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Tara Menon wins Harvard's Roslyn Abramson Award
The annual award recognizes faculty members who demonstrate exceptional commitment to undergraduate education.
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Pranavi Sharma - Thu, 10, Jul 2025
- 22:43 EDT
- 96
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Tara K. Menon / Facebook
Tara K. Menon, an assistant professor of English at Harvard University, has been named a winner of the 2025 Roslyn Abramson Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching. Menon, who was born in India, raised in Singapore, and now lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, shares the honor with Jason D. Buenrostro, a faculty member in Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology.
The annual award recognizes faculty members who demonstrate exceptional commitment to undergraduate education. Menon, who is completing her first academic book on speech and character in 19th-century novels, told the Harvard Gazette that the award stipend will support that work as well as her research for a second book about anger in fiction.
She said the idea for her second project emerged while giving a Humanities 10 lecture on The Iliad. “Students often enter my classroom because literature provides them pleasure, but I want them to leave it able to think more clearly about the world we inhabit,” Menon told the Harvard Gazette. “What reading novels can do, I promise my students, is to make them better thinkers.”
She added, “My hope is that students of mine recognize literature as an antidote to, but not escape from, our frenetic, polarized, and radically unequal world.”
Menon is also a novelist. Her debut, Under Water, is forthcoming with Summit in the UK (Mar. 12, 2026) and Riverhead in the US.
Hopi Hoekstra, Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, praised both awardees in a statement to the Harvard Gazette. “Tara Menon and Jason Buenrostro both bring exceptional energy, rigor, and dedication to their teaching,” Hoekstra said. “Their commitment to fostering inclusive and vibrant learning environments has left a lasting mark on their students and on our academic community.”
Buenrostro, Alvin and Esta Star associate professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, said he was honored to receive the award, particularly because it affirms the value of teaching and mentorship. He emphasized the importance of hands-on research in his teaching.
“The award inspires us to keep expanding a curriculum centered on hands-on research experiences, particularly in the analysis of large-scale genomic data,” he told the Harvard Gazette.
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