Friday, March 21, 2008

Writer: Philip Lee Williams, 706/542-8501, phil@franklin.uga.edu
Contact:  Catherine M. Jones, 706/542-0792, cmjones@uga.edu

Catherine M. Jones, professor of Romance Languages, receives Meigs Award for Excellence on Teaching

Athens, Ga. – Some years ago, as a freshly minted teaching assistant in a beginning French class at the University of Wisconsin, Catherine M. Jones (right) thought her job was to drill students in grammar, vocabulary, verb tenses and noun-adjective agreements. That illusion lasted only a few days. Soon she was, she says “constantly reinventing her role as a teacher.”

Now, some 20 years after joining the Romance languages faculty at UGA, she is one of the university’s most honored teachers and an internationally recognized scholar in French medieval literature. As if that weren’t enough, she also helped establish the French Language Community here at Mary Lyndon Hall and has supervised it since its inception in 2000.

“Perhaps her most outstanding quality as a teacher is her creativity,” says Nina Hellerstein, professor of French and interim head of the department of Romance Languages. “Her courses include numerous imaginative uses of technology, visual and audio enrichments, varied activities and interdisciplinary approaches. From the beginning of her career here, Dr. Jones has been one of the most outstanding instructors in our department.”

Indeed, her fresh, unusual approaches to material have drawn notice since the beginning. A student once said that “Dr. Jones is so good that she could teach a course on the phone book and people would sign up.” Hellerstein notes that she once saw Jones’s “imaginative and dynamic teaching style when I heard one of her lectures entitled `The Grateful Dead,' in which she traced the name of the rock band to its roots in medieval legend.”

Jones’s subject, medieval literature, however, is one of the more difficult areas in Romance languages, and the fact that she regularly brings it vibrantly to life for eager and interested students is a great tribute to her strong teaching methods, says Hellerstein.

The author of two books, an edited volume, and many scholarly articles, Jones can often be found conducting research in Europe, examining manuscripts of Old French epic poetry.

Her exemplary teaching in UGA’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences has not gone unnoticed. In fact, she has won almost every available teaching award available prior to the Meigs Award, including the Lothar Tresp Outstanding Honors Professor Award, the General Sandy Beaver Teaching Professorship, the Richard B. Russell Teaching Award and a Lilly Teaching Fellowship, among many others.

Students have consistently rated her classes as among the best during their college years.

“I can say with absolute confidence that she is one of the best professors I had during my tenure as an undergraduate student at UGA,” one former student writes. “Her love and interest in the information she teaches and in the learning process itself was evident from the first day to the final exam, and I never got the sense that she wasn’t happy to be in class teaching her students about French literature.”

How would Hellerstein describe Jones’s contributions? The word invaluable. She is clearly one of UGA’s best and most original teachers.

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