Dr. Kristine Hildebrandt
Dept. of English Language and Literature
2017 Paul Simon Outstanding Teacher-Scholar

The Paul Simon Outstanding Teacher-Scholar award is presented to an SIUE faculty member who has been recognized as an outstanding teacher and research scholar. The award demonstrates the belief that to be a good teacher, one must also be a good scholar. Winners of the Outstanding Teacher-Scholar award have shown significant contributions to original research or creative activities and have successfully integrated those contributions into their teaching practices.

Dr. Hildebrandt came to SIUE as an assistant professor in 2008. Since her arrival she has been a Principal Investigator (PI), Co-I, or Collaborator on 9 externally submitted proposals in which 3 were funded and 2 are under review in 2016. She also applied for 5 internal research grants which were all funded. This grant activity resulted in over $497,000 in externally funded grants and $51,000 in internal grants. Dr. Hildebrandt received SIUE’s first National Science Foundation CAREER Award which is both very competitive and highly prestigious. Her project along with SIUE collaborators “has re-imagined ways that languages, practices, and attitudes can be represented in atlas form by using free media tools.” Altogether, her research activities have led to 10 peer-reviewed journal publications, 9 chapters in edited, peer-reviewed books, one dictionary co-authored with SIUE faculty Dr. Jessica Krim, 18 national and international juried conference presentations, and 16 invited presentations on her SIUE research. Most notably, she is the Tibetan-Himalayan Library SHANTI (Sciences, Humanities and Arts Initiatives of Technical Humanities) creator of four audio-video archival collections: Gyalsumdo, Gurung, Manange, Nar-Phu.

Dr. Hildebrandt is currently leading two NSF sponsored collaborative research teams. The first collaborative team is documenting and archiving survivor experiences, responses, perspectives, and feelings about the 2015 earthquakes as they impacted the Mustang, Manang, and Gorkha regions of Nepal. The second collaborative team’s task is to document, archive, and describe aspects of the phonetics/phonology, lexicon, discourse patterns, and grammatical relations of four languages spoken in Manang District, Nepal. Beyond these two research teams, Dr. Hildebrandt co-founded and co-directs the Interdisciplinary Research and Informatics Scholarship (IRIS) Center. She stated, “this space (IRIS Center) allowed me to work with student research assistants in a peer-like environment, where they could learn about cutting edge methods, tools, and issues in the humanities and social sciences.” Since the launch of the IRIS Center in 2010, she has mentored through the Center over 12 undergraduate students and 6 graduate students.

Hildebrandt truly encompasses a teacher-scholar model in her interactions with students and she finds the interconnection between research and teaching to be one of the most interesting and often fulfilling aspects of her job. Dr. Hildebrandt wrote, “When I began my appointment at SIUE, I was struck by the ways that faculty are encouraged and incentivized to not only bring their research into the classroom, but to also bring students to the research ‘laboratory,’ whatever the discipline may be, and whatever that laboratory may look like.”

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Kristine Hildebrandt, the 2017 Paul Simon Outstanding Teacher-Scholar Award recipient, on her remarkable achievements.