UM News

Patricia Abril and David Graf

CORAL GABLES, Fla. (February 9, 2018)—The Faculty Senate voted unanimously at its January meeting to bestow the 2018 Outstanding Teaching Award on Patricia Abril, a vice dean and professor of business law at the Miami Business School, and the Distinguished Faculty Scholar Award on historian and archeologist David F. Graf, a world authority on Rome’s ancient Arabian client-kingdom, Nabataea.

Both professors will receive their awards at the Faculty Senate Awards Ceremony on Monday, April 16, when Stuart A. Miller, chair emeritus and longtime member of the University of Miami Board of Trustees, also will be honored with the Senate’s James W. McLamore Outstanding Service Award. The Senate selected Miller for one of its highest honors in November.

Abril, vice dean of graduate business programs, will be recognized for her excellence and distinguished record of teaching. She joined the Business School faculty in 2004, after practicing law and working for the Univisión Network in a business capacity. Her popular courses, many of which she developed, include all aspects of business law, business ethics, and negotiation.  She is known among her students for her interactive classes and mentorship.

Her research interests include intellectual property and privacy law, and she has served on national committees shaping legislation on privacy.

A graduate of Harvard Law School, Abril has received numerous awards for excellence in teaching at the Business School, and a number of national awards for excellence in scholarship, research, and career achievement.

Graf, the director of the Joint Saudi-American Jurash Project and the Hellenistic Petra Project (Jordan) in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Religious Studies, will be recognized for his outstanding scholarly achievements. He will present a short lecture on his research at the ceremony, which the University community is invited to attend.

A specialist in the Greco-Roman world in the Levant and Arabia, Graf just returned from a leave in Jerusalem, where, as the Seymour Gitin Distinguished Professor at the Albright Institute for Archaeological Research, he wrote a monograph on the history of the Nabataeans, an ancient people who claimed what is now Petra, Jordan, a UNESCO World Heritage site, as the capital of their kingdom.

A member of the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, Graf received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. A 2003 Fulbright Scholar in Saudi Arabia and an NEH fellow in Jordan (2014), he has excavated in Turkey, Israel, Jordan, and Egypt. He is the co-editor of the multi-volume Anchor Bible Dictionary (1992), author of Rome and Its Arabian Frontier from the Nabataeans to the Saracens (1997) and more than 130 scholarly articles.

The awards ceremony will be held at 5 p.m. on Monday, April 16, at the Newman Alumni Center.