Holy Cross Professor Wins Lifetime Achievement Award

WORCESTER, Mass. – Patricia Bizzell, professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross, has been named the 2008 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Exemplar Award winner by the national Council of Teachers of English. She will be presented the award on Thursday, April 3, 2008 at their main general assembly meeting and her remarks will be published in the December 2008 journal of College Composition and Communication (CCC).

“This is by way of being a lifetime achievement award for people in composition studies and rhetoric, and I am deeply honored to receive it,” says Bizzell.  “The roster of previous recipients includes a number of people whom I consider to be my mentors.”

The Exemplar Award is given to a person who is a role model for the CCCC organization. It seeks to recognize those representing the highest ideals of scholarship, teaching, and service to the entire profession, through a national and international scope. The award has been given each year, since 1991.

"The English department is thrilled that Professor Bizzell is getting the recognition in her field that she so strongly deserves,” says Rev. James Miracky, S.J., associate professor and chair of the English department. “Her teaching and service to the College has been generous and first-rate. In particular, her work with the College's Writer’s Workshop and her outstanding rhetoric course have been invaluable contributions to developing in our students the critical thinking and writing skills that are so central to the College's mission."

Bizzell, a member of Holy Cross faculty since 1978, earned her Ph.D. in English literature from Rutgers University. She is a nationally recognized authority on the teaching of composition and has lectured and conducted workshops at other institutions and at scholarly meetings. Bizzell is the author of numerous articles and essays on composition theory. Her book, The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present, which she co-authored with Bruce Herzberg, received the National Council of Teachers of English Outstanding Book Award in 1992.

A member of the advisory board for the Voices of Democracy Project, she worked to help create a Web site of important speeches in American history, with scholarly and teaching apparatus attached. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Bizzell prepared several units for the Web site including one on the speech "Religion and Race" by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, which was the keynote address at the first national conference of American clergy to address civil rights issues, in Chicago in 1963.

In addition, Bizzell served as president of the Rhetoric Society of America from 2004-06. She resides in Worcester.

Established in 1911, the NCTE has worked to advance teaching, research, and student achievement in English language arts at all scholastic levels.