Dr. Margaret Supplee Smith

By Nathan O. Hatch
February 20, 2014

We speak often about teacher-scholars at Wake Forest: people who artfully combine a love for educating and challenging students with a passion for academics and scholarship. There is no better example of the teacher-scholar ideal than Dr. Margaret “Peggy” Supplee Smith, the 2014 Medallion of Merit recipient.

When Dr. Smith came to Wake Forest in 1979, she walked into the brand-new Scales Fine Arts Center and was handed something of a blank canvas. At the time, the University did not have a formalized art curriculum. With the help of a handful of talented, determined colleagues, Dr. Smith built our Art Department into what it is today.

In the classroom, her passion for art history and modern architecture quickly captured the attention of her students. Dr. Smith sparked curiosity and enthusiasm by showing her students what it meant to be inquisitive and passionate. Her interest in architecture was second only to the love she had for her students. Perhaps the greatest compliment to her ability to captivate young minds was that students with no prior interest in the topic would enroll in her class just to learn from her. In most cases, she cultivated in them a lifelong appreciation of architecture. Her widely appreciated lectures, combined with a fine sense of humor and an ever-questioning intellect, have made her a sought-after professor, able academic leader and friend.

Beyond her dedication to her students and the Art Department, Dr. Smith collaborated with fellow faculty members to create the Women and Gender Studies program at Wake Forest. She became involved with Reynolda House and other community projects, most recently for example, the New Winston Museum. For more than a decade, she researched and coJ wrote a book, with her good friend Emily Wilson, centered on North Carolina women of achievement in many realms.

After that much-admired and widely read book, Dr. Smith followed her love for architecture and skiing to pursue the story of American ski resorts. As one of the few architecture historians in the country, she wove a fascinating text of social, historical, architectural and environmental richness that avails her expertise to those who never had the opportunity to sit in her classes.

In gratitude for her decades of leadership, ingenuity and enthusiasm as a teacher-scholar, her pioneering spirit that built our distinguished Art Department, her dedication to her greater community and her lifelong commitment to the spirit of Pro$Humanitate, Wake Forest University confers its highest honor, the Medallion of Merit, upon Dr. Margaret Supplee Smith on this Twentieth day of February, Two Thousand Fourteen.