Three arts and humanities faculty members in the College of Arts and Sciences have been selected for the 2023 Ronald and Deborah Ratner Distinguished Teaching Awards:

Patricia Sieber, Associate Professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures
Nyama McCarthy-Brown, Associate Professor, Department of Dance
Bart Elmore, Associate Professor, Department of History

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.

Patricia Sieber

Patricia Sieber will use her Ratner Award to create a graduate version of the Translation & Interpretation certificate with multiple exciting components: the expansion of a Chinese Theatre Collaborative; a Translation Summer School; recruiting a professional interpreter for the course “Intro to Community Interpreting”; and the creation of a translator-in-residence workshop. In her project submission, Sieber underlined how she teaches arts and literature as “a gateway to a time and a place, a gateway to thorny questions of individual aspirations, social norms, and collective memory, and as a gateway to the students’ self-growth.”

“I’m honored and humbled, and I’m excited that I will have the support and the resources to begin some of these new initiatives,” Sieber said. “Hopefully this will lead to further growth for our students and our learning community.”

Nyama McCarthy Brown

Nyama McCarthy-Brown, now the fifth faculty member in the Department of Dance to win a Ratner Award, aims to grow and strengthen connections between Ohio State and students in Ghana. By bringing dance education students to the University of Ghana to learn the Agbekor dance, McCarthy-Brown will create a sequential dance curriculum that will further help the department develop African diasporic dance skills and equip students with meaningful experiences of curricular development. In her proposal, McCarthy-Brown said she will work to be a “change agent – changing the way people think about dance through disrupting historically privileged canons of teaching dance technique, unlocking new pathways of learning and creative processing for movement, and embodying and demonstrating a value for other culturally-informed movement practices.”

“I am beyond excited to partner with my students and embark on a collaborative journey of learning and exploration at the University of Ghana in Accra,” McCarthy-Brown said. “We will be working with Department of Dance Professor David Quaye and dance students there to support a process of dance preservation through codification of the Agbekor dance.”

Bart Elmore

Bart Elmore, an environmental historian, will be using his Ratner Award funding to create a new study abroad program modeled on Ohio State’s World War II program that will take a select group of students each year to the United Nations Climate Change Conference. Students will be able to be in the presence of world leaders attempting to cool a warming planet. In his proposal, Elmore seeks to create high-impact experiences for Ohio State students, and 100% of the award’s teaching account funds will support students through the creation of scholarships.

“This is a departmental award, we all know this,” Elmore said. “I was inspired by the World War II program, so this is about a team effort. I’ve never had this kind of support to be able to build things. I think of this as a collective thing, and thank you to the Department of History for inspiring me.”

In 2014, Ronald and Deborah Ratner gave $1 million to establish the Ronald and Deborah Ratner Distinguished Teaching Awards in Ohio State’s College of Arts and Sciences. 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.