Alexandra Bolintineanu, Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, Centre for Medieval Studies and Woodsworth College has been awarded a 2022-23 University of Toronto Early Career Teaching Award, which recognizes faculty members who demonstrate an exceptional commitment to student learning, pedagogical engagement, and teaching innovation.
Professor Bolintineanu, who joined CMS and Woodsworth College in 2016 focuses her research on medieval wonders and monsters, digital pedagogy, and illegal typewriters. Her significant achievement has been creating and coordinating Woodsworth’s minor program in Digital Humanities, for which she devised the curriculum and designed and taught the first nine new courses. These program courses combine research and critical analysis with experiential learning, as students visit rare book collections and museums, and work hands-on with text encoding, digital mapping, data visualization, augmented and virtual reality, and 3D printing.
Students in Professor Bolintineanu’s courses learn to create digital exhibits and maps, turn medieval riddles into video games, and build digital archives of the lives of banned and endangered books. In one course, students analyzed the usability of their own teaching platform, Bb Collaborate. The project resulted in a journal publication with undergraduate students as co-authors. In a fourth-year capstone seminar, students join the research teams of digital humanities faculty across the university, where they gain experience in real-world research while also producing their own final projects.
Beyond university classrooms, Bolintineanu collaborated with U of T’s The Book and the Silk Roads project to design an online exhibit, Hidden Stories along the Silk Roads, a companion to a major exhibition at the Aga Khan Museum—a valuable resource during the museum’s pandemic closures which fed back into the classroom: Professor Bolintineanu’s students visited the exhibition, studied its artifacts, and learned from curators, museum educators, and collections specialists about the challenges and behind-the-scenes work of a major museum exhibition.
In addition to the Early Career Teaching Award, Professor Bolintineanu received the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities Outstanding Early Career Award (2019) and the Centers and Regional Associations (CARA) Teaching Prize of the Medieval Academy of America (2023).
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Arts & Science faculty members honoured with Early Career Teaching Awards