Eleanor Johnson has been awarded the 2025 Mark Van Doren Award for Teaching.
The Mark Van Doren Award for Teaching was established in honor of Mark Van Doren GSAS 1920, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, novelist, playwright, critic, editor and biographer, as well as a renowned scholar and legendary Columbia faculty member. It has been awarded annually since 1962 in recognition of a faculty member’s “humanity, devotion to truth and inspiring leadership.”
Johnson, who teaches Literature Humanities, medieval literature and theology, and the literature and cinema of horror, is the first professor to receive the Van Doren Award and Trilling Book Award in consecutive years (and only the fourth professor to receive both awards in the College’s history). She was honored with the Trilling Award in 2024 for Waste and the Wasters: Poetry and Ecosystemic Thought in Medieval England (2023).
She previously published two other scholarly books about medieval literature: Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve (2023) and Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Medieval English Prose, Verse, and Drama (2018).
Her forthcoming book, Scream with Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Cinema, 1968–1980, is a more public-facing book, and will be released by Simon & Schuster in September 2025. She is finishing a book on representations of female monstrosity in western culture.
Congratulations Professor Johnson!
