Top College profs score Abrams

Booyeon LeeBooyeon LeeThe Daily Pennsylvanian Since 1983, the award has sought to recognize teaching that is "intellectually rigorous, exceptionally coherent and that leads to an informed understanding of a discipline," according to the College Dean's Office. Living in a culture heavily saturated with media images, Sidlauskas said it is important for students to learn how those images are put together. Through her classes, she helps students become more skeptical of how the images can be used to manipulate personal views. She noted that many areas of scholarship can be derived from the arts. "Anything having to do with the fabric of culture can be extracted from paintings and sculpture," she said. She said her class trips to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art add life to her lectures. "I love seeing students' faces light up when they confront a work of art in real life that they have been studying," she said. Sidlauskas received her bachelor's degree in art history from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1977. After earning her doctorate at Penn, she lectured at the University from 1989 to 1990. She then taught at Columbia University before returning to Penn as a professor in 1994. According to Sidlauskas' students, her constant interaction makes her classes most interesting. "She treats her students not condescendingly, but as intellectual equals," College senior Stephanie Simon said. "She entertains what you say completely, which gave me confidence in my own research." Students gave Stallybrass' teaching style similar praise. "He gets students to look at things in text in a way you normally wouldn't -- like shoes, paper and clothes," second-year English graduate student Erik Simpson said. "He helps students see how things that appear to be the periphery of the text can be made central." Stallybrass said in the graduate seminar class Simpson took he particularly enjoyed concentrating on the function of writing and clothes as forms of memory. He explained how his interest in the relationship among English, anthropology and history has profoundly affected his teaching style. Stallybrass -- whose books include The Politics and Poetics of Transgression and Embodied Politics: Enclosure and Transgression -- said he is remarkably impressed with both the faculty and the students in Penn's English Department. "I know of no other English graduate program in the country where students are both so intellectually challenging and supportive of each other," he said. Stallybrass -- who concentrates in Shakespeare and cultural studies -- received his bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Sussex in England, where he also taught after graduating. Before coming to Penn, he taught at Dartmouth College from 1986 to 1988. He noted that much of his teaching style was developed at Sussex through interdisciplinary classes that incorporated library research projects into paper assignments. Interim College Dean Walter Wales will honor Sidlauskas and Stallybrass with the Ira Abrams Memorial Award at a reception April 30.