Rochelle Lieber, Professor of English, has been selected as the 2013 recipient of the Lindberg Award, given annually to the outstanding teacher-scholar in the College of Liberal Arts.
Professor Lieber earned her undergraduate degree at Vassar College and her Ph.D at MIT. She was appointed to the UNH faculty in 1981. In her three-plus decades here, Professor Lieber has been both a vigorous scholar and an exemplary teacher.
As a scholar, Professor Lieber has achieved at the highest levels. She has built her reputation internationally in morphology—the study of the form and formation of words—a subfield of theoretical linguistics. Indeed, she has been a key scholar in the resurgence and development of the field in the U.S., and is one of the first to establish the relatively new study of generative morphology. Professor Lieber has traveled extensively throughout western Europe, New Zealand, Canada, and the U.S giving invited talks and conference presentations on the subject. She has published nearly 50 journal articles, book chapters, encyclopedia entries, and reviews. She has authored 5 books in the field: Introducing Morphology (Cambridge U Press, 2010), Morphology and Lexical Semantics (Cambridge U Press, 2004), Deconstructing Morphology: Word Formation in Syntactic Theory (U of Chicago Press, 1992), On the Organization of the Lexicon (Garland Publishing, Inc., 1990), and An Integrated Theory of Autosegmental Processes (SUNY Press, Albany, 1987). A new publication, The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology (Oxford U Press), is expected to be released later this year. With colleague Pavol Stekauer, she has co-edited two volumes, The Oxford Handbook of Compounding (Oxford U Press, 2009) and The Handbook of Word Formation (Springer, 2005). It might not be surprising to learn that Professor Lieber has two more book projects in the works as I write this. Her scholarly influence extends to the larger field of linguistics through her editorial work: for the past six years, she was co-editor in chief of Language and Linguistics Compass, a peer-reviewed journal published by Wiley-Blackwell, and she currently serves on the editorial boards of no fewer than five other linguistics publications.
A former winner of a UNH Award for Excellence in Teaching, Professor Lieber’s reputation in the classroom is also stellar. She receives consistently high praise from her students in classes that range from the 400 to the 900 level. Students give her particularly high marks for enthusiasm, knowledge, preparation, and respectfulness. They repeatedly praise her for her ability to make a difficult subject fun, understandable, even joyful, so much so that one student notes “I remember being upset when class time was over. I have never felt that way about a class.” Students often comment on her obvious passion for the material, noting how it made the subject come alive.
Professor Lieber has clearly demonstrated that she possesses the highest qualities of scholarship and teaching and is therefore most deserving of the Lindberg Award.
The annual Gary Lindberg Award was established by the College of Liberal Arts in 1986 in memory of Professor Gary Lindberg of the Department of English. Professor Lindberg was an exceptional scholar and outstanding teacher whose dedication and service to the University of New Hampshire as well as the wider community exemplified the highest academic standards and ideals.
In memory of Professor Lindberg and as a means of publicly supporting superior faculty accomplishment, the College of Liberal Arts annually recognizes one truly outstanding scholar and teacher within the College. The award carries a $5,000 stipend. The recipient is invited to present the Liberal Arts Lecture to the public during the following academic year.
