Meet the 2019 Lenfest "Great Teacher" Award Winners

The eight winners of this year’s Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Awards come from the social sciences, humanities, arts and natural sciences, with nominations from department chairs, other faculty and students. Established in 2005 with a $12 million gift from the late University Trustee Gerry Lenfest (’58 LAW, ’09 HON) the awards “honor exceptional instruction and scholarship, with a special emphasis on the mentoring of students in the arts and sciences” and carry a $25,000 stipend for each of three years.

Here’s a look at those exemplary teachers.

Taoufik Ben-Amor
Gordon Gray Jr. Senior Lecturer in Arabic Studies
Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies

Ben-Amor, who earned his Ph.D. from the University of Tunis, specializes in Arabic language and linguistics, language and identity, and Arab music. Those nominating him for the Lenfest award praised his leadership as a lecturer, setting high standards for others in his department and in all areas of the field, and for the inspiration he provides to his colleagues and students through an “exemplary work ethic and discipline,” dedication and innovation. His mentoring of students was mentioned repeatedly as extraordinary and deeply valued by students, and several letters praised his excellence in all the classes that he teaches. Nominating letters cited his unique "intellectual generosity," illustrated by the 76 lectures on Arabic grammar he created for public access on YouTube.

Matthew Hart
Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature

A scholar of 20th and 21st- century Anglophone culture, Hart concentrates on modernism, contemporary literature, theory, and the visual arts. He teaches Literature Humanities (LitHum) in the Core Curriculum; several students called him the best professor they have had at Columbia. In nominating him for the Lenfest award, Alan Stewart, chair of the Department of English and Comparative Literature, noted that Hart expanded the University’s global presence with contributions to a partnership with Glasgow University and, with colleague Molly Murray, by establishing a new program at Queen Mary University of London. Hart , who has a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, is co-editor of the Literature Now book series at Columbia University Press and vice president of the Modernist Studies Association.

Kimuli Kasara
Associate Professor of Political Science

Kasara, whose Ph.D. is from Stanford, studies how ethnic identification, voting, and demography affect and are influenced by the policy decisions made by political elites in Africa. Nominating her for the Lenfest award, Timothy Frye, the chair of the political science department, cited her efforts to diversify the department. She has helped to institutionalize support for graduate students from underrepresented groups through multiple stages of the Ph.D. program and also has represented the department at the Ralph Bunche Summer Institute, a program that seeks to recruit graduate students from underrepresented minority groups.

Benjamin Marcus
Professor of Writing, School of the Arts

Marcus, who has an MFA from Brown, is an award-winning writer whose works of fiction include The Flame Alphabet, The Age of Wire and String, and more recently Notes from the Fog. His short stories have appeared in such publications as Harper’s, The New Yorker and The Paris Review. In her nominating letter, Rivka Galchen (SOA’06), a former student of Marcus’s and now an assistant professor of writing at Columbia, said, “his unostentatious brilliance offered me so many new ways to see both what I wrote and what I read, and has been a significant part even to this day in my career.” She included praise from other former students who have gone on to become published writers.

Serena Ng
Edwin W. Rickert Professor of Economics

Ng is affiliated with Columbia’s Data Science Institute, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, managing editor of the Journal of Econometrics and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She describes her research interests as macroeconomics, econometrics and big data. She was praised for the rigor and thoroughness of her teaching and for encouraging her students to dig deeper in their studies. Students commented that what they learned in her courses was applicable to real-world problems and one said she conveyed the beauty of math. Students she mentored now work at prestigious institutions around the world. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton.

Pier Mattia Tommasino
Assistant Professor of Italian

Tommasino, who earned his Ph.D. at Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy, teaches introduction to Italian, as well as a new course on the Qur’an in Europe. His research focuses on the linguistic, textual and religious relationships between southern Europe and the Muslim world, especially Italian and Latin translations of the Qur’an and the spread of Italian language and books in the Muslim Mediterranean in the 16th and 17th centuries. Nominating him for the Lenfest award, Teodolinda Barolini, Da Ponte Professor of Italian, cited his “remarkable interdisciplinary heft as a scholar” who is “truly and genuinely multicultural in his focus.” She included portions of student evaluations, in which they cited the supportive and open environment in his classes.

Gray Tuttle
Leila Hadley Luce Professor of Modern Tibetan Studies
Department of East Asian Studies and Cultures

Tuttle studies 20th century Sino-Tibetan relations as well as Tibet’s relations with China’s earlier Manchu Qing Empire. A current project focuses on relations between China and Tibet in the 16th to 19th centuries, when Tibet’s intellectual and economic centers shifted to the east. He mentors graduate students and has worked with the Center for Teaching and Learning to develop new teaching tools for undergraduates. Tuttle, whose Ph.D. is from Harvard, “has made enormous contributions to the growth of Tibet Studies as an academic field,” wrote Wei Shang, acting chair of the Department of East Asian Studies and Cultures, noting that Tuttle has taught 15 different courses in 13 years at Columbia and helped organize eight conferences.

Maria Uriarte
Professor of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology

Uriarte, who received her Ph.D. from Cornell, studies how forests change in response to natural disturbances, such as hurricanes and fires, and from human land use. In 2018, she led a team studying the impact of Hurricane Maria on El Yunque National Forest in Puerto Rico and the effects on forests of an expected increase in extreme weather. Nominating her for the Lenfest award, Dustin Rubenstein, an associate professor in her department, said Uriarte works “tirelessly to train and mentor students [and has] an unusual ability to work with individuals of varying abilities and socio-economic and cultural backgrounds and in very different research areas.” Uriarte developed an advanced statistics course for Ph.D. students and has co-authored some 70 research papers with students.