Graduate Faculty Mentor Award, 2025
College of Liberal Arts
Salyer has been one of the most valuable members of the university’s graduate faculty since she arrived at UNH in 1989. Her students praise her skills as a scholar, teacher, and mentor in every sense of the word. Her mastery as both a teacher and scholar led to her being named the Lindberg Prize winner in the College of Liberal Arts (COLA), the highest honor in the college.
Throughout her career, Salyer has been sought after by MA and Ph.D. students for her compassion, insight, and ability to ask the right questions. She has taught generations of graduate students how to understand a historiographical argument, how to write a research paper, and how to engage in high-level debate about important issues. Her doctoral advisees’ topics show the breadth of her expertise, with dissertations on such widely dispersed topics as the forced removal of Aleuts during World War II, tourism in 19th-century Maine, and the creation of Serbian immigrant communities in the United States. A review of the dissertations in the departmental collection suggests that she has been involved with about half of the ones written in the last 30 years.
One student recalled that in her teaching “Lucy sets a high bar, and her classrooms are places of deep scholarly engagement.” She added that “Lucy has modeled intellectual risk-taking as a vital piece of crafting a scholarly career.”
About this Award
The Graduate Faculty Mentor award is designed to honor a faculty member whose commitment to excellence in graduate student training has contributed significantly to graduate students’ professional development. Forms only accepted during application period.
