Fall 2011
Around the Quads
Mazower, Deodatis To Be Feted as Great Teachers
Mark Mazower, the Ira D. Wallach Professor of World Order Studies, chair of the history department and director of the Center for International History at the College, and Dr. George Deodatis, the Santiago and Robertina Calatrava Family Professor of Civil Engineering, have been selected as the 2011 recipients of the annual Great Teachers Award.
The award, presented by the Society of Columbia Graduates, will be presented at the group’s annual dinner in Low Rotunda on Thursday, November 3.
Mazower came to Columbia from England in 2004 as a tenured professor of history after establishing himself as a first-rate teacher and scholar at Christ Church, Oxford, Princeton, the University of Sussex and Birkbeck College London. He specializes in modern Europe within the international context and specifically the history of the Balkans and of modern Greece. He teaches both semesters of Contemporary Civilization, a rarity for a senior tenured faculty member, and a senior seminar in intellectual thought in 19th- and 20th-century Europe.
A prolific and gifted writer, Mazower’s most recent book, Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe, received the 2009 Lionel Trilling Award, which is bestowed annually by Columbia College students.
Deodatis began his academic career at Princeton in 1988 and received the school’s highest teaching honor, the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. He came to Columbia in 2002 and five years later was honored with the newly established Santiago and Robertina Calatrava Family Professorship in the Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics. In 2009, Deodatis was one of the recipients of Columbia’s Presidential Awards for Outstanding Teaching.
His research interests are in the area of probabilistic methods in civil engineering and engineering mechanics, where he has contributed in developing theories and methodologies for simulation of stochastic processes and fields to model uncertain earthquake/wind/wave loads and material/soil properties. He also is active in the reliability and safety analysis of structures, stochastic mechanics and earthquake engineering.
The Society of Columbia Graduates established the Great Teachers Award in 1949 to honor the faculty of the College and Engineering. Recipients have included Jacques Barzun ’27, ’32 GSAS; Mark Van Doren ’21 GSAS; Moses Hadas ’30 GSAS; Lionel Trilling ’25, ’38 GSAS; Kathy Eden; Kenneth Jackson; Alan Brinkley; Andrew Delbanco; and Robert Belknap ’57 SIPA, ’59 GSAS.
For further information, contact Andrew Gaspar ’69E at 212-705-0153 or agaspar@gasparglobal.com, or Anna Longobardo ’49E, ’52E at 914-779-2448 or longbard@optonline.net, or visit the society’s website.