Associate Professor Nick Mitchell Receives 2021-22 Distinguished Teaching Award

Nick Mitchell, an associate professor in the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and Feminist Studies Departments, has been awarded the 2021-22 Distinguished Teaching Award. He was honored for his positive impact on students and the leading role he has played in creating new programs that foster the intellectual development of students and UC Santa Cruz. One of those was the creation of the Black Studies minor in 2020.

The Distinguished Teaching Award honors outstanding teaching on campus. It is open to all faculty, teaching professors, and Unit 18 lecturers. Faculty peers make nominations, and candidates are considered based on their contributions to a culture of teaching, research-based pedagogy, and contributions to educational equity.

“Although the Academic Senate’s Committee on Teaching has presented annual Excellence in Teaching Awards for many years, it was only in 2018-19 that we began presenting this Distinguished Teaching Award as a way to recognize instructors who have made lasting contributions to a culture of teaching and to educational equity within and beyond UC Santa Cruz,” said Academic Senate Chair David Brundage.

“Nominated by both the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and Feminist Studies departments, Nick Mitchell is an exemplary teacher who has succeeded in creating space for diverse students,
both undergraduate and graduate, to thrive at UC Santa Cruz. We are honored to have Professor Mitchell as a colleague.”

Mitchell is a UCSC alumnus receiving a Ph.D. in history of consciousness with an emphasis in feminist studies. He was a founding coordinator of the Black Cultural Studies Research Cluster and the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Graduate Collective.

He was a faculty member in the Ethnic Studies Department at UC Riverside before joining the UCSC faculty in 2015. Professor Mitchell’s research and teaching examine the social arrangements of knowledge and how knowledge and its institutional practices impact social worlds.

He is the fourth recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award. Mitchell has also been awarded the Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty, 2016-2017, and the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2011-2013.