The Fintz Award for Teaching Excellence in the Arts and Humanities

The Fintz Award for Teaching Excellence in the Arts and Humanities recognizes outstanding faculty who, in keeping with the goals of integrative studies, seek to engage students with arts and humanities ways of knowing and to assist them in developing critical thinking and effective communication skills. The Fintz Award is possible thanks to an endowment provided by Professor Ken Waltzer, former director of CISAH, to honor his father. The selection of candidates, final recommendations made by the CISAH Advisory Committee, and awards ceremony take place during the spring semester of each year. IAH faculty may receive the Fintz Awards only once every five years.

2025 Award Recipients

Rick Blackwood 

The Fintz Award Committee is pleased to honor Rick Blackwood for his  outstanding teaching of IAH 241G: Sex and Violence in Film, TV, and Media. Professor Blackwood describes this class as a way to “engage the students not only as viewers of film, but as readers of the intellectual history that the filmmakers themselves bring to bear in their work.” This highly engaging class combines short, accessible readings with film screenings as a way to explore intellectual links from scholars like Socrates, Plato, and Einstein to the contemporary film canon, and asks students along the way how to make sense of media that engages through visceral depictions of subjects like sex and violence.

 

Laura Ramm

The Fintz Award Committee is pleased to honor Laura Ramm for her outstanding teaching of IAH 209: Totally Awesome 80s. This innovative online asynchronous class explores American cultural narratives about the 1980s, primarily through film and TV examples from the decade, and invites students to practice critical inquiry of shared experiences and individual stories. This course has been structured to engage with the ways that relying on a set historical narrative can occlude the diversity of personal narratives, and Professor Ramm notes that that popular themes among her students’ research projects include protest, rebellion, feminism, representation, and androgyny.

Elizabeth Tuttle

The Fintz Award Committee is pleased to honor Liz Tuttle for her outstanding teaching of IAH 231B: France and the Holocaust. Every week, Professor Tuttle’s students read historical texts to study the politics of occupied France and the Vichy regime. Through analysis of film and literature, students grapple with what it means to resist, to collaborate, to suffer, and to persecute, with the goal of better understanding the intricate forces that shape individual and collective experiences, as well as complex issues surrounding the memory and representation of war, trauma, and resilience.

 

The Somers Award for Excellence in Teaching

The Somers Award for Excellence in Teaching recognizes graduate teaching assistants who have demonstrated a commitment to excellence, innovation and creativity in undergraduate teaching. The Somers Award is possible thanks to an endowment provided by Louis and Randy Somers. Nominees are recommended by faculty and students for their strong ability to promote meaningful student-teacher interaction, as well as in creating a classroom environment that encourages active learning and critical thinking.

2025 Award Recipients

Senora Blanco (English)

Zachary Cho (History)

Blake Ginsburg (Philosophy)

Ayaat Ismail (English)

David Marchionni (History)

Nya Nulty (Music)

 

2025 Service to IAH Award 

Stephen Arch

CISAH is pleased to honor Steve Arch with the Service to IAH Award. Dr. Arch has been a vocal advocate of the Integrative Arts and Humanities at Michigan State since the 1990s. In his decades teaching for IAH, he has  connected with thousands of MSU undergraduates and supervised dozens of talented teaching assistants. He received the Fintz Award in 2018 and has been an English department representative to the IAH Faculty Advisory Committee several times.