September/October 2010
Around the Quads
Belknap, McKeown To Receive Great Teachers Award
Robert Belknap, the Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages at the College and director of the University Seminars, and Kathleen McKeown, the Henry and Gertrude Rothschild Professor of Computer Science at SEAS, are the 2010 recipients of the Great Teachers Award. They will be honored at the Society of Columbia Graduates Awards Dinner, which will be held in Low Rotunda on Thursday, October 21.
Belknap was educated at Princeton, the University of Paris, Columbia (a certificate from SIPA in 1957 and a Ph.D. in Slavic languages from GSAS in 1959) and Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) State University. He is the author of The Structure of the Brothers Karamazov; The Genesis of the Brothers Karamazov: The Aesthetics, Ideology, and Psychology of Making a Text; and other studies of Russian literature and of university education.
In 1956, Belknap began teaching at Columbia following Army service. Upon completing his dissertation on “The Structure of the Brothers Karamazov,” he began teaching Literature Humanities in 1960 and continued for nearly every year thereafter. He chaired Literature Humanities in 1963, from 1967–70 and again for two years in the 1980s. In 2000–01, he was honored for Distinguished Service to the Core Curriculum.
Belknap also has taught courses in Russian and comparative literature and literary theory and major Asian classics. He was acting Dean of the College in 1975 and also has been associate dean for student affairs, chair of the Slavic languages department and director of the Russian (now Harriman) Institute.
McKeown was torn between mathematics and literature as an undergraduate at Brown. She majored in comparative literature, but ultimately it was the computer science courses she took that led to her research and expertise in natural language processing. McKeown earned her Ph.D. from Penn in 1982.
She is the first woman to receive tenure and the first to serve as a department chair at SEAS. McKeown has received many awards and honors, including the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1985, an NSF Faculty Award for Women in 1991, the American Association of Artificial Intelligence Fellow in 1994 and the Association for Computing Machine Fellow in 2003.
The Society of Columbia Graduates, formed 101 years ago, established the Great Teachers Award in 1949 to honor outstanding teachers, one each from the College and Engineering School. Recipients have included such illustrious teachers as Jacques Barzun ’27, Mark Van Doren, Moses Hadas, Lionel Trilling ’25, Kathy Eden, Kenneth Jackson, Alan Brinkley, Andrew Delbanco, David Helfand and many others.
For further information on the dinner and awards presentation, 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, www.socg.com.
Alex Sachare ’71