The recipient of the 2011 CARA Award for Excellence in Teaching Medieval Studies is Howell D. Chickering.

Howell Chickering joined the English department at Amherst College in 1965, where he teaches first-year courses in English and courses on Chaucer, Old English, and Beowulf. In addition to numerous articles on Beowulf and Chaucer, his book, Beowulf: A Dual-Language Edition, was first published in 1977. It has gone through three editions and has provided a valuable resource for generations of teachers of the text and has made a lasting contribution to Beowulf studies. He has also turned his attention to medieval French literature, coteaching with colleagues at Amherst, Paul Rockwell and then Fredric Cheyette, with whom he authored an article on Yvain, published in Speculum in 2005. As professor of medieval literature at Amherst College for forty-five years, Howell Chickering has been an exemplary and outstanding teacher of medieval studies. His work throughout this long and distinguished career has been remarkable and consistent, demonstrating not only his skill as a great teacher but, as one of his nominators put it, "a habit of great teaching."

Howell Chickering's nomination generated an outpouring of support from students who had recently graduated, those long established as medievalists, and those who had chosen an entirely different career path but whose classes with Chickering had been essential to their intellectual formation. These diverse students all wrote passionately and at great length about the role he had played in their education. One wrote, "Professor Chickering's energetic and effective pedagogy made it possible for absolute beginners in Middle English to assimilate Chaucer's poetry into our store of mental resources, thereby making Chaucer interesting and relevant, even for students without an abiding specialist interest in medieval literature." Another relied on a sports metaphor to characterize his dedication: "Chick [as he is known] throws himself into his teaching as if it were a game of squash. . . . The clock strikes the hour, and then it is Chick against everything, against indolence, apathy, somnolence, inexperience. The class is the arena." Or, "What Chick transmitted to you was a total, unrestricted love of the subject, the subject being learning, and learning being exercising the brain, laughing, not understanding and not understanding till finally you got it." They all mentioned his emphasis on close readings of texts, the sense of discovery they experienced in his classroom, and the attention and respect he showed for their ideas. His untiring commitment to his students went far beyond the limits of the classroom. Again and again, we read about how Howell Chickering brought the texts to life for his students and how he changed their lives.

His colleagues also enthusiastically supported his nomination. Throughout his career he has consistently team taught courses with his colleagues at Amherst. He participated in three NEH summer institutes, for which he was instrumental in coordinating the teaching materials. That over twenty-five hundred copies of the materials for the institute on the medieval lyric have been distributed confirms that his teaching has reached a broad audience. Many of his students are now his colleagues; they discovered the Middle Ages in his classroom. Their letters attest to the pedagogic model he has provided and continues to provide for them.