Cox Faculty Award for Creative Scholarship and Teaching
Galen Brokaw
Galen Brokaw, professor and head of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures in the College of Letters and Science, is the recipient of the Cox Faculty Award for Creative Scholarship and Teaching. The award, which carries a $2,000 honorarium, is given in recognition of superior research combined with a record of excellence in the instruction of upper division and graduate students.
Brokaw has built an international reputation for bridging literary studies, anthropology, history and linguistics to recover Indigenous knowledge systems. His work dismantles the assumption held by scholars for centuries that Indigenous peoples of the Americas had no writing. He showed that both the Andean khipu – knotted strings used by the Incas to record everything from census data to histories and laws – and the pictorial manuscripts of the Aztec and Maya functioned as writing, fundamentally reframing understanding of human civilization.
In the classroom, Brokaw trains students to evaluate sources critically from multiple cultural perspectives and to build sophisticated arguments bridging linguistic and cultural divides. Recognizing that students need structured guidance to conduct sophisticated research, he redesigned the senior capstone course, building in clear benchmarks while simultaneously targeting language proficiency and cultural studies research.
“His teaching is not separate from his research but its natural extension, training students to conduct the same interdisciplinary, theoretically sophisticated, socially engaged scholarship that has made him a leader in his field,” wrote MSU professor of modern languages and literatures Bridget Kevane in a letter nominating Brokaw for the award.