Jenny Davidson,
associate professor of English and comparative literature, received the 49th
annual Mark Van Doren Award, and Katharina
Volk, associate professor of classics, received the 35th
annual Lionel Trilling Award, at a
ceremony to be held in the Faculty Room of Low Library on Wednesday, May 5.
The Van Doren Award honors a Columbia
professor for his/her commitment to undergraduate instruction, as well as for “humanity,
devotion to truth and inspiring leadership,” and is named for Mark Van Doren, a
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, novelist and literary critic. The Trilling Award honors
a book by a Columbia author from the past year — in this instance Manilius and his
Intellectual Background (Oxford
2009) — that
best exhibits the standards of intellect and scholarship found in the work of
Lionel Trilling ’27, the noted literary critic and author. Van Doren and
Trilling both were longtime members of the Columbia faculty.
The
Columbia College Academic Awards Committee, composed of students representing a
cross-section of majors within the College, selects the award winners. Committee
members spent much of the academic year auditing the classes of Van Doren award
nominees to observe the quality of their instruction and reading books under
consideration for the Trilling award. The committee met weekly to confer on the
selection process and to evaluate nominated professors and titles before
announcing the winners in April.
Davidson,
who earned her Ph.D. from Yale in 1999, specializes in 18th-century literature,
though she is also an expert on British cultural and intellectual history and
English literature. She has taught at Columbia since 2000 and was cited by the
committee for “her innovative assignments, her ability to facilitate student
participation — even in lecture classes — and her genuine care for her students’
educational experience.”
Volk received her Ph.D. from Princeton in 1999 and has been
teaching at Columbia since 2002. Volk is also the author of The Poetics of
Latin Didactic: Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, Manilius (Oxford 2002) and several
other edited volumes. Manilius is the
first English-language monograph on Marcus Manilius, a Roman poet of the first
century A.D., and committee members found it “engaging and accessible,
which is a testament to Volk’s ability to demonstrate the intellectual and
cultural milieu of Manilius.”
