For bringing curiosity, creative energy, and dedication to her students, colleagues, and the entire Bowdoin community, Associate Professor of English Ann Kibbie has been selected by the Alumni Council to receive the Alumni Award for Faculty and Staff.
Kibbie arrived at Bowdoin in 1989 with a bachelor’s degree from Boston University and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Since then, her scholarship has broken new ground by investigating the interplay of the historical, cultural, economic, and scientific elements that underpin Restoration and eighteenth-century British literature. She has also been praised for firing the imaginations of her students and breathing life into historical and fictional characters and the worlds that they inhabited through her research.
It did not take Kibbie long to establish her reputation as an exceptional teacher. In 1992, she received the Sydney B. Karofsky Prize for Junior Faculty, awarded on the basis of student evaluations to an outstanding Bowdoin teacher who “best demonstrates the ability to impart knowledge, inspire enthusiasm, and stimulate intellectual curiosity.” One of her former students wrote that Kibbie had “an enthusiasm for literature that was contagious” and a love for teaching and for those she teaches “that is impossible to overlook.
Kibbie’s publications and interests include the sentimental novel, Gothic literature, film noir, representations of money and capital in early modern literature, the nexus of law and literature, and interdisciplinary studies that link literature to nineteenth-century medicine. Her 2019 book, Transfusion: Blood and Sympathy in the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, for example, explores the profound impact that the revolutionary medical practice of human-to-human blood transfusion had on the popular imagination.
Kibbe’s creative approach to teaching, meanwhile, is demonstrated by a collaborative project undertaken in her class Imagining London in the Eighteenth Century, in which the students generated maps that allowed them to track movements of real-life and fictional figures around London.
The award also recognizes Kibbie’s service to the Bowdoin community, both within and outside the classroom. In addition to working on a number of campus committees, Kibbie was the faculty liaison to the Alumni Council for several years, working closely and effectively with council members, Alumni Fund directors, and the BASIC National Advisory Board, while ensuring that the interests and concerns of the faculty were represented.
The award salutes Kibbie for her outstanding and innovative scholarship, her dedication to teaching, her willingness to undertake committee and administrative work, and her contributions the various groups that serve the alumni community.
The award, along with others, will be presented during Reunion Weekend (May 28–31, 2026).
