Professor Higgins honored with Arts & Sciences Faculty Award for "Outstanding Teaching of Undergraduates"

Professor Lynn Higgins (The Edward Tuck Professor of French; Professor of Comparative Literature and Film Studies) was honored with the Elizabeth Howland Hand-Otis Norton Pierce Award for a Faculty Member Who Is an Outstanding Teacher of Undergraduates

Professor Higgins writes:

"I teach and write about French literature and film. I try to help students acquire the critical skills and moral imagination that fiction teaches. I invite them to adopt—if only briefly—the worldview of a Jewish teenage runaway during the German occupation, a colonial sheriff in pre-independence West Africa who begins to doubt his mission, a 19th-century orphan who moves to Paris in search of work. I especially value teaching in our programs in France, where students can test their understanding in daily conversations with host families.

I'm currently researching works that are adaptations from one medium to another and that also portray characters who migrate from one culture to another and must "adapt" to their new environment. I'm hoping these two meanings will intersect in useful ways. Marcel Proust remarked that "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." I love teaching Dartmouth undergraduates—they're smart and curious and hard-working, and most of them are headed for careers outside academia, where I hope they will take with them the "new eyes" and multiple perspectives they've discovered in their humanities courses."

Read more about this years honorees here