By Kody Kiser and Steve Shaffer 

LEXINGTON, Ky. (July 22, 2024) — The University of Kentucky Alumni Association started the Great Teacher Award program in 1961 to honor excellent teaching at the university. There have been more than 300 teachers honored since that first year. Nominations may only be submitted by current students.

To receive the award, a candidate must:

• Hold the rank of full-time lecturer or above and have been a member of the faculty for the past three years at UK.
• Have superior knowledge of the subject matter.
• Have original and innovative classroom presentations.
• Demonstrate concern for students, both inside and outside the classroom setting.
• Not have been a recipient of the award for the past 10 years.

A committee of the UK Alumni Association Board of Directors and a representative from the student organization Omicron Delta Kappa select the recipients based on objective rating and ranking of the eligible nominations submitted.

This episode of “Behind the Blue” spotlights one of the six Great Teacher Award winners for 2024. Jordan Brower is an assistant professor of English where he primarily teaches film and media studies. He earned his bachelor’s degree in English at Amherst College and his Ph.D. in English and film and media studies from Yale University.

Before coming to UK in 2019, he was a lecturer in the interdisciplinary history and literature program at Harvard University and, as a graduate student and then adjunct, at Yale University.

In his research, Brower studies the ways artists — writers of fiction and screenplays, directors, stars — understand their positions within the increasingly complex and chaotic media industries in which they work. His first book, “Classical Hollywood, American Modernism: A Literary History of the Studio System” (Cambridge University Press, 2024), charts the entwined trajectories of the Hollywood studio system and literary modernism in the United States.

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For questions or comments about this or any other episode of “Behind the Blue,” email BehindTheBlue@uky.edu or tweet your question with #BehindTheBlue. Transcripts for this or other episodes of Behind the Blue can be downloaded from the show’s blog page.

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