Warren and Martini Honored by the College of Arts and Sciences
Warren and Martini Honored by the College of Arts and Sciences
The department’s strong record of achievement in the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) Faculty Achievement Awards continues in 2010, with awards for research and teaching going, respectively, to Professors Wilson Warren and Ed Martini.
Bill Warren, Professor of History, was given the CAS Faculty Achievement Award in Research and Creative Activity. Widely known for his work as a historian of labor and education, Warren is the author or co-editor of six books, including, most recently, History Education 101: The Past, Present, and Future of Teacher Education, 
with D. Antonio Cantu, (2008); and Tied to the Great Packing Machine: The Midwest and Meatpacking (2007). In addition to his books and more than twenty scholarly articles in both of his primary research areas, Warren has served as the primary investigator on four federal grants for History Education, totaling nearly one million dollars.
This “sheer volume of work alone, impressive as it is,” as Warren’s nominator put it, “is not what deserves attention. More relevant is the reception his work has received and what experts in the fields spanned by his scholarship have to say about its merits and contributions.” Warren’s work in labor history focuses primarily upon workers and their efforts to achieve security and dignity in their lives, and on how industry affects local communities. These themes come together powerfully in Tied to the Great Packing Machine, which the Journal of American History called it an “incisive book” that “challenges our understanding of the past and raises astute questions about the present and future.” Warren is back at Western this year after teaching as a Fulbright lecturer in the Graduate School of American Studies at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan in 2008-2009. During his time in Japan, Warren was hard at work on yet another research project, which focuses on the global meat industry.
Ed Martini, Associate Professor of History, won the award for Faculty Achievement in Teaching in only his fifth year at Western. During that period, Martini has prepared eleven new courses, ranging from large general education classes to graduate research seminars. He has also served as the supervising professor for five 
undergraduate honors theses, six history graduate students, and, from 2007-2009, as the advisor for Phi Alpha Theta, the undergraduate history honors society.
Martini’s nominators made clear, however, that his work in the classroom was only a small component of his teaching efforts. He has also been at the front of department and campus efforts at integrating technologies, such as the use of podcasting and other digital media, into the classroom. “Energetic, innovative, and clear-eyed in his expectations of students,” one of his nominating letters noted, “Ed is already a leader in the graduate program and a mentor in pedagogical uses of technology to his colleagues.” Martini’s greatest pleasure in teaching, however, continues to come from working closely with students at all levels, something that is reciprocated in the numerous testimonials his current and former students wrote in support of his nomination. “In my six years of college,” one of those letters began, “no professor has taught me more about both myself and their respective subject matter than Professor Ed Martini.”
The department has consistently been represented in the college-wide awards, but this marks the third straight year history faculty have been honored in the category of research and creative activity. Dr. Nora Faires won the award in 2009, and Dr. José António Brandão received the prize in 2008. Similarly, this marks the fourth straight year that the college has awarded its top teaching prize to history faculty. Drs. Michael Chiarappa, Takashi Yoshida, and Robert Berkhofer received the teaching award from 2007-2009.