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AROUND THE QUADS

Popkin Receives 11th Annual Core Award

Dean Austin Quigley congratulates Lionel Trilling Professor of Literature Humanities Cathy Popkin at the annual Core awards. PHOTO: MASHA VOLYNSKY '06

Acclaimed teacher and Russian literature scholar Cathy Popkin, Lionel Trilling Professor of Literature Humanities, received the 11th Annual Award for Distinguished Service to the Core Curriculum in a ceremony at the Heyman Center for the Humanities on East Campus. At the same ceremony on November 13, two rooms in the center were dedicated to former College Dean Carl Hovde ’51 and Marsha M. Manns, both of whom are former Heyman Center associate directors.

Special Service Professor Wm. Theodore de Bary ’41, director of the Heyman Center, which presents the Core awards each year, observed that to receive this award, a professor “not only has to be a great teacher but also has to educate great teachers.” This award, he says, “honors [teachers] for their leadership.” Ira Katznelson ’66, interim vice president of the Arts and Sciences, remembered how, as a student, his “horizons were radically transformed” by the Core, and he saluted “Cathy Popkin, master teacher.”

Dean of the College Austin Quigley remarked, “Our wonderful Core Curriculum thrives on continuous debate.” It is “informed by history but not governed by it.” Although always evolving, the Core “continues to evolve in a consistent way,” he said. Quigley praised Popkin as a great teacher, and noted that the Core’s success is “dependent on faculty involvement.”

Henry Pinkham, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, said that Popkin educated him about the importance of the Core, which he described as “more vital now than it has ever been.” Eileen Gillooly, director of the Core Curriculum and one of last year’s recipients of this award, praised Popkin as “a superb teacher.” “No one has taught me more about teaching than Cathy” and “no one has been more fun to work with than Cathy,” Gillooly said. Another of Popkin’s colleagues, Richard Sacks, an adjunct professor of English and comparative literature, said, “Cathy perseveres, and in doing so she inspires us all to our very core.”

“It’s a real gift to know that my colleagues appreciate me,” Popkin said in accepting her award. An expert in literary theory as well as 19th- and 20th-century Russian literature, especially the work of Anton Checkov, Popkin has taught at Columbia for 18 years. She has taught Literature Humanities regularly and has served as chair of the program. Popkin so identifies herself with the course, she told the audience, that during the fall semester she cancelled a long-standing lunch appointment because it conflicted with the Lit Hum final; she only remembered later that she wasn’t teaching Lit Hum that semester.

Awards like this one have value, Popkin said, because “appreciation does not endure, memories fade. You want to catch people before they forget about you.” Nonetheless, she added, “I know I’ll never forget this.”

Timothy P. Cross

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