Jamie Bishop

Christopher James Bishop (November 9, 1971 – April 16, 2007), known as Jamie Bishop, was an instructor of German language at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, as well as an artist and craftsman. He was among those shot and killed in the Virginia Tech shooting. He was the son of Michael Bishop, an award-winning science fiction author. He was a Fulbright scholar at Christian-Albrechts University in Kiel, Germany. He helped run an exchange program at Darmstadt University of Technology in Germany. Bishop spent four years living in Germany, where (according to his web site) he "spent most of his time learning the language, teaching English, drinking large quantities of wheat beer and wooing a certain fraulein," Stephanie Hofer, who later became his wife. From 1995 to 1996 he taught at the Zentrales Sprachlabor of Ruprecht-Karls University of Heidelberg, and collected survey data for his Master's Thesis, Jugendsprache: a critical study of German "Youth Language."

Before teaching at Virginia Tech, Bishop worked in the Office of Arts and Sciences Information Services (OASIS) as an academic-technology liaison at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he provided technical support for faculty and staff members and graduate students. While at UNC, in addition to instructing German language classes, he developed a software package for students to digitally record and submit spoken language assignments to professors, a significant improvement over the previously used magnetic tape method. He received an OASIS Director's Choice Award in 2004. He produced the cover art for Michael Jasper's book Gunning for the Buddha, and for five of Michael Bishop's books; and designed "ingenious pieces of furniture." One of Bishop's "haunting" wrap-around book jackets is featured on the anthology Passing for Human, edited by Michael Bishop and Steve Utley.

According to Michael Bishop, Jamie "spoke German like a native, understood computers inside out, played drums in a basement band, bicycled and hiked, followed the fortunes of the Atlanta Braves as obsessively as his mother, grandmothers, and I did, and made friends everywhere. He was a people lover from the get-go, and his energy levels put mine to shame."

Memorials A scholarship fund was established in Jamie Bishop's name for German majors at Virginia Tech.

The annual "Jamie Bishop Memorial Award for an Essay Not in English" was established by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts as a prize for an essay on the subject of science fiction or speculative fiction not written in English, open to students and scholars presenting papers at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts.