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CARA Award for Excellence in Teaching
The recipient of the 2007 CARA Award for Excellence
in Teaching Medieval Studies is the distinguished historian
and intercontinental ambassador of learning János Bak.
János Bak, a Hungarian by birth, studied with
Percy Ernst Schramm, the celebrated historian of medieval
monarchy, in Germany. He might have made a distinguished career
in Hungary itself if circumstances had been different, but
he emigrated from his native land in the fateful year 1956.
He found a welcome reception in Canada and taught for almost
twenty-five years at the University of British Columbia before
returning permanently to a newly liberalized Hungary in 1990.
The years at the University of British Columbia
were filled with first-rate research and publications, service
to the academic community, and masterly teaching. Bak provided
students and scholars with a handbook, Medieval Narrative
Sources (in English and German), that has proved so valuable
in research, and he did further source-based work with the
Decreta regni mediaevalis Hungariae. He was the founder in
1985 of Majestas, the International Association for the Study
of Rulership, which publishes the journal of the same name.
In every way he has contributed to the growth of knowledge
of the Middle Ages-by writing for dictionaries and encyclopedias,
serving on editorial boards, organizing conferences, and translating
major works by scholars of the caliber of Erik Fügedi and
Aron Gurevich.
The years 1956 to 1990 were not easy ones
for Central and East European scholars. They could not readily
travel to the West to meet their colleagues or bring their
colleagues to their institutions. An underlying theme of János
Bak's intellectual and personal life in these years was his
work to ameliorate the conditions of the professional lives
of his Central and East European colleagues. He was tireless
in his efforts to break through the bureaucratic red tape
and political pressures that inhibited travel and contact
of all sorts. He managed on many occasions to help these colleagues
get permission to attend international conferences, to procure
stipends for research, and to remain supplied, as far as possible,
with up-to-date publications in their fields, to which otherwise
they would not have had access.
A career of such brilliance and humaneness
could have been crowned with the CARA Award simply for what
János Bak had achieved by 1990, if he had chosen to rest on
his laurels. Of course, he did not choose to do so. With the
changes in the political situation of Europe he returned to
Hungary and helped to organize the Department of Medieval
Studies at the Central European University. The university,
with the generous support of George Soros, initiated a new
era of enriching academic life in the post-Communist world.
At the very center of the project for the last fifteen years
has stood the wise and imposing figure of János Bak.
A festschrift in his honor bears a title that
sums up well the wonderful career of this new Odysseus: The
Man of Many Devices, Who Wandered Full Many Ways.
Respectfully submitted,
WILLIAM CHESTER
JORDAN LAURA WEIGERT
TIMOTHY GRAHAM, Chair
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