Professor of the Year
Nomination Letters
See "State’s Professor of the Year comes from English" in the University News (PDF) section of the Winter 2007 issue of Nevada Silver & Blue.
Professor of the Year Selection Committee, March 2006
Look no further! The best professor to ever teach a class is here at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her name is Cheryll Glotfelty. Ms. Glotfelty is, without a doubt, the most amazing teacher that I have had in all my educational experience. I must confess that not even a lengthy novel could capture what Ms. Glotfelty brings to a literature course, let alone to the lives of her students. I currently have a bachelor of arts in English Literature and am working on my masters in secondary education. I owe my passion for English and my desire to teach to Ms. Glotfelty. Through my college experience I have had the pleasure of having her as a teacher for three separate classes.
In English 282: Introduction to Language and Literary Expression (Fall 2002), Ms. Glotfelty was able to make the notoriously boring subject entertaining and thought provoking. She taught the class with enthusiasm and dedication. One unforgettable element to her teaching was her ability to get all her students interested in the subject at hand. She did this by using a variety of texts and sources of information. Ms. Glotfelty is very knowledgeable about the content of her courses. For each class, the texts grabbed your attention and made you want to keep reading. One book, Ellemenopea, proved to us just how important every single letter of the alphabet was to the English language. Each student also wrote a letter to him or herself to remember the content of the class at a future date. I found this method very creative and helpful and am able to easily access my notebook, referring to my favorite parts without fumbling through the work. Ms. Glotfelty’s enthusiasm and passion for the English language are evident in her daily teaching. When Ms. Glotfelty prompted a dialogue about a subject, her dedication and motivating energy was catalyst to start just about any discussion. She encouraged us to see the importance in the small, yet beautiful elements of the English language.
In English 300: Nevada in Literature—capstone (Spring 2003), Ms. Glotfelty educated our class on the history of Nevada and the wonderful authors our state harbors. She also taught us about connecting to place. By learning about the place you call home and truly making an effort to protect and support it, the place you live becomes more than just another spot on the map. Meeting Robert Laxalt after reading his book was a memorable moment that I, as a fan of literature and Nevada, will never forget. Meeting a real Nevada author made the stories of the land and his connection to the Eastern part of our state change our perspective on the land and the people who live here.
Ms. Glotfelty’s classes never stopped at her classroom door. On a class field trip we went to the museum on campus to explore Nevada’s history and see the very tools and artifacts then we read about in our texts. We had no need for a museum tour guide as Ms. Glotfelty told us the stories of struggle and success in Nevada’s past. She has the ability to bring the course content to life and to make you live it, not just learn about it.
The last class I took from Ms. Glotfelty was English 427: A Women and Literature (Fall 2005). Of all the classes I had with Ms. Glotfelty as the professor, this class was my favorite. She encouraged the class to look at our lives in terms of bioregionalism and to connect the idea of place with the ideas and varying values of feminism. This creative approach to the class made it even more interesting than I could have imagined. We read a variety of texts in this class that opened my mind to the world of feminism and to the idea of place and home. The course began with a sharing discussion about where we considered our home to be. Many people did not have an answer to this question or could not identify with Nevada as their true home at this point in the course. At the end of the semester, Ms. Glotfelty asked the very same question. This time, all of the students were able to define home in a way that did not even occur to them at the beginning of the semester. Home was now Reno, the desert beyond, and to some, Nevada.
Beyond the classroom doors was Nevada in its dusty flesh. Cheryll Glotfelty not only brought Nevada to the classroom, but she took the class out into Nevada! On a weekend adventure a portion of our class had the honor of traveling north to meet two authors who wrote about Nevada in one of our texts. Armed with walkie-talkies and directions, we drove for four hours in two separate cars to Pleasant Valley. This hidden hideaway in Northern Nevada was unbelievable and unforgettable. Ms. Glotfelty was able to coordinate an entire day of events that included eating lunch with some of the main characters from our text and even spending the afternoon eating freshly baked pie in one of the author’s homes. All the while, Ms. Glotfelty talked about the people of Nevada and the commitment of Nevadan’s to their home.
Ms. Glotfelty taught more than English classes, she taught us to be higher-level thinkers. Through journaling, group work, class discussions, field trips, and inventive projects, her classes took on different personalities. No two classes with Ms. Glotfelty were alike, and she always left you yearning to learn more. For all of her classes, she was always available before and after class to answer any questions. She is personal, inspiring, and dedicated. It seemed to me that in every one of Cheryll Glotfelty’s classes, the students became close friends and continued the pursuit of more information with the tools that Ms. Glotfelty provided. Her thirst for knowledge is contagious. She never fails to exceed my expectations for her course. I was convinced to transfer from education to the English department after having Cheryll Glotfelty as a teacher. She took my interest in English literature and turned it into a passion for teaching and sharing what I have learned from her with others. I now teach classes in the special education department at Reed High School here in Reno, Nevada. I constantly find myself quoting Ms. Glotfelty and trying to inspire my students to continue learning and find their passion in the same way the Md. Glotfelty inspired me.
Please select Cheryll Glotfelty for the Professor of the Year. Her countless hours of dedication and hard work make her the ideal candidate for your award.
Sincerely,
Allison Pistone
Dear Members of the Professors of the Year Program Selection Committee:
It is my enormous pleasure to write in support of Professor Cheryll Glotfelty’s nomination for a U.S. Professor of the Year Award. I cannot think of anyone I would recommend more highly. Over the past fifteen years, Professor Glotfelty’s contributions to undergraduate education have powerfully transformed the study of literature, not only at her home institution, the University of Nevada, but also nationally (and internationally), most of all through her role in inspiring and organizing the study of literature and environment.
I met Cheryll around eighteen years ago, at a Willa Cather conference in Red Cloud, Nebraska; she was then a graduate student completing a dissertation on representations of nature in the fiction of Willa Cather and Sarah Orne Jewett. After delivering an exquisite paper on one of Cather’s short stories and Jewett’s “The White Heron,” she passed around a petition calling for the coming-together of those interested in studying literature from what would now be called an ecocritical perspective. She urged literary scholars, accustomed to treating nature just as a backdrop for human conflicts and affairs, to engage in investigating the ways in which written texts represent the nonhuman (or more-than-human) world, and the complex interrelations between human and nonhuman. She urged literacy scholars to engage, as well, in making connections between literacy practice and the real world; and she argued for the ways in which the study of environmental themes promotes critical thinking, rhetorical analysis, and good writing. Two dozen people signed her petition, and from this yellow foolscap pad, the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment was born.
I am the 2006 President of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, know as ASLE. In the past fifteen years it has grown to over one thousand members; 850 of these are in the United States, and there are also branches in Canada, Japan, Korea, India, Australia/New Zealand, and Southeast Asia. ASLE publishes a journal, which Cheryll co-founded and edited for its first four years, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE); it has become a pre-eminent source for the finest contemporary environmental criticism, nonfiction, fiction and poetry. ASLE hosts biennial international conferences and annual regional symposia. It maintains an active website which published bibliographies, syllabi collections, information about textbooks and teaching anthologies, conference panels and workshops, and so forth. It also maintains an active program of mentoring, whereby students in environmental studies programs may receive fostering and advice from faculty elsewhere. It is one of the friendliest, most energetic organizations I have ever encountered: undergraduates, graduate students, activists, faculty persons, independent scholars and artists are all welcomed and included in its activities.
Cheryll did not start ASLE all by herself, of course. But her amazing independence and cheerful brilliance at that long-ago conference gave it its impetus, and her steadfast involvement over the years has been essential to its growth and continuity. She is its institutional memory, its presiding genius.
In her own scholarship, too, Cheryll Glotfelty has helped to transform the study of literature in the United States. The 1996 anthology she co-edited with Harold Fromm, The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, is the standard work in the field; virtually everyone who teaches ecocriticism or literature and environment uses it at the beginning of virtually every course, at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Certainly I do, and my students always praise it. Her various published essays continue her insightful engagement with pedagogy and place, as do the various keynote addresses and lectures I have heard her deliver. One of Cheryll’s most notable qualities is her ability to write and speak in such a way that everyone, from the beginner to the expert in her field, is illuminated and challenged. A leader – indeed a trailblazer – in the burgeoning field of literature and environment, she is a person of such expertise, passion, clarity, and charm that it has always been as it was that first day, when she passed around her petition: everyone is intrigued, everyone signs up.
I am struggling, as I end this letter of recommendation, to find superlatives that are superlative enough for Cheryll Glotfelty. Given the current environmental crisis and the urgent need for a more environmentally-educated citizenry, what she has offered and continues to offer to American undergraduate education is of absolute importance.
Best wishes,
Ann Fisher-Wirth
Professor of English
President, ASLE
To Whom It May Concern:
Inspiration is not a side effect that comes standard in your typical college course. A student is hard pressed to find time to be inspired while drowning in the swamp of memorization, writing assignments, presentations and an ever-changing social environment.
I was one of the students fortunate enough to be inspired in college. I can recall three courses that drastically changed my perspective on myself and the world around me. Oddly, none of these courses were within the focus of my major. Actually, the topics of these courses don’t seem to be related whatsoever. But, there was a common thread that made them equally inspiring: the professor – Dr. Cheryll Glotfelty. I whole-heartedly recommend her for the U.S. Professor of the Year.
I first met Professor Glotfelty in a large-lecture format required course. The Western Traditions course series was the most dreaded series of required courses at our university. Students typically don’t hope for anything more out of the course than to survive it. We dragged our feet into the cavernous lecture hall on the first day, the horror stories swirling in our heads, only to be greeted by a woman expressing the exact polar opposite condition we were in – she was enthusiastic, bubbly and had a smile so large that it must have extended right off her face. This person was, of course, Professor Glotfelty. I had a feeling that she was going to be the “wild card” that made the course bearable. Unlike typical large lecture courses, where it is easy to dissolve into the background of faces, Professor Glotfelty endeavored to make us feel like individuals – she wanted our experiences, our opinions and our spirits to dictate the course. She even aimed at remembering each student’s name – a feat I never again saw attempted by another professor in that format. The lectures and assignments admonished us to talk to each other and truly make this an interactive learning experience. This course was usually reading and regurgitating information – but not if Professor Glotfelty could help it. It was her objective to create a community out of this “captive audience,” rather than simply accept the fate and reputation of the dreaded Western Traditions lecture series. This is one of the things that make Professor Glotfelty so special – she battles dogma. As you’ll discover as this story goes on, she will seize a subject that seems disregarded, defeated and sometimes disdained, and through her dedication and passion, she will breathe a new life and a vibrant strength back into that subject. You cannot tell me that isn’t exactly what we hope for in a professor.
The next year, as I thumbed through the course book, I noticed Professor Glotfelty would be teaching a course other than Western Traditions. The course was an upper-level English course with a special topic entitled: “Old and Growing: Aging and Identity in America.” Hmmm, not my cup of tea. As unfortunate as it sounds, I was like most American youth, and I didn’t think I could be very interested in the topic of the elderly. However, based on past experience with Professor Glotfelty, I had a feeling that this course would be meaningful. Even my optimism couldn’t prepare me for the impact this course would have on me. This class was much smaller than the Western Traditions lecture course, and it allowed Professor Glotfelty to shine even brighter. As I had expected, she created a community out of the classroom. She will never take credit for being the star of the classroom because she, as I believe all great leaders do, gives all the credit to the group. Students will leave the class being proud of their own accomplishments and what they have learned, forgetting all along that we had traveled the path created by Professor Glotfelty. The class she designed was carefully crafted and I suspect she knew exactly how the journey would benefit us. She guided us through the experience with her infectious enthusiasm, her humbling dedication and her memorable smile. In this particular course, we read about aging and how it affects one’s identity – what an eye-opening series of literature! I certainly have no idea what it is like to be 65, 80 or older. The ideas had never even crossed my mind. But, I suppose that’s the importance of an innovative course like this. This kind of enlightenment can really impact the way our entire culture operates. I’m certain the cultural impact is one of the reasons Professor Glotfelty embraced the subject. I truly believe that Professor Glotfelty feels she can change the world. You know what? I think she can, too! That is the foundation of the theory of leadership and teaching – teach the few to affect the many.
The crowning project for the “Aging and Identity” course was to interview older Americans and compile and publish an anthology of the story of their lives. I decided to interview my grandfather. I had only ever seen my grandfather a few times in my life. I spoke to him on the phone, growing up, only on special occasions to blurt out, “Happy Birthday,” or “Merry Christmas!” I never had the benefit of sitting on his lap as a child, and hearing stories about his life. I realized, through this course, that I really knew nothing about my grandfather, a person with a wealth of perspective and experience. I had already lost my grandmother – I wrestled with the realization that I could soon lose my grandfather without ever knowing him. I called him one afternoon, and we had a longer conversation than all of the past phone calls combined. That single assignment changed my entire perspective. Older Americans were suddenly more real – they had feelings and experiences and knowledge that all gets lost when we simply look at them. When we look at a young person, we think about all they have to experience ahead of them in their lives. But when we look at an older person, why don’t we consider all that they have experienced? I found out, that afternoon, about some of the things my grandfather had experienced. I found out about his upbringing as a coal-miner’s son. He lived in poverty, and that’s why he will keep and straighten our old nails, to this day, rather than throw them away and buy new ones. My grandfather was a World War II Prisoner of War! His plane was shot down and he was captured and thrown into a Nazi POW camp! How could I have lived my life for so long and be completely unaware of this? I am eternally thankful to Professor Glotfelty for creating an opportunity to meet my grandfather – I mean, really meet him. As aforementioned, Professor Glotfelty takes subjects that are often kicked to the wayside, and she pours her dedication into them to create a fresh and relevant existence for them.
The final course I took with Professor Glotfelty was entitled, “Nevada in Literature.” Once again, I was largely influenced by the fact that she was teaching the course, and not necessarily the topic. I was not wild about taking a literature course as an elective in my senior year, especially not one the met on Fridays, but I was wild about getting a chance at another course from Professor Glotfelty. I am a native Nevadan, and I presumed that I had about as a good a perspective about Nevada as anybody else. After all, I had lived in Nevada for 22 years. Well, you have probably guessed by now that I was again enlightened. I discovered that my perspective on Nevada was incredibly enriched by absorbing the perspective of others. The literature she selected really helped me to understand the diversity in how Nevada is viewed. We read everything from Mark Twain’s elegant and articulate descriptions of Lake Tahoe, to Native American Sarah Winnemucca’s life, to the gritty life of local writers. In fact, I was glad to recently hear that Professor Glotfelty had compiled an anthology of Nevada literature. I will look forward to that when it hits the shelves. We not only read author’s work, we interviewed Nevada authors and wrote our own stories about their lives, as well as reviewed their writing. Our findings were published on a Web site so they could be shared with the community. On top of learning a lot about Nevada history, we were asked to write a series of short stories and poems about Nevada. These assignments were incredibly rewarding for me. Sure, I thought I knew how I felt about Nevada, I thought I knew what was unique; I thought I knew what I cherished about my memories in Nevada. Once I took the time to really consider how I felt, I was blown away. The class also reviewed books that photographically highlighted the beauty of Nevada. I used to cynically ask, “what beauty? It’s all brown!” Once I let Professor Glotfelty open my eyes, I had a whole new appreciation for the place I call home. I had the fortune of traveling the United States extensively after college. I took what I had learned to gain an even greater appreciation for Nevada – its historical, aesthetic and cultural value. I even now write poetry about the Nevada environment and I have taken up photography so that I could capture the beauty that I never saw before – hoping to help others see.
I have to apologize for the length of this letter of recommendation. I know that the Selection committee has hundreds of similar letters to read, and little time to do so, but I felt it would be an injustice to Professor Glotfelty if I could summarize her impact in a few paragraphs. I hope that I have made it clear that she is the type of professor we can all feel honored to advocate. I’m sure any of her past students could have written a letter of recommendation, and it would have highlighted these same incredible qualities. I am honored to recommend Cheryll Glotfelty as the U.S. Professor of the Year.
Sincerely,
Mike McDowell
University of Nevada, Reno
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