Congratulations to the six Arts faculty members who have received the 2025/26 Killam Teaching Prize and the three Arts Graduate Teaching Assistants recognized with the Killam Graduate Teaching Assistant Award.
Get to know the recipients and discover what these prestigious awards mean to them.
Killam Teaching Prize
The Killam Teaching Prize is awarded annually to faculty nominated by students, colleagues and alumni in recognition of excellence in teaching.
Dr. Alifa Bandali
Assistant Professor of Teaching, Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice
Dr. Alifa Bandali’s research and teaching interests include: intersectional approaches; feminist activism in institutional and creative spaces; Muslim women’s representations; emotional pedagogies; and feminist cultural and media studies (to name a few). Her teaching praxis seeks to bridge the gap between academia and everyday life. Her pedagogy includes the use of media and popular culture, along with emotions and what it means to take seriously the feeling body. She teaches a breadth of GRSJ courses, including GRSJ 300: Intersectional Approaches to Thinking Gender, and she will be teaching a new second-year special topics course in Winter 2026 related to masculinities and femininities.
In reflecting on this recognition, Dr. Bandali shares: “I don’t think I can express in words what this award means to me, but I want to highlight my deepest gratitude and thanks to all of those who have shaped and informed my teaching and learning, including mentors, peers, family, friends, students, and those I continue to collaborate with.”
Dr. Amanda Cheong
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology
Dr. Amanda Cheong teaches courses on migration, global development, and qualitative methods. She serves on the faculty advisory committee for the Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies Program and the executive committee for the Centre for Migration Studies. Dr. Cheong researches the impacts of documentation and legal status on people’s lives, working in partnership with stateless, undocumented, and refugee communities in Southeast Asia and North America.
As a first-generation scholar from an immigrant working-class background, and an undergraduate alumna of UBC, Dr. Cheong’s teaching practice encourages applied, experiential, and inclusive learning. She encourages community-based learning as a way for students to explore issues they care about in practical, equitable, and social change-oriented ways. She has supported undergraduate and graduate students in securing over $50,000 in funding to pursue community-based learning opportunities.
On what winning this prize means to her, Dr. Cheong had this to say: “I share this award with all of the students, especially those from racialized, migrant, and working-class backgrounds, who have felt that their identities and experiences are underrepresented in what is taught to them. I hope that we can keep working together to build a postsecondary learning community that celebrates the knowledge creation capacities of those who have historically been marginalized from this space.”
Dr. David King
Lecturer, Department of Psychology
Dr. King leads courses in personality, health psychology, and the psychology of sex differences, as well as a special topics course on the psychology of death and dying. He received his PhD in psychology from UBC in 2013, with a background in health, stress, and relational coping. He describes his teaching philosophy as collaborative, transformative, and socially conscious, striving to effect change in the minds of his students and, by extension, improve the world in which they live.
Whether discussing health disparities, discrimination, or coping with loss, he approaches his teaching with compassion and a concern for the greater good. Dr. King is also involved in a number of initiatives intended to enhance equity, diversity, and inclusion at UBC, and is the co-founder and coordinator of PrideMind, a community of care aimed at supporting 2S/LGBTQIA+ members of psychology.
Reflecting on the award, Dr. King shares: “I’m very honoured to receive this award, and so appreciative of all the amazing students I’ve taught over the years. As much as I have strived to inspire them to do great things, the truth is, they inspire me on a daily basis, and I am forever grateful.”
Dr. Patrick Pennefather
Associate Professor, Department of Theatre & Film
Dr. Patrick Pennefather’s teaching, research, and service are rooted in an ongoing inquiry to understand how technologies shape our interactions in the interconnected digital and physical spaces we inhabit. His roles as an xR researcher, project-based educator, sound designer, author, and technology developer are compelled by ceaseless experimentation and an interdisciplinary spirit that seeks collaborations across disciplinary boundaries.
As director of the Transmedia Spatial Storytelling Lab, his research includes: research creation, applied and experimental research with spatial audio, motion capture, and fine-tuning machine learning models. The iterative design of project-based learning experiences allows undergraduate students and the Emerging Media Lab students he has worked with to design sound for UBC Theatre productions and other media, develop emerging technologies like VR, Mixed Reality, and AI-powered projects, and collaborate on new forms of media creations. In that co-creative process, students also learn design thinking skills to solve real-world problems through hands-on learning and experimentation. Activities, interactions, short-lectures, and collaboration develop competencies such as self-regulation, problem-solving, critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and creativity.
On winning this award, Dr. Pennefather has this to say: “This award is a reminder that I have had excellent students that I continue to learn from. It is an affirmation that undergraduate, graduate, alumni and Emerging Media Lab students are open to learning differently: peer-peer, hands-on, multi-modal, in-person and hybrid project-based learning environments. Students I’ve worked with have come from Theatre, Film, Digital Media, Music, Visual Art, Cognitive Systems, Computer Science, Engineering, Biology, Earth Sciences, Forestry, Journalism, Media Studies, Interdisciplinary Studies and more. I am honoured to share the award with the many excellent teachers I have had, have co-taught with and learned from. I will strive to continue to improve my approaches to teaching and learning.”
Dr. Priti Narayan
Assistant Professor, Department of Geography
Dr. Priti Narayan’s research and teaching interests centre around urban processes and politics, anti-colonial theory, and community-centric perspectives. Her courses encourage students to look beyond received ideas of people and place, and imagine new directions of knowledge flows and varied forms of expertise. She aims to equip students with critical theoretical and political tools to examine and understand the world we all live and participate in, and create opportunities to collectively deliberate on what ethical inhabitation can look like. Her work is largely informed by collective struggles for tenure security in Chennai, India.
Dr. Narayan shares, “It is an honour to receive this prize. The classroom is a powerful arena for transformation, and to share it with inspiring students at a time of immense global change has been a very meaningful experience. I thank my students, old and new, and colleagues for their support and all the conversations.”
Dr. John Roosa
Professor, Department of History
Dr. John Roosa’s research and teaching interests include Southeast Asia, nationalism, imperialism, oral history, and human rights. He teaches courses such as Imperialism and Nationalism in Southeast Asia, Postcolonial Southeast Asia, and Human Rights in World History.
Graduate Teaching Assistant Award
Each year, UBC honours Graduate Teaching Assistants with the Killam Graduate Teaching Assistant Award, recognizing their excellence in teaching and the high regard they earn from students and supervisors.
Avontay Williams, Department of Philosophy
For Avontay Williams, learning Philosophy should be accessible, inclusive, active, and fun. Philosophical analysis is not merely absorbing the results of others’ investigations; it is an activity, something one does. Students learn to reason and engage philosophically by wrestling with ideas themselves. Students praise his success in achieving these aims, noting that his support helped them fully understand what they were unsure about during lectures, and that he created a welcoming class environment that stimulates high participation. They also describe his ability to take material that was sometimes difficult to digest and make it easy to understand and interesting to engage with as a truly wonderful experience. Students further share that discussion was the highlight of their school week and call it the best course experience so far.
Cody Brown, Department of English Language and Literatures
Reminding his students that there is no such thing as a literature emergency, Cody Brown infuses his classrooms with a sense of play that lessens the stakes while increasing attention and critical engagement. In his courses, English studies becomes a means of building an academic community grounded in relation, rapport, and attention to ourselves, others, and the world. Students describe his empathy for them as going beyond words and note that he is very interactive and attentive to his students, with teaching evaluations describing him as a “10/10 and a fantastic TA”.
Kirthana Singh Khurana, First Year & Interdisciplinary Programs
Kirthana Singh Khurana approaches teaching as a deeply collaborative act undertaken together. This entails recognizing students as individuals navigating their own academic journeys, with distinct backgrounds, ambitions, and challenges that shape how they engage. Students testify that Kirthana is incredibly supportive, helping them perform to the best of their capacities and build confidence in speaking. Her mentorship extends beyond academic instruction into a genuine investment in her students’ futures and exemplifies the spirit of this award: exceptional teaching, meaningful student engagement, and a level of esteem that is deeply felt by those she teaches.
