Kristin Phillips, Assistant Professor in the Department of Teacher Education has been awarded the Gail P. Kelly Award for Outstanding Dissertation in Comparative Education in 2009. The Kelly Award is conferred on a doctoral dissertation that manifests academic excellence, originally, methodological, theoretical, and empirical rigor, and that addresses social justice and equity issues in an international context. Kristen’s dissertation, “Building the Nation from the Hinterlands: Poverty, Participation, and Education in Rural Tanzania” (2009), was selected from the pool of nominations which was unusually large this year (a total of 18 nominations submitted) and truly outstanding. The selection committee was very impressed with Kristin’s work and noted its important contribution to the ongoing theoretical and methodological debates in the field of comparative and international education. The Kelly Award will be presented to Kristin at the forthcoming Annual Meeting of the Comparative and International Education Society to be held in Chicago, March 1-5, 2010. Congratulations Kristin.