The Princeton University chapter of Phi Beta Kappa will present its annual awards for excellence in undergraduate teaching to Shilo Brooks, lecturer in politics, and Andrea Graham, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.

The awards will be presented at a ceremony on Monday, May 26.

The students outline the criteria for excellence in teaching as skill in instruction, commitment to working with and building relationships with undergraduates, and the ability to spark students’ intellectual interests. Each winner is presented with a plaque.

Shilo Brooks

Shilo Brooks

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Sameer A. Khan/Fotobuddy

Brooks specializes in the history of political philosophy, politics and literature, and statesmanship. He is the author of “Nietzsche’s Culture War: The Unity of the Untimely Meditations” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

He joined Princeton’s faculty three years ago, and the rise of his reputation as a deeply engaging instructor in the classroom has been swift. The first course he taught, “Topics in American Statesmanship: The Art of Statesmanship and the Political Life,” drew 40 students in spring 2023. The following spring, the same course filled a lecture hall with nearly 250 students, becoming one of the largest courses in the department, with a similar enrollment this spring. 

Brooks’ students explore the lives of great leaders from Cyrus the Great and Machiavelli to Teddy Roosevelt, Frederick Douglass and Sandra Day O’Connor. “The course invites students to reflect on the nature of greatness and what it means to find meaning and purpose in the wider world,” said senior and Marshall Scholar Nolan Musslewhite, adding that Brooks is “a phenomenal rhetorician.”

Another student said that “seeing Shilo Brooks teach is like watching Picasso paint.”

Students also commended his dedication to the student experience outside the classroom, both as the executive director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and by leading a cohort of Princeton students in a seminar on great books each summer at Jesus College, Oxford.

Brooks earned his bachelor’s degree from the Great Books Program at St. John’s College, Annapolis, and his Ph.D. from Boston College.

Andrea L. Graham

Andrea Graham

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Sameer A. Khan/Fotobuddy

Senior Ron Shvartsman remembers Andrea Graham’s “Immune Systems: From Molecules to Populations” course as a lesson in the power of narrative.

Over the semester, she “wove a tale of conflict that involves trillions of soldiers, plays out on battlefields stretching from a single cell to the entire world, and which has raged for hundreds of millions of years,” Shvartsman said. “This is the story of the immune system.”

Graham is the faculty director of the Stony Ford Center for Ecological Studies at Princeton and served as a faculty co-director of the Global Health Program from 2015 to 2022. Her lab focuses on issues in immunology, utilizing quantitative methods drawn from evolutionary ecology.

In Graham’s signature immunology course, she takes this famously complicated topic and presents it in a way that helps the students themselves feel like storytellers. In assignments, they are encouraged to find imaginative ways to think about the science — by imagining, for example, how a parasite might exploit the weakness in the northern elephant seal’s immune system and then how the seal might fight the parasite.

Shvartsman also observed how thoughtfully Graham answered students’ questions, with a sensitivity to helping those with little science background feel as confident as those with more experience in molecular biology.

Graham earned her B.A. from Mount Holyoke College and her Ph.D. from Cornell University.