2021 Ratner Distinguished Teaching Award winners
Four arts and humanities faculty members in the College of Arts and Sciences have been selected to receive a 2021 Ronald and Deborah Ratner Distinguished Teaching Award:
- Scott Lloyd Dewitt, Associate Professor, Department of English
- Elizabeth Hewitt, Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies, Department of English
- Ousman Kobo, Associate Professor, Department of History
- Norah Zuniga Shaw, Professor, Department of Dance
The Ratner Awards recognize faculty who demonstrate creative teaching and extraordinary records of engaging, motivating and inspiring students. Each Ratner Award winner receives a $10,000 cash prize, as well as a $15,000 teaching account to fund future projects.
In 2014, Ronald and Deborah Ratner gave $1 million to establish the Ronald and Deborah Ratner Distinguished Teaching Awards. Ronald Ratner, of RMS Investment Group, is also the former director and executive vice president of development for Forest City Realty Trust Inc. He served on the Ohio State Board of Trustees from 2007 to 2015, having been appointed by former Gov. Ted Strickland. Deborah B. Ratner founded ArtWorks, a Cleveland-based arts apprenticeship program, and Reel Women Direct, an award for women film directors.
Scott Lloyd Dewitt
An Ohio State Alumni Association Distinguished Teaching Award recipient for his pioneering teaching approaches with technology, DeWitt has served as the director of The Digital Media Project, the Department of English’s digital media production and teaching studio. DeWitt is the author of Writing Inventions: Identities, Technologies, Pedagogies, which offers instructional stories, histories and classroom applications and connects the theoretical aspirations of the field with the craft of innovative computer-enhanced composition instruction. He is currently working on a large-data project that examines a corpus of 5000+ pieces of student writing collected when he was the director of Ohio State’s First-Year Writing Program. He is currently working on a text analytics project studying public writing about pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, for HIV prevention with researchers at Ohio State’s Wexner Medical Center and One Community Health in Sacramento, California.
Elizabeth Hewitt
Hewitt is currently researching the long history of science fiction, especially the utopian fictions and experiments in the 19th-century U.S.
Ousman Kobo
Kobo is currently working on his second book manuscript tentatively titled, The Gun and the Rosary: Subtle Relations of Co-existence between Charismatic Muslim Leaders and French Colonial Administration in Burkina Faso, 1920-1946.
Norah Zuniga Shaw
Zuniga Shaw presents frequently on 21st-century livability and humane technologies and is currently touring the Livable Futures project including transmedia performance rituals on climate change, radio ballets and creative public dialogs.
Zuniga Shaw is a published author on numerous dance and technology topics and was funded by the Battelle Endowment to complete a book/catalog about “Synchronous Objects” and the new methods in interdisciplinary practice-based research it required. Since 2004, Zniga Shaw has been director for dance and technology in theDepartment of Dance and Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD), where she is a professor and teaches courses in interdisciplinary research and composition, intermedia theater, critical theories of the body, embodied digital literacy and dance improvisation. She co-founded the Motion Lab at ACCAD and frequently consults with other universities and arts organizations on development of interdisciplinary research and facilities for multimedia performance.