Cormack Teaching Awards

Excellence in teaching

Dr. Lesley Cormack speaking at the FASS Fall Reception in October 2021.

The Cormack Awards were established by former Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) Dean Lesley Cormack in 2010 to celebrate excellence and innovation in teaching within the faculty. The award recognizes the passion that faculty members bring to the classroom, their quality of pedagogy, and the value they bring to their students’ education and the FASS teaching community.

The FASS Dean presents up to six Cormack Teaching Awards annually, one for each rank in the teaching stream (lecturer, senior lecturer, and university lecturer) and one for each rank of the research stream (assistant, associate, and full professor).

2023 Cormack Award winners

Amanda Watson is a senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. Her research interests include care, labour, social reproduction, disability, climate crisis, media representation of maternal labour and identity, and feminist pedagogy. She teaches on politics of family, global problems and the culture of capitalism, and power and conflict in Canadian society. Her current projects explore how young adults reconcile their desires for ethical family life and how young adults talk about their future relations in the context of interlocking crises.

Atiya Mahmood is a Professor at the Department of Gerontology. Her training is in environmental gerontology and her research focuses on health and built environments for older adults with a specific interest in neighbourhood environments, mobility, active living and pro-social behaviour/social engagement of diverse groups of older adults in community-based and supportive housing. She has over two decades experience in qualitative and mixed methods research in the areas of environment-behaviour studies and aging and built environment.

Coleman Nye is an assistant professor at the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies. She works at the intersection of feminist science and technology studies, graphic medicine, and performance studies. She co-authored Lissa: a story of friendship, medical promise, and revolution and is currently completing a monograph Biological Property: Race, Gender, Genetics which mines the epistemological linkages between genetic understandings of relation and property-based models of inheritance. 

John-Henry Harter is a lecturer at the Department of History and the Labour Studies Program. He has had what can be best described as a non-traditional education. A high school dropout, he worked as a washer of walls, a digger of ditches, a tender of bar, and a waiter of tables. Going back to school as a mature student, John-Henry graduated with honours with a degree in History and minor in Film Studies. He has a Masters and PhD in History from SFU. He writes on Class, the Environment, and Popular Culture when not consuming too much coffee and TV. 

Tamara O'Doherty is a senior lecturer in the School of Criminology. Her research expertise includes critical criminology, human rights and criminal law, collaborative and legal research methods. In addition to post-secondary teaching and decolonizing legal pedagogy contributions, O'Doherty’s research and publications have focused on the effects of criminalization, victimization, commercial sex, and human trafficking law.

Past winners

2022: Heather Bliss (Linguistics); Suzanna Crage (Sociology & Anthropology); Nicolas Kenny (History); Martin Santamaria (Economics); Rylan Simpson (Criminology); Luke Clossey (History)

2020-21: Steven Wright (Psychology); Matthew Hussey (English); Emily O'Brien (History & Humanities); Henny Yeung (Linguistics); Yuthika Girme (Psychology); Matthew Sigal (Psychology); Isobel Mayo-Harp (World Languages and Literatures)

2019: Danielle Murdoch (Criminology); Nicolas Fillion (Philosophy); Panos Pappas (Linguistics); Marianne Ignace (First Nations Language Program)

2018: Tina Adcock, Assistant Professor (History); Douglas Allen, Professor (Economics); Leith Davis, Professor (English); Dai Heide, Senior Lecturer (Philosophy); Steve Weldon, Associate Professor (Political Science)

2017: Rebecca Cobb (Psychology); Ashley Farris-Trimble (Linguistics)

2016: Lara Aknin (Psychology); Gregory Dow (Economics); Sarah Walshaw (History); Richard Wright (Psychology)

2015: Elise Chenier (History); Alex Moens (Political Science); Bidisha Ray (History); Aaron Windel (History)

2014: David Coley (English); Sheri Fabian (Criminology); Jack Martin (Psychology); Roxanne Panchasi (History)

2013: Jeremy Brown (History); Mike Everton (English); Neil Watson (Psychology)

2012: John Bogardus (Sociology & Anthropology); John Harriss (International Studies); Nicole Jackson (International Studies); Kate Slaney (Psychology)

2011: Alison Ayers (Sociology & Anthropology/ Political Science); Dave Cox (Economics); Alec Dawson (History/Latin American Studies)

2010: Lara Campbell (Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies); Nicky Didicher (English); Yue Wang (Linguistics)