New Vincent Cheng Prizes in English will Recognize Outstanding Works by English Students

Ensconced in an office brimming with books and papers, Vincent Cheng offers a friendly greeting through the open door. The east facing window reveals a view of campus straight from a college recruitment brochure, with buildings framed by gold and red leaves in riotous autumnal contrast to the still-green grass and the snowcapped peaks of the Wasatch in the distance. Cheng is the Shirley Sutton Thomas Professor of English and Distinguished Professor at the University of Utah, and he has been teaching English literature for 45 years. Sustaining his dedication is, in part, what is housed in the stacks of papers on the shelves in his office; he keeps a copy of the best three or four papers from each class he teaches, along with his comments and notes to students.

In an education environment that is ever more complex and digital, Cheng’s commitment to analog methods is refreshingly straightforward. “There are papers you don’t expect, on combinations of topics you don’t expect, but for me – what I enjoy most is seeing the light bulb go on in a student,” Cheng says, “and it happens once or twice in every course. He relates a story about a student who is a graduating senior and took a course from him two years ago. When she approached Cheng to ask for a letter of recommendation and asked if he remembered who she was, he did – she was one of the “light bulb” students whose final paper earned a spot in his office, having written about navigating a crisis of belief and realizing that her way forward had to be with an incredible brave, radical honesty with herself and her family about the truth of that crisis.

For Cheng, good writing isn’t about any particular style or mechanics (though he does confess to being a bit of an old-fashioned grammarian, having been educated by priests and nuns in Catholic schools with a penchant for diagramming sentences and studying Latin). “I’m less concerned with either format or style so much as the quality of thinking in a paper,” he says. “As an English professor, what we really teach is a specific form of reading and thinking – close reading, literary analysis, what the French call analyse de texte -  to be able to read a text closely enough to draw out interesting observations from it. When a student is able to do that and pull observations into a perceptive argument about the text, it’s a total joy to read and react to.”

This fall, the College of Humanities is announcing the Vincent Cheng Prizes in English, which will recognize outstanding written works by English students. Initially, the prizes will be $250 each for the best papers submitted by University of Utah English majors or minors. A committee of English department faculty will choose the winners, who will be announced each April.

The competition has been generously initiated by Vincent Cheng himself. After a childhood spent in Taiwan, Mexico, Brazil, Canda, the US, and Swaziland, Cheng earned his BA from Harvard University and his PhD in English from Stanford University. He taught for 20 years at the University of Southern California before joining the faculty at the University of Utah in 1999. Honoring his extraordinary teaching over 25 years in the Department of English, Cheng was selected as the 2024 winner of the Calvin S. and JeNeal N. Hatch Prize for Teaching and opted to create a scholarship with the prize money.

Asked what motivated him to create a student prize, Cheng reflected, “I thought to myself, ‘Okay, I’ve won my share of teaching prizes. I don’t need the money; what I’d like to do is see if it can be transferred internally so the whole $5,000 could be set up as a student prize for best papers by English majors or minors for a few years.’ I broached the idea with Morgan [Stinson, the college’s Director of Advancement] and she suggested using it as seed money to create an endowment to make these prizes permanent.”  

In addition to an award-winning teaching career, Cheng has had a productive and highly regarded scholarly record. He has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright, the University of Utah’s Distinguished Teaching Award (2014), and numerous other distinctions. He is the author of many scholarly articles and books, including Joyce, Race, and Empire (1995), Shakespeare and Joyce: A Study of “Finnegans Wake” (1984), “Le Cid”: A Translation in Rhymed Couplets (1987), Inauthentic: The Anxiety Over Culture and Identity (2004), and—most recently—Amnesia and the Nation: History, Forgetting, and James Joyce (2018).

Despite the accolades, Cheng considers his role as a teacher to be the most meaningful. “Over a long career as a professor, I’ve enjoyed being both a scholar and a teacher,” says Cheng. “But teaching (at both the undergraduate and graduate levels) has given me particular joy.  Now, toward the end of my career, I’d like to give some of that joy back—by helping fund prizes for excellent student work and other student-related activities.”
 
To contribute to the Vincent Cheng Prizes in English and create a permanent endowment for these student awards, click here.