2006 - 2007 Teacher/Scholar of the Year
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Lawrence C. Dodd |
Lawrence Dodd received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Minnesota in 1972. He subsequently served as a tenured faculty member at UT-Austin, Indiana-Bloomington and Colorado-Boulder. During these years he often taught as many as 1100 undergraduates a year, chaired fourteen dissertations, and was recognized five times for teaching excellence. He also developed an international reputation for his applications of game theory, social choice theory and social learning theory to the study of elections, legislative politics and legislative-executive relations in Europe and the United States.
Dodd joined the Political Science Department in 1995 at a point when UF was redoubling the effort to build quality doctoral programs and enhance its national reputation as a research university. The department offered him the Manning J. Dauer, Jr. Eminent Scholar Chair with the expectation that he would draw on his previous experiences to help in the building of its doctoral program, governing processes and research visibility.
Fortunate to join a forward-looking department, Dodd led the restructuring of the department’s doctoral program during his first year at UF. He brought to the task lessons learned in Austin, Bloomington and Boulder, particularly the need for a well-designed program to provide rigorous instruction across the range of methods, theories and interpretive perspectives within political science. He also embraced teaching one of program’s foundation courses, Scope and Epistemologies of Political Science; worked to build a doctoral training field of “Political Institutions” in the department; and engaged in intensive mentoring of doctoral students, twelve of whom have now graduated.
During his twelve years at UF Dodd has continued his scholarly work on Congress, including research during 2003-2004 as a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. Additionally, he extended his research to include the study of democratization in Latin America. He is now engaged in an NSF-funded study of the 2006 elections in Nicaragua jointly undertaken with Leslie Anderson, his Political Science colleague and wife. She is a University Research Foundation Professor at UF.
Alone or in collaboration, Dodd has published four authored and five edited books, one of which is in its eighth edition. He has written over fifty articles and essays. His most recent book, co-authored with Anderson, examines the democratization experience in Nicaragua over the past quarter century. Entitled Learning Democracy, it was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2005.
Dodd’s early program-building efforts in Political Science led to his receipt of UF’s 1998 Superior Accomplishment Award for Faculty Service. These program-building efforts included his creation of an annual Distinguished Scholar Lecture and Awards Banquet and a Department Guest Lecture Series, both initially funded by the Dauer Chair. More recently, he was one of five recipients of UF’s 2006-2007 Doctoral Mentoring Award.
Dodd is the second political scientist to win the Teacher-Scholar of the Year Award since its inception in 1960. The 1964-1965 winner was political scientist Manning J. Dauer, Jr. the individual for whom the Dauer Eminent Scholar Chair is named. Dauer Hall on the Florida campus also is named for Manning Dauer.
