Rosemary Wakeman and Héctor Lindo-Fuentes
The History Department are proud of faculty members Rosemary Wakeman and Héctor Lindo-Fuentes, who both won teaching awards at Fordham University’s 2014 Arts & Sciences Faculty Day.
We quote here from the citations read out at the awards ceremony.
For Rosemary Wakeman, who won the Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching:
This year’s recipient of the GSAS award for excellence in teaching has impeccable disciplinary credentials, a Ph.D. from UC Davis, teaching positions at Stanford, Berkeley, and Tennessee, monographs published by Chicago and Harvard. Her chair thinks of her as one of our most ardent defenders of research, valuing intellectual inquiry and bringing graduate students into the conversation.
Her emphasis on intellectual exchange has shaped her scholarship and GSAS offerings as she engages the significance of academic work in the lived context of daily city life across time and place. That engagement has propelled her into interdisciplinary leadership, and this award recognizes that contribution.
An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education last November talked about a “new effort to reimagine urban studies” by bringing architecture and humanities into conversation. To me, that was yesterday’s news. This year’s awardee has already created an urban studies master’s program focusing on the the humanities in the urban environment using the richness of Fordham’s locations, partnerships, and faculty. She has created links not only across departments, but across Fordham schools.
For Héctor Lindo-Fuentes, who won the Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in the Social Sciences:
Almost twenty years ago, a Fordham dean wrote of tonight’s honoree in the social sciences: “a major faculty asset, a fine teacher, a strong scholar, and a good colleague of sound judgment.” These words are even more accurate today than they were two decades ago. The author of numerous scholarly books and articles, our honoree has also distinguished himself by the public service his scholarship has engendered. Tonight, however, we focus on his teaching. Members of an introductory core class used words such as “amazing,” “awesome,” “hilarious,” and “passionate” to describe his teaching. An advanced level student simply wrote, “I gave him 9s for a reason.”
He holds a doctorate from the University of Chicago but his undergraduate education was completed in his native land at the Universidad Centroamericana “José Simeón Cañas,” a Jesuit university in San Salvador. He has had a major impact on higher education in El Salvador, and indeed, in all of Central America. His original focus on economic history has grown to encompass both education and the politics of memory. He has been enormously generous and effective in service, whether it be to the department or college, the United Nations or El Salvador. Among our students, it is for his teaching that he is known. As one student wrote, “I had heard great things about this professor and was still surprised how great the course was.”
Congratulations, Héctor and Rosemary!