Faculty Member Recognized by The University of Texas Board of Regents

Professor Charlotte Canning, Regents' Outstanding Teaching Award Recipient

Performance as Public Practice Area Head, Professor Charlotte Canning is among the recipients from throughout The University of Texas System who have been presented the Board of Regents' Outstanding Teaching Awards.

The awards, which range from $15,000 to $30,000 depending on level of experience, are believed to be among the highest in the country for rewarding outstanding undergraduate faculty performance and innovation.

Candidates for the teaching awards were nominated at the campus level then evaluated on several criteria, including student and peer evaluations, teaching portfolio and student learning outcomes.

Dr. Canning received her doctorate from the University of Washington. She serves as head of the Performance as Public Practice Program at The University of Texas at Austin, where she began her career in 1993. She teaches theatre and performance history and historiography, as well as feminist performance theory.

Charlotte Canning, Photo by J Elissa Marshall

She is the author of Feminist Theaters In The USA: Staging Women's Experience (Routledge, 1996) and The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chautauqua as Performance (Iowa, 2005) which won the 2006 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History, given each year to the best book in “theatre history or cognate disciplines,” Dr. Canning was the first member of the UT faculty to receive this prestigious award.

Additionally, Dr. Canning has served as the Book Review Editor for Theatre Journal, President of the Women and Theatre Program, and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College of Fine Arts. She is a past President of the American Society for Theatre Research. Currently she serves as the Associate Editor for Theatre Research International, the journal of the International Federation for Theatre Research, she will assume the editorship in 2013.

"“Outside of the recognition of the students, the core activity of teaching largely goes unnoticed,” Canning said in a recent UT System News Release. “The Regents Award is especially welcome, however, because it brings the great diversity of excellent teaching to the attention of those outside the classroom and communicates to the state what individual students have long known: with a great teacher behind you there are no limits to what you can achieve,” she added.

The Board of Regents' Outstanding Teaching Awards program was established in August 2008 as the latest in a series of University of Texas System initiatives aimed at fostering innovative approaches to teaching, research and commercialization endeavors at all 15 University of Texas System institutions.

A list of honorees from throughout The University of Texas System and the institutions at which they teach is available at www.utexas.edu.