Barbara Packer

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“She is articulate, brilliant and benevolent. She has inspired in me a quest for excellence. She has refreshed and renewed my delight in graduate school… This course and this teacher fulfill all my ideals and expectations what a graduate course should be,” writes a student who, with other students and alumni, voice enthusiastic support for Barbara Packer as a recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award. The portrait of Professor Packer which emerges from supporting letters and written class evaluations is that of a truly extraordinary teacher, one who amazes her students by making subjects they had dreaded to confront turn into a source of delight and amazement before their very ears, one whose infectious love for the literature she teaches seems newly born each day, one whose frequent encouragement of students to come and talk to her during office hours and graciousness toward them when they do astonishes those among them who expect only a sort of corporate coldness from our vast institution.

Professor Packer is a captivating blend of qualities not usually found together: rigor and humor, virtuosic but honest eloquence and a capacity for down-to-earth speech that rocks her students back on their heels with delight. Few are so willing to reveal to their students a capacity for visible emotional response to great passages of literature. Her students reflect they are not only more knowledgeable, but they are also better writers for the encouraging, expert and tactful attention she devotes to the effort to improve student writing.

Although her specialty is 19th century American literature, Professor Packer is often called upon to teach a variety of classes, bring her extraordinary ability to enlighten, challenge and inspire to each class. Former students attest that she is a student's teacher and a model for the teaching they themselves plan to do. In sum, a graduate student comments, “I want to teach English the same way she does – not condescendingly but with a genuine wish to share a love of literature with others.”