Cynthia Nazarian, associate professor in the department of French and Italian, honored with University Teaching Award

Cynthia Nazarian, associate professor in the department of French and Italian, has been honored with the University Teaching Award. Nazarian will receive the Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence.

As a specialist of Renaissance literature, Nazarian regularly teaches the period between 1500 and 1630 CE, primarily in French. While she recognizes this era is “remote in time and language, and often foreign in mores” for her students, she “does not feel that the best way to assuage their anxieties is simply to downplay the difficulty of the material.” Instead, she encourages them to “push through that unfamiliarity with heavy doses of encouragement and enthusiasm.” Throughout the term, she signposts the progress students have made so they can “derive a sense of personal accomplishment from their effort.”

The key to Nazarian’s success as teacher is that she “makes the material come alive,” one student wrote. Her department chair shared that she does this through “an irresistible combination of enthusiasm, innovative exercises and assignments, and the thoughtful incorporation of objects, media, and experiences.” Nazarian’s chair also praises her ability to engage undergraduates from diverse majors and personal backgrounds, using literary texts as “a point of departure for learners to explore material culture, the history of medicine, philosophical questions about religious tolerance and a host of other topics.”

While the texts she teaches are often more than 500 years old, Nazarian manages to connect the material to modern life for her students, including situations they confront long after they leave her classroom. As one graduate noted, “Even years after our graduation, I find myself regularly reflecting on several of the lessons and insights I drew from her class to motivate my own thought processes.”

Nazarian is an associate professor in the department of French and Italian in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.