Baylor’s 2026 Centennial Professors Awarded Funding for Research Projects

Contact: Lori Fogleman, 254-709-5959
Follow us: @BaylorUMedia on X and LinkedIn

Baylor University faculty members Kelly C. Johnston, Ed.D., associate professor of curriculum and instruction in the Moody School of Education, and Alexander J. McNair, Ph.D., associate professor of Spanish in the College of Arts & Sciences, have been selected to receive the 2026 Centennial Professor Awards for their proposed research projects over the next academic year. The awards will provide funding for Johnston’s development of the Baylor Educator-Scholar Collective as a model for ongoing professional formation and McNair’s research examining Antonio Enríquez Gómez’s adaptation of Cidian lore within the cultural and religious context of the Spanish Inquisition.

The Centennial Professor Award, created by the Baylor Class of 1945, honors two tenured faculty members annually with a $5,000 Centennial Faculty Development award for research projects that facilitate their development and contribute to the academic life of the University. These projects may include travel for study or research, the development of innovative teaching materials or other professional development activities.

Baylor Educator-Scholar Collective

Johnston’s Centennial Professor proposal focuses on the development of the Baylor Educator-Scholar Collective, a sustained intellectual and professional community for graduates of the Moody School of Education. The Collective will serve as a model for ongoing professional formation through a digital hub, annual gathering and integration with graduate education that reflects both innovation and strong alignment with Baylor’s mission and strategic priorities.

“Being selected feels like a significant milestone in my time at Baylor,” Johnston said. “This recognition affirms that the University values faculty whose scholarship and practice are in meaningful conversation with each other, and this initiative is a direct product of that relationship. Being able to bring that expertise to bear on Baylor's own community, in a place where alumni flourishing is an institutional value, is an honor.”

Johnston’s research emphasizes fostering long-term engagement among Moody SOE alumni, supporting reflective practice and advancing educator identity as a scholarly and evolving vocation. Her project grew out of a recurring question she often asked herself in the classroom: How will my students carry this forward?

“As someone who came to Baylor first as a student before returning as a faculty member, I know something about what it means to leave this place carrying commitments you're still figuring out how to live. Not just the content knowledge, but the deeper commitments to inquiry, to reflective and responsive practice, to seeing yourself as scholars of your own work,” Johnston said. “My research on professional learning has convinced me that those commitments grow best in philosophically grounded community, and the Educator-Scholar Collective is my contribution toward that goal.”

Through her research, Johnston hopes an enduring network emerges, where Baylor-prepared educators continue to develop throughout their careers, where graduate students take on the work of designing and sustaining that community as part of their own formation and where faculty extend their impact beyond the classroom and into the future of the profession. Through the Centennial Professor award, she will visit Teachers College at Columbia University to study alumni engagement models and later launch a scalable and sustainable network at Baylor that has the potential for lasting institutional and professional impact.

El Cid in the Age of the Inquisition

McNair has been a student of the medieval Spanish hero known as El Cid for many years. El Cid may be best known today by the statues and plaques commemorating him that dot the Spanish landscape or as the recent subject of a Netflix series, an animated movie and graphic novels. More than a decade ago, McNair started researching a play about El Cid written around 1660. With his Centennial Professor award, McNair will reconstruct the performance history of this influential play and produce a critical scholarly account of its development, which will represent a significant contribution to the field of Spanish Golden Age literature.

While researching the play, McNair found the playwright’s story fascinating. Antonio Enríquez Gómez lived for more than a decade in disguise, under the alias Fernando de Zárate, and was on the run from the Inquisition, which had received reports that he was secretly practicing Judaism. With no religious tolerance in Spain, as elsewhere in the 17th-century world, McNair found it interesting that a dissident writer, who would die in an Inquisition prison in 1663, was the author of a play about El Cid – the Spanish icon of Christian orthodoxy.

“Moreover, I began researching the play’s reception on the stage and in print,” he said. “I found that Enríquez’s play was by far the most popular version of El Cid over the 18th and early 19th centuries – probably because the public didn’t know it was written by Enríquez. And yet, very few people are aware of this version today, as it essentially disappeared from the public eye after its final performance on stage in Madrid in 1836.”

As part of his research, McNair will examine archives in Madrid, rare materials in U.S. collections and participate in major international conferences. He also will travel to consult Inquisition records, early printed quartos and annotated theatrical copies. He hopes his critical edition of the play, which will be released later this year, along with a book project, will bring attention to this lost classic of the Spanish stage, perhaps even inspire a new generation of actors and directors.

“It would be fun to see Enriquez’s Cid in the theaters for the first time in almost 200 years,” McNair said.

As this year’s Centennial Professors, McNair and Johnston are the 49th and 50th recipients of the award that has facilitated faculty development and their contributions to academic life since 1987.

“I look at all the professors who have received this award before me and am a little overwhelmed to be following in their footsteps,” McNair said. “They are true Baylor legends all, and I am so honored to take my place among them. It’s humbling to try to live up to that standard.”

ABOUT BAYLOR UNIVERSITY

Baylor University is a private Christian University and a nationally ranked Research 1 institution. The University provides a vibrant campus community for 20,000 students by blending interdisciplinary research with an international reputation for educational excellence and a faculty commitment to teaching and scholarship. Chartered in 1845 by the Republic of Texas through the efforts of Baptist pioneers, Baylor is the oldest continually operating University in Texas. Located in Waco, Baylor welcomes students from all 50 states and more than 100 countries to study a broad range of degrees among its 12 nationally recognized academic divisions. Learn more about Baylor University at www.baylor.edu.