Eric Roberston has been selected to receive the 2025 Sweet Candy Distinguished Honors Professor Award.
For the past 35 years, the Sweet Candy Company has generously supported the Honors College, funding scholarships for eight students and one professor yearly. Honors students nominate professors to receive the Sweet Candy Distinguished Honors Professor Award. HSAC then selects one professor as a finalist, who is invited to speak at the Honors College Degree Recognition Ceremony the following year.
Eric Robertson is beloved among Honors College students for his dynamic instructional style in HONOR 2211 & 3200. Despite his notoriety among students, he was surprised to hear of his selection as the Sweet Candy Professor. “I teach classes that aren’t the favorite classes of some students. It’s the research and the writing classes. A lot of students are kind of freaked out about writing classes.”
Empowering Students Through Creative, Interdisciplinary Learning
To inspire students to write without fear or anxiety, he decided to alter the style of his classes: “Think of me as your editor instead,” he says. “Students choose their own topics for what they’re going to write about. They’re going to choose exactly the kind of paper or writing project that they think is going to be most useful to them.” He also uses this style as an opportunity to “talk about all these amazing topics that honors students are researching and thinking about.”
Robertson loves the Honors College for its intimate class sizes and the ability to craft courses that he is passionate about. In these unique courses, like the capstone classes for the Human Rights and Resources Integrated Minor and the Ecology and Legacy Integrated Minor, he is able to put his academic specialty into the curriculum. “My graduate work is in what’s called ‘environmental humanities.’ So, I love putting those things together instead of separating out science from art or science from the humanities—it’s all part of the human experience.” He feels that this connective coursework is what makes the Integrated Minors so special.
Scholarship Beyond the Classroom
To continue to pursue his specialty, Robertson works as an editor and author for The Dark Mountain Project, an “environmental humanities journal out of the UK.” The project inspires solutions to climate change by “changing our culture and how we celebrate the year, the stories we tell about birth and death and food and reproduction, sex, relationships, non-human animals. It’s stories about all of that that this organization wants to examine and change.”
Personally, he prefers to write creative nonfiction to put research and real-life experience together in a creative essay. His most recent published piece is one such essay inspired by his time working with students at the Oxford Consortium for Climate Change through Honors. “The Fist of Amenhotep” analyzes “Western cultural metabolisms. It’s using the work of a guy by the name of Gregory Bateson who wants us to look at ourselves as a super organism, kind of like an ant colony, so that we can understand how we use energy and how that energy use is connected to our cultures.”
Looking Ahead
Robertson will be teaching HONOR 3890: Ancient Ideas and Modern Problems (an IR course) in the fall, alongside his usual HONOR 3200 course. In 2026, he plans to teach Urban Ecology: Human Habits and Habitats, a hybrid class with an emphasis on fieldwork, which will serve as a diversity credit and an elective for Ecology and Legacy students.
Congratulations to Eric Robertson on this well-deserved recognition—his inspiring teaching, interdisciplinary passion, and commitment to student growth embody the very best of the Honors College!
McKenna Hall | Journalism Intern, University of Utah Honors College