I
am extremely proud to share that Dr. Steven Emmanuel, Professor of
Philosophy at Virginia Wesleyan University, has received the 2018 Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia.
The
Outstanding Faculty Awards, sponsored by Dominion Energy, are the
Commonwealth’s highest honor for faculty at Virginia public and private
colleges and universities, recognizing superior accomplishments in
teaching, research, and public service. Nominees are selected by the
institutions, reviewed by a panel of peers and chosen by a committee of
leaders from the public and private sectors. This year’s committee
received 83 nominations. The group was narrowed to 27 finalists, and Dr.
Emmanuel was selected as one of 12 award recipients.
Provost and
Vice President Timothy O’Rourke refers to Professor Emmanuel in his
nomination letter as the “quintessential teacher-scholar”… “a person of
uncommon ability, good spirit, integrity, and civic commitment.” Indeed,
his accomplishments and upstanding character are admirable and his
academic and community impact is far reaching.
A teaching
affiliate with the Pluralism Project at Harvard University, he is the
past recipient of the Samuel Nelson Gray Award, Virginia Wesleyan’s
highest award for distinguished teaching. A former Fulbright Fellow at
the University of Copenhagen, Dr. Emmanuel has published extensively on
Kierkegaard and other philosophers. He is co-editor of Kierkegaard’s Concepts,
a six-volume, 1,500-page compendium, published over a three-year period
(2013-15). He is also the author or editor of six other books on
philosophy, most recently Buddhist Philosophy: A Comparative Approach (2017). Demonstrating his wide-ranging academic interests, Dr. Emmanuel is co-editor of Revisiting Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood: Teaching and Learning about Self and Community (2016) with Dr. Kathy Merlock Jackson (VWU Professor of Communication).
During
summer 2016, Dr. Emmanuel and Dr. John Wang (VWU Professor of Computer
Science)—supported by a $37,000 ASIANetwork grant, which they wrote—led a
team of six Virginia Wesleyan students on a research trip to China. The
team studied the economic and environmental impacts on world cultural
heritage sites in a rural province. Dr. Emmanuel also led five Virginia
Wesleyan students to Vietnam in 2007 with Dr. Stu Minnis (VWU Associate
Professor of Communication) to study the healthcare system in that
country. His film, Making Peace with Viet Nam, which chronicles the trip, won Best Long Documentary at the 2009 Beijing
International Film Festival and the Merit Award at the 2009 Buddhist
Film Festival in Sri Lanka.
Dr. Emmanuel has served as chair of
the Humanities Division and chair of the campus chapter of the American
Association of University Professors (AAUP). He has received VWU’s Sara
Rose Award for Leadership in Service Learning and the Martin Luther King
Jr. Peace and Justice Award. He is a past chair of the board of
directors of the ASIANetwork and a statewide coordinator for the
Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges Ethics Bowl (2005-2017). He
was also awarded a 2014 Mednick Memorial Fellowship, which supported
his travel to Japan to investigate the intersections of Zen Buddhism and
warfare.
Please join me in congratulating Dr. Emmanuel on this
very well-deserved achievement. We are immensely proud of his
accomplishments and grateful for his contributions to Virginia Wesleyan
University. The Outstanding Faculty Awards ceremony will take place
March 1 in Richmond.
