English Professor Robert Bell wins Great Teachers Award
Baylor University has named Williams Professor Robert H. Bell recipient of the Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teachers (1998).
He was selected on the basis of his "extraordinary teaching abilities, record of positive, inspiring, and long lasting effects on students, and national and international achievements.
"Bell is a remarkably productive scholar whose writings on biography and autobiography, on eighteenth-century literature, and on Joyce have earned him a wide and appreciative audience in the scholarly community," said Stephen Fix, chair of the English department. "He is widely regarded—by faculty, students, and alumni—as one of the most distinguished teachers Williams has had in modern times."
Bell holds the William R. Kenan chair at Williams, awarded to a faculty member "whose enthusiasm for good teaching, breadth of interest and achievement shows promise of a creative relationship not only with undergraduates but also with young faculty."
In 1994, he founded the Williams Project for Effective Teaching which offers teaching instruction and support for new faculty.
"Bell was extremely generous with his time," said Vijayendra Rao, assistant professor of economics who was part of the group when he came to Williams three years ago. "His obvious brilliance as a teacher, his generosity of spirit, his humor and energy made us all better teachers. I do not know another person at Williams who better personifies the ideal liberal arts professor."
Lawrence Graver, John Hawley Roberts Professor of English, Emeritus, said, "Perhaps the most compelling evidence of Bob's success as a teacher has been the loyalty of his former students." Former students ask other professors and fellow classmates about Bell, keep in contact with him, and visit him regularly.
"Bob is not as a teacher in the standard sense, but someone who lives teaching in the effortless way of those who are both gifted and able to do what they love to do," said one of Bell's former students, Brooks W. Fisher '80." Teaching can create an arrogant distance, but everything about Bob's style and work removes distance, inviting in humor and warmth."
Meredith L. McGill '83 remembers Bell's enthusiasm for literature and his success at sharing this enthusiasm with students. "Bob approached the major plays with a reverence that acknowledged their bawdy, crowd-pleasing dimensions and he used the low scenes to lead us to a fuller appreciation of the high scenes. Bob's was an open classroom, full of give and take. He was neither afraid of Shakespeare, nor of us, and his pleasure in and enthusiasm for the material was infectious."
In addition to the Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teachers, Bell's teaching and scholarship have twice been recognized by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for College Teachers (1990 and 1993) and the American Association of Higher Education's Exemplary Teacher Recognition Award (1994).
He is the author of Jocoserious Joyce: The Fate of Folly in Ulysses (Cornell University Press, 1991) and editor of Critical Essays on Kingsley Amis, forthcoming from G.K. Hall/MacMillan Press. He has contributed to many academic journals, including Philosophical Quarterly, English Literary History, Modern Language Quarterly, Criticism, American Scholar, and Liberal Education. He regularly contributes to newspapers, magazines and the electronic media, and is a regular host of WAMC's "Book Talk."