Award dinner honors Arts and Sciences faculty members
By Linda B. Glaser and Kathy Hovis
College of Arts and Sciences faculty member Jenny Mann received the Robert and Helen Appel Fellowship for Humanists and Social Scientists, and Caitlín Barrett received the Robert A. and Donna B. Paul Academic Advising Award in the College of Arts and Sciences at a May 24 trustee-faculty dinner, which recognized universitywide teaching and advising and newly tenured faculty.
“We’re very proud of these exceptional faculty and the important contributions they have made to the college,” said Gretchen Ritter, the Harold Tanner Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. “We are also grateful to the Appels and the Pauls for their support of great teaching and advising.”
Mann, associate professor of English, who has been at Cornell since 2006, is a passionate and dedicated teacher who receives glowing evaluations from her students, according to Professor Roger Gilbert, chair of the Department of English. Students take special note of her availability, sincere attentiveness to student comments in class, her helpful and copious comments on their writing and her ability to foster engaging discussions even when students were anxious about their ability to read early modern literature. Students also praise her work as an adviser and TA mentor, says Gilbert.
Mann has conducted many workshops for the Center for Teaching Excellence and plays a leadership role in improving job placement support to Ph.D. students in the field of English. Her course on utopias, which more than doubled in size the second time she offered it, is one of the English department’s most popular courses.
Barrett, assistant professor of classics, who has been on the Cornell faculty for three years, was recognized for her energy and dedication. As director of undergraduate studies in the archaeology program, Barrett undertook a complete revision of the major and minor, which resulted in eight times more students pursuing the degree. Her changes to the archaeology curriculum unified and strengthened faculty and contributed to the renaissance of archaeology at Cornell, according to Charles Brittain, the Susan Lynn Sage Professor of Philosophy and Humane Letters and chair of Classics.
She developed and led two trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where 166 students visited ancient and medieval collections. Barrett has also made it a priority to discover and promote to archaeology students summer fieldwork experiences, and hopes to lead a summer in Egypt program when the political climate calms there, says Brittain. She was also an integral adviser to the student team working to digitize Cornell’s collection of plaster casts.
Other honorees were Associate Professor Barbara Correll, English; Ismail Baggari, physics; and Senior Lecturer Antonia Ruppel, classics, who received Stephen and Margery Russell Distinguished Teaching Awards. A new award this year, the Deanne Gebell Gitner ’66 and Family Annual Prize for Teaching Assistants, went to Adhaar Desai, English, and Nicole Weygandt, government.
The Paul Academic Advising Award was established in 1992 to honor undergraduate advisers. Recipients receive a semester’s leave with full salary and fringe benefits.
The Appel fellowships have recognized faculty excellence since 1995 and give recipients a semester’s sabbatical leave at full salary to write, develop new courses, conduct research or otherwise enrich their teaching and scholarship.
Linda B. Glaser and Kathy Hovis are writers for the College of Arts and Sciences.
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