UW graduate student (English) Jentery Sayers was chosen as one of just nine students in the nation to receive the K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award from the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U).

Each year, the award is given to graduate students who display promise as future leaders of higher education. Sayers attended the AAC&U Annual Meeting, in Washington, D.C., where the award was presented.

“It was a convention for deans, presidents and university staff, with an emphasis on liberal art schools,” said Sayers, who is also a Society of Scholars Fellow at the Simpson Center for the Humanities. “They were interested in what all of us were doing in the classroom.”

Sayers has designed and taught more than 10 courses at Cornish College of the Arts, UW Bothell and UW Seattle, on topics ranging from literary modernism to new media.

“In other classes, I feel like teachers teach to get to an endpoint, but for him, every single process is really important,” said Michelle Mascardo, a senior who has taken two of Sayers’ classes. “It wasn’t just about getting to that endpoint.”

Sayers believes that he learns from his students as well.

“I learn from my previous classes to make new ones,” Sayers said.

That should come as no surprise, since it’s actually the past that interests Sayers the most, especially in dealing with technology.

“How can you use these new technologies to study the past?” Sayers asked, “It’s particularly interesting when you can learn the technical history, but the cultural questions are also really interesting to me.”

Sayers’ dissertation examines the cultural history of sound reproduction dating back to 1860. He also works on audio documentaries dealing with different eras in music, such as civil-rights songs, as a research intern at radio station KEXP this quarter.

Sayers has already received recognition for his innovative classes, and he hasn’t stopped designing new ones. Sayers’ newest class, entitled “Modernism Now: Digital Platforms for Studying Fiction,” will be offered in the spring as ENGL 242. Students will use blogs and Twitter, and compose Web texts to share their work.

“The idea with the class is there’s all this stuff in modernization at the turn of the 20th century, and 100 years later, we’re in a similar situation,” Sayers said. “A lot of people are obsessed with newness. And new has a history.”

Reach contributing writer Bryden McGrath at development@dailyuw.com.