Elizabeth Baer Receives Faculty Scholarly Achievement Award Posted on May 8th, 2012 by Matt Thomas '00

Professor Elizabeth Baer

Elizabeth Baer, professor of English and African Studies at Gustavus Adolphus College, received the 2012 Faculty Scholarly Achievement Award on May 5 at the College’s Honors Day Convocation.

Faculty members are nominated for the award by fellow faculty members based on professional accomplishments regarding research activities in private, public, or corporate settings; publication; presentations at scholarly meetings or conferences; and exhibits or performances.

Baer holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Manhattanville College, a master’s degree in English from New York University, and a Ph.D. in English from Indiana University. Her scholarly work spans the fields of history, religion, pedagogy, literature, and women’s studies. She has written or edited four books including the recently published work The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction, which traces the history of the Golem legend from the third century to the present. Her other published works include Shadows on My Heart: The Civil War Diary of Lucy Buck of Virginia, 1861-1865 (1997), The Blessed Abyss: Inmate #6582 in Ravensbruck Concentration Camp for Women (2000), and Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust (2003).

Baer has lectured, traveled, and taught all over the world including Gustavus January Interim Experience courses in Germany, the Czech Republic, Northern Ireland, South Africa, and Namibia. This past January she co-taught a class on the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 and organized an accompanying lecture series that attracted standing-room-only audiences. She has also garnered major awards including a Bush Foundation Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholar Award, a Pew Scholarship, and a fellowship at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. A leitmotif of Professor Baer’s scholarship is the tenacity with which she investigates important and difficult issues such as sexual violence in the Holocaust and genocide in Rwanda. Her focus is social justice and the role of literary texts in achieving such justice.

First awarded in 1986, the Faculty Scholarly Achievement Award was reestablished in 2004 and is now announced during the annual Honors Day Convocation.

Previous winners of the Faculty Scholarly Achievement Award:

2011: Eric Dugdale, Classics
2010: Peg O’Connor, Philosophy and Gender, Women, and Sexuality Sudies
2009: Eric Carlson, History; Barbara Fister, Library
2008: Linnea Wren, Art and Art History
2007: Chris Gilbert, Political Science
2006: Mark Kruger, Pyschology
2005: Michael Hvidsten, Mathematics/Computer Science
2004: Joyce Sutphen, English
1990: Tom Emmert, History
1989: Rich Hilbert, Sociology/Anthropology; Marlene Flory, Classics
1988: Lawrence Potts, Chemistry; Stewart Flory, Classics; Ann Brady, English
1987: Byron Nordstrom, History; William Dean, Religion; Ron Christenson, Political Science
1986: Conrad Hyers, Religion

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