President Hunter Rawlings has named the 1997 Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellows, honoring effective, inspiring and distinguished teaching of undergraduate students.
The honorees, announced at a May 24 dinner on campus, are: Joan Jacobs Brumberg, professor of human development and family studies and of women's studies; Debra Ann Castillo, professor of Romance studies and of comparative literature; David Feldshuh, professor of theater, film and dance; and Clifford Pollock, the Ilda and Charles Lee Professor of Engineering.
The awards -- $25,000 each over five years -- are named for the retiring chairman of the Cornell Board of Trustees, Stephen H. Weiss '57, who endowed the program. Each year the Weiss Presidential Fellows Selection Committee, headed by the secretary of the faculty, seeks nominations from junior and senior students, faculty and academic staff for the distinguished fellowships, from which the committee selects a half-dozen nominees. Final decisions are made by the president.
Fellows carry their titles as long as they stay at Cornell and may hold them concurrently with other named professorships. Here are biographies of this year's honorees adapted from text developed by the Office of Communications in the Division of Alumni Affairs and Development for the awards dinner program:
Joan Jacobs Brumberg
Brumberg teaches in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies. As a historian among social scientists, she calls herself a "missionary for history." She educates not only her students but her colleagues on the historical context of human and family development.
A measure of her success is that students report that her classes had an impact on the way they thought about themselves, their families and their communities. A colleague writes: "Students praise her courses for their engaging and challenging content and for the new perspectives they offer...they praise her for the attention she gives to their writing and describe her as a role model for female students."
Since the fall of 1992, Brumberg has been director of undergraduate education for HDFS; she has also become de facto adviser for large numbers of students. Her door is always open, and students who can't find their regular advisers turn to her.
She received her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia and her B.A. cum laude from the University of Rochester. In addition to numerous articles, she has written three books, including Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease, which received the Berkshire Book Prize from the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, the John Hope Franklin Prize from the American Studies Association, the Watson Davis Prize from the History of Science Society and the Basker Memorial Prize from the Society for Medical Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association. Her work on women's history has been recognized by the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is committed to making her scholarly work accessible to a general audience, and her forthcoming book, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, published by Random House, is an alternate selection for the Book of the Month Club.
Brumberg received the Merrill Presidential Award for teaching in 1995 and 1988. Her classes cover 19th- and 20th-century social and cultural history of the United States; history of American women; history of childhood, youth and the family; social history of American Medicine; and history of sexuality.
Guided discussion is a favorite teaching method. "We had wonderful discussions in class . . . they were managed in a way that allowed for a variety of personalities and backgrounds without mass confusion or pointless debating," writes one of her students. Believing undergraduates should experience primary research, she was instrumental in the donation of the John and Abigail Adams family papers to the university. She then adapted her course History of Female Adolescence to make the letters a centerpiece of the students' experience. Furthermore, she actively seeks primary sources, such as adolescent diaries, and makes them available to students as well as other scholars. Students have said that this engagement with primary historical material was one of their most stimulating experiences at Cornell.
Debra Ann Castillo
Castillo is that ideal all great universities seek -- a brilliant scholar and a committed teacher. A list of her publications covers many pages and ranges across her favorite subjects: Latin-American, Spanish and Latina women writers, and feminist and postcolonial theory. Her reputation as a scholar is international; she is the president of the international organization La Asociación de Literatura Femenina Hispánica. She has been invited to lecture in Taiwan, Argentina and Mexico, as well as Cambridge University and the University of Costa Rica.
Castillo is a dedicated and innovative teacher who has inspired great admiration and loyalty among her students. Not one to forget her students as she closes her office door at the end of the day, she has been part of the Faculty-in-Residence program at Balch Hall (1991-1995). Here, she and her husband, Carlos, exemplify what it means to be committed to the life of the mind. Their renowned Sunday brunches brought together students, faculty, administrators and visiting scholars for Latin meals and Mexican mariachi music. Even now, her home is a favorite rendezvous for students.
Believing that learning takes place outside the classroom, she also has served on the Language House Program Executive Board (1987-90), been adviser to La Organización de Latinas Universitarias (1993-95) and to Sigma Lambda Upsilon -- Señoritas Latinas Unidas (1993-95).
She is on the advisory board of the Spanish language arts journal La voz and is also the major adviser and inspiration for the theater group Teatrotaller, which produces plays by Hispanic authors. Castillo also has helped several undergraduate students in a summer theater workshop program with Ithaca-area Latino elementary school students.
Castillo received her B.S. at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and her M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has taught at Cornell since 1985. As of July 1, she will be director of the Latin American Studies Program at Cornell.
She has published four books, including Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism, which received an honorable mention for the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize of the Modern Language Association. She has a book, Easy Women: Sex and Gender in Modern Mexican Fiction, in press and is collaborating on a multidisciplinary book on female prostitution in Tijuana.
Of her teaching style she says, "I make students in my undergraduate courses keep journals, and I encourage creative projects in lieu of formal papers." She believes writing these journals makes her courses useful even to students who do not intend to pursue a literary career. Because of the journals, students come to class well prepared since they have already made "a written commitment" to the texts under discussion.
One student writes, "She makes Cornell come alive with foreign cultural influence and love for human language and human beings."
David Feldshuh
David Feldshuh, artistic director of Cornell's Center for Theatre Arts and the Albert C. and Molly Phelps Bean Faculty Fellow in Theatre Arts, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth College and received his actor training as Reynold's Scholar at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. A McKnight fellowship took him to the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, first as an actor and then as associate director. While at the Guthrie, he earned a Ph.D. in theater from the University of Minnesota and completed an M.D. in 1979. He is a board-certified emergency room physician and a fellow of the American College of Emergency Physicians.
Feldshuh has remained active in the professional theater primarily as a playwright. His latest play, Miss Evers' Boys, chronicles the infamous Tuskegee Institute medical studies and has won numerous awards; it also has been produced at major theaters throughout the United States and was adapted for an HBO movie. Feldshuh has been particularly creative in using the theater as a vehicle for heightening students' understanding of complex social issues. For example, he co-produced a prize-winning video, Susceptible to Kindness: 'Miss Evers' Boys' and the Tuskegee Study, to explore the issues of race and ethnicity.
Since his arrival at Cornell in 1984, Feldshuh has helped revitalize the theater program. His teaching responsibilities have centered primarily on Fundamentals of Directing I and II, along with Creativity and the Actor (Theatre Arts 285, offered during three summer sessions). The directing courses are very small and intensive, demanding dedication and effort from both students and teacher. They offer a unique approach to the teaching of directorial technique. They emphasize learning by doing and practicum experience in directing student actors enrolled in a lab company. He has developed a workbook for each year's class that incorporates student-to-student comments from the previous year. A student writes: "He did not try to teach me his style.... Instead, he helped me find my own."
As a director, Feldshuh works closely with all the students involved in a production. The weeks of preparation are as much a learning experience for those students as any formal classroom.
Outside the classroom, Feldshuh is known for his genuine interest in his students as individuals and is concerned about their lives as well as their intellectual and artistic growth. In his commitment to his art, he is a model for students who often confront the commonly held belief that the arts are a form of self-indulgence and are peripheral to life rather than at its core. The fact that he is a practicing physician reinforces the centrality of both aesthetic and scientific modes of thought. A colleague writes: "David Feldshuh is the best example that I can think of at Cornell University of a truly 'Renaissance' person."
Clifford R. Pollock
Pollock received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Rice University. Since Pollock came to Cornell in 1983, the student response to his courses has been extraordinarily enthusiastic. "As a classroom teacher he is nothing short of legendary," says one colleague. "He energized and inspired students and rejuvenated our optoelectronics curriculum." For example, he redesigned the notorious "SuperLab" -- the required Electrical Engineering Laboratory course -- to high praise from both students and colleagues. He also developed the highly popular sequence of Lasers and Optical Electronics courses.
Pollock has received five teaching awards from 1988 through 1995, coming from three distinct sources -- students themselves, the dean of the college and his advisers, and a national group, which awarded him the C. Holmes MacDonald Outstanding Teaching Award.
In 1996 he was designated a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. He is technically at the forefront of his field and, at the same time an energizing, inspiring teacher and a mentor for undergraduates in electrical engineering. An associate director of the school, he has maintained an open-door policy that welcomes students and invites them to discuss their concerns with him. He is the faculty adviser to the Cornell chapter of the Eta Kappa Nu honor society. Further, he is probably the only faculty member at Cornell to have been immortalized as a character in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation by a former student, who is now a scriptwriter and science consultant for the series.
As head of the School of Electrical Engineering's Faculty Advising and Academic Actions Committee, he dealt with complex cases of students in academic difficulty. Pollock is particularly adept at helping students understand the wisdom of taking unpleasant options that are in their long-term best interest. In addition, he has then helped students explain their choices to parents and family. Because of Pollock's obvious concern for their welfare, many students seek his advice in evaluating their career goals and options.
"Most of all I remember the long hours he spent in the lab and the attention he gave to each student," writes one former student. He "did a great job of motivating me to work hard, yet I never felt like the lab work was busy work," another writes. "He had the ability to make difficult theoretical topics more tangible." Pollock stimulates student interest by supplementing the course material with creative, real-life engineering applications based on anything from his childhood experiences to the most recent research.
The school's instructional mission is always his top priority. A colleague writes: "For Cliff Pollock, teaching is part of his calling. No puritanical sense of duty drives him, but instead a focused enthusiasm and commitment to doing a job effectively because the job is important."