{"id":69911,"date":"2012-12-11T09:19:49","date_gmt":"2012-12-11T14:19:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=69911"},"modified":"2012-12-14T08:43:41","modified_gmt":"2012-12-14T13:43:41","slug":"anthropology-professor-recognized-nationally-as-mentor-for-graduate-students","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2012\/12\/anthropology-professor-recognized-nationally-as-mentor-for-graduate-students\/","title":{"rendered":"Anthropology Professor Recognized Nationally as Mentor for Graduate Students"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Professor<\/a>
Professor Francoise Dussart in her office. (Christine Buckley\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Anthropology professor Francoise Dussart has been awarded the Faculty Mentor of the Year award from the Institute on Teaching and Mentoring, a nonprofit educational organization funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Gates Foundation.<\/p>\n

The Institute gives its national award to professors it determines best honor the “Compact for Faculty Diversity,” a partnership of regional, federal, and foundation programs that focuses on minority graduate education and faculty diversity.<\/p>\n

Dussart, who is also a core faculty member in the Center for Women\u2019s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, studies social anthropology, including expressions of gender and Australian Aboriginal society and culture.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe award is meaningful because there are different ways to be a graduate adviser,\u201d she says. \u201cYou have a particular relationship with every grad student and you have to make it work. Every relationship is different.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of Dussart\u2019s current students, Rita Offiaeli, nominated her for the award. Offiaeli herself was recently awarded a grant from the Ruth Landes Memorial Fund to pursue her dissertation research, “When the Kolanut (Cola acuminata) Meets the Electric Slide: Constructing Transnationalism in New England.”<\/p>\n

In recommending Dussart for the award, Offiaeli said she is a mentor who sees the personal, academic, and professional aspects of life as interwoven with each other.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy experience is that when Professor Dussart mentors or discusses issues with me, she does not just see a graduate student but an individual who is female, older than most students, mother of four teenagers, and at any one time is positioned in various ways on the landscape of life and graduate school,\u201d she wrote in her recommendation. \u201cAnd yes, Professor Dussart somehow manages to keep these different aspects of my life within focus while gently prodding me to take even those aspects I may sometimes overlook into account, not dissuasively but encouragingly, as I make plans for the future.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dussart said being selected for the award is an opportunity for her to reflect on her role as a mentor.<\/p>\n

\u201cGetting the award made me pause and say, I\u2019m doing things well, but how can I do things better?\u201d she says. \u201cMentoring is not always rewarded, so it\u2019s very energizing.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anthropology professor Francoise Dussart has been named Faculty Mentor of the Year by the Institute on Teaching and Mentoring, an organization funded by NSF, NIH, and the Gates Foundation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":69928,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[63],"class_list":["post-69911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-07 04:41:23","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69911"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69911\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70139,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69911\/revisions\/70139"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/69928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69911"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=69911"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=69911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}