Emily Steiner Receives the CARA Award for Excellence in Teaching

Emily Steiner, Professor of English, has been awarded the Committee for Centers and Regional Associations (CARA) Award for Excellence in Teaching. CARA became a standing committee of the Medieval Academy in 1969. It assists institutions and individual medievalists in meeting the challenges that face medieval studies in the classroom, the library, and other institutional settings locally and nationally. It supports those who work to develop special projects and programs of instruction, local and regional networks of medievalists, and centers of research and institutions in medieval studies.

CARA says of Steiner, "Through her intellectual vibrancy and careful close-readings she has guided students—graduate and undergraduate alike—through some of the most challenging aspects of the English canon. Her teaching explores the nexus of literary, devotional, legal, polemical and academic writing that shaped literary production during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and its reception. It is her extraordinary versatility that makes her pedagogy so effective. Moreover, she has been at the center of an ever-expanding community of scholars in which she is renowned for fostering undergraduate research, guiding graduate dissertations, and making Penn’s manuscript resources accessible to medievalists in the classroom and over Twitter, where she has introduced over 10,000 followers to the humor, beauty, and diversity of medieval manuscript culture."

Steiner has twice been awarded the Undergraduate Advisory Board’s teaching award, and won the Lindback Award for Distinguished teaching in 2016. In “Old English Life,” an annual event she has organized on campus, she brings together undergraduate and graduate students and practicing poets to present translations, new poetry, and mixed media response to texts spanning the Old English corpus.

Click here to view the official award announcement.

Click here to read about Steiner's Twitter account, which has more than 11,000 followers.

 

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