Arbella Bet-Shlimon, Assistant Professor, Department of History; and Mary St. Germain, Head of the Libraries Near East Section, are recipients of 2017 UW Awards of Excellence.
Professor Bet-Shlimon received the UW 2017 Distinguished Teaching Award. The award honors faculty members for their work with students. Criteria for selection includes mastery of subject matter; innovation in course and curriculum design; ability to inspire, guide, and mentor students through independent and creative thinking; and service as a mentor, collaborator, and consultant to other faculty and teaching assistants by helping to enrich the scholarship of teaching and learning. Professor Bet-Shlimon’s research and teaching focus on the politics, society, and economy of twentieth-century Iraq and the broader Persian Gulf region, as well as Middle Eastern urban history. In addition to specialized courses on these topics, she offers general introductory courses on the modern Middle East, including a survey of the Middle East since the nineteenth century.
Dr. Mary St. Germain received the UW 2017 Distinguished Librarian Award. The award recognizes excellence in librarianship, especially as it benefits the academic community through innovative approaches to professional practice, research, and/or teaching and learning. Additional factors include creativity, leadership, service, scholarship, and demonstration of the University of Washington values of integrity, diversity, excellence, collaboration, and innovation. Dr. St. Germain has developed extensive online resources and guides accessible from the Libraries website for students and scholars of the Middle East. She handles foreign-language material acquisitions and cataloguing from the Middle East and Central Asia and makes periodic trips to the region, where she puts to use her knowledge of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Russian.