Daniel Immerwahr is being honored with the 2023 University Teaching Award. The annual recognition is given to professors who demonstrate excellence and innovation in undergraduate teaching. Immerwahr is the Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities in the department of history in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. He earned his Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley.
“Driven by a commitment to teach at the highest levels, this year’s University Teaching Award honorees have greatly enhanced our students’ learning experiences,” said Provost Kathleen Hagerty. “These awards recognize the impact of these efforts for our students as they prepare for success in dynamic fields of work.”
Daniel Immerwahr’s approach to history centers on narratives. He explains that organizing facts into narratives enables “a way of seeing how this led to that.” Furthermore, rather than doing so in a way that only expands students’ “circles of knowledge,” Immerwahr aims to expand their “circles of caring,” too, so that they “emotionally connect with the past” and “see how the events of centuries past bear on their lives today,” his nomination states. His chair explains that Immerwahr “builds a set of explanations to try to answer the question: Why did the world come to be as it is? And he challenges students to come up with their own accounts.”
Immerwahr’s students praise his engaging lectures. One writes, Immerwahr “has a gift for taking topics that might seem dull or inaccessible to non-experts…and crafting lively, entertaining stories that capture the complexity of scholarly debate with elegant simplicity.” His chair elaborates that Immerwahr “is as astute a listener as he is a talker, and what his seminars demonstrate are the rewards to be found in fostering discussion, in helping students to cultivate their own voices and learn how to talk to each other.” Another former student agrees: “In his classes, I always felt that I was a serious intellectual contributor; my thoughts were treated as important and worthwhile, and he pushed me to engage deeply with complicated questions.”
The recipients of the 2023 University Teaching Awards were nominated by the deans of the schools or colleges in which they have principal appointments. Honorees were selected by a committee chaired by the provost and made up of senior faculty members, University administrators, the President of the Alumnae of Northwestern University and a student representative.
The award includes a salary stipend for the next three years as well as funds for professional development. The term begins at the start of the 2023-2024 academic year.
Scheduled for Tuesday, May 23, in Guild Lounge on the Evanston campus, the awards ceremony also will be livestreamed.