This year, the Committee chose Paul Christesen as its Fellow after reviewing a wide range of evidence: student evaluations; reports on two successful Foreign Study Programs in Greece, a strong statement from the Department Chair, Jeremy Rutter that praised this teacher's availability to students and readiness to teach a wide range of courses. These achievements alone would put Professor Christesen in the front rank of Dartmouth instructors. What further distinguishes him was his initiative in finding new ways to improve student learning. This junior colleague already has senior strengths: he is capable of acting on his own and of building productive alliances with colleagues. Here are some representative achievements:

• The Greek Foreign Study Program. He not only directed the Greek Foreign Study Program (FSP) twice, but did so with tremendous panache, setting up an innovative web site. This site facilitated student learning and broadcast the Program's activities to colleagues, other students, and parents, who were able to track their children's journeys around Greece; it has inspired development of a parallel web site for the Department's Rome FSP.
• When major Greek museums closed in preparation for the Olympics, he again showed initiative, arranging for a week-long visit to the British Museum, complete with specially negotiated tours of the galleries by its curators. This worked so well that the Department plans similar British Museum trips in the future.
• According to Professor Rutter, he "played a major role in persuading the department to offer a team-taught introductory course to satisfy the college's interdisciplinary requirement and encourage a wider range of Dartmouth's undergraduates to enroll in a Classics."  After designing the course, he taught it:  "the course had to be capped, with extraordinarily high enrollments of  275 and 175, by far and away the largest figures for any Classics course offered in 25 years at Dartmouth."
• On his own, as an effort to build student intellectual life, he established an informal student discussion group that has now ballooned, with seven groups and 75 student members: this was featured in Dartmouth Life in February, 2003. He is, in short, completely dedicated to the undergraduate mission of the College.

Like all '62 Fellows, Professor Christesen is a fine scholar, with contributions to major journals on Roman literature, Greek economic history, and - his particular area of interest at the moment - the reasons why nudity became common in Greek athletic contests in the sixth century B.C.

For more information, including descriptions of some courses taught by Professor Christesen, click here.

The Class of 1962 Faculty Fellowship Committee:

John E. Clark

Alan Dynner

Bruce Feldman, M.D.

Joshua Rich V

Daniel P. Tompkins