Professor at Fort Lewis College is Winner of State Board of Agriculture’s Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award

For her commitment to students and her willingness to study, learn and create new intellectual challenges in response to her students’ and society’s needs, history Professor Doreen Hunter from Fort Lewis College today was named winner of the State Board of Agriculture’s Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award

Other recipients of the SBA award included Dale Hein, professor of fishery and wildlife biology at Colorado State University, and Margaret Barber, assistant professor of English and foreign languages at the University of Southern Colorado.

Hunter, who also received the 1999 Alice Admire Outstanding Teaching Award, joined Fort Lewis College in 1980 after teaching four years at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Prior to that, she taught in the School of English and American Studies at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and also held teaching posts at California State University at Fullerton and the University of California at Berkeley.

She described her goal in teaching as propelling her students "beyond the surface narrative of the past and into an understanding of the challenges, motives, choices and consequences experienced by the diverse peoples who lived the American past."

She also has changed the lives of many students outside her discipline through her participation in the college’s many interdisciplinary programs, her colleagues note.

Hunter has served as chair of the History Department and has served as a member of the college’s Women’s Study Committee, the General Education Task Force, the Human Heritage Planning Group, the Honors Council, the Curriculum Committee, the Library Committee and others.

Her professional affiliations include membership in the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians and the American Studies Association. She holds a bachelor’s degree in history and philosophy from Stanford University and a doctorate in U.S. history from the University of California at Berkeley.