Professor Stone Receives Bene Merenti Medal

At the annual Convocation ceremony, held this year on March 10th at Lincoln Center, Professor Elizabeth Stone received the Bene Merenti metal for 40 years of service to Fordham University.

Father McShane lauded Professor Stone, as well as the other award recipients, for not only touching every aspect of life at Fordham, but for also extending their good works to the world at large.

President McShane with Professor Stone

Here is the tribute celebrating Professor Stone’s illustrious career:

“For Professor Elizabeth Stone, a story runs through it. There is her writing about storytelling: her book about family stories, and her beautiful, haunting memoir, A Boy I Once Knew, that braids her own story with the one told in volumes of diaries left to her by a former student after his death from AIDS. There is also her study of stories: her scholarship on biography and autobiography, and recently, her work on last wills and testaments, which, in an original turn, she shows to be a different kind of story, shaped from beyond the grave.

But the stories that truly distinguish the career—and character!—of Elizabeth Stone are of a more personal kind: for generations, she has helped the students in her classes, and especially at The Observer, the Lincoln Center student newspaper she founded and advised for many years. Elizabeth helps her students create not simply their writing but also their own professional lives, their own vocations, their own stories. The Observer has won many awards, but its journalistic distinction is only part of Elizabeth’s own story. More important is the community that she has built there, and in her classrooms generally. It is a community of inquiry, of story building, of support, and of personal creativity—and it is fueled by the generosity of Elizabeth Stone. This generosity is evident through all of her work, for 40 years and counting. Long may it run.”

Congratulations to Professor Stone, and thank you for all you do for your students, for the English Department, and for Fordham University.