CNU professor receives 2007 Outstanding Faculty Award
Schwarze is third CNU faculty member to receive this honor

News Release - Feb. 8, 2007
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Media contact:
Carolyn Cuthrell
Office of Communications and Public Relations
carolyn.cuthrell@cnu.edu
(757) 594-7331

Dr. Tracey Schwarze

(NEWPORT NEWS, Va.) — A Christopher Newport University professor has been named one of 12 recipients of the 2007 Outstanding Faculty Awards from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia. Dr. Tracey Schwarze, associate professor of English, was recognized with the Commonwealth’s highest honor for faculty at Virginia’s public and private colleges and universities. The award recognizes Dr. Schwarze’s superior accomplishments in teaching, research and public service.

“This is a great honor for Dr. Schwarze and a great honor for CNU,” said CNU President Paul Trible. “This award reflects the caliber of the young faculty coming to CNU and confirms that our academic transformation is succeeding.”

“Tracey Schwarze’s professional life is the epitome of what the Virginia Outstanding Faculty Awards were intended to honor,” said Dr. Richard Summerville, CNU Provost. “Adored by her students, respected as a scholar, and treasured by her University, she is in every sense ‘outstanding.’ In a brief seven years of service to Christopher Newport University, she has become chair of her department, president of the faculty senate and one of the most respected voices on the entire faculty. This is rare and precious currency; and the Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award is a fitting recognition for Dr. Schwarze’s contributions to her students, her discipline, her University and the Commonwealth.”

Dr. Schwarze is the third CNU faculty member to receive the Outstanding Faculty Award. Dr. Susan St. Onge, professor of French, was a 1997 recipient, and Dr. Harold Cones, professor of biology, was awarded in 2000.

Since joining the CNU faculty in 1999, Dr. Schwarze has taught more than 1,000 students and designed 17 courses, from freshman composition to public relations writing to major author seminars.

Students consider Dr. Schwarze to be a rigorous, provocative teacher and rate highly their learning in her courses, repeatedly noting in their course evaluations her ability to get students to set high goals and pursue intellectual excellence.

“Dr. Schwarze can lead a class into a place that some of us probably didn’t previously want to be,” wrote one of her students in a History of the British Novel course. “She’s hard, but good. You learn things that you don’t forget.”

She prepares and mentors her students for graduate school, and many have earned acceptance into such highly ranked institutions as The University of California, Irvine, the University of Virginia and Emory University. She also involves her undergraduate students in research. Four of her students have won competitive undergraduate research or honors grants, and she has sponsored more than 40 students presenting papers at various research conferences.

Dr. Schwarze’s research on James Joyce has earned her an international reputation as scholar of the Irish writer and poet. Her first book, “Joyce and the Victorians,” was published in 2002, and she is working on a second book, “Dirty Linen:  James Joyce, Victorian Scandal, and Identity in the Modern Moment.”

Dr. Schwarze also creatively joins her scholarship, teaching and devotion to student development. When she was invited to lecture at the prestigious International James Joyce Summer School at University College, Dublin, in summer 2005, Dr. Schwarze arranged to take with her five students to attend the school and complete research projects at the National Library of Ireland.

She has assumed an ever-expanding faculty leadership role on campus, including leading committees that have developed new curriculum, improved student services, developed new writing requirements and shaped the Writing and Learning Center planned for the expanded CNU Library. She was a faculty senator for two years before being elected president of the faculty senate. And this fall, she began leading an eleven-person committee of faculty members and senior administrators in a nationwide search for a new provost for the University.

Nominees for the Outstanding Faculty Awards were assessed on their teaching, discovery, integration of knowledge and service. They were also judged on how strongly their accomplishments reflected the missions of their respective institutions. After an initial peer-review phase, a selection committee – comprised of members of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia and leaders in Virginia government, business, and education –scrutinized the nomination materials.