The June 8th “Celebrating the Humanities” event marked the end of the 2017-2018 Academic Year by honoring student and faculty award winners in the Humanities. The event also included a poster session featuring The Humanities Institute Undergraduate Research Fellows.
See the event program and all award winners here.
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Linguistics professor Jim McCloskey receives Dizikes Award for teaching in Humanities
By Scott Rappaport | June 19, 2018
Linguistics professor Jim McCloskey was presented with the John Dizikes Teaching Award in Humanities at the Humanities Division’s 2018 Spring Awards celebration held at the Cowell Provost House.
Established in 2002, the annual award is named in honor of emeritus professor John Dizikes, one of UC Santa Cruz’s founding faculty members. It is designed to celebrate the Humanities faculty’s commitment to excellence in teaching and its transformative impact on undergraduate students.
In addition to being honored with a check for $3,000, the faculty winner is also entitled to select an undergraduate student to receive a $3,000 scholarship. McCloskey chose to split the prize between two senior graduating students in linguistics—Clara McMahan and Luis Hurtado.
“Teaching is often painful,” McCloskey observed, as he accepted the award on the eve of his retirement. “There is nothing like the pain you feel at the end of those days when it hasn’t gone well in the classroom…But sometimes (the best times) it does work in the room–a real exchange takes place and questions are asked, and a light is lit, and there is excitement around ideas newly experienced.
“And it’s best when it’s improvised or unplanned and a student will turn the whole proceeding around by offering, nervously, a question or a suggestion–the one you wanted. Or maybe didn’t. Which you can then grasp and make something of. And in those exchanges the benefits are even, mutual, and reciprocal.”
Read the full article, including the opening remarks by Executive Vice Chancellor, Marlene Tromp at UCSC News >