Abigail De Kosnik Receives Distinguished Teaching Award
The Distinguished Teaching Award is the UC Berkeley campus' most prestigious award for teaching, intended to encourage and recognize individual excellence in education. Such teaching rises above good teaching: it incites intellectual curiosity in students, engages them thoroughly in the enterprise of learning, and has a life-long impact. While acknowledging the fact that Berkeley faculty comprises many outstanding teachers, the Committee on Teaching is highly selective in determining the recipients of this award: only 223 faculty have received the award since its inception in 1959.
We want to congratulate Abigail De Kosnik for being one of the five UC Berkeley faculty who have been selected as recipients of the 2023 Distinguished Teaching Award, the campus’s most prestigious honor for teaching.
From the announcement:
Abigail De Kosnik was described to the committee as “generous, thorough, and challenging — invitingly so — as a teacher” by her colleague Mel Chen, associate professor of gender and women’s studies. Chen added that students speak of De Kosnik “not with the expected hierarchical reverence, but rather a beautiful sense of gratitude and collegiality, which was clearly a response to the mode of address she had cultivated with them.” The committee added that De Kosnik builds an inclusive environment in the classroom where she acknowledges and challenges biases and hierarchies.
A former student was quoted, saying, “Overall, Gail has impacted my life in countless positive ways. Gail commands respect through kindness and competence while — and I think this is so important — actively dismantling the white supremacist and patriarchal standards so prevalent in the academy.” The committee added that she is a “riveting lecturer.”
Abigail De Kosnik is the Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media, an Associate Professor in the Berkeley Center for New Media and the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, and an affiliated faculty member of Gender & Women’s Studies. She researches popular media, particularly digital media, film and television, and fan studies. She is particularly interested in how issues of feminism, queerness, ethnicity, and transnationalism intersect with new media studies and performance studies.
Learn more about this prestigious award here and in the announcement here.