The Lindberg Award
2007 Lindberg Award Recipient
Sheila McNamee, Professor of Communication
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Award announced February 16, 2007
Shelia McNamee, Professor of Communication, has been selected as the 2007 recipient of the Lindberg Award, given annually to the outstanding Teacher-Scholar in the College of Liberal Arts.
Professor McNamee has a long and distinguished career at UNH. First appointed in 1982 from the doctoral program at the University of Massachusetts, she has in the intervening years become one of the University’s most engaged faculty across all areas of involvement. Under her leadership the Department of Communication developed an impressive core of faculty achievement and innovative curricula for students. Her current and former students write passionately about the influence she had had on their lives. And her colleagues see her as a model to emulate in teaching, research, and contributions to the many communities she serves. The Lindberg is a fitting award for the cumulative success she has achieved.
Sheila’s students are especially revealing in the ways they describe the dynamic she brings to the University. As one whose specialization is that of interpersonal communication, she regularly and seamlessly guides students through the world of interaction by providing them with the analytic lens to recognize and understand communication theory. Her classes become exciting laboratories; course projects take on experimentation, data collection, and individual and group analysis; participants make connections between action and theory. Her whole class evaluations are impressive in themselves, but the testimonials from students reveal far greater evidence that her courses transform the way they think and assess their human surrounding. Indeed, many pay her the ultimate compliment of changing them from passive students to passionate learners.
The range and application of her scholarship is similarly remarkable. Over the course of her career at UNH she has produced five books and fifty journal articles and book chapters, all while presenting colloquia or workshops in over forty five international settings. Her work on the intersection of language and social construction has attracted broad acclaim and spawned a range of related and derivative work on personal interaction. Literally practicing what she preaches, Sheila has collaborated with some of the true pioneers in the fields which interleave with her own, occasioning a host of testimonials to the role her research has played in the development of the field.
In a university setting we are accustomed to analyzing any and all manner of communication with great authority. Sheila, we are delighted to acknowledge, can and does do just that, with great and genuine authority. Our collective congratulations to her for so richly deserving this prestigious award.
