(OLD WESTBURY - July 8, 2014) Ian Reifowitz, SUNY Empire State College professor of Historical Studies, is a 2014 recipient of the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities.SUNY System Administration and Chancellor Nancy L. Zimpher characterize individuals selected for this honor as role models within the SUNY community. The honor also provides systemwide recognition for consistently superior professional achievement and encourages the ongoing pursuit of excellence.

"Faculty and staff who receive the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence have served their students, fellow faculty and staff, campuses, and communities with the utmost distinction, and it is a great honor to be able to recognize them with the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence,” said Zimpher. “Congratulations to all of this year’s recipients.”

“I am thrilled and honored that SUNY has recognized my scholarly accomplishments,” said Reifowitz.  “I am especially grateful to my dean Michael Spitzer and the administration of Empire State College for nominating me and for providing institutional support, including sabbatical time, without which I could never have earned this award.”

“My congratulations go to Ian Reifowitz for being recognized as among the best faculty across the SUNY system,” said Merodie A. Hancock, president of the college. “Ian’s scholarship and his creative activities are remarkable among his SUNY peers, and the knowledge he’s gained through research and writing make him a better mentor to his students and a stronger colleague for faculty, which enriches the Empire State College community of learners on Long Island and across the state.”

Reifowtiz has taught history at Empire State College since 2002. His articles appear on the politics and opinion website Daily Kos, where he is a contributing editor. He also has been published in The Daily News, Newsday, The New Republic, In These Times, The Post-Star, the San Diego Free Press, Truthout, the Kyiv (Kiev) Post, and the Huffington Post.

Reifowitz’s first book, “Imagining an Austrian Nation: Joseph Samuel Bloch and the Search for a Multiethnic Austrian Identity, 1846–1919,” was published by East European Monographs and distributed by Columbia University Press in 2003. His second book, “Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity,” was published in 2012 by Potomac Books.

Articles Reifowitz has written about his scholarship have been published in prestigious national and international peer-reviewed academic journals including the Journal of Jewish Identities, Nationalities Papers and East European Quarterly. His writing and book reviews also have appeared in many other publications.

In 2009 Reifowitz received the college’s Susan H. Turben Award for Excellence in Scholarship.

About the Chancellor’s Awards for Excellence

The Chancellor’s Award for Excellence is presented annually to faculty and staff in six categories: faculty service, librarianship, professional service, scholarship and creative activities and in teaching and classified service.

Through these awards, system administration and the chancellor also publicly proclaim pride in the accomplishment and personal dedication of its instructional faculty, librarians, and staff across its 64 campuses and system administration.

In acknowledgment of their selection, recipients are recognized in the college catalogue as a State University Chancellor's Award for recipient. A certificate and a Chancellor’s Excellence Medallion also are presented to each honoree to commemorate selection. Recipients are honored by their respective campuses during commencement exercises, at academic convocations or at other special events.

About SUNY Empire State College

Empire State College, the nontraditional, open college of the SUNY system, educates more than 20,000 students worldwide at eight international sites, more than 35 locations in the state of New York, online, as well as face to face and through a blend of both, at the associate, bachelor’s and master’s levels.

The average age of an undergraduate student at the college is 35 and graduate students average age 40.

Most Empire State College students are working adults. Many are raising families and meeting civic commitments in the communities where they live, while studying part time.

In addition to awarding credit for prior college-level learning, the college pairs each undergraduate student with a faculty mentor who supports that student throughout his or her college career.

Working with their mentors, students design an individual degree program and engage in guided independent study and course work onsite, online or through a combination of both, which provides the flexibility for students to choose where, when and how to learn.

Students have the opportunity to enroll five times during the year.

The college’s 70,000 alumni are active in their communities as entrepreneurs, politicians, business professionals, artists, nonprofit agency employees, teachers, veterans and active military, union members and more.

The college was first established in 1971 by the SUNY Board of Trustees with the encouragement of the late Ernest L. Boyer, chancellor of the SUNY system from 1970 to 1977.

Boyer also served as United States commissioner of education during the administration of President Jimmy Carter and then as president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

More information about the college is available at www.esc.edu.

 

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Media contact: David Henahan, director of communications

518-587-2100, ext. 2918

David.Henahan@esc.edu

518-321-7038 (after hours and on weekends)