History professor Ginger Frost and World Languages and Cultures chair Mike Ledgerwood have been honored with the Howard College of Arts and Sciences Dean's Awards in Research and Teaching. Each award provides a fund of $1,500 that the winner can draw upon to attend a professional conference within the next year. Associate Dean and Professor of English Rosemary Fisk presented the awards at a May 1 faculty meeting.

Ginger Frost, with 17 years of service to Samford, is recognized by her colleagues as one of the college’s most productive and prolific scholars, despite currently serving as speaker of the Arts and Sciences Faculty Assembly and teaching a full course load. Since publishing her third book, Victorian Childhoods, in 2009, she has continued to produce articles and book reviews. In the past year alone her writings on social history and family law have appeared in Women’s History Review, Journal of British Studies, and Gender and History. She also serves on the editorial boards of the Victorians Institute Journal and the Journal of Victorian Culture. One measure of her scholarly impact on the profession is that her second book, Living in Sin, came out in a paperback edition in May 2011, while her first book, Promises Broken, came out in a paperback-on-demand edition. After sixteen years scholars still use these books for classroom teaching.

Ledgerwood, recipient of the Dean’s Award in Teaching, has completed six years at Samford, but his work also has an international impact as he serves as President of the International Association for Language Learning Technology. At Samford he habitually teaches overloads even as he administers the language placement tests of all incoming students, supervises the English as a Second Language (ESL) program, and works with faculty to incorporate linguistic theory and technology into teaching, among other duties demanded by a complex department. Ledgerwood is fluent in English, French, Spanish, German and Portuguese, has studied Romanian, Romansh, Catalan, Italian and Latin, and speaks a smattering of several other languages. Currently, he is studying Mandarin Chinese in preparation for speaking engagements in China this year. He has spoken in Japan and India in recent years. He often finds himself developing a new course, such as Colloquial French Cuisine or a Francophone survey for which no textbook exists in French. He hopes to publish a new edition of his book A Student’s Guide to Using Technology for Effective Language Learning.