 |
History Professor
Mehrdad Kia |
|
Simply
the Best
The state's top professor
A member of the University of Montana history faculty who already has won
all of UM's awards for teaching now is recognized as one of the best college teachers in
all of Montana. Mehrdad Kia, a professor specializing in the history of the Middle
East, has been named the 2000 Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching/Council
for the Advancement and Support of Education Montana Professor of the Year. He already
owns UM's 1997 Distinguished Teaching Award, the 1999 Most Inspirational Teacher of the
Year Award, the 1999 Tom Boone Town and Gown Award and two teacher of the month awards,
one in 1997 and one in 1999.
A native of Iran, Kia has been western Montana's resident expert on the Middle East
since coming to UM in 1989 and often is sought out by media for perspective on conflicts
in that part of the world. Colleagues regularly use "brilliant" to describe him
as a teacher, and students flock to his classes.
"Mehrdad's courses draw exceptionally well," said Harry Fritz, professor and
chair of UM's history department, "and he teaches a subject that most Americans don't
know anything about and, in fact, they are hostile toward - Islamic culture and the Middle
East. Yet he's won every teaching award that the University can offer, and if his students
could vote, he'd win them all again."
When he arrived at UM in 1989, Kia said, most of his students thought of the Middle
East and North Africa as a "vast desert populated by camels, terrorists, religious
fanatics and 'crazy zealots' aiming to undermine the economic and political interests of
the United States. So in his classes he set out to humanize those peoples and their
cultures, but without glorifying and apologizing for the violence and inhumanity in their
societies.
Kia holds master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and
taught there and at Cornell College in Iowa before coming to UM.
CASE established the Professor of the Year program in 1981 and administers it with the
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. UM Regents Professor Paul Lauren won
the award for Montana in 1991, and UM health and human performance Professor Annie Sondag
earned it again in 1998.
|
