KSC Professors Sander Lee and Klaus Bayr Receive Faculty Research Awards
KEENE, N.H. 5/2/06 - Dr. Sander Lee, professor of philosophy, and Dr. Klaus Bayr, professor of geography, have been chosen to receive the Keene State College Award for Faculty Distinction in Research and Scholarship for 2006. They are the fifth and sixth recipients of the award, which recognizes contributions to research and scholarship at Keene State.
Dr. Lee is being honored for his pioneering work on the intersection of aesthetics, ethics, and popular culture and his scholarship on philosophical issues in Holocaust and genocide studies. For more than 20 years, he has analyzed film and television from a philosophical perspective. He has published many essays on the topic, and a book about the intellectual dimensions of Woody Allen's films, Eighteen Woody Allen Films Analyzed.
In 2004, he combined his areas of interests in the essay "Scapegoating, the Holocaust, and McCarthyism in Billy Wilders Stalag 17," which appeared in Film and Philosophy. And in 2005 his essay "Rights, Morality, and Faith in the Light of the Holocaust" appeared in the anthology Genocide and Human Rights: A Philosophical Guide, edited by John Roth.
Dr. Lee has served as president of the Northern New England Philosophy Association (2002-03) and the International Society for Value Inquiry (1988-1993). In 1988 he helped found and served as the first president of the Society for the Philosophical Study of Genocide and the Holocaust.
"Sander is an inspirational teacher. He sets high standards for his students and works closely with them to help them meet those standards," says Ann Atkinson, chair of the Department of Communication, Journalism, and Philosophy. "His scholarship enriches his classroom, our department, Keene State College, and his discipline."
Dr. Bayr's current research has four focuses: analyzing snow measurements for NASA (in the Monadnock region), glacier research in Austria in conjunction with NASA, developing and publishing maps and atlases for area schools (The New Hampshire Atlas, The Vermont Atlas, The Rhode Island Atlas, and The Electronic Atlas of New Hampshire and Vermont), and examining rice cultivation in Malaysia.
For more than three decades Dr. Bayr has pursued numerous research opportunities that have benefited the College. A National Science Foundation grant he received established KSC's first Geographic Information System (GIS) Remote Sensing Laboratory, which serves traditional students and also continuing education students in a GIS Certification Program that he initiated. He has integrated students into several of his funded projects, such as the New Hampshire, Vermont, and Rhode Island atlas projects. Dr. Bayr and his student assistants worked on ground truthing for the Terra Satellite on the Earth Observing System by NASA to measure amounts of snowfall in the Keene area. This information was used by NASA to verify and compare the findings of the satellite with the actual data. KSC was eventually the only academic institution in the United States to be working with NASA in this way.
Dr. Bayr has received the New Hampshire Professor of the Year award (1996) from the Carnegie Foundation and the KSC Distinguished Teacher of the Year award (1995).
"No other faculty member that I know at KSC has achieved so many scholarship accomplishments over such a long time period," say Jo Beth Mullens, geography professor and department chair. "Clearly, Dr. Bayr is an extremely active and accomplished scholar."