Dickinson College Faculty Selects English Professor for Highest Teaching Honor
Professor of English Claire Seiler and Becca Brown '24 share a celebratory moment during Commencement. Photo by Dan Loh.
Claire Seiler Received the 2023-24 Dickinson Award for Distinguished Teaching
by Craig Layne
The college’s faculty has honored Professor of English Claire Seiler with this year’s Dickinson Award for Distinguished Teaching. Determined each academic year by a faculty vote and approved by the president, it is the college’s highest teaching honor.
“Students tell me that working with Professor Seiler has improved their writing, their thinking, their way of participating in classroom conversation and discussion, and their way of being in the world,” Provost & Dean of the College Renée Ann Cramer said as she announced Seiler’s award during the academic year’s final faculty meeting.
“One of the great things about teaching at Dickinson is that I get to learn constantly from colleagues I admire, and to be inspired by the work they do in the classroom and the world,” said Seiler. “So, to be selected by Dickinson’s wonderfully talented faculty for this honor? It pretty much floors me.”
Seiler teaches modern and contemporary American, British and Irish literature. “In a given semester I’ll be teaching, say, an intermediate course on feminist literary history and theory, a First-Year Seminar on Zadie Smith, and “Plague Years,” an advanced course informed by my current research on the literary history of polio and my work with [John B. Parsons Chair in the Liberal Arts & Sciences and Professor of Russian] Alyssa DeBlasio,” said Seiler. She and DeBlasio recently received a $350,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for their proposal “Beyond the New Normal: Disability, Literature and Reimagining Social Justice.”
“What’s distinctively Dickinson about my teaching is that it benefits deeply from the curiosity of our students and the expertise of colleagues across campus,” Seiler explained. “When I teach the literature of the Harlem Renaissance, for example, I teach in Waidner-Spahr Library, in the collection of archival materials that College Archivist Jim Gerencser ’93 and Special Collections Librarian Malinda Triller-Doran have been assembling for several years—and now with help from students! The final project in my Celtic Revival / Harlem Renaissance course asks each student to make a thorough case for a new acquisition for Special Collections. Just last month, the College acquired a first edition of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), which Vanessa Abraham ’25 urged us to seek out.”
At the conclusion of the 2018-19 academic year, Seiler received the Ganoe Award for Inspirational Teaching, which is awarded by the graduating class during Commencement.
Seiler earned her B.A. from Middlebury College, M.Phil. from Trinity College, Dublin, and Ph.D. from Stanford University.
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Published July 12, 2024