The 2025 Outstanding Teaching Awards: Zada Komara
Each Friday this summer, UKNow is highlighting one of the winners of the University of Kentucky’s 2025 Outstanding Teaching Awards, given by the Office for Faculty Advancement with the Office of the Provost.
LEXINGTON, Ky. (June 27, 2025) — Zada Komara, Ph.D., a Senior Lewis Lecturer in the Lewis Honors College, is one of nine winners to receive the University of Kentucky’s 2025 Outstanding Teaching Awards.
These awards identify and recognize individuals who demonstrate special dedication to student achievement and who are successful in their teaching. Recipients were selected via nomination and reviewed by a selection committee based in the UK Provost’s Office for Faculty Advancement and the Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching (CELT).
“I think so highly of the students that nominated me for this award. Being worthy of the exaltation of such incredible people is the highest honor,” Komara said. “Helping them change the world, helping them navigate challenges and loving them to the fullest is an award in and of itself. It’s easy to love teaching when it’s an exercise in mutual praxis.”
Komara holds three degrees in anthropology and is an archaeologist of the recent past. Her research focuses on honors pedagogy, public history and archaeology, Appalachian coal towns, contemporary garbology and the relationship between consumption and social identity. She is also a UK Appalachian Center and Department of Anthropology affiliated faculty member.
Komara likens her role as a teacher to participating in a tabletop roleplaying game like Dungeons & Dragons.
“Teaching is a lifelong narrative roleplaying adventure with many rewarding quests undertaken with the best guild,” she said. “There’s nothing more enriching than evaluating and building knowledge together in an invested community of students, faculty, and staff who truly care about social equity and mutual empowerment.
“Teaching is being challenged every day not to stagnate in your thinking or compassion. Hanging out with people every day who want to apply their intellectualism toward a just world is a heck of a job and I can’t imagine a better adventure.”
Students praised Komara for being creative in her teaching and supportive of student goals and needs.
“In her class learning goes far beyond our readings, and the discussion that she facilitates allows space for open and deep discourse surrounding important and interesting topics,” wrote a student in support of Komara’s nomination. “Our class assignments and projects are creative, and I've genuinely enjoyed each of them.”
“She is extremely supportive, providing well thought out guidance and advice to her students,” wrote another student. “(Komara) is extremely considerate to her students’ needs and special circumstances while creating an environment that allows her students to thrive academically and socially.”
Komara’s current projects all lean toward student-directed research and include the UKY Slang Collection Project available on UKnowledge abut campus slang and folklore, the Rendville Coal Town Archaeology Project in Ohio’s Appalachian coalfields, and the Rose Street Garage Archaeology project about campus recreation and consumption. She supervises the Materiality at UK Oral History Project and the College Life Oral History Project, which collectively total more than 500 student-collected interviews and can be accessed at UK’s Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History. Komara also administers the UK Appalachian Center’s Coal Camp Documentary Project, a collaborative documentation effort focusing on company coal towns in Kentucky’s 54 Appalachian counties.
This award follows her previous teaching recognitions as one of the UK Alumni Association’s 2024 Great Teacher Award winners and one of the UK College of Education’s 2024 Teachers Who Made a Difference.
****
This year’s Outstanding Teaching Awards were given to six faculty and three graduate teaching assistants. Each winner received an award certificate, a commemorative engraved gift and a cash award in recognition of their teaching excellence at a campus ceremony on May 1. Read more here.
As the state’s flagship, land-grant institution, the University of Kentucky exists to advance the Commonwealth. We do that by preparing the next generation of leaders — placing students at the heart of everything we do — and transforming the lives of Kentuckians through education, research and creative work, service and health care. We pride ourselves on being a catalyst for breakthroughs and a force for healing, a place where ingenuity unfolds. It's all made possible by our people — visionaries, disruptors and pioneers — who make up 200 academic programs, a $476.5 million research and development enterprise and a world-class medical center, all on one campus.