2026 Award Recipient
Congratulations to Dr. Jamie Rankin, the 2026 Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching Recipient!
Baylor University has named Jamie Rankin, Ph.D., University Lecturer in German at Princeton University and inaugural director of the Princeton Center for Language Study, as the 2026 recipient of the Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching. The Cherry Award honor was announced during the Spring Baylor Faculty Meeting hosted by Provost Nancy Brickhouse, Ph.D.
Baylor’s Robert Foster Cherry Award is a prestigious national teaching award designed to honor great teachers, stimulate discussion in the academy about the value of teaching and encourage departments and institutions to recognize their own great teachers. Along with a record of distinguished scholarship, individuals nominated for the Cherry Award have proven themselves to be extraordinary teachers with positive, inspiring and long-lasting effects on students.
As the 2026 Cherry Award recipient, Rankin will receive a $250,000 award -- the single, largest monetary reward presented by a college or university to an individual for exceptional teaching – and an additional $25,000 to the German Department at Princeton to further Baylor University’s commitment to great teaching. Rankin will teach in residence at Baylor for a semester.
“Dr. Jamie Rankin is a gifted scholar and teacher whose pedagogical innovations shape the way German is taught in colleges and universities across the United States” said Cherry Award committee chair Kevin D. Dougherty, Ph.D.,, professor of sociology, Master Teacher and associate vice provost for faculty honorifics. “In his courses as well as through his textbooks and online resources, Dr. Rankin helps transform students into global citizens. His significant contributions to second-language acquisition make Dr. Rankin a fitting recipient of the Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching.”
Rankin visited Baylor in October 2025 to present his Cherry Award finalist lecture, “Choose Your Words Carefully: Transforming Language Learning through Research-based Vocabulary Acquisition” and said he looks forward to returning to Baylor, this time to teach.
“At the end of my visit to Baylor as a finalist, having met so many wonderful people on the Cherry Award committee and in the Department of Modern Languages & Cultures, I thought to myself: ‘I would love to win this just for the opportunity to work alongside these colleagues,’” Rankin said. “They were all so genuine, so committed to teaching, so enthusiastic about their academic fields, that I came away hoping to get to know them and learn from them. That and attending as many Baylor basketball games as possible, of course.”
For Rankin, a great teacher needs skill, patience and empathy.
“It’s always seemed to me that the most effective teachers – and that includes coaches, choir directors, mentors of any kind – are people who can put themselves imaginatively in the position of someone who doesn’t yet have the knowledge or skills in whatever is being taught,” he said.
Rankin specializes in second-language acquisition, teacher training and curriculum development, with work published in Die Unterrichtspraxis and The Modern Language Journal. In 2015, he was appointed as the inaugural director of the Princeton Center for Language Study, supporting instructors and students across languages with workshops, research resources and professional development.
A recipient of Princeton University’s President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, Rankin is a co-author of Handbuch zur deutschen Grammatik, now in its sixth edition, and the creator of der|die|das, an online introductory German textbook that integrates second-language acquisition research with vocabulary learning. He also has developed a range of digital teaching tools, including an interactive website designed to support language instruction on Zoom during the pandemic.
A member of the Princeton faculty since 1991, Rankin earned his A.B. in music at Wheaton College, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University.