Carr, Evans, Lyne, and Scaglion Honored for Exceptional Mentoring of Doctoral Students

Four University of Pittsburgh professors have been chosen to receive the 2010 Provost’s Award for Excellence in Mentoring, an achievement that recognizes faculty members for their mentoring of doctoral students. The awardees will be honored at a reception at 3 p.m. April 20 in the University Club’s Ballroom B.

This is the fifth year the awards will be granted; each of the honorees will receive a cash prize of $2,500. The winners were selected from a pool of nominees whose names were submitted by Pitt doctoral students and faculty.

The honorees are Jean Ferguson Carr, a professor of English in the School of Arts and Sciences; John Harry Evans III, Katz Alumni Professor of Accounting in the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business; John Lyne, a professor of communication in Arts and Sciences; and Richard Scaglion, a professor of anthropology in Arts and Sciences.

“Graduate education is at the heart of our scholarly activities, and the individuals recognized by this award exemplify the dedication of Pitt faculty to providing intellectual and personal guidance that promotes the development of our doctoral students as leaders, scholars, and innovators,” said Pitt Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor James V. Maher.

Brief biographies of each of the recipients follow.

Jean Ferguson Carr

Jean Ferguson Carr serves as director of Pitt’s Women’s Studies Program and is a former director of the Committee for the Evaluation and Advancement of Teaching. She is the coauthor of Archives of Instruction: Nineteenth-Century Rhetorics, Readers, and Composition Books in the United States (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), which won the Modern Language Association’s Shaughnessy Prize for the best book on composition in 2006, and is a coeditor of the Pittsburgh Series in Composition, Literacy, and Culture. Students mentored by Carr have published books with such publishers as the State University of New York Press and the University of Georgia Press and are well placed in tenure-stream positions as scholars, teachers, and administrators of composition programs.

John Harry Evans III

John Harry Evans III is an accomplished researcher whose work has been recognized by such notable organizations as the American Accounting Association and the Journal of Management Accounting Research. He recently was named senior editor of The Accounting Review and has served as editor of the Journal of Management Accounting Research. The former director of doctoral programs in the Katz School, he has been recognized as Teacher of the Year by Pitt’s MBA students seven times. Students mentored by Evans have earned tenured faculty positions at such leading research institutions as Northwestern University, Pennsylvania State University, Michigan State University, and the University of Maryland.

John Lyne

John Lyne

is the former chair of the Department of Communication as well as the department's former director of graduate studies. He also is a faculty member of the graduate program in bioethics and a resident fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science. Lyne is a well-recognized scholar who has served on editorial boards of journals that include Argumentation & Advocacy, The Quarterly Journal of Speech, and Communication Theory, and he has been general editor of a book series on rhetoric of inquiry. Dissertations completed under his direction have been honored by the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender and the National Communication Association. Former students Lyne has mentored have been well placed in tenure-track faculty positions, have been recognized for their scholarship, and have served in leadership roles in their professional societies.

Richard Scaglion

Richard Scaglion is the director of Pitt’s Asian Studies Center and a fellow of the American Anthropological Association as well as the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. He is the editor of the anthropology journal Ethnology. A recipient of the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 1984, Scaglion has instructed a grant and research design course that was responsible for a nearly perfect record of students receiving external funding awards. He also holds a dissertation-writing group for his students. Students mentored by Scaglion have gone on to successful academic careers, and many have advanced to senior positions within their fields.