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Margaret Oakes receives SCICU Excellence in Teaching Award
Margaret J. Oakes, Department of English.
Furman University’s Margaret J. Oakes is this year’s recipient of the South Carolina Independent Colleges and Universities (SCICU) Excellence in Teaching Award.
Since 2006, SCICU annually recognizes and celebrates outstanding professors through the award program. A faculty member from each of the 21 institutions comprising SCICU is selected using criteria determined by the respective colleges. Recipients were honored April 22 at a special dinner and awarded professional development grants.
Oakes, a professor of English and chair of the humanities interdisciplinary minor, specializes in early modern British poetry and drama as well as detective fiction. While Oakes’s teaching focuses on her specialty areas—Donne, Shakespeare and other 16th- and 17th-century literature—she teaches everything from “The Iliad” to Jesmyn Ward.
A highlight of her teaching career is her work coordinating the first-year humanities course sequence, an interdisciplinary experience that engages Furman’s best and brightest. Oakes has also led study away programs to the United Kingdom, Ireland and Italy. For decades, she has guided students toward successful careers through professional development classes that prepare them for life beyond graduation, a key component of The Furman Advantage.
Oakes holds a bachelor’s degree in English and a Juris Doctor from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a master’s degree in English from Northwestern University and a doctorate in English and humanities from Stanford University.
After a career as a real estate securities lawyer, she returned to graduate school and joined the Furman faculty in 1996. She has published on George Herbert, Francis Bacon, J.K. Rowling, Sara Paretsky and Dorothy Sayers. Her book about gender presentation in Shakespeare, “To Gender or Not to Gender: Casting and Characters for 21st Century Shakespeare,” was published by McFarland Books in 2024.
Outside the classroom, Oakes serves on numerous university committees in support of Furman faculty, staff and students. She sponsors the English honor society and mentors an ever-growing flock of Furman alumni, whose friendships continue to grow.