From “Today@CSU”

CSU’s Alumni Association and the Student Alumni Connection are proud to announce the 2011 Best Teacher Award recipients.

Best of the best: The 2011 Best Teacher Award recipients are Katherine Browne, Debbie Crans, Catherine DiCesare, Greg Dickinson, Jennifer Krafchick, and Subhas Karan Venayagamoorthy.

The six teachers were selected from just under 300 nominations.

This year’s Best Teachers will be honored at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, April 7, in the Lory Student Center North Ballroom.

Catherine DiCesare, Ph.D., associate professor, Department of Art, College of Liberal Arts.
M.A. Syracuse University, Florence, Italy and Syracuse, N.Y.; Ph.D. University of New Mexico.

Professor DiCesare’s specialty is Pre-Columbian art history. Her research focuses on sacred images and ritual practices among the Aztecs of central Mexico before and after the conquest. Dr. DiCesare also teaches a variety of classes on western European art, including the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods, and periodically takes students to study early Italian Renaissance art on-site for the department’s summer study abroad program in Castiglion Fiorentino, Tuscany.

In 2009, she published Sweeping the Way: Divine Transformation in the Aztec Festival of Ochpaniztli. This study investigated colonial manuscript illustrations of a Pre-Columbian festival known as Ochpaniztli and addresses particularly the many ways in which Christian friars and native Mexicans together tried to represent and understand outlawed ritual practices and images of sacred beings. Her present research continues to focus on Aztec ritual imagery.

Read full article about all six winners, and information about attending the awards ceremony.