The award recognizes and celebrates the commitment of outstanding University of Virginia faculty members to leadership, scholarship, and citizenship, the qualities used as criteria in the selection of Jefferson Scholars. As will be the case with future annual honorees, Mr. Ramazani was selected by a panel of Jefferson Scholars alumni. The award includes $5000 to support future research and inquiry, and the opportunity to address the general University community on the ideals of leadership and citizenship as related to the recipient’s field of scholarship.

Mr. Ramazani's lecture included reflections on his own student experience at the University, the element of service in teaching, and the evolution of his perceptions of leadership, scholarship, and citizenship. He encouraged the audience to consider how they will "fight the world's fight:"

So I put the same question to you, tailoring three versions of it to the Jefferson Scholars’ creed. First, as a citizen, how will you fight the world’s fight? At the University, for example, what will you do to continue to broaden the civility we prize here, perhaps especially in resistance to the vicious intimidation recently directed at African American and other members of our community, putting at risk the spirit of free inquiry and give-and-take so precious and vital at our university?

Second, as a scholar, how will you fight the world’s fight? What will you do, for example, to continue to provide a model of the driven, unrelenting, unembarrassed student scholar, seriously and passionately pursuing intellectual work inside and outside the classroom, collaborating on research with professors and fellow students, and thus helping to drive the stake in the heart of the outmoded stereotype of UVa as a party school?

And third, as a leader who is also a scholar, how will you fight the world’s fight? For example, what will those of you who go on, as I’d imagined I would, as diplomats or politicians or public officials, do to nourish public policy with scholarship—to promote environmental and health policies that, instead of ignoring, are deeply informed by scientific research; foreign and defense policies that, instead of turning a deaf ear to scholars who know the most about other regions of the world, reach out and make use of their expertise; economic and social policies that, instead of being short-sighted, reflect the best long-term thinking about changes in the nature of the global workplace and our role within it?

The Jefferson Scholars Foundation believes the annual Faculty Prize and lecture will foster a vital and ongoing dialogue about Jeffersonian ideals that transcends the specific confines of the classroom.

"We seek to encourage the University community as a whole—and not just Jefferson Scholars—to embrace our common Jeffersonian legacy, and to confront the unique benefits, challenges, and obligations that it imparts," said Daniel W. Cunnane (Col, JS ’99) in his introduction of Mr. Ramazani.

The lecture served as the opening event for the first-ever Jefferson Scholars Alumni Reunion. Attended by 124 Jefferson Scholars alumni, the reunion included three days of intellectual and social opportunities at locations around Grounds and Charlottesville.

R. Jahan Ramazani graduated from the University with highest distinction in 1981 and joined the faculty in 1988, after earning an M.Phil. at Oxford and a Ph.D. at Yale. He was Chair of the Faculty Senate from 1997 to 1998, and then held the Mayo NEH Distinguished Teaching Professorship between 2001 and 2004. He is the author of three books on modern and contemporary poetry: Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy, and the Sublime (Yale University Press, 1990), Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (University of Chicago Press, 1994), and The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English ( University of Chicago Press , 2001). Poetry of Mourning was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2003, Professor Ramazani edited the third edition of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. This year, he edited The Norton Anthology of English Literature’s volume on The Twentieth Century and After. He has won the Guggenheim Fellowship, the NEH Fellowship, and the Rhodes Scholarship.