UMaine College Recognizes Outstanding Faculty Members
Contact: Joe Carr at (207) 581-3571
ORONO — Faculty members in English, Anthropology and Modern Languages and Classics, and a teaching assistant in History are the recipients of 2008 awards presented by the University of Maine College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Presented annually to faculty members nominated by their colleagues and students, the awards honor overall achievement and particular strengths in teaching, research and service. The college also honors an outstanding teaching assistant, who is recognized jointly by the Graduate School.
Harvey Kail, professor of English, will receive the award for outstanding teaching and advising. Paul (Jim) Roscoe, professor of anthropology, will receive the award for outstanding research and creative achievement, and Kathleen March, professor of Spanish, will receive the outstanding service and outreach award. Abigail Davis, a graduate student in history, will receive the teaching assistant award.
Kail is founding director of the University of Maine Writing Center housed in the English Department. A veteran teacher with 30 years on the UMaine faculty, Kail has trained and supervised hundreds of peer tutors who have worked with thousands of students in the Center and in teaching jobs after graduation. He is an expert on collaborative learning recognized nationally and internationally as an outstanding teacher of teachers. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English from the University of Toledo and a doctorate from Northern Illinois University.
Roscoe came to the University of Maine in 1984 with degrees in physics, liberal studies in sciences and anthropology from Manchester (England) University and a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Rochester. He has published 32 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and two of his own edited volumes. In the last 25 years, he has spent more than two and a half years in Papua New Guinea, 26 months of that time living with the Yangoru Boiken of the East Sepik Province. His papers have won national and international prizes and he received the university’s Presidential Outstanding Teaching Award in 1996.
March came to the University of Maine in 1984 with bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees in Spanish from State University of New York at Buffalo. She also earned a doctorate in creativity at the University of Maine in 2002. March is a leader in creating models for service learning, the most dramatic being a class that travels to Honduras during spring break, where students use language skills in providing educational and health supplies and services for residents of the Copan region in Santa Rosa and in the rural village of Dulce Nombre. March has served on numerous college and university committees and the Faculty Senate, for which she was president in 1996-97.
Davis serves as a teaching assistant for courses Environmental History, Maine History and U.S. History. Her supervising professors Richard Judd and Howard Segal praise her dedication, preparation, enthusiasm and ability to communicate with students, individually, in review sessions and in lectures. Davis earned a bachelor’s degree in American history from Western State College in Gunnison, Colo., and is creating a history of the Appalachian Trail as an intellectual concept in her graduate study.
The 2008 awards will be presented April 22 at a reception in the McIntire Room of the Buchanan Alumni House on the Orono campus.