UNC faculty, staff and students are grieving the loss of former colleague Christopher "Jamie" Bishop, a German instructor at Virginia Tech who was among the first killed in the shootings there on Monday.
Bishop worked at Carolina from September 2000 to August 2005. As an academic technology
liaison in UNC's Office of Arts and Sciences Information Services (OASIS), he provided technical support for faculty, staff
and graduate students in several foreign language and international studies
departments. He helped language instructors integrate technology into their teaching. He also taught a German language course in the spring of 2004.
"Jamie's hard work and dedication influenced the way in which many foreign language courses are taught at UNC," reads a written statement released by OASIS. "Jamie's passion for education coupled with his creativity made him a truly exceptional academic technology liaison and an integral part of the Office of Arts and Sciences Information Services."
Clayton Koelb, professor and chair of the department of Germanic languages, told the local media, "Having Jamie as a technian, you almost looked forward to having computer problems.... Usually he would not only take care of the problem you called about, but he found some other problem you didn't know you had and fixed that one, too."
Bishop provided computer hardware and software support for UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences, served as the academic technology and classroom computing consultant in the James M. Johnston Center for Undergraduate Excellence and worked as an academic technologist and web designer for various academic departments.
He was the recipient of an IT Award from the University in 2002 for excellence in Information Technology. He also participated in academic presentations at national conferences that supported his work.
He and his wife Stefanie Hofer moved to Blacksburg, Va.,
in 2005, when she accepted a position as assistant professor of German
in the foreign languages and literature department at Virginia Tech. Hofer
received a Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures at UNC in May 2005.
Bishop at first worked as a computer technician and part-time German instructor at Virginia Tech. In the fall of 2006, he became a full-time German instructor.
He received his B.A. in German Studies (1993) and
M.A. in Germanic Linguistics (1998) at the University of Georgia.
He also studied in Germany
at Universitat Kiel on a Fulbright Fellowship in 1993-94 and at Universitat
Heidelberg in 1995-96.
