Hira Mahmood, a PMA Ph.D. student, has won a 2025 Russell Family Teaching Award in Performing and Media Arts. Mahmood’s research focus includes aesthetics, affect (shame, disgust, embarrassment), psychoanalysis (abjection, desire, language), visual and material cultures, and subjectivity. In Fall 2025, she will be teaching the course PMA 1175: FWS: Hell is a Teenage Girl: Terror and Turmoil of Girlhood in Horror Films.
The Russell Family Teaching Award is intended for professorial faculty, lecturers, senior lecturers and teaching assistants who have demonstrated their devotion to teaching, where teaching is understood to include classroom presence, preparation and administration, student counseling (including general advising of students formally assigned, but not necessarily enrolled in the recipients’ course), development of new courses and new methods of student instruction.
“I am passionate about teaching, working with students, and building a classroom space that makes everyone feel welcome and invested in learning from each other,” said Mahmood. “Receiving the Russell Family Teaching Award means so much to me.”
Read more about this award.
