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Three
Faculty Members Honored for Their Teaching
Three faculty members were named
recently as winners of the Kathleen Compton Sherrerd ’54 and John J. F. Sherrerd Prizes for Distinguished
Teaching.
They are: Andrea Hairston, professor
of theatre; Susannah Howe, senior lecturer in engineering;
and Douglas Patey, professor of English language and literature.
The Sherrerd Teaching
Award is given annually to Smith faculty members in recognition
of their distinguished teaching records and demonstrated
enthusiasm and excellence.
The award was established in
2002 with a generous contribution to Smith by the late Kathleen
Sherrerd ’54 and John Sherrerd. Their donation was given
with the specific purpose of initiating an annual prize to
recognize outstanding teaching at Smith.
The three 2013 Sherrerd
Award recipients will be honored during a reception and presentation
of the awards on Thursday, October 24, open to the Smith
community. .
 Smith
alumna Andrea Hairston, the Louise Wolff Kahn 1931 Professor
of Theatre and Afro-American Studies, joined the Smith faculty
in 1989 and served as an instructor in theatre at Smith from
1979 to 1983. After graduating from Smith in 1974, Hairston
completed her master of arts degree at Brown University in
1977. In 1978, Hairston co-founded Chrysalis Theatre, a Northampton
company that produces original performance works of music,
dance and theater. She continues to serve as artistic director
of Chrysalis. Hairston’s recent Smith courses include Black
Women Playwrights, Playwriting and Screenwriting, and The
Magic If, a course on speculative or fantastic theater and
film. Alongside her teaching, Hairston remains active as
a playwright, novelist, theater performer and director. Her
plays have been produced widely and she has received numerous
playwriting and directing awards. Hairston has also published
two award-winning novels, Mindscape and Redwood
and Wildfire.
In 2011, Hairston received the International Association
of the Fantastic in the Arts Distinguished Scholarship Award.
 Susannah
Howe is the director of Design Clinic, in the Picker Engineering
Program, a two-semester capstone design course in which senior
engineering students collaborate on applied projects sponsored
by industry and government. Howe, who has directed the program
since its inception in 2003, has coached 65 design teams
and collaborated with 35 different sponsoring organizations.
Her current research focuses on innovations in engineering
design education, particularly at the capstone level. She
has been instrumental in connecting the engineering capstone
community nationwide; has served as co-chair for the past
two Capstone Design Conferences; and is helping lead an initiative
to develop an online repository for capstone practices and
resources. Howe is also involved with efforts to foster design
learning in middle school students and to support entrepreneurship
at primarily undergraduate institutions. Completing a bachelor
of science in engineering degree at Princeton and masters
and doctorates in engineering at Cornell, Howe’s professional
background is in civil engineering with a focus on structural
materials.
 Douglas
Patey, Sophia Smith Professor of English Language and Literature,
is a specialist in 18th-century British literature and thought.
He teaches courses on Pope and Swift, the 18th-century novel,
the English language, the technology of reading and writing
(on the history of literacy), and seminars on Jane Austen,
Evelyn Waugh and the development of literary theory. He also
frequently directs Smith’s interdisciplinary Program in the
History of Science and Technology, and is one of the founding
members of the college’s Book Studies Concentration. Patey
has written or edited five books, including Of Human Bondage:
Historical Perspectives on Addiction in 2003, as well as
essays on Dryden, Pope, Swift, Johnson, Austen and Hegel.
Patey joined the Smith faculty in 1979 after completing
a bachelor’s degree at Hamilton College, and masters and
doctoral degrees at the University of Virginia. He has been
the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment
for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies
and the Guggenheim Foundation.
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