Jeremy Menchik Awarded Gitner Family Prize
Jeremy Menchik, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Fredrick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, has been awarded the School’s 2017 Gerald and Deanne Gitner Family Prize for Faculty Excellence.
Watch Prof. Menchik receive the 2017 Gitner Family Prize for Faculty Excellence:
Menchik will be presented with the award’s commemorative silver plate at the Pardee School Convocation Ceremony on Saturday, May 20, 2017 at the Walter Brown Arena.
The Gitner Family Prize for Faculty Excellence was endowed by the Gitner Family in 2014. The Gitner Prize honors teaching and mentoring excellence and is awarded each year to a faculty member who embodies the School’s mission to advance human progress. The prize also includes a cash award. Pardee School Dean Adil Najam said that “the generosity of the Gitner family and the establishment of this award has allowed the School to recognize what Boston University and those now in the Pardee School have always valued highly – good teaching, mentorship, and service.”
Menchik joined the Pardee School as an assistant professor four years ago with a PhD and MA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a BA from the University of Michigan. He immediately attracted the respect of his colleagues and admiration of his students.
“Although we always receive a number of strong nominations for the Gitner Family Prize – a testimony to the breadth of excellent teaching at the Pardee School – the selection committee was unanimously impressed by Professor Menchik’s commitment to the field of International Relations and Religion and to his students,” Najam said. “He exemplifies the exceptionally talented and dedicated faculty we are lucky to have at the Pardee School.”
Well before his recent book – Islam and Democracy in Indonesia: Tolerance without Liberalism – came out, his students had already recognized his ability to describe the most complex phenomenon, most clearly. As one student who nominated him for this award put it, “[Prof. Menchik] makes challenging and complex material extremely accessible, and every class is exciting and enlightening.”
He is consistently described as knowledgeable, accessible, and engaging. But most of all, as caring. As one of his students put it: “His extensive professional and academic experience and knowledge is paralleled only by his sense of humor, kindness, and compassion.” His classes, including those on “Religion and International Relations” and on “Islam and Politics,” attract not only those who find the topic compelling, but many who just want to study with him.
Menchik has received the International Studies Association (ISA) Religion and International Relations Book Award, the Mildred Potter Hovland Journal Article Prize, the Best Qualitative or Multi-Method Submission to the American Political Science Review, the Graduate Student Paper Award from the Indonesia and East Timor Studies Committee of the Association of Asian Studies