For their commitment to excellence and innovation in teaching, six distinguished Oberlin faculty members in the College of Arts and Sciences and the Conservatory of Music have been selected to receive a 2007-08 Oberlin Teaching Excellence Award. The prizes are determined each year by the respective faculty councils based on information gathered during the regular merit-evaluation process, on nominations from department chairs, and on the recommendations of the deans of the College and Conservatory.
The College recipients are Carol Lasser, professor of history, Sylvia Watanabe, associate professor of creative writing, and Robert M. Young, professor of mathematics. Receiving awards from the Conservatory are Tom Lopez, associate professor of computer music and digital arts, Daune Mahy, professor of singing, and Charles McGuire, associate professor of musicology.
Each of the distinguished teachers represents Oberlin's commitment to excellence and innovation in teaching, say Sean Decatur, dean of Oberlin’s College of Arts and Sciences, and David Stull, dean of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music.
The recipients will be honored at Oberlin’s annual awards dinner on Monday, October 13 in the Klutznick Commons of Peters Hall. The awards, which were bestowed by the council in late June, carry a $1,000 cash prize. The winners’ names will be inscribed on a plaque to be located in an appropriate setting.
Sylvia Watanabe, Associate Professor of Creative Writing
“In the 12 years that Sylvia Watanabe has taught at Oberlin, she has become widely known as one of the stellar teachers in the division of arts and humanities,” says Dean Decatur. “She has a national reputation as a writer of non-fiction and fiction and is in demand as an outside reader and judge of literary prize competitions. She brings to the Oberlin classroom wide experience and judicious skills in reading work in progress and bringing it to a higher level.” Her writing workshops have consistently earned the highest praise from students and colleagues alike: In that difficult crucible in which students learn how to write, Sylvia is clearly an extraordinary facilitator and teacher, encouraging and developing with engagement, commitment, and (as students often comment) wisdom. She is also a devoted and successful mentor of student writers through and beyond their time at Oberlin: A remarkable number of her students have gone on to creative writing programs of national stature, to win honors, such as Fulbright and Watson fellowships, and have been nominated for the prestigious Pushcart Prize. Sylvia’s excellent teaching and mentoring have been significant factors in the continuing national reputation of Oberlin’s creative writing program.
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Carol Lasser, Professor of History
“Since joining the College in 1980, Carol Lasser has demonstrated the ability to teach a range of courses that excite and engage students from a variety of levels and majors,” says Dean Decatur. “Carol is viewed as a dedicated, enthusiastic, inspiring teacher who emphasizes reading, writing, and analytical skills.” Students describe themselves working harder and learning more than they anticipated in her courses. Whether co-teaching or teaching individually, Carol creates courses that students find “fascinating,” “challenging,” and “fun,” and she is consistently given extremley high scores on her student evaluations of teaching. Carol’s courses focus on American history, particularly Oberlin history and the women in the antebellum period. Students appreciate her emphasis on understanding why things happened as they did. She regularly advises a number of honor students and directs private readings, serving as an effective mentor to a large number of students. Students appreciate the time she devotes to meeting with them outside of class, despite her numerous other obligations.
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Robert M. Young, Professor of Mathematics
“Robert M. Young is widely recognized at Oberlin for the brilliance of his lecturing,” says Dean Decatur. “Seeing Bob present a mathematics lecture is tantamount to attending a flawlessly delivered one-person play – every line spoken is polished, there is a well-developed plot, and the underlying theme – that mathematics is beautiful – is unmistakable. Few among us can rise to this level even on occasion. That he lectures with such clarity and panache day in and day out is truly remarkable.” Students lavish praise on Bob for his teaching, with comments such as: “Each lecture was a work of art, filled with high drama.” “Lectures were perfectly prepared and dramatically executed.” “I was so moved by the last lecture that I almost cried!” Those who teach after him are reluctant to erase the stunning drawings he leaves on the blackboard. His teaching of calculus is informed by the research that went into his masterful book Excursions in Calculus: An Interplay of the Continuous and the Discrete. He has inspired countless students to continue their study of mathematics at deeper levels and has been sought out by honors students, who benefit from his infectious enthusiasm for his subject.
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Daune Mahy, Professor of Singing
"Daune Mahy is an extraordinary teacher who has made a phenomenal contribution to the field of professional singers and certainly to the world of pedagogy and Oberlin instruction,” says Dean Stull. “She is one of the most distinguished members of our faculty, and we are very pleased this year to honor her for her magnificent work over so many years.” Since joining the Conservatory faculty in 1980, Daune has had an impact on numerous singers, from her private students to participants in the Oberlin-in-Italy and vocal academy programs she co-founded and currently directs. Developed in collaboration with fellow professor of singing Gerald Crawford, the Oberlin-in-Italy program uniquely pairs vocal coaching with immersion in Italian language and culture. This past summer was the program’s first in Arezzo, “a vivacious city,” Mahy says, with “a long history of artistic endeavor.” In the Vocal Academy for High School Students, Mahy reaches younger singers. Two of her students, Carolyn Betty ’99 and Alyson Cambridge ’02, won the prestigious Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. Many of her students have gone on to appear with the Metropolitan Opera, New York City Opera, Chicago Lyric Opera, and St. Louis Opera, and to win prizes conferred by the Met Opera, George London Foundation, Lucia Albanese Competition, the Elardo Opera Competition in Brugge, Orpheus, the National Association of Teachers of Singing, and Tuesday Musical Club, among many others. Ms. Mahy’s own performing career has ranged from opera to musical theater to recital, with significant performances at Carnegie Hall and tours of southern Spain, Italy, Germany, and France.
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Tom Lopez, Associate Professor of Computer Music and Digital Arts
Director, Contemporary Music Division
Program Chair, TIMARA
"Tom Lopez has been a wonderful mentor and a superlative teacher for many years in the Oberlin Conservatory of Music,” says Dean Stull. “His leadership and his vision of contemporary music have brought extraordinary projects such as Lost Highway into our midst. Tom's work as a composer is highly regarded throughout the world, and he is one of the most respected colleagues we have in the Conservatory today.” Lopez enjoys a distinguished composing career, recognized by awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Aaron Copland Fund, Meet the Composer, and ASCAP. He was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship as a composer-in-residence at the Centre International de Recherche Musical in Nice, France. A dedicated and extraordinary teacher, Lopez has served on the Oberlin faculty since 1999 and has lectured at festivals and conferences around the world. Over the years, he has spearheaded a number of projects to advance Oberlin and its students within the new music community: producing Aural Capacity, biennial CDs of student composers' works; bringing the OCEAn festival of new music to Oberlin in 2002; collaborating with the Cleveland-based Ingenuity Festival in 2005; designing the sound for the American premiere in Oberlin and New York of Olga Neuwirth's opera Lost Highway in 2006; and organizing an electronic music festival in honor of Professor of Computer Music Gary Lee Nelson in 2007. His most recent endeavor is co-producing a just-released recording for the Centaur label, Music from the TIMARA Studios Oberlin Conservatory of Music that showcases works by all of the composers who have contributed to the Technology in Music and Related Arts program. Lopez is a 1989 alumnus of the College.
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Charles McGuire, Associate Professor of Musicology
“Charles is an outstanding scholar in his field, and one of the most highly regarded teachers in the Conservatory of Music. As both an alum and an extraordinary musician, we are very proud to have Charles on our musicology department, and this award signifies phenomenal achievement so early in his career,” says Dean Stull. A 1992 graduate of Oberlin's double degree program, McGuire has offered exceptional instruction and mentorship at the Conservatory for seven years. A leading scholar specializing in Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, oratorio, and music of the Victorian era, McGuire has published and lectured extensively on these topics and others. He has been the recipient of numerous fellowships as well as a Certificate of Distinction in Teaching from Harvard University, where he served as visiting lecturer and earned his MA and PhD. He has also taught at Ball State University, the University of Maryland at College Park, and James Madison University. McGuire's essays on Elgar and his contemporaries have appeared in The Cambridge Companion to Elgar, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the Elgar Society Journal, Elgar Studies, and Elgar and His World. His book, Elgar's Oratorios: The Creation of an Epic Narrative, was published in 2002. His second book, Music and Victorian Philanthropy, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.
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