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.”

Chase Hensel, SEAS '10, has been selected as a 2010 Eben Tisdale Fellow.  The Eben Tisdale Fellowship offers outstanding opportunities for students to learn about high tech public policy issues with hands-on experience in Washington, D.C.

The Fellowship has two components: a full-time 8 week public policy internship with a high-tech company, firm or trade association, and weekly issues seminar lunches hosted by Tisdale sponsors. The Fellowship offers a $5,000 grant to students who are accepted.

The first of its kind, the Eben Tisdale Fellowship brings eligible students to Washington, D.C. for internships that explore current public policy issues of critical importance to the high technology sector of the economy. 

The goal of the Fellowship is to create a supportive and collegial environment in which a new class of public policy professionals will be mentored to help ensure that the high-tech industry continues to have highly capable and well-trained individuals in both policy advocacy and senior management positions.

Two recent Columbia alumni, Colin Felsman, CC'09, and Shira Milikowsky, School of Arts '07, have won the Luce Scholarship. This is the first time in over five years that Columbia has had two scholars in the same year.  The Luce Foundation describes the program as being “aimed at a group of highly qualified young Americans in a variety of professional fields. It is unique among American-Asian exchanges in that it is intended for young leaders who have had limited experience of Asia and who might not otherwise have an opportunity in the normal course of their careers to come to know Asia. The Program provides stipends, language training and individualized professional placement in Asia for fifteen to eighteen young Americans each year.”  While the award varies depending on placement, it can provide approximately $30,000 for the year.

Colin Felsman CC ’09 from Dulles, VA was a double major in Anthropology and Political Science.  Since graduation, he has been working at a non-profit development agency in Harare, Zimbabwe.  He will focus on entrepreneurial aid and development in Shanghai next year at the Non-Profit Incubator. 

Shira Milikowsky received her M.F.A in Directing from the School of the Arts in 2007.  Since graduation, she has been working on a number of theater projects in New York City, including the recent revival of Hair where she was an Assistant Director.  Her placement is still pending, but she hopes to be in either Tokyo or Seoul working with an arts company.