Awards & Appointments

Congratulations to Michael Parker who was the recipient of the 2001 Bertie Fearing Outstanding Teacher Award!

"... the root word for education is educere, which means "to lead" in one sense and "to draw out" in another. Although all of us complain about how woefully our students are prepared when they come to ECU, our job is not to fill empty, or nearly empty, vessels with knowledge. Our job is to lead them to educate themselves, to impart to our students a hunger and thirst for knowledge so they spend their time filling that hunger and thirst. In the classroom, we help them draw upon their resources."

For TCR's extended interview with Michael Parker please click on the link. 

Ron Hoag has been named chair of  The Thoreau Birthplace Acquisition Committee charged with acquiring the Concord birthplace of Henry Thoreau for The Thoreau Society.  The 18th-century house and its large parcel of land had been a working farm in private ownership until several years ago, when the property was purchased by the Town of Concord and committed to the joint care of several nonprofit agencies.  Because that  coalition proved unable to secure the necessary funding for restoration and preservation of the house, the Town of Concord and The Thoreau Society have begun discussions aimed at transferring the farmstead to the society, which would restore the house and use it as a headquarters and for educational purposes.  Because of what proved to be the benevolent neglect of past owners, the saltbox-style structure retains most of its original features.  To see a photograph of the Thoreau Birthplace, click on the link.

Congratulations to Karen Baldwin who was awarded the 2001 Department Service Award!

"When these awards were set up, I was appointed to the establishing committee. I voiced my objection there to yet more contests pitting colleague against colleague, selecting the 'best' as though no other's work was worthy. Since the inception, though, instead of tending to establish another departmental 'artificial aristocracy,' the series of awards has evolved into something quite humane and democratic. I am very pleased to receive this year's departmental acknowledgement of the value and extent of my work to communicate the importance of folklore and folklife on local, regional, and national levels. And I will be very pleased to help select and applaud next year's worthy service award recipient."

For TCR's extended interview with Karen Baldwin please click on the link.

Congratulations to Gay Wilentz and Seodial Deena for receiving the English Department Research Award! Wilentz has been recognized for her work, Healing Narratives: Women Writers Curing Cultural Dis-Ease (Rutgers U P, 2001), concerning the writer's relationship of culture and health. "I was glad to win the award," she said. "I spent over six years on this book. Sometimes we are isolated and it is nice to know the department knows what we are doing." Deena's Canonization, Colonization, Decolonization: A Comparative Study of Political and Critical Works by Minority Writers (Peter Lang, 2001) uses multicultural and post-Colonial literature and theory to focus on the oppressed and marginalized writers of the British colonies in Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, and America. "It felt good to receive the award," Deena said. "My colleagues awarded me with this honor. These are the people I love and work with on a day to day basis. They are the most important people to me and to receive acknowledgement from them is wonderful." 

Congratulations to Michael Aceto and Margaret Bauer, recipients of the College of Arts and Sciences Research Award. Aceto has researched and recorded the Caribbean dialect known as Creole Barbudan English, an evolution of European and West African influences on the island of Barbuda, and plans to document his study. Bauer has just completed her book length inter-textual study, "What Shadow, What Stain, What Mark": The Legacy of William Faulkner in Contemporary American Literature, and is currently at work on a "book about women's friendships" in the writing of Toni Morrison, Ellen Douglas, Ellen Glasgow, Frances Newman, et al.