Robert Siegle receives 2009 XCaliber Award
Robert Siegle, professor of English in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Tech, received the university's 2009 XCaliber Lifetime Achievement Award for excellence as an individual involved in teaching with technology.
Established in 1996 by Office of the Provost, the XCaliber Award (shorthand for exceptional, high caliber work) is presented annually by the Virginia Tech Center for Innovation in Learning to recognize individual faculty members or teams of faculty and staff who integrate technology in teaching and learning. The award celebrates innovative, student-centered approaches to learning activities. Awardees receive a cash award and are called upon to demonstrate their work.
Siegle was recognized for his teaching innovations in the area of digital literary culture and his pioneering technological leadership over the years within the Department of English.
The selection committee cited Siegle’s Digital Literary Culture course as an innovative course that extends traditional literary analysis by viewing literature in the digital age as anything (video mashups, hypertext, virtual performance art, etc.) that can be created and distributed digitally. In this course, students examine these digital texts from a cultural studies perspective and engage in the process of thoughtfully creating their own works. By engaging with these digital texts, they are empowered to rethink modern culture and participate in the creation of new forms of literature.
A member of the Virginia Tech community since 1977, Siegle has served as director of Virginia Tech’s Writing Program and has won numerous awards, including the Certificate of Teaching Excellence and Fulbright awards to India and Sri Lanka. His grants include a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Seminar at Yale University and other NEH stipends for research and a CEUT/UOIP project grant for internationalizing the curriculum. He is the author of The Politics of Reflexivity: Narrative and the Constitutive Poetics of Culture, Suburban Ambush: Downtown Writing and the Fiction of Insurgency, and Mirror to Mirror: Postmodernity in South Asian Fiction, as well as several electronic publications. He has served as publication reviewer for The Johns Hopkins University Press, McGraw-Hill Book Company, Little Brown & Company, St. Martin’s Press, W.W. Norton, and Wesleyan/New England University Press. He has served on the Fellowship Selection Panel for the NEH and the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars.
Siegle earned his bachelor’s degree from Emory and Henry College and a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
