Tharini Viswanath, Rachel Mann, and Tony Jarrells, have received "Teacher of the Year" awards honoring their accomplishments
Dr. Viswanath, an Assistant Professor and McCausland Fellow, specializes in children’s and young adult literature. Her students praise her deep knowledge about the material she teaches, as well as her gift for facilitating probing and inclusive class discussions. one student explained, “She is wonderful and always made us feel comfortable and let us be undeniably ourselves.” This ability to create a classroom environment that is at once safe and encouraging while also challenging comes up again and again in comments from those who have taken her classes.
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Dr. Mann is a Senior Instructor and an expert in seventh- and eighteenth-century British literature, who helps her students in Communicating Moral Issues engage with challenging contemporary moral questions and become better public speakers. Students repeatedly praise Mann’s approachability and openness and also express their gratitude for class discussions that really make a difference. As one student notes, this course “made me think in ways that I’ve never through before.” The English Department and its student are lucky to have such dedicated and inspiring teachers.
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Dr. Jarrells, an Associate Professor who specializes in Romanticism and Scottish literature, inspires students at all levels to engage with unfamiliar texts. “I’ll be chasing this kind of love for a course again for the rest of my academic career,” extolls one student, “I find myself thinking of this class and my takeaways from it all the time.”