Honoring Excellence
The Kenyon community came together on Tuesday, April 12, to celebrate the accomplishments of students, teachers, and mentors at the annual Honors Day Convocation. Highlighting the event was the awarding of the Trustee Teaching Excellence Awards, which went this year to Associate Professor of Political Science Pamela Camerra-Rowe and Assistant Professor of English Ivonne García. The awards recognize a senior and junior faculty member for "exemplary teaching informed by creative scholarship."
Camerra-Rowe won the award given to a tenured faculty member who has been on the Kenyon faculty for at least ten years. García won the award given to a faculty member who has been teaching at Kenyon fewer than ten years.
Camerra-Rowe, who joined the Kenyon faculty in 1994, was praised for her high standards and for the "feisty energy" she brings to class discussion, in the words of one student. "It is impossible to remain ambivalent to what we're studying when she is so excited," the student wrote. She was also praised for the time she spends mentoring students and advisees contemplating careers in public service and international affairs, including students preparing Fulbright proposals.
Camerra-Rowe is a specialist in comparative, European, and American politics with a research focus on interest groups and political parties and on regulatory and social policy in the European Union and Germany. Her recent publications include articles about European economic reform and German politics. Outside the classroom, Camerra-Rowe has worked in the U.S. Senate as an American Political Science Congressional Fellow and in the German Economics Ministry as a Robert Bosch Foundation Fellow. She is also president of the Kenyon's Phi Beta Kappa chapter, Beta Chapter of Ohio, and was a recipient of a Whiting Foundation Teaching Fellowship in 2003-04. She received her bachelor's degree from Davidson College and her doctorate from Duke University.
García joined the faculty in the autumn of 2006 and was one of the Marilyn Yarbrough Dissertation Teaching Fellows at Kenyon during 2007-08. She was praised for her "endless devotion" to her students and advisees, and for her contributions to student life, especially her role in organizing the College's Martin Luther King Jr. Days of Dialogue. García has also been an advocate for Latin/Hispanic students and other minorities, facilitating the "Living La Vida Loca" film series and serving as faculty advisor for the ADELANTE Latin student club.
One colleague wrote: "Professor García, as much as any junior colleague in recent memory, has both boldly stated and demonstrated in her deeds that college service is one of those higher callings that allow faculty members to make a lasting impact upon the lives of their students long after they have graduated."
García is a specialist in nineteenth-century American and postcolonial literature and in Latina studies, whose interdisciplinary approach to teaching and research emphasizes nation, race, gender, and ethnicity. She recently received a Whiting Foundation Teaching Fellowship to support work on her book, Haunted by Cuba: U.S. Imperialism, Slavery and the American Colonial Gothic, 1830-1898, which is under advance contract with Northwestern University Press.
Born in Boston but raised in Puerto Rico, García earned a B.A. and M.Ed. in public policy from Harvard University before working for ten years as a newspaper journalist in Puerto Rico. She earned her doctorate at Ohio State University.
The Trustee Teaching Excellence Awards carry a $5,000 stipend and were established the College's Board of Trustees in 1999-2000 to promote excellence by raising the visibility of outstanding performers.