Today’s first Feldman Award winner was nominated for this award for each of the past four years. During the past eleven and a half years at UNC Asheville, our colleague has published three books, twelve articles, and five reviews, regularly delivered conference papers at regional, national, and international conferences, frequently taught overloads to serve general education students as well as majors, served on the Faculty Senate and the Committee of Tenured Faculty – and all the while also served as chair of a department!

This colleague has served on the Committee for Distinguished Scholars, the University Planning Committee, the SACS Academic Programs committee, the Academic policies Committee, the ILS Oversight Committee, and the task force on creating a Religious Studies major at UNC-Asheville. Our awardee also served as an advisor to a recent Drama Department production of British playwright Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine, and recorded the entire play so that the student actors could hear how a real British accent sounds. Furthermore our colleague has been active in the community, volunteering for MAGIC (Mountain Area Gardeners in Communities) and as an assistant to those who provide pet therapy for patients at the Mountain Area Hospice.

While our awardee is “modest and self-effacing,” our awardee’s coworkers are not shy about enthusiastically singing the awardee’s praises. A reviewer of one of our winner’s published volumes, commenting on its careful scholarship, intelligent argumentation, and wide scope of appeal wrote that the work “will have to be considered by those who come after.” A list of our awardee’s scholarly publications is indeed impressive, but the quality of work is at the highest of research levels. Our awardee has published with some of the most prestigious scholarly publishers in the field: the work produced is known and respected by scholars here and abroad who recognize our colleague as one of the leading authorities in the discipline.

A faculty member at UNC-Asheville writes that our awardee is “without doubt one of UNCA’s finest scholars” whose “exceptionally high standards serve as an inspiration as does her persistent and sincere pleasantness and her care for the hearts and minds of all her colleagues and her students.” Another says, “In an academic community replete with outstanding scholars and professionals, she is among the best.” The faculty members in her department, tenured and non-tenured alike, praise her ability to build consensus, her effectiveness, and her ability to promote faculty and students. They describe her as a role model, and use terms like “stellar” to describe her. Her departmental faculty regards her with deep affection, respect, and admiration, and recognizes the hard work on her part to develop a harmonious group of faculty and students.

A paragraph from her cover letter probably best attests to the breadth and depth of her interests: “The big book I really want to write concerns ancient imperialism in literature, building on some of the material I used in my first book but expanding it to cover Roman writers as well. One of the great benefits of teaching in a small department is that I have not been typecast as a Hellenist but can teach Latin as well, and certain conference papers that I have already given, on Livy and Horace, consider the representation of the Roman empire in literature. I hope to rework these and expand my work on Athenian imperialism in light of the later empires and imperial theory and to produce a really substantial work of scholarship on the subject. I have waited to start on this because it is an immense and highly interdisciplinary topic and I wanted to write one slightly more popular book before I embarked on it, giving the teaching pressures I have faced. However, I plan to start this after I have turned some of the growing number of conference papers I have written into articles.”

One recommender amusingly notes that when she was shepherding Mark Padilla around campus when he was interviewing here, “I could obviously see that the high-point of his tour was actually meeting THE Sophie Mills, Theseus-Scholar.”

Because of her high level of academic rigor, a command of her discipline, and her effective leadership, it is with great pleasure that I announce that the 2006 Feldman Award goes to Dr. Sophie Mills.

Peer citation:
I observed Sophie Mills’s CLAS 473, Special Topics: Thucydides, class on Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2005 from 2:45 to 4:05. This is an upper level Greek course: there were five students who were in class.

In the class students were working with three pages of Greek text from Thucydides, which they had been assigned to translate prior to coming to class. The text was complex, but the students had done their homework, and were able to handle the text quite well. Each of the five students was interested and engaged in the translation project. Their level of skill with the Greek text is a testimony to the high academic rigor of UNCA’s Classics Department.

Prof. Mills knew the subject matter she was teaching extremely well and she knew the students in the class. She was familiar with the text, the grammar of the passage, and the history of the text. She constantly made connections to other works in Greek literature. Her expertise in the field really showed, and this made the class a super learning experience for the students. Furthermore, Prof. Mills continually encouraged and praised the students with comments like “That is a very interesting question,” “That is a very good point,” and “Well done!” She constantly asked probing questions which kept the students alert and engaged.

Prof. Mills revealed herself as a master teacher in a Humanities discipline. Her class was not just a discussion of the finer points of grammar – as important as these are for understanding a text – but Prof. Mills was able to extend the discussion to a larger humanistic one concerning the nature of democracy, the meaning of history, and the essence of leadership. She was able to raise the issue of the individual’s place in a society and to ask the ancient question from the Greeks: What is the good life?

What Prof. Mills exhibited was a high level of academic rigor, a command of her discipline, and proficiency as a teacher. Her students had familiarized themselves with a complex Greek text, and were able to engage in a larger humanistic discussion.