Baylor Names History Professor 1999 Cherry Award Recipient

Baylor University has named a history professor at Rice University the Robert Foster Cherry Chair for Distinguished Teaching for the 1999-2000 academic year. Dr. John B. Boles, the William Pettus Hobby Professor of History, will teach a week-long series of seminars during the 1999 fall semester and will return to teach in residence at Baylor during the 2000 spring semester.
Boles, a Rice alumnus, earned his doctorate from the University of Virginia. A renowned expert on United States Southern history, especially as it relates to antebellum social, cultural, religious, women's and black history, he is the author of The Great Revival, 1787-1805: The Origins of the Southern Evangelical Mind; Black Southerners, 1619-1869; and The South Through Time: A History of an American Region. He also serves as managing editor of the Journal of Southern History.
"I am very excited about coming to Baylor to teach a new group of students and to get to know a new area of Texas," Boles said. He tentatively is scheduled to teach two courses during the 2000 spring semester -- an undergraduate survey course on the history of the American South and a graduate seminar on Southern religious history.
Robert Foster Cherry graduated from Baylor in 1929 and entered the Baylor Law School in 1932, passing the state bar exam the following year. Before his death, he established the Cherry Award for Great Teachers and the Cherry Chair for Distinguished Teaching, which are awarded in alternating years, to honor great teachers and to expose Baylor students to the world's greatest teachers. Recipients of the Cherry Chair have demonstrated extraordinary teaching abilities and a record of positive, inspiring and long-lasting effects on students. The recipients also are required to be scholars with national and international achievements.
The recipient of the Robert Foster Cherry Chair for Distinguished Teaching receives an award of $100,000 and agrees to conduct a week-long series of lectures in the fall and return to teach in residence during the spring semester. Boles will be honored in September at the annual Robert Foster Cherry Award Banquet.