UF Honors Program names Dunlevie Professors for next year

April 6, 2010

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Two distinguished University of Florida faculty members have been appointed as Elizabeth Wood Dunlevie Honors Term Professors for the 2010-11 academic year.

Ranga Narayanan, professor of chemical engineering, and Howard Louthan, associate professor of history, will each teach a course for the UF Honors Program during the fall semester. In addition, each professor will be responsible for organizing an event in the spring, tied to the fall course, for the UF community.

The Elizabeth Wood Dunlevie Honors Term Professorships are made possible by a generous endowment gift from Elizabeth Wood Dunlevie, a UF graduate. The goal of the program is to encourage the most esteemed faculty at UF to participate in the Honors Program as instructors and mentors. The endowment provides summer salary and support for the faculty members’ spring activities.

Narayanan will offer an interdisciplinary course titled Patterns in Nature with Applications to Engineering and Science. This course is aimed at juniors and seniors, and will give students an understanding of pattern formation and cooperative phenomena. Students also will be required to participate in outreach activities with local school teachers through the Spring Engineering and Science Fair. Narayanan’s spring activity will consist of a workshop with poster and paper sessions for the students, and a distinguished guest speaker will be invited to deliver a plenary lecture.

Louthan’s course is titled Challenging Authority in the Renaissance World, and will focus on a variety of Renaissance figures who challenged the norms of their society: the scholar, the artist, the prince, the religious leader, the scientist, the peasant, and the explorer. In the spring term, Louthan will organize a workshop around the theme “Understanding the Reformation World,” culminating in a visit from Euan Cameron of Union Theological Seminary, in New York City, widely considered the foremost North American authority on the Reformation.

Narayanan joined the faculty at UF in 1981. He has published nearly 80 papers and is the author or editor of four books in his field. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Proctor and Gamble Fund, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He has garnered numerous teaching awards in the College of Engineering, and, in 2009, was inducted into the UF Academy of Distinguished Teaching Scholars.

Louthan has been a faculty member in the UF department of history since 2001, where he also serves as the department’s undergraduate coordinator. He has published several books on the Reformation and related topics and dozens of articles and reviews in scholarly journals. He has received support for his work from the Lilly Endowment, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Center of Theological Inquiry, and Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study, among others. He is regarded by students as one of the top teachers in the history department, and has introduced many innovations into the undergraduate curriculum.

Dunlevie Professors are selected by Kevin Knudson, the director of the Honors Program, in consultation with a committee of UF faculty, from a pool of nominees submitted by department chairs.