HFA Recognizes History’s Asheesh Siddique and English’s Ruth Jennison for Excellence in Teaching with the 2024 College Outstanding Teacher Award
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The College of Humanities & Fine Arts (HFA) has announced its 2024 College Outstanding Teaching Award recipients: Asheesh Siddique, assistant professor of history, and Ruth Jennison, associate professor of English. The College Outstanding Teaching Award is given annually within HFA to professors who have made significant contributions to undergraduate student education.
Siddique is a historian of early America, early modern Europe, and the British empire whose research and pedagogy explores the role of collecting, managing, and using knowledge to the history of state formation and governance.
In his teaching statement, Siddique wrote, “Having taught at two major private research universities (Columbia University and the University of Southern California) and a major flagship public research university (Pennsylvania State University), I can state confidently and without reservation that the undergraduate and graduate students at UMass are the finest I have ever taught. The opportunity to work with such talented, dynamic, and curious learners at UMass has been the greatest experience and privilege of my career.”
He earned his doctoral degree at Columbia University, a master’s degree from the University of Oxford, and a Bachelor of Arts from Princeton University. His research has been supported by institutions such as the American Philosophical Society, the Huntington Library, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, and the Social Science Research Council.
Siddique was selected as a 2016-18 Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Southern California as well as the 2018-19 Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Humanities & Information at Penn State University.
Jennison is an author, educator, and scholar on 20th and 21st century American poetry, the avant-garde, Marxism, feminism, and critical geography.
“I am always proud of my students’ eagerness and ability to embrace unknown and new texts, in community with one another,” Jennison wrote in her teaching statement.
"To push someone’s thinking beyond their comfort zone while also offering them new understandings of poetry in a safe, enjoyable learning space is a marvelous achievement,” says Donna LeCourt, chair of the English Department. “That Professor Jennison accomplishes this year after year in course after course is even more astounding. Hers is not a pedagogy that reaches only a select few; the success of her courses doesn’t vary by the topic, the level, or the students in a given class. Professor Jennison is consistently successful about extremely difficult subject matter.”
She earned her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Bachelor of Arts from Bryn Mawr College. She also received an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend.
College Outstanding Teaching Award recipients are celebrated for exceptional teaching, mentoring, and curriculum development efforts, and for their impact on students' lives. Each award consists of a $1,000 prize and a commemorative plaque.