Dear Members of the Georgetown University Community:
It is a pleasure to share with you this year’s recipients of the President’s Awards for Distinguished Scholar-Teachers. These awards recognize faculty members who have made an extraordinary impact on our community through the integration of ambitious scholarship and dynamic student engagement.
We look forward to recognizing our newest awardees at Spring Faculty Convocation on Tuesday, March 21, 2023, at 5:00 p.m. in Gaston Hall.
Please join me in congratulating this year’s recipients:
Jennifer Natalya Fink, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of English
Core Faculty in the Program in Disability Studies
Georgetown University College of Arts & Sciences
Marc M. Howard (L’11), J.D., Ph.D.
Professor, Department of Government
Director, Prisons and Justice Initiative
Georgetown University College of Arts & Sciences
Josiah Osgood, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of Classics
Georgetown University College of Arts & Sciences
Last fall, I invited members of our community to nominate faculty who exemplify a deep commitment to scholarship and teaching. A committee of faculty members and past scholar-teacher awardees, led by Alison Mackey, Ph.D., Professor and Chair in the Department of Linguistics, reviewed the nominations and identified a small group of finalists. I wish to thank the members of our community who submitted nominations during the Fall semester and the members of our committee for their dedication and care throughout the review process.
It is a privilege to recognize these Distinguished Scholar-Teachers for their depth of expertise, their impact on our students, and their commitment to research and teaching.
Sincerely,
John J. DeGioia
2023 Awardees
Jennifer Natalya Fink serves as Professor in the Department of English and core faculty in the Program in Disability Studies. An award-winning novelist, theorist, and playwright specializing in feminist, queer, and crip studies, Professor Fink joined the University in 2004. Dr. Fink’s innovative work explores wide-ranging topics while crossing and redefining multiple genres. She is the author of seven published books, including two works of non-fiction and five of fiction. Her novel Bhopal Dance, which won the Catherine Doctorow Prize for Innovative Fiction, was widely hailed as groundbreaking in its reframing of the Bhopal disaster to examine our present crises. Her other novels are similarly acclaimed. Dr. Fink’s latest nonfiction work, All Our Families: Disability Lineage and the Future of Kinship (Beacon, 2022), creates a new paradigm for ending ableism and redefining kinship by reclaiming our disability lineages. Her play Bitter Flower, which explores racism and classism in the fight for women’s suffrage, was adapted into an online film, selected for several festivals, and staged at Georgetown. Dr. Fink’s range of expertise and facility across diverse subject areas has made her a sought-after speaker, performer, and teacher. In the classroom, she is a dynamic educator, investing in and supporting students’ academic interests and success in interdisciplinary courses. She has advised numerous honors and graduate theses, led the English Honors Program, directed the Program in Disability Studies, mentored countless students, designed interdisciplinary courses, and launched the Disability Studies MA/Ph.D. Certificate. Professor Fink is widely regarded for her tireless dedication to advocacy, accessibility in the classroom, and for fostering an inclusive environment.
Marc M. Howard serves as Professor in the Department of Government and holds a courtesy joint appointment at Georgetown University Law Center. He also serves as Director of the Georgetown University Prisons and Justice Initiative and Co-Founder of the Georgetown Pivot Program. Since coming to Georgetown in 2003, Professor Howard has authored three books with major university presses and countless articles and other prominent publications. His early award-winning scholarship focused on democracy and authoritarianism, primarily in Europe. His more recent work has analyzed incarceration and the United States prison system, for which he has received national recognition for his scholarship and activism. His latest book is Unusually Cruel: Prisons, Punishment, and the Real American Exceptionalism (Oxford University Press, 2017). In addition to his popular “Prisons and Punishment” class, Professor Howard co-teaches “Making an Exoneree,” an extraordinary course in which undergraduate students reinvestigate likely wrongful conviction cases and advocate for exonerations. The course has resulted in five prison releases to date. Professor Howard’s students have noted that his mentorship has transformed their future professional lives. Beyond the Hilltop, Professor Howard established Georgetown’s credit-bearing program at the DC Jail and degree-earning program at the Patuxent Institution, a maximum-security Maryland prison, as well as two Georgetown reentry programs for formerly incarcerated people. He also serves as Founder and President of the Frederick Douglass Project for Justice and as Co-Founder of the Reckoning Project, and in 2020 was recognized by the American Political Science Association with a Distinguished Award for Civic and Community Engagement.
Josiah Osgood serves as Professor in the Department of Classics where he recently concluded six years of service as department chair. Professor Osgood is a world-renowned Roman historian who specializes in the fall of the Roman Republic, including the civil war years of 49-31 BCE. He joined the University in 2002 and has since authored seven books. Professor Osgood’s research portfolio has ranged from the lived experience of one woman during the Roman civil war to a global overview of the breakdown of the Roman Republic and establishment of the Roman Empire. His varied publications include new annotated translations of Suetonius and Sallust, two key Roman historians, with introductions that explain their relevance today. He has published with several academic presses, including Cambridge University Press, Princeton University Press, and Oxford University Press. He recently published Uncommon Wrath: How Caesar and Cato’s Deadly Rivalry Destroyed the Roman Republic (Basic Books, 2022), which explores an important yet understudied political rivalry. In addition to his sole-authored works, he has co-edited three volumes of collected essays. His writing is accessible to non-academic audiences, garnering wider readership, and his Georgetown courses have had broad appeal to students outside his department. Professor Osgood is known as a devoted teacher, and he proactively makes ancient history come to life through engaging coursework. Since 2002 he has co-led multi-week summer intensive courses in Greece, Turkey, and Italy, all while creatively incorporating new technology to enhance the student learning experience.
Due to a prior commitment, Professor Osgood will formally receive this award later this semester.