Richard Bell and Valentine Hacquard Named 2026 Distinguished Scholar-Teachers

The faculty members have earned one of UMD’s highest honors for excellence in both scholarship and teaching.

By ARHU Staff 

Professor of History Richard Bell and Professor of Linguistics Valentine Hacquard have been named 2026 Distinguished Scholar-Teachers at the University of Maryland.

Established in 1978, the Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Program honors a select group of faculty each year who have demonstrated notable achievement in both scholarship and teaching. Recipients are selected by a panel of former honorees convened by the associate provost for faculty affairs.

Each Distinguished Scholar-Teacher delivers a public lecture on a topic within their academic discipline and receives a $5,000 honorarium to support professional activities. This year, sevenfaculty members from across campus received the distinction.

Bell is a historian of early America who explores the social, cultural and political transformations of the United States from the Revolution through the Civil War. He is the author of “The American Revolution and the Fate of the World” (2025), a prize-winning new book that repositions the nation’s founding as a global event, and “Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped Into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home” (2019), an account of the Reverse Underground Railroad. His work has been supported by fellowships from institutions including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Library of Congress and Yale University, and he is a former Andrew Carnegie Fellow. A frequent public historian, he has lectured for the Smithsonian Institution and appeared on C-SPAN. Bell is the recipient of more than a dozen teaching awards, including the University System of Maryland Board of Regents Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Hacquard works in linguistic semantics—the study of how grammar constrains meaning in human languages—and in first language acquisition. Her focus is on the language of possibility and necessity, belief and desire, statements and questions. Her research has appeared in leading journals in linguistics, philosophy and cognitive science, and has been supported by multiple grants from the National Science Foundation. She is a frequent invited speaker at universities and conferences around the world. In her two decades at Maryland she has advised more than 10 Ph.D. students, all of whom have gone on to postdocs and professorships in linguistics, philosophy, computer science or developmental psychology, and mentored several undergraduate researchers, some of whom have since received Ph.D.s in top linguistics programs.

Learn more about the Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Program. 

Photos of Hacquard (left) and Bell (right) courtesy of the faculty members.