Brett Karpf ’26 walks to make sense of the world. He walks because he loves to walk. And he walks because he has to, for reasons he’s still trying to understand. Beginning in August, fully funded by a fellowship from the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, Karpf will spend a full year walking — and thinking about walking. His proposal, “Seeking Meaning in Motion,” was one of 39 winning projects out of 155 Watson finalists nationally. �ֲ���ý is one of 40 participating colleges that can nominate up to four students each year. 

Karpf, who grew up in and around New York City, cannot remember a time when he was not in motion. Shuttling by car, subway, and bus from place to place, movement settled him. It was when he began attending a summer camp just an hour away from �ֲ���ý that he really began to understand how motion felt different when he was walking. 

“When you’re moving slowly, you’re constantly being met with new stimuli, such that your mind is refreshing at a natural pace,” Karpf says. “As opposed to, for example, when you’re in a car, you’re passing by everything so that it’s hard to focus on any one thing.”

When he arrived at �ֲ���ý, he took to walking across Lewiston every night after dinner. “It was an incredible way for me to get to know the place,” he says. “It grants you a level of intimacy that otherwise is kind of hard to reach. You’re more autonomous in what it is that you’re observing. It also allowed me to find my own place within �ֲ���ý.”

Karpf, an English major who frequently drops lines from various texts to tell a story of his own, is inspired by Henry David Thoreau’s writing about walking. Thoreau celebrated what he called
“sauntering,” derived from sans terre meaning “without land or a home.” To Thoreau, sans terre means “having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering.” 

Karpf plans to “saunter” through seven countries, spending time with a cooperative of herders in Mongolia, Zen Buddhists in Japan, semi-nomadic Sámi reindeer herders in Sweden, and others. He will also visit Australia, Norway, Nepal and India, each of which has a culture attached to movement. Karpf will bring his curiosity to more deeply understand the role of walking within those cultures, while self-examining his own motivations. 

“I think in some part what I’m hoping for is a comfort in stillness. At the end of it, I’d like to have a sense that I can settle down a little bit.”

Karpf was encouraged to apply for the Watson after spending time with friend and fellow Watson finalist Poppy Marsh ’26 of San Francisco, Calif., on an Otis Fellowship in 2024. That experience — framing a project, moving through the application, and then visiting the Dolomites — informed his Watson application and his initial interview. The �ֲ���ý Watson fellowship committee, led by Robert Strong, director of national fellowships, saw that this was a strong project.

“Brett’s Watson project intrigued the �ֲ���ý committee because it is internally tuned but seeking externally as well,” Strong says. “Throughout his application process, Brett was reaching to articulate something just beyond the reach of words — but something he feels and knows when walking.” 

Working to harness an idea beyond the reach of words and turn it into an actionable plan, Karpf knew he would need support. Each of �ֲ���ý’ four Watson finalists was paired with a �ֲ���ý mentor, and Andrew Mountcastle, associate professor of biology, was Karpf’s. 

“His research project was just totally organic to who he is as a person and authentic to him,” Mountcastle says. “We saw that right away in both his written material as well as his interview process.” 

In addition to serving on the Watson committee for �ֲ���ý, Mountcastle has a special perspective on the Watson. Following his own college graduation, he won a Watson fellowship and used it to study different cultural responses to sea mammal beachings in seven countries. And while he did learn about the question at hand, he learned the most about himself, which made him uniquely qualified to help Karpf with the messier questions about a year away from home.

“At first glance, the Watson feels very outward,” Mountcastle says. “You’re traveling to different countries, doing a self-designed project. You’re exploring the world. But I think the lasting impact on me was what was happening internally.”

The duo met almost weekly, leading up to the interviews with the Watson Foundation in December. “We’d talk about his latest draft,” Mountcastle says. “He’d get really excited about different angles and exploring different potential components of his project. And then he’d disappear for a week and spend all his time writing.” 

Karpf also went into the application process with the support of Associate Professor of English Sanford Freedman, who has come to know Karpf well over his four years at �ֲ���ý. In addition to working together on Karpf’s senior honors thesis on William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Karpf helps Danielle Freedman, Sanford’s wife, with her gardens. 

“Brett Karpf’s powerful ability is to speak to people at all levels,” Freedman says. “What may go unnoticed is the capacity of what he brings to these exchanges: friendship, hope, goodwill, and an amazing perspicacious consciousness registering and analyzing life exchanges.”

As Karpf begins to plan the year ahead in earnest, he is humbled by this opportunity. “Motion is a great privilege. An American passport is a great privilege. A lot of people can’t go as easily around the world as I’ll be able to, and many people can’t even leave their own neighborhood.” Karpf is also aware of the opportunities that have opened up for him because he was in a community that encouraged him, at a school that supported him. Faculty and staff, but also fellow students, helped Karpf feel like his questions were worth asking. 

The one thing that he wants to tell �ֲ���ý students as his time comes to a close? 

“Apply to stuff! One reason I got this Watson is because I had applied for other things at �ֲ���ý, whether that be the Otis Fellowship or an environmental grant.” One experience leads to confidence to apply for the next. And support from the Otis family will continue to help Karpf on the roads ahead. “The Otis family helped fund my summer last year where I was working on the Allagash doing trail work and made it possible for me to purchase gear,” including a pair of boots that will carry him across seven countries in the coming year. 

“I love these boots, by the way,” he says. “Though I may have to get them re-soled again.”

Four �ֲ���ý seniors are hoping to get the chance to spend the next year seeking answers to some big questions. Finalists for the Watson Fellowship, these students are exploring differing approaches to work across cultures, persistent traditions amid changing political boundaries, how meaning can be made from movement, and community-driven approaches to power grids.

The Watson Fellowship offers college graduates support to travel for a full year exploring a complex topic. Fellows receive $40,000 along with health insurance and a year’s worth of student loan payments (if needed). In exchange, they must remain outside of the United States for a full year, beginning in the August following their college graduation.

“This is some version of heaven,” said Robert Strong, director of national fellowships. “The Watson allows �ֲ���ýies to spend a year traveling the earth constrained only by the limits of their curiosities, which Watson believes should be limitless.” �ֲ���ý is one of 41 colleges and universities that can nominate students. Each institution is allowed to nominate up to four students from within their own highly competitive pool. The last time �ֲ���ý students were awarded a Watson was in 2023, when two �ֲ���ý seniors, and , received the prestigious fellowships.

This year �ֲ���ý has four nominees: Poppy Marsh ’26 of San Francisco, Calif., John Harun-DeLong ’26 of Fairbanks, Alaska; Brett Karpf ’26 of Ridgewood, N.J., and Linh Hoang ’26 of Hanoi, Vietnam. And if awarded, their travels could span 19 countries — from Nepal to Norway to New Zealand.

We caught up with these four finalists, to learn more about what they hope to accomplish if they receive a Watson. Poppy Marsh, a double major in English and politics, has proposed a project to explore identity and community among those impacted by political borders in five countries. Marsh was an Otis Fellow in 2024 and spent eight weeks in the Italian Dolomites, hiking and talking to people about climate change and environmental degradation. Marsh sees the Watson as “the grandparent of the Otis,” with a longer time frame, larger scope, and increased independence on the part of the fellow. For the Watson, she explains, “I’m curious about individual and communal conceptions of identity as it relates to the invention of the modern state through, around, and between communities whose presence on this land predates the state’s modern borders. So my project is thinking about this through distinct methods of cultural, linguistic, and social preservations of these communal identities as they relate to the land that they’ve remained on.”

Marsh’s interdisciplinarity shows up in her work at �ֲ���ý. Her politics thesis, which is “a comparative study of the refugee accommodation regimes in Greece and Kenya,” focuses on policy differences in shifting communities. Her year-long poetry thesis allows another way to explore questions of place. “For that, I’m interested in ideas of homeland, ideas of what it means to come from a place and no longer be with it or what it means to come from a place and remain with it.” 

Marsh’s idea for the Watson builds on questions of belonging, but never aims to find answers or offer solutions. “I’m not really after a specific political or social definition. I’m not interested in proving a rightful belonging to land or affirming a rightful belonging to land. That’s so far from my place. What I want is structured around open-ended curiosity. I want it to be stretchy. I want it to be bent and folded and contradicted. I want it to be able to hold water and leak as well, depending on where I am.” 

Marsh credits her first-year seminar professor and advisor, Senem Aslan, professor of politics, for her growing enthusiasm and curiosity about these questions. Aslan has been Marsh’s advisor all four years and has encouraged Marsh to move toward these goals. 

John Harun-DeLong ’26 of Fairbanks, Alaska, could have selected any number of big questions to follow for his proposed year abroad. He is a cellist, on the debate team, and majoring in biochemistry with minors in philosophy and Hispanic Studies. But within those varied interests is a throughline:  “Climate change is what really drives me. I need to think of it. For me, my life isn’t just my own body. It’s like my entire community of Alaska and my hometown. And so the destruction of that is fundamental. Everything that shaped you, if those are being destroyed, that’s the most complete destruction of the self that can exist, really.”

Though he aims to work toward a MD/PhD in the future, Harun-DeLong first wants to spend time understanding, and comparing, power grids around the world to work toward more sustainable and safer solutions for the U.S.. 

His plan is to travel to countries with a decentralized power grid or microgrids that are more resilient than the aging – and vulnerable – grid in the U.S. It isn’t only the science that interests Harun-DeLong. These microgrids also “allow [citizens] to have truly democratic control over the grid because the people in the village are supposed to maintain and decide what the best grid policy is.” 

There’s a precedent for Harun-DeLong to figure it out as he goes, and find opportunities along the way. Last summer, when Harun-DeLong knew that he wanted to work with some of the top cancer researchers in the world, he cold-called them. He showed up in Spain and ended up working as a research assistant for Maria Blasco, director of the Spanish National Cancer Research Center. 

Linh Hoang ’26 of Hanoi, Vietnam was traveling in Svalbard, Norway, when she met a stranger who changed her life. In a shared kitchen, over instant ramen, Hoang struck up a conversation with a man who explained his own big questions. He had spent the past two decades in constant motion, always striving through work to reach the next rung on the ladder. He suddenly stopped and asked himself: “What do I actually want?” That reflection struck Hoang as she was busy working toward her own future. Why wait for a mid-life break to ask this question? Talking to friends across the globe who are building lives in a time of uncertainty, Hoang believes that it is worth pausing to notice how various cultures respond to and help shape relationships to work. 

Hoang’s Watson project emphasizes existential questions and places her generation in a broader context of work culture. “From my Watson, I will learn how people across cultures navigate the same tensions I’ve felt: between ambition and meaning, belonging and freedom, expectation and reality. I will return with a deeper understanding of how systems and emotions intertwine, and with the humility to know that both matter.” 

Those who know Hoang as a double major in math and economics might be surprised that she is focusing on philosophical questions. Hoang’s understanding of economics will certainly impact the questions that she asks, but she really is interested in a more personal approach in her travels. Hoang’s proposal lays out a plan to visit nine countries in the coming year. 

Hoang is already making plans to pursue graduate work that bridges math and finance. She isn’t on the fence about her next steps, and she does not see the Watson as “opting out.” Instead, she is remembering the stranger in Norway reflecting on his life and his choices. And in framing these questions comparatively in cultures both known for their high-pressure or their laid-back approaches to work, Hoang is certain to move toward her next phase with more understanding. “What I’ve found,” Hoang says, ”is that when I talk to more people, I learn more about myself.“ 

Brett Karpf ’26 of Ridgewood, N.J. spends a lot of time walking. Whether covering hundreds of miles along trails in Italy on his Otis Fellowship, wandering through urban Morocco during study abroad or simply moving from place to place in Maine, walking gives meaning to his life. As he has grown and reflected more on the role of motion in his own life, he has begun asking more questions about walking and movement, such as “Why is it that moving, walking especially, can enable us to gain a better sense of faith or understanding or contentedness?” 

An English major, Karpf is deeply engaged in analyzing words; his two-semester thesis project explores sublimity in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! But Karpf has also served as an assistant to �ֲ���ý horticulturalist Jeremy Lavertu and worked as a gardener for Sanford Freedman, associate professor of English. His proposal for the Watson allows him to combine his love of the natural world with his analytical skills as he works to understand what happens for people who spend time walking outside. 

Though Karpf’s experiences walking have been selective and intentional, he is drawn to nomadic cultures whose very existence is tied to movement. “I’m looking for similarities and oppositions between different groups. You can find so much cultural similarity between places that are thousands of miles apart, if not tens of thousands of miles apart, and who are using motion to sort of reach similar ends.”

Karpf will explore people who walk for various reasons, including religious pilgrims. He hopes to learn “by interacting with people who are walking as a means of religious observance or as a way to become closer with what they deem to be divine.” The project will also explore “cultures where motion and movement are prioritized — herders, semi-nomadic peoples, including people that used to be nomadic and no longer are,” in order to understand the drive to hold to traditions that are increasingly threatened.

Karpf hopes to find meaningful answers — and at minimum, answers that help him understand himself more. “I am seeking how others experience purpose and understanding when it feels deeply entangled with movement: Can their experience help me understand my own?”

Each week this fall, we’ll introduce new �ֲ���ý professors who have tenure-track positions on the faculty.

This year’s nine tenure appointments are in the disciplines of art and visual culture, classical and medieval studies, economics, English, environmental studies, dance, politics (two appointments), and psychology.

This week we introduce the seventh of our nine new faculty members, Katie Adkison.

Name: Katie Adkison

Title: Assistant Professor of English

Degrees from: University of California, Santa Barbara, Ph.D. in English; Colorado State University, M.A. in English literature, B.A. in English education

Her work: Adkison studies the role of an individual’s spoken voice in early modern English literature — what the actual feeling of speaking means and conveys, especially in terms of power structures.

In Adkison’s scholarship, voice becomes a “kind of embodied sensation. Not literally a sixth sense, but something more akin to sensing knowledge than to just a tool of communication.”

Her dissertation: “The Sense of Speech: Voice and Sovereignty in Early Modern Tragedy,” describes the relationship between early modern theories of sovereignty and the phenomenology of the voice in Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy.

For example: In the opening scene of King Lear, the titular monarch decides to divide his kingdom based on how much his three daughters say they love him. His first two daughters make elaborate but insincere declarations of love.

Lear then turns to his third daughter, Cordelia, and asks, “What can you say to draw a third more opulent than your sisters?” Cordelia, who does truly love the king, responds, “Nothing, my Lord.” She continues:

Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave
My heart into my mouth: I love your majesty
According to my bond; nor more nor less…. (1.1.91-93)

In referring to her own voice, Cordelia is trying to tell her father “something about politics and about love that his love test is failing to understand,” says Adkison. She’s saying that “love and politics are not mathematical equations. You can’t give more love through your voice the way that you can give more money or more of something tangible.”

The opening scene is a kernel in the larger lesson of the play. Cordelia, in effect, is vocalizing the fact that her vocalization can’t do what her father wants it to do — it can’t be reduced to words. “She’s saying, ‘There’s more to love here, just as there’s more to language in the very voice I’m speaking through.’”

The scene sets the stage for the tragedy. “Lear wants words to equal inheritance, a kingdom, power.” Cordelia wants no part of it. “And so it ends, with death, tears, and so much pain,” says Adkison.

Iambic sortameter: In King Lear’s opening scene, Shakespeare uses a jarring version of iambic pentameter for some of Cordelia’s lines. “The rhythm is off,” says Adkison, noting that the Bard sometimes “uses an extra syllable, 11 instead of the usual 10 — or even a whole extra two-syllable iamb — in some lines.”

Shakespeare did that often, she explains, usually to draw attention to something. “If the rhythm is off, you are supposed to feel it as an audience member.”

We can’t know the intentions of the author now or 500 years later. But the meaning is there, regardless. That’s magic to me.

Adkison recalls the moment that “something felt off in one of the lines. And so I started counting syllables, the way you’re supposed to when something feels off.” The extra syllable “had to be purposeful. It’s too perfect not to be.”

In Cordelia’s 11-syllable lines, there is “something that literally can’t be divided up. The rhythm of the lines is as out of step with her father’s demands as her inability to speak her love is. She’s really talking about vocal rhythm and the experience of voice to explain what’s going on.”

A beautiful thing: “The beautiful thing about how literature thinks about language is that we can’t know the intentions of the author now or 500 years later,” Adkison says. “But the meaning is there, regardless. There’s always something new to be parsed and to be found. That’s magic to me.”

Classroom magic: Sometimes, magical classroom moments happen when a teacher allows a discussion to go off the straight rails.

Last winter, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Adkison was teaching Thomas More’s Utopia. A student asked, “Is anyone watching The Good Place?” referring to the NBC fantasy comedy about a utopian, but problematic, afterlife.

Rather than guide the discussion back to the 16th century, Adkison took a moment to connect the dots. She noted the etymology of the word “utopia” and how it “can mean ‘the good place’ or ‘no place’ or ‘the good place that cannot exist’ or something along those lines.”

Eager for wordplay, Adkison’s students jumped at the chance to connect More’s Utopia to The Good Place, which led to a “conversation about the way that the show uses and problematizes the notion of a utopia in such interesting ways.”

Then she guided the students back to how More imagined what a good life looked like in his Utopia. “The text is infamously sticky about how one constructs a good life, what it means to live the good life, and all the problems that are wrapped up in that text.”

And a course is born: All of that left Adkison “wanting so badly to teach a class on utopia.” And if you look at utopia, “you have to teach the second half of the class on dystopias because it seems to be true that a good place for some frequently comes to mean a bad place for others.”

“College students are special because they will think with you — taking on the agency of research and thinking of their learning as their own.”

And, voilà! This spring, Adkison will teach such a course on utopian and dystopian fiction, from More’s Utopia and Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World to George Orwell’s 1984 and the first of N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy. “I’m hoping we’ll end with the first season of The Good Place and try and end on a funny note — even if it’s not necessarily optimistic in all of the ways one wants it to be.”

Why �ֲ���ý? “I was so excited when I visited �ֲ���ý to see how much collaboration happens between departments and between students and faculty. Collaborative research structures the idea of the undergraduate thesis that all students write here.”

Why college? “College students are special because they will think with you — taking on the agency of research and thinking of their learning as their own.”

Finding her path: “At my core, I have always known I wanted to be a teacher,” Adkison says.

“I thought I would be a high school English teacher for the rest of my life. But my path to graduate work was one I found late in the stages of my own bachelor’s degree, when I was taking education courses alongside literature courses. I realized I had more questions about the literature. I couldn’t be done.”

It may be cold comfort in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, but within disasters there are ultimately lessons that benefit humanity.

At �ֲ���ý, in fact, the name of an environmental studies course reflects this reality. Taught by Jane Costlow, Clark A. Griffith Professor of Environmental Studies, “Catastrophes and Hope” scrutinizes how disaster narratives can serve us.

Including, in a way, lessons about our expectations from narrative itself. Costlow led the course this winter as the catastrophe of COVID-19 tightened its grip — a catastrophe that, as Costlow and her students discussed one day, is all the more disturbing because we have little idea of how it will ultimately play out.

In other words, unlike hurricanes or earthquakes, COVID-19 thus far is defying our sense that many disasters, like novels or films, have a plot arc.

In that way, the pandemic reminded Costlow of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which was a topic of that class discussion. In the midst of the pandemic, she said, we’re “far away from having a sense of a beginning, a middle, and an end.”

Costlow is not the only member of the �ֲ���ý faculty who is watching COVID-19 and wondering what it has to teach us in terms of what we believe, how we feel and respond, and how we get along. Meet a few more:

Stephanie Kelley-Romano, Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies

For Kelley-Romano, a rhetoric scholar known for her research into conspiracy theories, the noise around COVID-19 may be too much of a professional opportunity.

Conspiracy theorizing is as old as humanity, but “what’s most different about COVID-19 is the audience,” Kelley-Romano says. “We’re all stuck at home, all on lockdown, and that’s around the world. And we have this ‘infodemic,’ this glut of information about the virus.

“Of course, people want to know what causes it, what could potentially prevent or cure it, where did it start, why is it here?” — questions that are like an open cash register to the conspiracy spinners. “And what’s different is that we’re all just available to look on our phones for obscene amounts of time.”

Another difference is the universal reach of the virus. “When we have something that so broadly affects all members of our community in such dramatic ways, it really shakes people up and makes the grasping for information to anchor ourselves more desperate,” Kelley-Romano says.

Which primes people to believe things that, in normal times, they would reject as ridiculous. “And the degree to which people stay engaged on the internet with news seems to me to be inversely proportionate to their actual emotional health,” she adds. In short, she advises, limit your screen time and don’t share conspiracy theories, even just for laughs.

From a Chinese lab being the origin of the virus, to 5G cell phone technology being a vector for it, to cow urine as a cure for it, the pandemic has produced a bumper crop of conspiracy theorizing. Unless she’s working and deliberately thinking about politics and rhetoric, Kelley-Romano finds it helpful to filter her consumption of mainstream news. “I do that only when I cook meals and I’m semi-distracted. I just trust that what I get will be enough.”

Lillian Nayder, Professor of English

“Like so many of the people around us, writers and artists are responding to the pandemic with creativity and with compassion,” Nayder says. “Literary representations will no doubt help us to understand the inequities and injustices underscored by the pandemic, as well as the connections that it has fostered and exposed.”

Looking ahead, she continues, “scholars who study ‘the literature of COVID-19’ will help us grasp the meanings of the disease in cultural, social, and artistic terms — meanings which are already emerging in the medical context of the disease and our efforts to contain it.”

Nayder’s own teaching models that scholarly imperative. Her two courses that examine relationships among literature, empathy, and medicine, she says, are “closely tied to our current crisis and our ways of responding to it — not only in terms of the panic and anxiety generated by the pandemic, but also in terms of the creativity, narrative and otherwise, that it is inspiring.

“In particular, the humanity — and the vulnerability — of medical practitioners who have stories to tell about their patients, themselves, and their families have really come to the forefront.

“These stories of loss, of suffering, of sacrifice, recovery, and love foreground the power and value of what we are calling ‘the medical humanities,’ and our understanding of our own corporeality more generally as well.”

Nayder follows The New York Times’ continuing portraits of people touched by COVID-19, “as well as the political dimensions of the pandemic,” she says.

“And, of course, I’m learning from the stories and experiences that my students are relaying as we’ve been meeting remotely” for her course “The Arctic Sublime,” which looks at 19th-century perceptions of the Arctic — a literature “with its own representations of fear, physical duress, and feelings of awe.”

As events unfold, Nayder continues, “my questions involve the ideas of ‘normalcy’ that the pandemic has raised: What is ‘normal’? When and how — and should — we return to it?”

Cassandra Shepard, Visiting Assistant Professor of Africana

“My research is on disaster,” Shepard says bluntly. Specifically, this New Orleans native examines the impact of settler colonialism — the systematic replacement of an existing population with settlers from away — on the rebuilding of her home town after Hurricane Katrina.

(Long after the 2005 storm and subsequent flooding, many longtime NOLA residents were stranded in cities where they’d taken refuge, clearing the way for a variety of new people — colonizers, really — to take their places.)

“I think about settler colonialism as a disaster,” Shepard explains. “And as a matter of fact, I consider it the disaster that creates more disaster.”

In August 2005, New Orleans residents, hauling what belongings they can, line up to enter the Superdome in advance of Hurricane Katrina. (Marty Bahamonde/FEMA)

In other words, the legacies of racial, economic, and civic injustice left by settler colonialism constitute a slow-motion, mundane kind of misery that gets noticed only when a more-newsy catastrophe comes to call.

Cassandra Shepard, Visiting Assistant Professor of Africana. (Marshanda Smith)

“The things that we think are disastrous are really just an additional cataclysm,” she says. “We’re already existing in a state of disaster — I would consider it perpetual disaster. Then we get a spike, an unusual cataclysm — that could be a hurricane, that could be coronavirus, it could be different things….These spikes really reveal what was already there.”

Shepard sees strong parallels between a phenomenon like COVID-19 and the dominance in recent decades of so-called neoliberalism, the privileging of private-sector over public interests in government activity.

COVID-19, similarly to neoliberalism, “perpetuates inequality,” Shepard says.

“We see how hard it’s hitting communities of color,” as well as unemployed, precariously employed, and undocumented workers — people ineligible for stimulus funds even though they may be doing work that’s now considered essential. “The people who were the most vulnerable are still the most vulnerable.”

In New Orleans’ 9th Ward, houses and automobiles are in piles after Hurricane Katrina. (Photograph by Infrogmation)

A disaster like the coronavirus places a certain obligation on scholars like Shepard. “One of the ways that we can show people that what we’re doing is valuable to their reality today is by engaging with disaster and showing what people don’t know,” she says — “helping people to make sense of what’s happening around them.”

Justine Wiesinger, Assistant Professor of Japanese

Wiesinger has conducted extensive research into the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent nuclear disaster in Japan’s Tōhoku region. Specifically, she studies how that catastrophe and others are represented in film and theater (indirectly inspired by the Tōhoku events, her play Waters Rise premiered in 2019).

Members of a fire and rescue team from the U.S. head into downtown Ofunato, Japan, to search for survivors following the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. (Photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Matthew Bradley)

She had planned to bring a Short Term class to Japan this year, so Wiesinger has followed the progress of the outbreak there since early February.

Yet, she says, “in some ways, I’ve almost been resisting tying COVID-19 too closely to my research, because I think it’s important to maintain a consciousness that this is an extremely different event” from the 2011 tragedy. “I want to maintain a commitment to keeping the memory of that disaster alive and a consciousness of its specifics.”

Assistant Professor of Japanese Justine Wiesinger. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Still, Wiesinger notes, there are parallels that are hard to miss. “We continue to see, in my opinion, a tendency toward slow and ineffective responses from the central government.” Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe’s “rhetoric has been critiqued as frequently meaningless, impenetrable, and avoidant of responsibility,” she says — a “tone-deafness that’s being widely criticized in social media.”

For instance, “his policy of providing two protective masks per household has been mocked in memes on Twitter using iconic pop-cultural families trying to decide how to divide up two masks among multiple people.”

“In some senses I think people throughout Japan are coming into contact with the absurdities of a leadership that is often more concerned with economics than human life — whereas after 2011 it was mostly just people in the rural Tōhoku region who had to contend directly with similar approaches.”

Wiesinger adds, “Many of us are encountering similar problems in our own countries and these tendencies will have to be confronted worldwide. Sometimes disasters give us the opportunity to clearly see where the cracks in our value systems lie.”

“I feel like poetry gets mislabeled as a high art that’s exclusionary in some way,” says Gabriel Fried ’96, a poet, teacher, and poetry editor. “Rob made things intimate, but he was never exclusionary. If you wanted in, you got admitted in.”

“Rob” is Rob Farnsworth, retiring after this academic year as senior lecturer in English. Author of three poetry collections, poetry editor for seven years of the quarterly American Scholar, and founder of the creative writing program and the Literary Arts Live reading series at �ֲ���ý, he was a mentor to Fried — and to many others who have studied poetry, both the reading and the writing of it, with Farnsworth during his 26 years here.

On Feb. 12, Literary Arts Live presented Fried and two other alumni poets at the Muskie Archives for a reading and a tribute to that longtime champion of creative writing at �ֲ���ý. Farnsworth himself had offered an LAL reading three weeks earlier.

Rob Farnsworth reads his poem “Vagrancy” during the Literary Arts Live session on Jan. 25 in Muskie Archives. An homage to W.B. Yeats, whose poem “The Wild Swans at Coole” Farnsworth references, the poem is about the “specific, anonymous, reorienting pleasures of solitary travel.”

Joining Fried were Christian Barter ’90 and Craig Morgan Teicher ’01. Barter didn’t study with Farnsworth, but they are friends who met when Farnsworth published Barter in The American Scholar. is Bye-bye Land, which received the Isabella Gardner Prize. A trail crew supervisor at Acadia National Park, he served as the park’s poet laureate during its centennial year, 2016.

Teicher is director of special editorial projects at Publishers Weekly, teaches creative writing at New York University, is a literature and music critic, and has . Brenda Is in the Room was awarded the Colorado Prize for Poetry.

And Fried is poetry editor for Persea Books and an assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri, and has . His Making the New Lamb Take was named a Best Book of 2007 by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

During their �ֲ���ý visit, the trio talked with us about cold weather at �ֲ���ý, reasons for making poetry — and, of course, Rob Farnsworth.

Christian Barter ’90, at center, makes a point while fellow poets Gabe Fried ’96, at left, and Craig Morgan Teicher ’01 listen. Visiting �ֲ���ý for an evening poetry reading on Feb. 12, they met with students in the Muskie Archives during the afternoon. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Christian, you barely overlapped with Rob when you were here. How did you get to know him?

Barter: A teacher I had in graduate school, poet Sydney Lea, told me that Rob was the poetry editor at The American Scholar — “I think he’d like your work, maybe you should send him some poems.” So Rob took a couple poems of mine. A few years after that, when my first book came out, he asked me if I’d like to read at �ֲ���ý. And then I got to meet him in person, and of course immediately liked him.

Craig and Gabe, what are some early impressions from studying with Rob?

Teicher: For me, very clearly, it was Rob’s way of teaching, which was to ask us questions very articulately, and then to hold us to a high standard as to how we answered them. It deeply matched the reason I got into poetry in the first place, which was the need to put things into my own words all the time — just to try to get something said that I didn’t think anybody was listening to.

I was amazed to realize there was a man who taught that way and that I could take classes with him. I was like, “Oh, if this is what poetry is for, then I want to do it.” Then I just took every class I could with Rob, and we’ve stayed friends since.

Fried: I don’t know if I have ever met a more perfect teacher of undergraduates. He would recognize something in an incipient writer that they wouldn’t even know themselves was impressive, and he’d focus on that rather than on all the things that could be fixed or changed.

Shown gesturing for emphasis during the Feb. 12 poets’ gathering with students, faculty, and staff, Craig Morgan Teicher ’01 has published four books of poetry and prose. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Is Rob present in your teaching?

Teicher: Exclusively and always. I had a marvelous 10th-grade English teacher who also taught by summoning articulate responses, and Rob showed me a more mature version of that. And that’s the only way that I know how to teach — basically I sit down in a room with a book and start asking questions.

Fried: To really listen to how students are responding, to help them know what questions to ask of a poem, but then to let them do the asking and to underscore the ways in which they have made important observations about a poem — that all comes from Rob.

How have your reasons for writing poetry evolved over the years?

Barter: At first, I was writing very much day-to-day poems of observation. For better or worse, I’m now writing more with a world view in mind and more consciously trying to tackle larger issues in my work, though always grounded by real-life things. I’ve become very interested in writing topical poems about climate change and the political atmosphere in which we live, and that kind of thing.

Teicher: Getting married and having kids really changed what I thought poetry was for. My son has pretty severe cerebral palsy, and so most of my latest book, The Trembling Answers, comes out of a period five or six years ago when he was severely medicalized. It was a period of having a lot of experiences that only my wife and I could share. Again, it’s that thing of having to say something that you need to have understood, so you need to find a way of explaining it such that people might be able to understand it.

Poet Rob Farnsworth was among the listeners in the Muskie Archives as three alumni poets, including two of his former students, talked with students, staff, and faculty on Feb. 12. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Fried: Writing poems made sense to me, because I loved to play with words, shift them around and make noises with them. But my impetus for writing poems has always been to try to figure out nostalgia, feelings of memory and longing, and trying to parse how much of that is self-generated and how much of it comes out of the initial experiences that we’re nostalgic for.

Anything you’d like to add about your �ֲ���ý education overall, or your feelings about visiting?

Barter: I needed to grow up more than many when I got here. I started here at 17 and my first year was pretty rough. But then I found my people, which is where so much of it begins for all of us. And that was just a wonderful blessing and that’s the wonderful thing about �ֲ���ý — you can find your people here.

As far as me becoming an artist, it was a process of learning how to be disciplined and learning how to be effective. That happened largely through learning to compose music, and Bill Matthews was a big part of that for me as my mentor. He taught me a lot, not just about writing music, but about being an artist and what it takes to actually make something as an artist, and not just dream.

Teicher: I was looking around today and realizing that there’s nowhere that I can look here that doesn’t give me a strong memory of something that happened. And to me, the students look really similar to my peers. And that may be just because they’re just as cold as we were and therefore bundled up in similar clothing.

Poet Gabe Fried ’96 answers a question from the audience as Christian Barter ’90 and Craig Morgan Teicher ’01 look on. Fried’s classmate and Lecturer in English Jess Anthony, at left, and Senior Lecturer in English Rob Farnsworth, in white shirt, presented the three poets at �ֲ���ý on Feb. 12. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Patricia Akhimie of Rutgers University, one of eight presenters at �ֲ���ý’ New Approaches to Early Modern Literature and Culture symposium, listens to a presentation on Sept. 26. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“I don’t want to be accused of having an ax to grind” by bringing current political or social-justice issues into discussions of early modern literature, a Shakespearean scholar told a �ֲ���ý symposium the other day.

Which was not to say that David Sterling Brown, assistant professor of English at the University of Arizona, wants to bar those issues from the classroom or his students’ awareness. Quite the opposite, said Brown — an African American man who, earlier that morning, had presented a paper subtitled “Black Life Matters in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.”

“I want the students to come to these issues on their own. I don’t want to force-feed them. I don’t want to make them think that I am just depositing my ideas” into those discussions, Brown said.

At the lectern, Aileen Liu of UC Berkeley gives a presentation on storytelling in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. Fellow presenters are (from left) Kirsten Mendoza, Vanderbilt University; Jennifer Park, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and Jose Villagrana, also of Berkeley. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The role of contemporary concerns in the teaching of centuries-old literature was one of the fresh concepts explored during the symposium New Approaches to Early Modern Literature and Culture on Sept. 26. Brown was one of eight young scholars of early-modern literature, all from backgrounds underrepresented in the field, who shared research and professional insights at the symposium presented by the Department of English at �ֲ���ý.

Another presenter was Madiha Hannachi, a native of Tunisia and a doctoral candidate at the University of Montreal. She studies Shakespeare’s presence in the Arab world, an unusual topic in early modern studies. “This kind of symposium is empowering for young scholars coming from underrepresented groups, and who have interesting views and refreshing research,” she said.

When Hannachi heard about the symposium, “I felt like it represents me. I’m part of an underrepresented group in North America and I work in a field that is also underrepresented,” Arab perspectives on Shakespeare. “This event really spoke to me.”

A mix of faculty and graduate students, the presenters came from across the U.S. as well as Canada. In their formal presentations, six of the eight dealt in some way with Shakespeare. (Playwright Christopher Marlowe and poet Philip Sidney also got their due.)

Patricia Akhimie of Rutgers University–Newark revealed a surprising equivalency between racial ideology and the roles of the abused, bruised twins both named Dromio in The Comedy of Errors. “Racialist logic can rationally tie any somatic mark,” like a bruise, “to any social meaning, even a meaning as complex as identity,” Akhimie said.

Jeremy Glover ’17 of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, takes notes during the New Approaches to Early Modern Literature and Culture symposium held at �ֲ���ý on Sept. 26. In the background are Senior Lecturer in English Rob Farnsworth and Roya Biggie of Grinnell College. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Hannachi took a macro view of the Bard. She explained why productions of Shakespeare in Arab countries involve much more than just text translation — it’s a transcultural process as much as a translinguistic one. Especially fascinating was her description of Sulayman Al-Bassam’s award-winning The Al-Hamlet Summit, a 2002 adaptation of Hamlet that represented the title character’s “complete immersion into Arab culture” and the present day.

In contrast to the tightly structured research presentations, morning and afternoon roundtable discussions generated dynamic examinations of the context in which early modern literature scholars — especially those who are bringing needed diversity to the field — do their work.

Topics arising during the afternoon roundtable included the legacy of old literary categories that continue to shape the profession — even through such factors as the names of professional journals — while failing to accommodate today’s breadth of perspectives on race and gender; student interest in English literature and in humanities broadly; and the point during the course of a semester when rising student engagement brings joy to the work.

A theme that arose in both roundtables (and, in the morning, led to David Brown’s remark about grinding axes) was anachronism and “presentism” — the introduction (or intrusion, as some old-school academics see it) of contemporary concerns into examinations of old literature.

“I’ve noticed with our papers today that many of the period-specific questions we’re asking are motivated by our own concerns about this current historical moment,” said Roya Biggie, a doctoral candidate at the City University of New York Graduate Center. (Her research focuses on early modern treatments of ecological and interspecies relationships.)

“At least in my experience, when I try to make those connections explicit, I’ve been criticized for being anachronistic,” Biggie said. “And there is a certain anachronism that goes with that.

“But at the same time, I personally think it’s worth it because, why ask irrelevant questions?”

With Shakespeare dominating the presentations at the New Approaches to Early Modern Literature and Culture symposium, it was wise to come prepared. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The symposium came about because �ֲ���ý’ English department “wanted to educate itself about new scholarship in the field,” said Therí Pickens, associate professor of English, who organized the symposium with English faculty colleagues Eden Osucha and Sylvia Federico.

The presenters’ “new approaches were wide-ranging,” said Pickens. “One of the takeaways was definitely an expansion of the categories with which most scholars frequently work — race, gender, sexuality, etc.”

The symposium, she said, “was an amazing opportunity for professional development, research collaboration, and pedagogy for both the presenters and the department.”

The presenters were selected through a competitive process. “We tried to create a conversation among them that was exciting and groundbreaking,” Pickens says.

“We also paid attention to scholars who are underrepresented in the field. It was important to us to get voices who were embodying and researching new perspectives.”

Support for the symposium came from the New Scholars Series, an Office of Equity and Diversity initiative that brings scholars from historically underrepresented backgrounds to �ֲ���ý.

Eighteenth-century writer Samuel Johnson had James Boswell as his tagalong chronicler.

�ֲ���ý theater and English major Allie Freed ’16 has classmate Dylan Ray.

Video camera in hand, Ray followed Freed for a few weeks recently and produced a short film of her academic and work life at �ֲ���ý for the college’s Great Day to Be a Bobcat campaign.

Ray, a biological chemistry major from Denver, jokes that he’s “spent most of college my career locked away in the labs of Dana and Carnegie” so the project illuminated a “completely different side of �ֲ���ý.”

“It reminds me that �ֲ���ý students are so versatile and multitalented.”

Freed, from Gloucester, Mass., and Ray are co-workers in the Advancement Office, though she “had no idea that Dylan was such a gifted filmmaker.” Her takeaway? “It reminds me that �ֲ���ý students are so versatile and multitalented.”

“Refreshing” is what Ray says about the experience. He got to “see parts of �ֲ���ý that I don’t know much about and the range of interests students have” — including what he calls Freed’s “amazingly different passions on campus.”

Like many �ֲ���ý students, Ray’s academic work includes a strong dose of digital studies (an offering that will get more robust for all students with the launch of a new Digital and Computational Studies Program in fall 2018.)

One of Ray’s academic concentrations is film and media studies, and the knowledge he’s gained in that realm has empowered him to “combine science and film production” in a few of his science classes.

Poet Sinead Morrissey gives a Language Arts Live reading on May 8. (Sam Russica)

�ֲ���ý College welcomes prize-winning Northern Irish poet Sinèad Morrissey for a reading at 6:30 p.m. Friday, May 8, in Skelton Lounge, Chase Hall, 56 Campus Ave.

Part of the Language Arts Live series of literary readings, sponsored by the English department, the event is open to the public at no cost. Morrissey’s books will be available for purchase. For more information, please call 207-786-6256.

In a review of Morrissey’s recent work, The Guardian newspaper wrote, “Morrissey’s poetic framings and exposures of author, reader/viewer, and object in dynamic and angular relation to each other make her a compelling advocate, and exemplary practitioner, of both seeing and doing things differently.”

Morrissey’s reading concludes the Language Arts Live series for this academic year.

Born in 1972 and raised in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Morrissey is the author of (all from Carnet Press) Through the Square Window (2009), The State of the Prisons (2005), Between Here and There (2001) and There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996).

This year, Farrar, Straus and Giroux released her collection Parallax, which won the T.S. Eliot Prize. Among her other awards are the Patrick Kavanagh Award and the Michael Hartnett Prize. Her poem “Through the Square Window” won first prize in the UK National Poetry Competition.

After having lived in Germany, Japan and New Zealand, Morrissey is a writer-in-residence and lecturer at Queen’s University in Belfast and is the city’s inaugural poet laureate.

Professor Emerita of English Carole Anne Taylor. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Professor Emerita of English Carole Anne Taylor, a scholar, teacher and champion of social justice, died March 11 at the Gosnell Memorial Hospice House in Scarborough. She was 71.

Taylor joined the faculty in 1978 and was one of the first women to receive tenure at �ֲ���ý, in 1985. Promoted to full professor of English in 1993, she was a founding member of the college’s interdisciplinary programs in African American Studies and American Cultural Studies, and she played a crucial role in the college’s development of its first affirmative action policy in the 1980s.

Her colleague Charles Carnegie, professor of anthropology and past chair of the Program in African American Studies, called her “a champion of justice both on campus and in the wider community who encouraged students to bridge the divide between theory and practice.”

Those students, he said, are her legacy: “a pioneering cohort of alumni that she helped to cultivate and who have stayed on beyond graduation and contributed to significant change in the local region.”

Taylor twice received the college’s Kroepsch Award for Excellece in Teaching.

Long involved in Maine social justice issues, Taylor was an adviser to the Maine Rural Workers Coalition in the early 2000s, with the goal of helping rural migrant agricultural workers develop leadership skills, and she involved �ֲ���ý students in the work.

“The best thing about it,” she once said, “is that it gives students a sense of what it’s like to do social justice work that really is worker-centered — it’s not about themselves. It’s not charity work.”

Carole was the author of The Tragedy and Comedy of Resistance: Reading Modernity through Black Women’s Fiction (1999) and A Poetics of Seeing: The Implications of Visual Form in Modern Poetry (1985).

In 2000, Professor of English Carole Taylor (left) listens during a class discussion with Maine author Carolyn Chute. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

At the final faculty meeting of the 2011 academic year, Professor of English Lillian Nayder delivered the traditional tribute upon Taylor’s retirement from the faculty. Below is the text of that tribute:

2011 tribute to Carole Anne Taylor by her colleague Lillian Nayder

When we think about Carole Ann Taylor and what she means to �ֲ���ý College and to the English department, a number of words spring to mind: among them, “politico,” “mentor,” “matriarch,” “activist,” “raconteur,” “warrior” and “theorist.” She is a woman who is Brave (with a capital “B”). If you don’t yet know why these terms describe Carole so aptly, a sketch of her contributions to �ֲ���ý should help.

Carole received her bachelor’s degree from Reed College and her Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard University.

Carole came to �ֲ���ý in 1978, when the school was a very different place than it is now. Indeed, Carole has played a crucial role in transforming the college from what it was then into the �ֲ���ý of 2011: a liberal arts institution still, but one in which gender, class and race are significant categories of critical analysis — in which the study of African American and ethnic American literatures redefines the ways we think about and teach the English and American canons — and in which middle-class values are more easily recognized for what they are: middle class.

Her hallmark courses are those that take students outside the mainstream.

Our newly revised mission statement recognizes that we teach and learn through the “transformative power of our differences.” The courses that Carole has brought to the �ֲ���ý curriculum speak to such values and aims. She has taught the “European Tradition from Homer to Cervantes” and “Major American Writers,” but her hallmark courses are those that take students outside the mainstream.

She taught courses like “The Dissenting Tradition of American Literature,” for example, which addresses issues of poverty, class, ethnicity and sexual orientation, and focuses on works “by or about those who have felt themselves [on the outskirts] of American culture”; “Storytelling,” which draws on diverse traditions and introduces students to cross-cultural forms and ways of telling; and “Literature and Cultural Critique,” which uses theoretical ideas about cultural difference and power to inform interpretation and enable students to rethink their conceptions of the literary.

For years, Carole taught “Writer’s Workshop,” once the sole creative writing class at �ֲ���ý; with Carole’s help, that course has developed into the four poetry and prose writing classes that now make up the concentration in creative writing within the English major. Carole’s demanding encouragement of so many fiction writers and poets who have passed through our department — and her unflagging generosity to them — have been gifts beyond reckoning.

Her support, her insight, her advice and her humor have meant the world to those who found themselves embattled on various grounds.

Carole was one of the first women to receive tenure at �ֲ���ý, preceded only by three or four other women on the faculty. With Anne Thompson, she was one of the two matriarchs of the English department when I arrived in 1989. Carole has been a steadfast mentor to many a junior faculty member. Her support, her insight her advice, and her humor have meant the world to those who found themselves embattled on various grounds.

From 1989 onward, Carole served on the Affirmative Action Committee at �ֲ���ý, and for much of the 1980s, she worked toward that end as a member of the subcommittee that drafted an Affirmative Action Plan for the college. “What will �ֲ���ý be,” one colleague asks, “without Carole’s unerring instinct for justice?”

While Carole’s institutional legacy may be the presence of affirmative action at �ֲ���ý, her curricular legacy lies in our attention to interdisciplinarity. These two commitments were effectively combined in the early 1990s, when Carole became the driving force behind the Mellon symposium for first-year students entitled “Constructions of Racial and Ethnic Identity.”

Designed to counter the received cultural knowledge students brought with them to college, the symposium was taught by a team that comprised Bob Branham, Marcus Bruce, Elizabeth Eames, Leslie Hill and, of course, Carole; it served as a living and breathing argument for the importance and potential of African American studies on this campus.

Not surprisingly, her works and experience as an activist energize her teaching.

In both 1990 and 1991, the Filene Room was filled to capacity with more than 100 students each term, enthralled by Carole’s analysis of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Sula. As one of the students in the class put it only last month, “that symposium changed my life.” Those who taught the symposium worked to create what became our programs in African American Studies and American Cultural Studies. A founding member these two interdisciplinary programs, Carole served as chair of ACS in its earliest years.

An architect of that program, Carole also served for more than a decade as an adviser to what is now OUTfront at the college. Her fight for social justice at �ֲ���ý and beyond has been tireless. Not surprisingly, her works and experience as an activist energize her teaching. A participant in the Freedom Summer of the mid-1960s, she sees each class meeting as a vital chance to challenge entrenched views and provoke new possibilities of thought.

For some students, this challenge can be unsettling; after sometimes-difficult class meetings, Carole meditates on the best ways to address the issues at hand, often designing innovative group work and pertinent readings to move the class forward. Eager to provide fresh ways to learn, she has been rewarded with students inspired by the challenges she offers. Many of them have received scholarships, fellowships and entrance into excellent graduate programs, and some have dedicated their lives to social change.

Carole has twice won the Kroepsch teaching award at �ֲ���ý and she is deservedly famous as a mentor of our students, with a line reaching down the hall from her Pettigrew office. Although she is a sophisticated theorist, her advice to students can be very down-to-earth — as one recalls, Carole sometimes remarks that a point or a statement is “as clear as mud.”

Carole teaches her students to… recognize the sometimes “subtle [differences between] how things seem [and] what they really are.”

Carole’s students speak of her kindness as well as her brilliance, a combination especially valued by those writing their honors theses under her direction. One advisee describes Carole’s crucial encouragement during what proved to be a very difficult time: “Carole urged me to continue. She coached me through the entire thesis writing process… [and] allowed me to see the more interesting parts of what I was writing… I was having trouble writing down all of the brilliant ideas that came out of Carole’s mouth… [this was before laptops in class were widespread!], so I asked if I could bring a tape recorder… Each evening I would painstakingly write down everything she said, and read and reread her encouragement and suggestions. Regrettably, I have not had the pleasure of working on such a challenging project since my senior honors thesis.”

Another advisee notes that Carole teaches her students to “examine cultural and personal biases” and to recognize the sometimes “subtle [differences between] how things seem [and] what they really are.” Yet another credits Carole with “forever changing the way that [she] thinks”: “Professor Taylor… open[ed] my eyes to a new way of thinking about [literature] as well as [about] people in the world around me. I feel so thankful for having studied under her.”

While colleagues aided or mentored by Carole may not have recorded her words on tape, they remember and value them as fully as many a struggling thesis advisee. Carole has taught and inspired her colleagues; she has fought many good fights on their behalf. Sometimes she has acted as a shield, putting herself between an unseasoned or vulnerable faculty member and an antagonistic superior or an insolent student.

She has been alert to circumstances in which she could explain how privilege might be skewing important decisions, and has used her standing to protect those marginalized by “business as usual.” She has been an affirmative action activist and a presidential search committee member.

Have I mentioned that she is a mother and grandmother? A musician, an artist, a gardener and a cook? That she is spirited, generous and funny? That she has worked in construction and that she has been hijacked (I mean literally, on an airplane)? While we hope she can avoid some of these pastimes, we hope she will have more time for most in the intervals of her social activism. Carol, thank you for all you have done for your students, for the college and its faculty. We are most deeply indebted to you.

Novelist and screenwriter Sayed Kashua.

In separate events, �ֲ���ý College presents a film about the struggles of Arab-Israeli co-existence and a talk by the film’s screenwriter, an Arab-Israeli journalist and novelist described as “the best Hebrew writer working today.”

A Borrowed Identity shows at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 11. Screenwriter Sayed Kashua presents the lecture “Cultural and Political Criticism Through Humor'” at the same time the following day, Thursday, March 12. Both events take place in Schaeffer Theatre, 329 College St.

A Borrowed Identity runs 105 minutes and is in Arabic and Hebrew with English subtitles.

“Kashua has a weekly column in [the Israeli newspaper] Haaretz, a wildly popular prime-time comedy on Israeli television and three critically acclaimed novels under his belt,” Debra Kamin writes in a profile in. “And everything he has done, he has done in Hebrew.”

Set in the 1980s, Kashua’s semi-autobiographical screenplay for Borrowed Identity begins with a smart, yet socially awkward boy named Eyad (played by Razi Gabareen and Tawfeek Barhom) who transitions from living in an Arab town to studying at a boarding school in Jerusalem. While there, he struggles to learn Hebrew and to find his social identity.

He is befriended by a love interest, Naomi (Danielle Kitzis), and by Yonatan (Michael Mashonov), a boy with muscular dystrophy. In the face of prejudices aimed at his Arab heritage, Eyad must keep many aspects of his life a secret as he navigates the complex social world in which he finds himself.

Directed by Eran Riklis, A Borrowed Identity (also known by the title Dancing Arabs) calls for a resolution to the sociopolitical tension between Arab and Jewish communities in the Middle East. A Borrowed Identity had its world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival and its U.S. premiere at the Telluride Film Festival.

Kashua is an Israeli-Arab author from Tira, Israel. Much of his work is dedicated to promoting political change and the peaceful coexistence of Arab and Israeli peoples through ironic humor. He writes the hit TV show Avoda Aravit (“Arab Labor”), the only show on Israeli TV focusing on Arab characters, which has been compared to the pioneering U.S. sitcom All in the Family.

He is the author of the novels Dancing Arabs and Let it Be Morning (both from Grove Press, 2007); and Second Person Singular (Grove, 2012), which prompted the Israeli website Walla! to proclaim Kashua as “the best Hebrew writer working today.”

He won the prestigious Bernstein Prize and the Israeli Prime Minister’s Prize in Literature (2004).