Eberly College Graduate Commencement

Judith Gold Stitzel, professor of English and women’s studies, joined the West Virginia University Eberly College of Arts and Sciences in the Department of English in 1965 and retired in 1998. Stitzel was the founding director of the WVU Center for Women’s Studies (now the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies). She has lectured and participated in conferences nationally and internationally and published both fiction and nonfiction in scholarly and literary journals, such as the Colorado Quarterly, Frontiers, A Journal of Women Studies, College English and, most recently, in North Dakota Quarterly an essay about discovering her mother’s unexpected annotations at the age of 89 on an instruction pamphlet, entitled “The Refrigerator Talmud.” “Field Notes from Grief: The First Year,” an account based on her journal documenting life following her husband’s death, has been praised as a support to others who have lost someone they loved and, more widely, as a song of praise for loving relationships.  

Stitzel has had a wide range of achievements and commitments throughout her career. She was the initiator and director of the “WVU Women’s Centenary: Excellence Through Equity,” the two-year celebration of women’s admittance to WVU from 1989 to 1991. She has received the Vandalia Award, Mary Catherine Buswell Award for Outstanding Service to WVU, Minority Students Faculty Recognition Award, International Students Award, CASE West Virginia Teacher of the Year Award, Neil S. Bucklew Social Justice Award and WVU Foundation Outstanding Teacher Award. She was also a CASE silver medalist in the National Professor of the Year Program and a Danforth Association Fellow.