English's Malcolm Sen Receives 2023-24 Distinguished Teaching Award

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Associate Professor in the Department of English Malcolm Sen has been named a recipient of the 2023-24 Distinguished Teaching Award by the Center for Teaching and Learning. 

Sen is a past recipient of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts Outstanding Teacher Award, a former Lilly Teaching Fellow and a Sustainability Curriculum team member. He teaches courses on postcolonial studies and the literature of environmental change and the climate crisis. He is also the founding member of the UMass Environmental Humanities Initiative, and Director of the Specialization in Environmental Humanities in the English Department.

Across these areas, Sen centers the importance of humanistic approaches to grappling with climate change that focus on the role of history, narrative, race, culture and gender in our understandings of the current moment. He notes that “my teacher-scholar mission is to prepare resilient and resourceful students for a future which they, rather than I, will inhabit.”  In this way, Sen uses discussions and collaborative learning practices to build students’ interdisciplinary critical thinking. 

As one student described, “Professor Sen shepherds and fields conversations between and among the disciplines, rather than bringing a diverse array of students into the classroom and funneling them into a specific way of learning and knowing.” 

Through Sen’s courses, students came to reflect on how “what is discussed in the classroom is not an isolated event; our thoughts and observations bear weight in the larger ecosystem of the world,” as another student shared.

Since 1961, the University of Massachusetts has presented the Distinguished Teaching Award to instructors who demonstrate exemplary teaching at the highest institutional level. This highly competitive and prestigious campus-wide honor is the only student-initiated award on campus.