2022: Caroline Beer, Professor of Political Science, Director of Liberal Arts Scholars Program for the Social Sciences

2019: David P. Massell

2017: Gayle R. Nunley, Associate Professor, Romance Languages and Literatures

2016: Luis A. Vivanco, Professor Anthropology, and Co-Director, Humanities Program

The 2015 Robert V. Daniels Award Recipient: William Mierse, Richard and Pamela Ader Green and Gold Professor of Art History, Department of Art and Art History

Through his scholarship, teaching, and service, Bill Mierse has made important contributions to international studies here at UVM.  His courses have exposed students to art from a number of different regions, cultures, and historical periods.  This includes the art of Central Asia, Greece, Ancient Rome, Medieval Europe, and Pre-Columbian Latin America.  In addition, Bill has contributed to UVM’s TAP program, teaching classes focused on the Silk Road and more recently developing a class that asked students to consider “Why Build That?” Through this, students worked to understand the societal, economic, aesthetic, practical, and personal factors that have informed architectural choices.  Bill has also led and lectured on international tours, most notably for the Vergilian Society’s 2003 trip to examine archeological sites in Spain.  He also served as a visiting professor in Brazil.

Bill is an art historian. His areas of scholarly production and interest are in Greek and Roman art and archeology, particularly in the western Mediterranean region and the ancient Near East. His emphasis is in the Bronze Age (4,000 to 3,000 B.C.) and Iron Age (beginning before 1,000 B.C.). He was awarded UVM faculty grants for participation in a symposium on art in the Dunhuang Caves (western China), research in Israel, and in Andean countries for pre-Columbian art. His books include: Temples and Sanctuaries from the Early Iron Age Levant, Recovery after Collapse (Eisenbrauns: Winona Lake, IN, 2012); Ocho Ensayos sobre al Arte Romano (Revista do Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia, Universidade de Sau Paulo, Brazil, 2000, co-author); and Temples and Towns in Roman Iberia: The Social and Architectural Dynamics of Sanctuary Designs from the Third Century B.C. to the Third Century A.D. (University of California Press, 1999). Bill is also the author of an impressive collection of articles, as well as reviews and a dictionary on topics of art history, archeology, numismatics, and art pedagogy.  Most recently, Bill was awarded Richard and Pamela Ader Green and Gold Professorship.  This will allow him to undertake an in-depth study of ancient Central Asia.

Bill has also contributed to international studies through his service activities at UVM. He served as director of two regional studies programs, the Middle East Studies Program (1995-1997) and the Latin American Studies Program (1998-2000).  He was also curator for the 1999-2001 “Four Honduran Artists” exhibit beginning at UVM and touring to Texas, Maryland, and New Jersey, as well as curator or co-curator for three other exhibits.  On top of all this, Bill remains centrally involved in efforts to promote interdisciplinary at UVM, a project that is of central concern to the Global and Regional Studies Program.

The 2014 Robert V. Daniels Award Recipient: Dennis Mahoney, Professor of German

Dennis Mahoney, Professor of German, was the recipient of the 2014 Robert V. Daniels Award for Outstanding Contributions to International Education. Dennis joined UVM in 1979 and attained the position of full professor in 1994. Over the last 35 years, through research, teaching and service, he has been a leader in building and advancing international studies at UVM. Dennis’ classes in the Department of German and Russian Studies have included upper-level courses that have allowed students to explore German Romanticism, the works of luminaries such as Richard Wagner, Friedrich Schiller and Heinrich von Kleist, and the interactions between literary development and events such as the French Revolution and the rise of German nationalism. Dennis has also taught Area and International Studies classes and in the TAP program with a course exploring literature from the Enlightenment to Nazism. He was honored with UVM's 2001 Kroepsch-Maurice Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Dennis has a truly impressive record of service, activity, and outreach in international studies. One central element of this has been his work with residentially-based education. As a Dennis Mahoney and Peter VonDoepp newly minted Assistant Professor, Dennis was tapped to serve as faculty director of the German House, and he and his spouse Angi resided in an apartment in the Living/Learning Center for several years. In 2005 Vice President Lauck Parke and John Sama asked Dennis to help conceptualize a new idea - the creation of Residential Learning Communities (RLCs). Dennis was an important contributor to the first team that developed the framework for RLCs and went on to serve as Faculty Director of the Global Village RLC for its first two years (2006-2008). "D-Mo," as students affectionately called him, was the perfect person to launch this initiative, and to get students excited about participating. Dennis' strengths as director included bringing UVM faculty into this community to engage with students, providing cultural and artistic programming, supporting international exchange students and UVM students who wanted to study abroad, and linking the Global Village with local and regional organizations with a global focus.

Beyond this, Dennis served as the Interim Director of the European Studies program in 1997-98, the Director from 2000 to 2005, and the Acting Director in 2011. From 2006 to 2008 he served on the committee that laid the groundwork for the development of the Global Studies program at UVM. He has offered public commentary for Lane Series events and organized Burack lectures in 2006, 2007, and 2011. Finally, since 1994, Dennis has served as UVM coordinator of our student exchange program in Augsburg, Germany.

Dennis’ scholarship has focused on the works of Goethe, Novalis, Schiller, and other authors of the Age of Goethe. He is the author or editor of seven books and has published forty articles and chapters and nearly ninety book reviews on areas of his scholarly expertise. His book, Roman der Goethezeit, brought him national and international recognition. This is also the case for his three books on the German Romantic writer Novalis, two written in German and one in English. His book on The Critical Reception of Novalis' Novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen was named one of Choice magazine's "Outstanding Academic Books for 1995." In his most recent project, he served as editor of The Literature of German Romanticism (2004), part of the 10-volume Camden House German Literature series that represents the most detailed history of German Literature in English. Since 2012 he has been serving as the President of the International Novalis Society and is the first non-German to do so.
 

Denise Youngblood, professor of history, received her Ph.D. in 1980 from Stanford University and after working for six years at the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, came to UVM in 1988 as an assistant professor. She received tenure in 1994 and was promoted to full professor in 1999. She has served as chair of the History Department and Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs.

Denise is a prominent scholar of Russian film, with six single or co-authored books, including the prize-winning Movies for the Masses: Popular Cinema and Soviet Society in the 1920s, winner of the Heldt Prize for Best Book by a Woman in Slavic Studies, and numerous peer-reviewed book articles and chapters. Prof. Youngblood

We also recognize Denise as a renowned teacher and mentor, who has impacted many students in her home department and across the college, earning numerous distinctions, including the University Scholar Award, Dean’s Lecture Award, and Kroepsch-Maurice Award for Excellence in Teaching.

She has been a major pillar in our Russian/East European Studies program, for which she served as its director in the 1990s and whose courses are central to that program. She has also been a major supporter and participant in the life of our international studies community more broadly, including having served on the committee that designed the Global Studies major. We value her contributions greatly.

Recipient of the 2012 Robert V. Daniels Award: Professor Wolfgang Mieder

Photo: Prof. Mieder at right.

Prof. Mieder received his Ph.D. from Michigan State University in 1970 and came to UVM in 1971 as an assistant professor. He passed through tenure, associate professor, and achieved the top rank of full professor by 1978, only 7 years after arriving.

He is a scholar of German literature, the history of the German language, fairy tales, and folk songs, and is the world’s leading paremiologist.  He also served as chair of the UVM Department of German and Russian from 1977 until 2008.

Prof. Mieder appears to live by an old Latin proverb - “Nulla dies sine linea” (not a day without a line drawn—typically read as—not a day shall pass without something done), having been author or editor of at least 205 books and as author or co-author of 465 articles. Since 1984 he has been the editor of Proverbium: Yearbook of International Proverb Scholarship, an annual book that is published by the University of Vermont with subscriptions from around the world.  In typical generous fashion, Prof. Mieder has personally packed up and shipped copies of Proverbium to well over one hundred scholars in lesser-developed countries, and around the world, for 28 years. Proverbium celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2008 with volume 25.  Prof. Mieder is also the editor of the Supplement Series to Proverbium and has been a guest professor at the University of Freiburg in Germany and the University of California at Berkeley.

We recognize Prof. Mieder as a renowned and much-beloved teacher and mentor, who has impacted deeply countless students in his home department and across the college, especially in the European and Russian/East European Studies programs. He and his courses have been a pillar of the European Studies Program for decades, and, consummate university citizen that he is, he has been a major supporter and participant in the life of our international studies community – first with the Area and International Studies Program and then with the Global and Regional Studies Program as it is now known. His steady, constructive, and supportive engagement with this broader international studies community is something that is much appreciated by our Program.

Prof. Kevin McKenna, a colleague and close friend, cited one of Prof. Mieder’s favorite medieval Latin proverbs–one that truly applies to Prof. Mieder himself: “Bis dat qui cito dat” meaning “He gives twice who gives quickly.”  Whether helping his students or his colleagues at UVM and around the world, no one gives more of himself in helping others or does so as quickly and selflessly as Wolfgang Mieder.

An Interview with Wolfgang Mieder by Luis Vivanco

I recently sat down with Wolfgang to learn more about his remarkable career, scholarship, and involvement in international studies at UVM. Here are some highlights from that conversation.

On coming to the U.S. at the age of sixteen…

"My dream as a young boy in Germany in the 1950s was to come to America, the dreamland, roads paved with gold, and so on. I had met a German-American journalist from Detroit. When I was sixteen I wrote to him to see if he could find some families for me to stay with. He did and I came for a year. The fact that I didn’t come with a program was my fortune because at that young impressionable age, I fell immediately in love with the United States. I do mean that. A couple of months afterwards I was begging my parents to stay. I didn’t go home for four years! I took my two years of high school and ended up at a small college in Michigan, Olivet College. I’d gotten a nice stipend from the Michigan Student Aid Foundation, and that paid for about half, and the other half I worked—I ran the language lab and so on. I started off as a math and chemistry major, and like so many students I changed my mind a few times and ended up in the humanities, majoring in French and German."

How he came to the study of folklore…

"I got a free ride to the University Michigan and got my M.A. there in a year, and went back to Germany to study a semester at Heidelberg. I also studied for two semesters in France. Then I made the decision to switch universities one more time and decided to go to Michigan State in the German Department. That was, in a roundabout way, my good fortune because I met Stuart Gallacher who was a student of the famous American folklorist Archer Taylor. That is where I was introduced to the study of fairy tales, legends, jokes, folk songs, and, of course, proverbs. And that clicked. From there it was a straight shot. I wrote my dissertation on the contextual function of proverbs in a 19th-century Swiss novelist’s work and then enjoyed that work so much that very quickly I started thinking of other projects.

When I came to UVM in 1971, senior professors thought that teaching a course on folklore would be a good idea because of the accessibility of the subject matter, and it enters into so many cultural, literary, and linguistic aspects. Over the years my interest in folklore became very much broader as far as comparative work is concerned. I always try to tell my students if you want to do serious folklore work you should do it as comparatively as possible."
 

Recipient of the 2011 Robert V. Daniels Award: Dr. Juefei Wang

On May 5, 2011, Dr. Juefei Wang was awarded the 2011 Robert V. Daniels Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Field of International Studies.

Dr. Wang is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Vermont and currently serves as program director of the Freeman Foundation. He received his M.Ed. in Comparative Education at Beijing Normal University, an M. Ed. in Foundational Studies of Education, and Ed. D. in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Vermont.

During the past two decades, Dr. Wang has been a leader in international education at UVM and in the state of Vermont, promoting Asian Studies curriculum development and educational exchanges between Vermont students, teachers, and administrators with counterparts in China, Japan, and Thailand. He founded the University of Vermont Asian Studies Outreach Program in 1994 and served as its director until 2008, under his leadership received the inaugural Prize for Excellence in International Education from Goldman Sachs Foundation and the Asia Society. The Asian Studies Outreach Program model developed by Dr. Wang has become a model for building the Asian Studies curriculum and educational exchange programs in schools across the nation.

The 2010 Robert V. Daniels Award Recipient: Prof. George Moyser 

Established in 2004 in honor of the late Professor Emeritus of History Robert V. "Bill" Daniels, the award celebrates the achievements of UVM's most distinguished scholars and teachers of international studies. Previous recipients include Professor Emeritus of History Robert V. Daniels (2004), Professor Emeritus of History William Metcalfe (2005), Professor Emeritus of Economics Abbas Alnasrawi (2006), Professor Emeritus of History Peter Seybolt (2007), Professor André Senécal (2008), and Professor Kevin McKenna (2009).

Interview with 2010 Award Recipient Prof. George H. Moyser by Luis Vivanco

Professor Moyser is Professor of Political Science, serving as Chair of that department between 1997 and 2010. He also served as Director of UVM’s European Studies Program (1991-7) and as Liaison Officer for the UVM-Sussex University Exchange Program (1994-2006). Professor Moyser received his B.A. from the University of Manchester and M.A. from the University of Essex, both in England, and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He joined the UVM faculty in 1987 as an already accomplished scholar. Professor Moyser is an internationally recognized specialist in Western European comparative politics, focusing on political participation and the relationship between religion and politics. He is retiring this spring after 23 years at UVM.

In March, I sat down with George to learn about his career, scholarship, and involvement in international studies at UVM. Here are some of the highlights from that conversation.

On his intellectual formation:

When I went to the University of Manchester in 1963, I went into a program that was unusual in British universities in that you didn’t go to read a particular major but you had a common social science first year. If anything I went to read Economics but I soon found studying American, British, and Soviet politics seemed very exciting. One of my teachers in my final year was an American teaching in Manchester. Political Science in Britain and Europe at the time was much more historical and legal, less social sciency. He taught a course called “Political Behavior” which wasn’t about studying constitutions and history but studying people. This really engaged me. This behavioral revolution opened up a whole new array of political topics. For example, studying interest groups which are not official governmental organizations, is not mentioned in any constitution. But also studying individual behavior, like voting behavior. Why do people vote? Why do they participate? How do people develop their political attitudes? It wasn’t abstract graphs, it was studying real people acting in a political way. That’s been my interest in life and scholarly contribution.

On coming to the U.S. to pursue a Ph.D.:

Michigan was a great place to be. It had the Inter-University Consortium for Political Research which still exists and is probably the world’s biggest archive of data. I was sitting on a mine of information and political surveys. I dove into these archives and put it all on magnetic tapes. It was very primitive computing with the cards that you put into a computer and it would whirr away and you would get the output; it was nothing like today. My thesis was a comparative study of how regional characteristics within Britain and Italy shape political normative climates and affect individual voting. It reflected on the one hand my orientation to studying people acting politically with my interest in European comparative politics.

On his cross-Atlantic academic career:

After I finished my Ph.D. I went back to Britain because I was on a visa that required me to leave the United States and bring the “good news” of American academia back to my home country. I went back to Manchester with something of a zeal to bring back all the new ideas and skills I’d learned at Michigan. I was rather naïve! I found that the atmosphere was rather conservative, resistant to new ways of looking at politics. They would tolerate me but I was not going to change the whole dynamics of the department so I started thinking about coming back to the U.S. Then Mrs. Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979. Eventually, she began pressing the universities very hard. She basically thought that we were all left-wing layabouts who didn’t contribute to the national economy. Many of us working in Britain with American Ph. D.s thought if we’re not appreciated here let’s go back to the U.S. where we are appreciated! By that time I was a tenured professor so I wanted to be careful about where I moved. I applied to UVM for an open position and came in as an Associate Professor. As I discovered later it had just been annointed as a Public Ivy so it was entering this whole new golden era. I had always thought Vermont was a nice place to live from a European perspective.

On his involvement in European Studies and the University of Sussex Exchange Program:

I gravitated to the European Studies Program and I got on the Executive Committee. They were delighted to have someone interested in helping out, especially from the Political Science side. From there I became director of the Program. One of the slight oddities of the European Studies major at the time was that there was one required course, the Geography of Europe. Along with others, I thought yes, to have an understanding of the geography of Europe is important, but it’s not the sole, central focus of the program. So we undertook the reorganization of the major, dividing it into the history and social side, and the literary, philosophical, and cultural side. We also had the idea to have a capstone senior seminar that would bring students from across European Studies. That didn’t work out terribly well because we didn’t have the resources to have people committed to it.

At Michigan, I was an international student and I found it such an amazingly positive experience. When I came here the whole idea of studying abroad was on the table and I thought this was something I should support. Sussex University in England approached us about doing an exchange program. I think the exchange isn’t as strong as it used to be. But when the British students would come here, I would reach out to them and help them to climatize to the American ways and the UVM ways of doing business.

On his future plans:

Shall I be doing some research? I hope I will. One of my interests has been in religion and politics. I did a piece not so long ago on the World Council of Churches, which is based in Geneva. It made me realize there has been no study at all on its political relationship with the UN and other international organizations. It has been mainly studied from a religious, theological institution end, as an ecumenical organization, not so much its pursuit of social and economic justice, which is what a lot of it is about.  So that is one thing I might do. Another project is that one of the major differences between Western Europe and the United States is what you might call the collapse of institutional religion, in terms of it sort of being a cultural power and a moral authority. It’s lost a lot of political clout that it used to have in years past. So one of my interests would be to say, “What is, or will be, the relationship between religion and politics in Europe in this sort of ‘post-church,’ ‘post-institutional’ situation?”

As for where I’ll be based, well I don’t know. That’s an open question. I don’t think we’ll be going back to Britain, although for many years I thought that that’s where I would end up. You know, I thought that my mission here was to bring a knowledge and understanding of European politics to American students and when I retired, that job was sort of done, and then I’d go back to Britain, but I’ve been here too long and am too entrenched, family-wise and every way, that I think that’s off the table.

2009: Kevin J. McKenna, Professor of Russian
Director of  Area & International Studies, 1989-2007

2008: André Senécal, Professor Emeritus of French
Director of Canadian Studies, 1997-2006

2007: Peter Seybolt, Professor Emeritus of History
Director of Asian Studies 1969-2007

2006: Abbas Alnasrawi

2005: William Metcalfe, Professor Emeritus of History

2004: Robert V. Daniels, Professor Emeritus of History