Murshed and Saidi Named Recipients of 2024 Chambliss Faculty Research Awards

KUTZTOWN, Pa. – Dr. Feisal Murshed, associate professor of Business Administration, and Dr. Christine Saidi, professor of History, have been awarded Kutztown University's 2024 Chambliss Faculty Research Awards for their extraordinary research and scholarship endeavors. The awards were presented during the university's Faculty and Staff Convocation and Celebration Friday, Aug. 23.

The Chambliss Faculty Research Award, inaugurated in 2004 through a gift from Dr. Carlson R. Chambliss, professor emeriti of physical science, is meant to recognize the very highest achievement in research and scholarship and can be awarded only once within a person's career.

Murshed has served in the business administration department since 2013. Throughout his career, he has served the business and marketing fields in different roles and continues to be an active member.

His research expertise lies in the intersection of customer-centric marketing strategy and consumer choices/decision-making. He combines managerial relevance with academic rigor to enhance understanding of consumers, markets and economies. His research has appeared in top scholarly journals in marketing. He is actively pursuing research in diverse areas such as sustainability, brand management, sales force management and small business management. During his time in KU, he has co-authored 20 peer-reviewed articles and 14 peer-reviewed conference proceedings.

He is on editorial boards of multiple marketing journals. He has also served as an external reviewer of Ph.D. thesis. He has won the Outstanding Researcher of the Year award in the College of Business multiple times. He is an affiliated faculty member of the Center for Sales and Marketing Strategy at the Foster School of Business, University of Washington.

He received his Ph.D. in marketing from Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pa. He earned his MBA from Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio.

Dr. Christine A. Saidi has been a faculty member at Kutztown University for 16 years. She is a prolific and highly respected African history scholar, whose research focuses on gender and linguistics, especially in early Bantu social history.

Saidi has published two books, “Women’s Authority and Society in Early East-Central Africa” (2010) and “Bantu Africa” (2017). She has two more books nearing completion titled, “Beyond Gender in Early African History” and “Gendered Implications of Matriliny in Africa, Past and Present.”

She also published three articles in leading peer-reviewed journals since 2021, with another one before this. In 2021, she published “Leza, Sungu, and Samba: Digital Humanities and Early Bantu History” in History in Africa. Her “The Father is also the Sister: A Non-Binary Gendered History of Matrilineal Bantu Communities” appeared the following year in a special matriliny issue of the Nordic Journal of African Studies. Saidi’s “My Husband is Also My Daughter: The Social History of Bantu Matrilineal Zones: 1450-1800” was published in 2023 by Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal. She has also published six chapters in books.

Saidi also produced four digital publications including “East, Central and South Africa from 300 CE to 1000 CE” in ABC-CLIO Encyclopedia of World History (2010); “Kingdom of the Kongo” in Encyclopedia of Empire (2013); “Women in Precolonial Africa,” in Oxford University Research Encyclopedia African History (2020); and “Early Modern Women of Africa,” in Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing. She has also contributed no less than six chapters to four different African history books.

Saidi is not confined to publications as she has presented numerous papers at national and international conferences. In 2018, she presented “Recapturing Early Social History in East-Central Africa” at the Reclaiming Early Zambian History Conference in Lusaka, Zambia, and “Beyond Gender, New Paradigms for Researching Early Bantu History” at the Rethink Gender in Africa Workshop at the University of Ghent, Belgium, in 2021.

She received five grants and a three-year award from the National Endowments for the Humanities in 2019. The Kutztown University Research Committee has also funded two of her proposals to conduct research in Europe and Africa in 2022 and 2023. She also obtained a grant from the state of Pennsylvania to create Open Education Resources to help make Africana resources available to all students and teachers.

Saidi has provided numerous students with research opportunities including seven different students in the KU Bears Summer Research Program and supervising independent studies and Honors capstone projects. She has also sponsored multiple student presentations at local and regional conferences.