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Irene Guenther Awarded for Excellence

By Daniel Wallace
April 30, 2018

Irene Guenther

Irene Guenther, assistant professor in the Honors College, has been awarded the 2017-2018 University of Houston Teaching Excellence Provost Core award, one of the highest honors bestowed by the University. The award was presented at the 2018 Faculty Excellence Awards Dinner on Thursday, April 26, at the University of Houston Conrad N. Hilton Hotel.

In the fall of 2017, she received the Ross M. Lence Distinguished Teaching Chair award and was a recipient of the inaugural Bee Wong Faculty Engagement Award, both from the Honors College.

Guenther is a modern European and American historian. Courses she teaches include U.S. History since 1877, World War II and Home Fronts, and 20th Century Genocides, which has become a hallmark course on human rights and activism for Honors College students in many disciplines. She is the author of the award-winning Nazi “Chic”? Fashioning Women in the Third Reich, as well as a book published this summer on a German soldier whose art bore witness to the tragedy of war on the Western Front. 

She is also the curator of “Postcards from the Trenches: Germans and Americans Visualize the Great War,” an exhibition that traveled to Washington, D.C., Houston, and Germany. This centennial exhibition commemorates the First World War through soldiers’ art, and won the Federal Republic of Germany’s Cultural Exchange Award.

“Quite honestly,” writes Guenther, “I feel that I’m the ‘good’ teacher the award indicates I am in large part because Dr. Monroe and the Honors College support me in everything I do for and with my students. I strongly believe that Honors and Dr. Monroe deserve to share the award with me.”