Illinois Wesleyan Professor of Russian Studies Marina Balina was named as the 2008 winner of the Pantagraph Award for Teaching Excellence at the University on Wednesday, April 18, at the annual Honors Day Convocation in Westbrook Auditorium of Presser Hall.
“This is the highest honor that Illinois Wesleyan can give, and I am honored and thrilled and happy and overwhelmed,” said an emotional Balina as she received hugs of congratulations from fellow faculty members and staff.
The $1,000 teacher-scholar award is the University’s top teaching honor and is sponsored by the daily newspaper headquartered in Bloomington that services eight counties and more than 60 communities in Central Illinois. The honoree is selected by Illinois Wesleyan’s Promotion and Tenure Committee based on nominations received from members of the faculty.
A native of Russia who earned her Ph.D. at Leningrad State University (now St. Petersburg), Balina joined IWU’s faculty in 1989 and is now a member of the University’s department of modern and classical languages and literatures. Along with teaching the German and Russian languages and Russian literature, she has published more than 20 articles and four books in three different languages, and earned an international reputation for work with children’s literature. She has been the recipient of grants from the U.S. Department of Education, the Austrian Ministry of Culture, the American Association of Learned Societies, the National Endowment of Humanities and the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars.