CONWAY, Ark. (November 24, 2014) – Hendrix professor Dr. Kristi McKim was recently honored by the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry with the 2014-2015 Exemplary Teacher Award.
Dr. McKim is the Charles S. and Lucile Esmon Shively Odyssey Associate Professor of English and Chair of Film Studies Program.
The award was established to express the church’s support of and appreciation for faculty who have demonstrated exemplary leadership, excellence in teaching, service to students and commitment to education. Recipients receive an appreciation certificate and a cash award.
"I'm completely surprised and grateful to receive this generous award, especially as selected by my colleagues, whose hard-working dedication to teaching and serving our community inspires me continually,’ said McKim. “It's an honor, every day, to work alongside such accomplished and passionate teachers;
and it's thus humbling to be singled out for my own accomplishments. I am, after all, first and always a student to the generations of teachers (in my family, with my own formal education, and here now at Hendrix) who have inspired me to love learning; that I might receive public recognition
for what so meaningfully enriches my life feels like the best kind of dream."
McKim’s teaching and research explore the ways that cinema can enrich our perception by correlating our experience of time (through clocks, calendars, bodies, histories) with environmental changes (gravity, weather, seasons) and human emotion (such as nostalgia, desire, love, melancholia). Her books include Love in
the Time of Cinema (2011) and Cinema as Weather: Stylistic
Screens and Atmospheric Change (2013). She has published on Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life (in Camera
Obscura), Agnès Varda’s Jacquot de Nantes (in Studies
in French Cinema), Bernardo Bertolucci’s The
Dreamers (in Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction, vol. 2), and non-fictional film experience (in the forthcoming collection Cinephilia
and Teaching); her articles and reviews also appear in Film
Philosophy, Senses of Cinema, Film
Quarterly, H-France, and Film
International.
McKim lives in Little Rock with her husband, Mark Barr (a 1992 Hendrix graduate) and their one-year-old son, Henry Robert.
Founded in 1876, Hendrix College is a national leader in engaged liberal arts and sciences education. This year, Hendrix was named the country’s #1 “Up and Coming” liberal arts college and #8 in the nation for “Best Undergraduate Teaching” by U.S.
News and World Report. Hendrix is featured in the 2015 Fiske Guide to Colleges, Forbesmagazine's list of America's Top Colleges, the 2014 Princeton Review’s The Best 378 Colleges, and the latest edition of Colleges That Change
Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think about Colleges. Hendrix has been affiliated with the United Methodist Church since 1884. For more information, visit
www.hendrix.edu.