Ananya Roy Assistant Professor, City and Regional Planning B.A., Mills College M.C.P. and Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley

Acceptance speech

This is a deeply humbling experience. It is humbling to be recognized for what I love doing: to teach. It is humbling to recognize that I have so many people to thank and acknowledge:

My chair, Robert Cervero, along with Marty Wachs and Malla Hadley, put together this nomination. I would not be here to receive this award without that nomination. I should also note that Robert took over the chairship of DCRP last year and in this one year has made us all feel so deeply connected to and grounded in the department. So, thank you Robert. A warm thank you to my colleagues at DCRP for friendship and collaboration: Judy Innes, Fred Collignon, Betty Deakin, Anno Saxenian, Tim Duane, John Radke, Karen Christensen, Robert Ogilvie, Michael Southworth At an institutional level, I am grateful to EVCP Paul Gray and Dean Harrison Fraker for their many years of encouragement. I have been fortunate to receive support from many quarters of this campus, notably the Hellman Faculty Fund, the Prytanean Alumnae Society. The Prytanean Alumnae Society has quite literally made me one of their own. I owe a special, special acknowledgement to Dean John Lie who has created a lovely second home for me at International and Area Studies. Here, I find myself engaged with wonderful new worlds such as the Berkeley Programs for Study Abroad and the IAS Teaching Programs.

This award is a recognition not so much of my capacities as it is of the interface and relationship between my academic life and those of my students. I proudly share this award with my GSIs who are amazing teachers in their own right. Will my GSIs please stand and take a bow? I also want to recognize my brilliant and splendid undergraduate students. They inspire me; they humble me - their work, their questions, constantly shape my research and writing and praxis. I wrote, in my teaching statement, about the privilege of teaching at Berkeley, the privilege and responsibility of teaching at what I believe is the world's most distinguished public university. Yes, I am in love with the idea and ideal of a great public university. This idea and ideal is a fragile and beautiful thing. I have had the pleasure of experiencing this beauty but I am also recognizing what it means to confront this fragility, of trying to maintain a diverse and inclusive and accessible and excellent and brave academic environment.

Let me end on two personal notes with two personal acknowledgements to people who are not here today but are very much on my mind. My parents, in Calcutta, have been in many ways my original teachers: my father with his passion for mathematics; my mother with her immersion in literature and the humanities. I am not sure that either of them has been fully convinced with my role as a social scientist. In a strange case of six degrees of separation, I recently found out that Ani Adhikari and I went to the same high school in Calcutta and that she had my mother as a teacher at that school! Indeed, my mother tells me that Ani was one of her favorite students. Bengali crossroads in the global and transnational world that is UC Berkeley.

Finally, my partner and best friend, Nezar AlSayyad, who is a magnificent teacher and whose 20+ years of teaching and institution-building at Berkeley is the gold standard that I cannot ever match. In everyday and extraordinary ways, Nezar makes my work possible.