Lilly Fellows collaborate to improve teaching

Six untenured faculty – already distinguished scholars and teachers – have been named UW–Madison’s 1998-99 Lilly Teaching Fellows.

Established nationwide by the Lilly Endowment Inc. in 1974 and in UW- Madison’s College of Letters and Science in 1992, the program offers one-year grants to promising assistant professors so that they can either develop a new undergraduate course or redesign an existing one. Each fellow works with an established mentor in the field, as well as with specialists on and off campus.

This year’s recipients are:

• William Bement, zoology. Bement will redesign a course in cell biology to emphasize the process of science.
• Ksenija Bilbija, Spanish and Portuguese, will develop a new undergraduate course, Introduction to Hispanic Cultures. The class will enhance students’ language proficiency and increase their exposure to cultural topics through the study of popular music, television, the performing arts, advertising and more.
• Matthew Gumpert, comparative literature, will offer a new approach to the study of ancient Greek mythology that will focus on the persistence of classical themes as a basis of contemporary culture in film, television and other media.
• Paul D. Hutchcroft, political science, will re-evaluate one of his department’s foundation courses, Introduction to Comparative Politics, in light of major changes during the last decade in international politics.
• Marlys Macken, linguistics, will create a course on language diversity in the United States.
• Gerhard Richter, German, will develop a course based on the German tradition of the thought-image. Richter is interested in how the images of the modern age such as telephones or gas stations became signs of larger cultural trends in the work of writers such as Bertolt Brecht, Siegfried Kracaucer, Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin.