Previous

||

This Issue

||

Next

AROUND THE QUADS

Bent, Gillooly Honored With Core Awards

By Timothy P. Cross

On Thursday, November 21, Anne Parsons Bender Professor of Music Ian David Bent and Director of the Core Curriculum Eileen Gillooly were honored with the 10th annual Awards for Distinguished Service to the Core Curriculum at a ceremony in the Heyman Center for the Humanities. Sandra Pierson Prior, former director of the composition program (better known as Logic and Rhetoric), received a special award for her services to the curriculum.

Dean Austin Quigley said that the awards honored “people who are most true to the tradition of the Core — that is, they are innovators.” David Cohen, vice president for Arts and Sciences, praised the honorees for their “uncommon contributions to the essence of undergraduate education at Columbia.”

Ian Bent PHOTO: Eileen Barroso

Bent is a specialist in the history of music theory and music analysis, especially that of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. He came to Columbia in 1986, having taught previously at the University of London Kings College, Harvard and the University of Nottingham. His many publications include Analysis (Norton, 1987), Music Analysis in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1994) and Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism (Cambridge, 1996). Bent, who received the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching in 1995, has been active in promoting the use of the Web for instruction. A longtime teacher and former chair of Music Humanities, he was instrumental in developing the Sonic Glossary and other electronic resources used in Music Hum classes. (See CCT, Fall 1998.)

Professor of Music Walter Frisch described Bent as “the most active, proactive and devoted” teacher of Music Humanities. “We quake at the thought of what we will do without Ian,” who is retiring at the end of this year, Frisch said.

In accepting the award, Bent acknowledged, “It’s taken me pretty well 16 years to understand what [Music Hum] is all about.” He says he valued teaching the course because it was “always a fresh experience for me.”

Eileen Gillooly PHOTO: Eileen Barroso

Gillooly, who also is adjunct associate professor of English and comparative literature, earned her bachelor’s degree from Scripps College in 1977 and her doctorate from Columbia in 1993. She was hired to help coordinate the Contemporary Civilization and Literature Humanities courses in 1991, and has been the chief administrator of the Core Curriculum since that time. She was named director of the Core in 1999 and adjunct associate professor in 2001. In addition to Lit Hum, Gillooly teaches courses in 19th-century British literature and culture. She is the author of Smile of Discontent: Humor, Gender, and Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Chicago, 1999), which won the 2001 Perkins Prize from the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature.

In assessing Gillooly’s contributions to the Core, Lionel Trilling Professor of Literature Humanities Cathy Popkin, Lit Hum chair, described Gillooly as “the brain and heart and regulator of the entire organism.” James R. Barker Professor of Contemporary Civilization James Zetzel, chair of the Contemporary Civilization program, said, “It’s Eileen who unifies [the program] and makes it work as a unity” while having “a career as a scholar that would put many of us to shame.”

Gillooly noted the challenge of working with the 15 departments that contribute faculty to teach the Core. But, hearkening back in good Columbia fashion to The Iliad, she boasted of having “several extra fistfuls from the urn of blessings” as a result of her work with the Core.

During her 15 years at the helm of the Logic and Rhetoric course, Prior trained and supervised hundreds of graduate students in the teaching of writing. She also participated in various programs and initiatives that integrated writing into Core courses and the general undergraduate curriculum. Edward Tayler, the Lionel Trilling Professor in Humanities emeritus, praised Prior for her “combination of sympathy, humanity and rigor.”

Special Service Professor Wm. Theodore de Bary ’41, director of the Heyman Center; Maja Cerar, a preceptor for Music Humanities; and Maggie Pouncey ’00 also spoke at the ceremony, which is organized each year by the Heyman Center.

Previous

||

This Issue

||

Next