The S. Mary Florence Burns Award for Teaching Excellence and Impact was presented to David Siegel, Ph.D., assistant professor of political science at St. Joseph’s University, New York (SJNY). The honor aims to recognize SJNY faculty who are a guiding light for driving academic and professional excellence.
Selected from a pool of highly qualified candidates, Dr. Siegel was recognized as a faculty member who embodies the characteristics and legacy of St. Joe’s alumna and former administrator and professor S. Mary Florence Burns ‘46, who recently celebrated her 100th birthday.
While the award recognizes faculty on the Brooklyn campus, Dr. Siegel splits his time between teaching in Clinton Hill and Patchogue.
A graduate of Syracuse University, his teaching experience spans nearly 15 years working as an adjunct and assistant professor at several colleges and universities before joining SJNY in 2021. While educating, guiding and uplifting students, he continued along with own academic path, earning an M.S. in global affairs from New York University and his Ph.D. in political science from The Graduate Center, City University of New York.
Over the course of his four years at St. Joseph’s, Dr. Siegel has taught several courses. A personal favorite is international law.
“It’s one of the few topics I teach for which there are some definitive answers,” Dr. Siegel said. “If we want to know what a rule of international law is, we can consult textual sources. There are well-established and defined processes for knowing whether and how certain rules apply to particular states, though still room for debate, analysis, and interpretation.
Dr. Siegel’s SJNY-100 seminar this academic year delved into the politics of the dystopian future.
“We worked with a lot of fiction—books and film—it was a fun and thought-provoking and we got to focus more on the process of thinking and writing than on any substantive material. The students seemed to enjoy it and I’m looking
forward to developing that course further and teaching it again in the future,” he shared.
Past winners of the S. Mary Florence Burns Award have included Raymond D’Angelo, Ph.D., (professor and chairperson of the department of sociology); Rosemarie Hamlin, M.S., CCC-SL (assistant professor of communication studies) and Michael J. Hanophy, Ph.D. (professor and chairperson of the department of biology).
