News and Events
College of Humanities Announces Two English Faculty Awards
Lee K. Abbott is author of six collections of stories, including most recently, All Things, All at Once: New and Selected Stories, published by Norton. His stories, reviews, and articles have appeared in numerous journals including The New York Times Book Review and The Southern Review. He has twice won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Abbott was the 2004 recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award. The Humanities Distinguished Professor award honors senior faculty who have earned distinction in the areas of teaching, service and scholarship, and whose work—especially in professional service and scholarship—has earned them national and international recognition. Abbott was one of only two people college-wide to receive the distinction this year.
As a teacher, Abbott earns high marks for the ways in which he challenges his students. "He's made me defend my own writing, which has made it so much better," said Laurel Gilbert, graduate student in fiction. "He'll ask me to work through the justification for my writing choices. He'll ask why I want it that way, and through answering, I'll either come to the conclusion that the choice I wanted to make wasn't going to work in the first place, or I'll be in that much better a position to make the choice in my writing."
Amy Shuman is a professor in Folklore and Critical Theory, and author of articles on conversational narrative, literacy, food customs, feminist theory and critical theory. She's the author of two books: Storytelling Rights: The Uses of Oral and Written Texts by Urban Adolescents, and Other People's Stories: Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellow, she's also a recent fellow at the Hebrew University Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem. Each year the College gives one Humanities Exemplary Faculty Award. The purpose of this award is to honor those individuals who, over a period of years, have developed a noteworthy academic profile, with exceptional strength in research and/or teaching, and who serve as role models for students and younger colleagues.
Sheila Bock, a graduate student in Folklore, says Shuman is an inspiration to her students. "[Shuman's] teaching style lends itself to wonderful class discussions, ones that are really helpful in figuring out the best way to approach often unwieldy research material. Every time I leave Amy's classes and office hours, I feel like I can't start writing quickly enough. "
