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W&L Professor Wins Outstanding Faculty Award

Suzanne P. Keen, professor of English at Washington and Lee University, has been recognized as one of 12 outstanding faculty members from Virginia. This year’s recipients were selected from a pool of 96 candidates nominated by their peers for their excellence in teaching, research and public service.

The Outstanding Faculty Awards program is the Commonwealth’s highest honor for faculty at Virginia’s public and private colleges and universities, and is administered by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia.

Keen is the Thomas H. Broadus Professor of English and teaches courses on world fiction in English, British fiction after 1900, literary approaches to poverty, children’s literature and the novel.

“We in the English Department are very proud of Suzanne and the achievement this award represents. Her scholarly accomplishments are highly visible to the whole community; she has an international reputation in her field,” said Lesley Wheeler, head of the English department at W&L.

She adds that this award highlights Keen’s “substantial accomplishments in the classroom, her innovative use of service learning in her Children’s Literature course, her service to the Shepherd Program and to teacher education as well as the English department, her deep commitment to one-on-one writing instruction. Wheeler says Keen has the scholarly credibility to shine at a Research I institution but “she chooses to work here because she loves the emphasis on close student-faculty relationships that liberal arts colleges offer.”

Keen’s two most recent books, “Empathy and the Novel” (Oxford) and “Milk Glass Mermaid” (Lewis-Clark Press) were both released last June. Her earlier books include “Victorian Renovations of the Novel” (Cambridge, 1998), “Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction” (Toronto, 2001), and a textbook, “Narrative Form” (Palgrave, 2003).

Keen received her A.B. and A.M. from Brown University, and her Ph.D. from Harvard University.