Dizikes Faculty Teaching Award 2021-22

The Dizikes Faculty Teaching Award celebrates the Humanities Division faculty’s commitment to excellence in teaching and its transformative impact for undergraduate students. The award is named in honor of Professor Emeritus John Dizikes, a member of the founding faculty whose powerful ability to inspire and engage generations of students exemplifies our aspirations as teachers.

Since 2002, the Dizikes Faculty Teaching Award has celebrated the work of outstanding teachers and their students. The award honors the work of faculty and supports students who aspire to learning and critical thinking. Faculty recipients of the award receive a grant and designate students from a Humanities Division program to receive scholarships in their name that recognize academic accomplishment.

ELAINE SULLIVAN
Associate Professor of History; History Undergraduate Program Director
Recipient of the 2021-22 Dizikes Faculty Teaching Award

"I am a Historian, Egyptologist, and Digital Humanist. These roles have influenced all my teaching and mentoring of students at UCSC. As a Historian, I challenge my students to analyze and assess non-western, pre-modern, and non-textual source material. Because my own research harnesses new digital technologies, in my courses on the history of gender, the state, religion, and the architecture of ancient Egypt and the broader ancient Mediterranean world, I use these emerging tools to engage my students in the study of this fascinating time and place. With 3D artifact models, digital maps, and reconstructions of ancient cities, together we explore new ways for examining the past. As an Egyptologist, I challenge students to engage directly with ancient primary sources, including texts, art, architecture, and other forms of material culture, asking them to grapple with the questions of interpretation and uncertainty that are a fundamental aspect of the study of ancient history. My goal as an instructor is always to help students see the relevance of the past (and the way modern people interpret our past) to our world today."

Professor Sullivan is an outstanding instructor and mentor who has the ability to mesmerize students, grasp and maintain their attention, and create the conditions for learning that translate into intellectual production. Dr. Bruce Thompson, an outstanding lecturer in the history department, observed that her “technological wizardry was light-years beyond anything I’ve seen in any other classroom.”

Across the board, students found her welcoming and approachable, compassionate, enthusiastic, encouraging, incredibly supportive, and extremely dedicated. Repeatedly students remarked upon her focus on them as individuals and concern for their success; students found themselves treated as equal learners. One student said, “It was as if someone turned on the lightbulb in your head that you didn’t even realize was there.”