Young Teacher Award
Wendy Nicholson, 1998
"Wendy Nicholson, your intelligence, careful preparation, and enthusiasm for your discipline and craft help students connect historical events with modern life in history courses and Freshman Studies. A versatile teacher, you have experimented with and perfected a myriad array of strategies for promoting discussion in classes, which have earned accolades from your students. As one put it, you 'direct discussion without dominating it,' while another opines that you 'did not rule the class, but administered it.' In short, students find your classes enlightening, mind-opening, provocative, and helpful, both in covering the material and in promoting their own intellectual skills.
Students applaud your well-organized, interesting, informative, and eloquent lectures, and one of them, at least, appreciates your 'plain speech--no hoidy toidy nasty vocab where it wasn't needed or wanted.' By connecting historical events with prior precedents and with current situations, you bring 'a spark of the modern' to your presentations. You also have the gift of knowing how 'to make students laugh,' which is another way of saying that you have found ways to make the rigorous pleasurable.
Your scholarly work displays the same spark. In an article provocatively titled 'Amazons and Angels,' you examine how American women in post-revolutionary Philadelphia were 'corrupted,' in Thomas Jefferson's view, by the arrival of European luxuries. I will not comment here on any biographical analogies that might be suggested by this topic.
For your creative teaching, concern for students and colleagues, and ability to make history both relevant and exciting, it is a pleasure to present to you the Young Teacher Award for 1998."