Assistant Professor Karen Gross Honored for Excellence in Teaching

Graves Award Includes $10,000 Grant to Support Research

Lewis & Clark is continuing its recent run of success with the Graves Award, one of the premier honors for humanities teachers at liberal arts colleges.

“Karen’s receiving of the Graves Award in the Humanities serves not only to acknowledge her inspirational and effective teaching in all her classes, but also to shine a well-deserved light on the very high quality of teaching one finds in every department and program at Lewis & Clark,” said Kurt Fosso, associate professor of English and director of the College’s Exploration and Discovery core course program.

Four Lewis & Clark professors won the Graves Award between 1998 and 2006. Joining them now is Karen Gross, assistant professor of English and a winner of the 2008 Graves Award.

Gross, who receives a $10,000 grant to support her work on a book examining Geoffrey Chaucer’s Italian influences, joins these other Lewis & Clark professors in the ranks of Graves Award winners: David Campion, history (2006); Rebecca Copenhaver, philosophy (2004); Nora Beck, music (2000); and Alan Cole, religious studies (1998).

The Arnold L. and Lois S. Graves Award is administered by Pomona College and the American Council of Learned Societies. It is given in alternate years to select young professors teaching in the humanities at liberal arts colleges in Oregon, Washington, and California.

A 1997 University of Southern California graduate, Gross received her Ph.D. from Stanford in 2005 and joined the Lewis & Clark faculty the same year. Her scholarly interests revolve around the reception of classical texts, medieval literary theory and education, medieval biography, humanism, and the relationship between literature and the visual arts.

In her forthcoming book, Gross examines both what Chaucer borrowed from Italian sources and which Italian literary innovations he rejected. She said, “By examining what Italian qualities Chaucer does not carry over into his own poetry—and what he creates in their stead—I not only clarify Chaucer’s work but also invite readers to rethink how literary influence operates and how we describe the interactions of northern and southern Europe during that transitional moment between the medieval and the early modern periods.”

Gross says her literature students are also finding that much can be learned from what’s missing from a text. “I think they have enjoyed asking questions that have to do with absences, with what is conspicuously missing in a text, and seeing how a gap can be a productive place to start,” Gross said.