in the tech space," she explains.    

In addition to the UMass Lilly Teaching Fellowship, Meï has been announced as one of five 2024-25 Mutual Mentoring Micro Grant faculty recipients for her project, “Rendering Revolution – Curation Across Disciplines.” Offered by the UMass Amherst Office of Faculty Development, the Mutual Mentoring Grant program provides funding to help faculty and librarians develop and strengthen their mentoring networks and grow as researchers, teachers, and leaders in their fields. This award will support Meï's ongoing research collaboration with Jonathan Michael Square, an assistant professor in Black Visual Culture at Pasrsons School of Design.  

Meï joined the CICS faculty in 2020. As a literary historian and translator, her background in translation studies informs her approach to teaching writing in CICS as a multimodal and multilingual form of human expression. Her research explores the intersections of fashion, narrative, and translation in Black Atlantic literary traditions. She received a PhD in comparative literature from UMass Amherst in 2022.