Spring 2008 Newsletter Front Page

Stephen Arata, NEH Distinguished Teaching Professor

In 1994 the Teaching Resource Center won a Special Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. This grant, together with gifts secured by the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, enabled the creation of three rotating U.Va. NEH Distinguished Teaching Professorships (DTPs). Each endowed chair, awarded to an associate or full professor for a three-year period, recognizes excellent undergraduate teaching in the humanities. This year’s award went to Stephen D. Arata, the Richard A. and Sara Page Mayo Distinguished Teaching Professor of English.

Counting on teaching, as Steve writes, “to keep me intellectually supple,” he models for his students “the peculiar combination of surrender and critical detachment that worthwhile literature asks from us as readers.” Although reading is by nature “an isolating activity,” Steve encourages his students to consider thinking of it as “a social activity.” For each class, his primary goal is to create an interactive environment in which “students begin to talk to one another in fruitful ways, to formulate ideas collectively, and to develop a sense of intellectual community and collegiality.” Steve likens his approach for discussion leading to drawing a topographical map—once he outlines a particular conceptual space for the day’s discussion, the ensuing conversation may begin in any number of suitable locations as the class fills in the map’s contours.

During his term as a NEH Distinguished Teaching Professor, Steve plans to help open more lines of communication among humanities teachers in Virginia colleges, providing the means and occasions for literary studies scholars or students at different universities in similar courses to exchange wisdoms online.