Lycoming College faculty honored with teaching awards

Lycoming College recognized two faculty members with teaching awards at this year’s Honors Convocation, held at Williamsport’s Community Arts Center.

The winner of the 2019 Plankenhorn Alumni Award for Faculty Excellence was Jeremy Ramsey, Ph.D., assistant professor of chemistry and chair of the department. Ramsey’s teaching focuses on general and analytical chemistry, with his most recent course addition being a first year seminar studying the science of chemical demonstrations.  He is also deeply involved in Lycoming College’s Warrior Coffee Project, an international, interdisciplinary program where faculty and students apply what they've learned in their Lycoming College classrooms to assist communities in need.  Every spring, Lycoming chemistry students travel to the Dominican Republic’s village of El Naranjito to help improve villagers' access to clean water and to use chemical analysis of green coffee to encourage the production of a more valuable crop by small family-run coffee farms.

The 2019 Junior Faculty Teaching Award recipient was Meghan Andrews, Ph.D., assistant professor of English. Andrews is an early modernist whose research focuses on the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. At Lycoming, Andrews teaches not only Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature but the full sweep of literary history, all the way from Classical Literature to a special topics course ending with “The Handmaid’s Tale.” She greatly enjoys teaching both inside and outside her period, and constantly finds herself energized by the thoughtfulness and enthusiasm of students encountering much of the literature she teaches for the first time, most especially in their ability to see very contemporary concerns in what can on the surface seem alien or outdated texts. Andrews is also an active researcher; her book project, “Shakespeare’s Networks,” argues that Shakespeare's social networks and institutional affiliations were key influences on his plays and poems, and has received grant support from the American Council of Learned Societies among other institutions. Her published work can be found in Shakespeare Quarterly, Renaissance Drama, SEL, and Marlowe Studies.

Lycoming College faculty continues to provide an education rooted in the liberal arts, but modernized with 21-st-century experiential learning opportunities.