Professors Nicholas Dames, chair of the English and Comparative Lit Department, and Boris Gasparov, a professor of Slavic Languages, will both receive awards from the Columbia College Academic Awards Committee this spring. Bwog wishes them both congratulations.

what professors’ houses look like

The Columbia College Academic Awards Committee is pleased to announce the winners of the 2013 Mark Van Doren Award for Teaching and Lionel Trilling Book Award. The honorees are selected annually by a student committee to honor faculty members for their contributions in the classroom and in print. The awards will be presented at a ceremony in Low Library on May 8, 2013.

Nicholas Dames, Theodore Kahan Professor of Humanities and chair of the Department of English and Comparative Literature, will be presented with the 2013 Mark Van Doren Award for excellence in teaching. Boris Gasparov, professor of Slavic Languages, will receive the 2013 Lionel Trilling Book Award for his book, Beyond Pure Reason: Ferdinand de Saussure’s Philosophy of Language and Its Early Romantic Antecedents.

The Mark Van Doren Award for Teaching has been awarded each year since 1962 in recognition of a faculty member’s humanity, devotion to truth and inspiring leadership. The award was established in honor of Mark Van Doren GSAS ‘21, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, novelist, playwright, critic, editor and biographer, as well as a renowned scholar and legendary teacher who inspired generations of Columbia students.

The Lionel Trilling Book Award is given to a member of Columbia’s faculty whose book was published in the previous year and upholds a level of excellence commensurate with the work of Lionel Trilling CC ‘25, GSAS ‘26, GSAS ‘38. The award was established in 1976 in honor of Professor Trilling, a gifted and dedicated teacher who was deeply committed to undergraduate education, as well as a public intellectual known nationally for his scholarship and literary criticism, which appealed to a wide-audience.

The winners will be honored at an awards ceremony that will take place from 6 to 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, May 8, 2013, in Faculty Room, Low Library. Students, faculty, members of the Columbia administration, and family and friends are welcome to attend.

Winning via Shutterstock