Lee University honored its distinguished alumni this year by presenting awards to individuals from each department. The honoree chosen for the Department of History, Political Science & Humanities was Dr. Hannah Matis.
“I am deeply honored by the Distinguished Alumni Award from the History Department at Lee University,” said Dr. Matis. “The faculty both challenged me intellectually and, through their mentoring, gave me the self-confidence to pursue my undergraduate courses and then to go on to succeed in graduate school.”
Originally from Maine, Dr. Matis was a double major in history and English at Lee. While at Lee, she was chosen to participate in the Cambridge program, as well as the study abroad program in the United Kingdom that is offered each May.
Upon graduation from Lee in 2003, Dr. Matis was accepted to the MA program in Medieval Studies at Durham University in England. Following her completion of that degree, she returned to Lee and taught for one semester.
While teaching at Lee, Dr. Matis was accepted into the PhD program at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville to pursue training in classical languages before going on to the Medieval Studies program at Notre Dame, where she completed her doctorate last year.
"Hannah was a gifted student and has now been recognized as an equally gifted scholar,” said Dr. Robert Barnett, distinguished professor of history at Lee. “As a representative of our program and of Lee in general, we couldn’t be prouder of Hannah as she personifies those qualities of passion, intellectualism and talent to which we would hope all our students aspire.”
Dr. Matis is now a post-doctoral fellow at Notre Dame. Her main area of interest, among others, is Celtic monasticism.