O'Leary Faculty Recognition Awards Presented at Holy Cross

WORCESTER, Mass. – Four members of the College of the Holy Cross faculty have been honored with the Arthur J. O’Leary Faculty Recognition Award. These $10,000 honoraria are given each year by the senior vice president, Frank Vellaccio, to senior faculty members who make a special contribution to Holy Cross through their teaching, scholarship and/or service. The O’Leary Awards are intended to honor the recipients, to advance their work, and to encourage other members of the faculty to attain a high level of professional achievement and to be a positive influence in lives of students. The 2008 recipients include:

Patricia Bizzell, professor of English, earned her Ph.D. in English literature from Rutgers University. A member of Holy Cross faculty since 1978, she is a nationally recognized authority on the teaching of composition and has lectured and conducted workshops at other institutions and at scholarly meetings. Her book, The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present, which she co-authored with Bruce Herzberg, received the National Council of Teachers of English Outstanding Book Award in 1992. A member of the advisory board for the Voices of Democracy Project, she worked to help create a Web site of important speeches in American history, with scholarly and teaching apparatus attached, which was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. She was recently awarded the 2008 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Exemplar Award by the National Council of Teachers of English and served as president of the Rhetoric Society of America from 2006-08. Bizzell plans to use the award towards an M.A. in the Jewish Liberal Studies Program at Hebrew College in Newton, Mass.  She is currently a graduate student in the program and is getting ready to teach courses in Jewish literature at Holy Cross in the spring.  She resides in Worcester.

Francisco Gago-Jover, professor and chair of the modern languages and literatures department, received his Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his B.A. from the Universidad de Valladolid in Spain. A member of the Holy Cross faculty since 1996, Gago-Jover has been chair of the department of modern languages and literatures since 2004.  He has received two Hewlett-Mellon grants to develop course materials at Holy Cross. He is author of Arte de bien morir y Breve confesionario (1999) and Vocabulario militar castellano, siglos XIII-XV (2002), co-author of Lexical Studies of Medieval Spanish Texts (2004) and Diccionario militar de Raimundo Sanz (2007); since 2002 he has been one of the editors of the Dictionary of the Old Spanish Language. He plans to use the award to work on the edition and study of two 19th century manuscript dictionaries; one is about the vocabulary of the Asturian language, and the second one is a military dictionary. He will travel to the Hispanic Society of America in New York City, and the Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid, Spain, to examine the manuscripts and acquire digital copies. Gago-Jover lives in Worcester.

Lynn Kremer, professor of theatre, earned her M.F.A. at Brandeis University and her B.F.A. at the University of Minnesota. A Holy Cross faculty member since 1983, she has written and directed for theatre, opera, and video.  Her work has been performed at the Miller Theatre Sonic Boom Festival in New York City; the Walker Art Center and Fringe Festival in Minneapolis; the Tsai Performance Center and Boston Center for the Arts in Boston; the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center; the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C.; and in venues in Ft. Worth, Chicago, and Ireland. Her visual pieces are informed by the theatre and dance traditions of India and Indonesia. While living in Micronesia, she produced and directed a video program on the chant/dance traditions of Palau through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts/Dance program. Kremer has been the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts/Opera Program, the New England Foundation for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Commission, the Worcester Arts Lottery, the LEF Foundation, the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center and Holy Cross.  The New England Theatre Conference gave her a special award for Outstanding Achievement on a National Level. Kremer will use her O’Leary grant to research, travel, develop, and mount three new theatrical works. She lives in Princeton, Mass. with her husband and daughter.

Todd Lewis, professor of religious studies, received his Ph.D. and M.A from Columbia University and his B.A. from Rutgers University.  A member of Holy Cross faculty since 1990, Lewis is one of the world's leading authorities on the religions of the mid-montaine Himalayan region and the social history of Buddhism. In addition to scholarly books and articles published in leading academic journals, Lewis has shot, directed, and produced films for classroom use and co-authored a textbook, World Religions Today (Oxford University Press, 2005), which is widely used today in college classes. Lewis is the chair of the Holy Cross Japanese Garden Campus Initiative, a program to build a tea house, multipurpose room, and several gardens on campus.  Over the past 10 years, Lewis has become one of the leading academics involved nationwide in the continuing education of K-12 teachers on the cultures and religions of Asia. In this area he has co-directed three summer institutes at Holy Cross funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities, done workshops across New England on myriad subjects, and served as lecturer for study tours to Asia. Lewis resides in Holden.

The Arthur J. O’Leary Faculty Recognition Awards have been made possible by an endowed gift to the College from Thomas H. O’Leary ’54, former President, CEO and Chairman of Burlington Resources, in memory of his father, Arthur J. O’Leary.