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Awards
Celebrating research excellence in the humanities and social sciences
The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) is proud to announce the 2026 recipients of the FASS Research Excellence Awards. Congratulations!
Recognizing established and early career researchers in the humanities and social sciences respectively, the awards underscores FASS' commitment to celebrating its researchers at every stage of their career journey. All four award recipients will be formally recognized at the FASS Fall Reception in October.
Award Winners
Research Excellence Award in Humanities
Deanna Reder
English and Indigenous Studies
Deanna Reder (Cree-Métis) is a professor in the Departments of Indigenous Studies and English and the research lead for "The People and the Text: Indigenous Writing in Lands Claimed by Canada”. Working collaboratively with colleagues, she has brought scholarly attention to understudied works by Indigenous authors and advocated for the Indigenization of editing practices and pedagogy (e.g., Honouring the Strength of Indian Women: Plays, Stories, Poems by Vera Manuel, 2019; Elements of Indigenous Style, 2nd Edition, 2025; Read Listen Tell, 2016). She has prioritized research that considers one’s responsibilities to relevant Indigenous people (e.g., Cold Case North, 2020).
Reder’s monograph, Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition: Cree and Métis âcimisowina won the 2024 Canada Prize and the 2025 MLA Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. Funded by the CFI Innovation Fund, she is working with the Canadian Research Knowledge Network to redesign its digital archival Canadiana collection.
Research Excellence Award in Social Sciences
Eric Beauregard
Criminology
Eric Beauregard is professor in the School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University. Beauregard obtained his PhD from the University of Montreal in 2005. Prior to joining academia, he worked as a criminologist for Correctional Service of Canada, where he assessed more than 1,200 sex offenders. He began his academic career in the Department of Criminology at the University of South Florida in Tampa before moving to Simon Fraser University in 2007. His work focuses on the crime-commission process, decision-making, the criminal investigation, and homicide. Professor Beauregard has developed an expertise in the research on sexual violence and sexual homicide, and he has provided training to law enforcement agencies nationally and internationally. He has published more than 200 publications in the field of sexual violence and policing, and he serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Criminal Justice.
Early Career Research Excellence Award in Humanities
Sabrina Higgins
Global Humanities and Archaeology
Sabrina C. Higgins is an associate professor cross-appointed between the Departments of Global Humanities and Archaeology, and serves as the director of the Stavros Niarchos Centre for Hellenic Studies at SFU. Her research is inherently interdisciplinary, drawing from the fields of late antique studies, archaeology, religious studies, art history, papyrology, and gender studies, and encompasses four diverse research streams: mariology, graffiti studies, late antique archaeology, and public scholarship, the latter of which is the subject of her recently published co-edited volume, Ancient Pasts for Modern Audiences: Public Scholarship and the Mediterranean World. She is an active field archaeologist, serving as a co-investigator on the Philae Temple Graffiti Project and the Ibis Hypogeum Graffiti Project, North Abydos (both in Egypt), as well as the co-director of the excavations at Golemo Gradište, Konjuh in North Macedonia. Finally, she also the co-founder of two digital humanities projects, Peopling the Past and the Digital Mary Project.
Early Career Research Excellence Award in Social Sciences
Darren Byler
International Studies
Darren Byler is an associate professor in the School for International Studies. His research focuses on the Uyghur people in China, surveillance technologies and colonial racial capitalism. His book Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City was published by Duke University Press and received the 2023 Gregory Bateson Award from the Society for Cultural Anthropology and the 2023 Margaret Mead Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology. He is also author of In the Camps: China's High-Tech Penal Colony, which investigates the surveillance and mass internment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, co-editor of Xinjiang Year Zero a textbook on Uyghur colonization, and co-translator of The Backstreets a Uyghur language novel by Perhat Tursun. His current work examines the infrastructures of thought reform in contemporary China and the effects of Chinese investment and high-tech infrastructure on stateless populations in Southeast Asia.