Teacher-Scholar Legacies: Rebecca Thomas
By Grant McAllister, Associate Professor of German
Professor of German Dr. Rebecca Thomas’ career has been quite the adventure. A native Californian, Rebecca completed her undergraduate and bachelor’s degrees at UCLA before moving eastward to pursue her doctoral degree at Ohio State. After working abroad and perfecting her Bavarian dialect in Bad Feilnbach in 1979, she received her Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in 1992. She then nurtured her zeal and love of teaching German through positions at Georgia Tech and at Georgia Southern before Professors Larry West and Tim Sellner convinced her to join the Wake Forest faculty in 1993. Over the next 32 years, she would become a model of the teacher-scholar ideal in the Department of German and Russian, a generous and compassionate guide to generations of students, a dedicated scholar, and one of the most respected and beloved members of the Wake Forest community. We have all come to know her warmth, sharp wit, understanding, and her unyielding dedication to the profession.
Students will forever remember Rebecca’s commitment to learning and how her dedication extended far beyond the classroom. She gave freely of her time and energy, offering extra help and encouragement whenever it was needed. For Rebecca, education was never confined to a schedule or a location (the story of her teaching German at home with a one-week-old baby boy is well-known!); it was a relationship between teacher and student, rooted in care, dedication, and respect.
Her time spent in the Dean’s Office was equally profound. In 2010, Rebecca accepted the offer to serve as Associate Dean of the Faculty, and later as co-interim Dean of the College. She led with purpose, strength, empathy, and fairness, earning the admiration and trust of her colleagues; one even called her “the most humane administrator the campus has ever had.” As an administrator, she placed her colleagues first, always mindful of their lives, dreams, and aspirations, and how university policy impacted these varied realities.
After leaving the Dean’s Office in 2015, she became the director of the Flow House in Vienna. Having studied abroad as a graduate student and having taught for two decades at the AIMS Summer Music Institute in Graz, Austria, Rebecca understood well the opportunities for personal and intellectual growth that time abroad affords. She brought these experiences with her as she set out to fortify and invigorate the program with new leadership and oversight that improved the students’ experience abroad and simplified the role of the resident professors. She completed the hard work and undertook the tough decisions not for personal gain or recognition; she did it to make her successor’s work easier.
Rebecca Thomas retires leaving behind a legacy measured in the countless lives she touched — students who found inspiration in her classrooms; colleagues who found circumspection in her advice and compassion in her leadership; and friends who found loyalty and love.
As she embarks on her next adventure, with her best friend and husband, Professor Chuck Thomas, we honor her exemplary sense of humanity and her contagious commitment to making the world a little better.