The Stanford Alumni Association awarded history professor Caroline Winterer the Richard W. Lyman Award on Feb. 24.
According to the Alumni Association website, the award honors faculty who extend Stanford’s intellectual community, fostering meaningful connections between Stanford and its alumni through teaching, speaker engagements and educational programs.
“The Richard W. Lyman Award recognizes faculty members who have made significant contributions to alumni education and engagement,” Director of Alumni Education Imee DuBose said. “Its purpose is to honor those faculty who embody the spirit of lifelong learning and who have fostered meaningful connections between Stanford and its alumni.”
DuBose said Winterer’s sustained engagement with alumni played a major role in her selection.
“Professor Winterer stood out due to her exceptional commitment to fostering relationships with alumni over the past 16 years,” DuBose said. “Her contributions have not only enriched the alumni experience, but have also reinforced community building within these groups.”
Winterer currently serves as chair of Stanford’s Department of History and holds the William Robertson Coe Professorship of History and American studies. She is also a professor of history, classics and education. Winterer said the recognition came as a welcome surprise.
“One donate’s one’s time and energies to the alumni just freely and joyfully and with no expectation of an award,” Winterer said. “So this was just very lovely.”
For more than 16 years, Winterer has participated in alumni programs ranging from regional club events and Reunion Homecoming to Sierra Camp and the university’s travel trips. During these programs, she shares her scholarship with alumni around the world, with a distinctive style.
On these travel trips, Winterer is known for delivering informal mini-lectures, called “snack lectures” – or, as she calls them, “snectures.” These spontaneous talks often take place on buses between destinations, where Winterer builds on the group’s shared experiences at historical sites, such as New England, Cinque Terre, Sicily and Piedmonte.
“You’ve just seen something together, whether a temple or a monastery, and everyone is excited,” Winterer said. “So I’ll strike while the iron is hot and talk about how a historian might think about it.”
Winterer specializes in American history before 1900. Her work explores how people in the past understood their world.
“I’m really interested in how people think,” Winterer said. “The millions of people who walked the earth before us left fingerprints for us — little traces of their existence. I love trying to bring those people to life again.”
For many alumni, these experiences on her trips rekindle the curiosity they first discovered at Stanford, and Winterer believes that curiosity is central to both education and community.
“Caroline Winterer has an extraordinary gift for turning history into connection — between ideas and places, scholarship and curiosity, Stanford and its alumni,” said Howard Wolf ’80, vice president for alumni affairs and Stanford Alumni Association president, to the association website. “She exemplifies the very best of faculty service and Stanford citizenship.”