By Kate Rix

The Division of Arts and Humanities has announced the winners of the first annual Divisional Distinguished Teaching and Service Awards.  Receiving the awards are Professor Whitney Davis (History of Art), Professor Kristen Whissel (Film Studies), and lecturer Nelly Timmons (French). Each will receive an award of $2,000.

In establishing these awards, Arts and Humanities Dean Janet Broughton said she wanted a way to recognize the innovative teaching and dedicated leadership of the arts and humanities faculty.  “Our faculty make Berkeley the nation’s most exciting place for exploring fundamental ideas with rigor and imagination,” she said, “and this year’s award-winners exemplify the values that our faculty bring to their work in arts and humanities.”

Professor Davis received the award for his extraordinary record of University and departmental involvement since coming to Berkeley in 2001. History of Art Department Chair Patricia Berger describes Davis as “committed to bringing the arts and humanities into more prominent view campus-wide  … If energy and commitment to program- and institution-building are prerequisites for the Distinguished Service Award, then Whitney Davis has more than shown his mettle.”  

Davis was a founding member of the Berkeley Center for New Media, an innovative program that draws together faculty and students from the arts, humanities, computer science, and information technology studies.  He is the director of the Consortium for the Arts, which joins Berkeley’s highly regarded visual and performing arts departments with its world-class art museum, film archive, and performing arts center, to foster interdisciplinary collaboration and promote the arts at Berkeley.  As director of the Arts Research Center, he leads an ambitious artists’ residency program, an ongoing seminar series for faculty and graduate students, and support for innovative curriculum development in the arts.

As recipient of the Division’s first Distinguished Teaching Award for Senate Faculty Members, Professor Whissel has demonstrated not only effective teaching but also an ability to engage students with passion, even in required courses they think they won’t like. One such course was the gateway course, “Silent Film.” Student evaluations of Whissel’s teaching of this  course required of film majors included comments describing her as “an amazing educator” who “creates a motivation and thirst for knowledge for the students.” In a larger undergraduate course on “The Woman’s Film” students heaped on the praise, describing Professor Whissel as “concise, well-spoken, thorough, relevant, accessible, and organized … She is the best professor I have had ever.”

Film Studies Program Director Mark Sandberg praised Professor Whissel not just for her outstanding classroom achievements but also for her refusal to rest on her laurels. “She is a natural teacher with great pedagogical instincts,” he said, “but is also the sort who nevertheless works very hard and strategically at improvement as well.”

Receiving the Distinguished Teaching Award for Lecturers was Nelly Timmons. One of Berkeley’s corps of skilled language instructors, she has received extraordinarily high student evaluations — 173 perfect “7’s” out of 252 recent evaluations. “Students are inspired to pursue their language studies because of Dr. Timmons’s teaching,” said French Department chair Michael Lucey.

Chair Lucey noted that in her French 4 course, Timmons weaves opportunities for students to practice spoken French with discussions that require the tools of literary analysis. This balancing act is challenging, he says, and Timmons “achieved all these goals elegantly.” For example, during a discussion of a play by Jean-Paul Sartre, Timmons might open by asking students to compare images of hell from their own culture to Sartre’s images, and then ask them to analyze the meaning of details in Sartre’s play.

Reflecting on the 2007 award winners, Dean Broughton said they each show the spirit of dedication to excellence that typifies Berkeley’s faculty. “These are people who always go the extra mile,” she said. “Faculty members like these make Berkeley great.”