Background
He was the son of Michael Bishop, an award-winning science fiction author Bishop grew up in Pine Mountain, Georgia, and earned his bachelor"s and master"s degrees in German from the University of Georgia.
He was the son of Michael Bishop, an award-winning science fiction author Bishop grew up in Pine Mountain, Georgia, and earned his bachelor"s and master"s degrees in German from the University of Georgia.
University of Georgia.
He was among those shot in the Virginia Technical shootings. 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.
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."
While at University of North Carolina, 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 left University of North Carolina in 2004 for Virginia Technical, where he was an instructor in German, and taught information technology for Vermont"s Faculty Development Institute. In addition to being a German teacher, Bishop was a multimedia artist, photographer and graphic designer, who spoke of "changing the world with art".
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."
Bishop was killed on April 16, 2007, during the Virginia Technical shootings, while teaching an Elementary German class.
A scholarship fund was established in Jamie Bishop"s name for German majors at Virginia Technology
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.