It was the Tuesday after Commencement, and Jane Costlow paced around her Hedge Hall office, up to her elbows in books, boxes, papers, and assorted memorabilia. The college’s Clark A. Griffith Professor of Environmental Studies was nearing the end of her 34-year �ֲ���ý career, and the only thing left was to pack up and move out.

The scene is repeated each year, of course, but more often recently with the retirement of the baby boom generation of faculty members.

Costlow tosses some papers into a recycling bin outside of her Hedge Hall office. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

I’d seen historian Michael Jones and his wife, Judy Head, empty his Pettengill Hall office. I’d listened to poet Rob Farnsworth speak of plans for his beloved books piled high in Hathorn Hall. I’d learned how historians Dennis Grafflin and John Cole went door to door on their Pettengill corridor, asking colleagues to adopt tomes they themselves couldn’t take home.

“Don’t worry,” said the student, who had picked up a book. “Your old friends will make new friends.”

And I’d heard how my husband, historian Hilmar Jensen, had regretfully placed 200 of his volumes in boxes labeled “free books” in the lobby of Perry Atrium. All were eventually claimed. Pausing one day to unload a final armful, he remarked to an observant student, “This feels like saying goodbye to old friends.”

“Don’t worry,” said the student, who had picked up a book. “Your old friends will make new friends.”

For the generation of scholars and teachers who have painstakingly collected books by the hundreds, even thousands, the task of retiring and closing up an on-campus shop presents various emotional and practical challenges, not the least of which is, “What do I do with all those books?”

Costlow pauses for a moment with a stack of books she’s packing in her office. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

That vexing question, along with other rites of passage faced by baby boomers emptying the scholarly bench, planted the original seed for my interest in documenting the last year of somebody — anybody’s — teaching at �ֲ���ý.

In August 2019, Jane Costlow gamely stepped into that role. There could have been no more willing, insightful, nor patient subject.

When her classroom teaching career stopped abruptly and early, in March 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, she gracefully transitioned to remote teaching. When the semester ended (Costlow did not teach during Short Term), she spent long hours in her Hedge office, clearing the space for her replacement, a recent Ph.D. who will move in when he arrives on the �ֲ���ý campus sometime this summer.

Costlow met that young scholar at a symposium last year, and she knows he will teach courses on climate change and fiction; to that end, she’s left an assortment of books and other materials that she hopes he’ll find useful, including a folder of papers about Lewiston and Auburn.

Costlow and her husband, David Das, discuss packing strategies during one of her moving sessions. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Costlow begins a yearlong sabbatical this August, after which she will officially retire in August 2021. And she leaves at a particularly difficult time as �ֲ���ý — administrators, faculty, staff, and students — confront the challenges of COVID-19 and the nation’s greater-than-ever awareness of systemic racism in U.S. society. “I really feel for people,” she said, knowing that she will no longer be an active participant in the coming struggles.

The pattern of sabbaticals, she said, “provides an incredible luxury that we have as academics to take periodic time off — having a kind of Sabbath in your life. That actually gives us a little bit of practice at shifting gears, so it’s not completely unfamiliar to no longer have the demands of teaching.”

What’s different now, she said, is no longer being driven by a need to complete this project or fulfill that obligation or stand for promotion.

Costlow began her office move-out in April by first reviewing its entire contents, deciding what to save, what to dispose of, and what to try to pass on to others. Some of her discoveries — such as two folders of correspondence — delighted her.

Costlow reviews the 34 years worth of accumulated files in her office filing cabinet. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“Rather than pitching those things, I actually wanted to go through them,” she said. She read the approximately 100 letters, some of which she had written, others written to her.

She found an initial note from a young female graduate student, Jehanne Gheith (now an associate professor at Duke), writing her dissertation at Stanford on the Russian writer Evgeniia Tur, one of a number of women writers from the 19th century whose work and significance for cultural history has been retrieved by scholars over the past three decades, says Costlow.

“I was the only person, certainly in English, maybe in the world at that point, who had written anything about this woman writer. So Jehanne reached out to me, and we have since become very dear friends. It was cool to find the inaugural letter of our friendship.”

In undertaking that office audit, she rediscovered a younger version of herself: a new scholar emerging from graduate school.

Other surprises included a few missives from her late colleague, French professor Dick Williamson, a “hugely important person in the early years of my life at �ֲ���ý,” and a series of thank-you notes written by two other departed faculty colleagues when they were deans, Carl Benton Straub and Jim Carignan ’61, thanking her for moderating a panel or serving on a committee.

Costlow holds a grading ledger from 1999. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

In undertaking that office audit, she rediscovered a younger version of herself: a new scholar emerging from graduate school, at Yale, “a really wonderful graduate program, but one with a very traditional curriculum and entirely male faculty, which had been pretty much my experience as an undergraduate, as well,” she said; and then arriving at �ֲ���ý “interested in questions of women’s writing, feminist criticism, and different ways of thinking about cultural legacy and whose voices are heard.”

As she looked at all the books she’d acquired, all that she’d read, and what she’d written — unpublished and published — and conversations she’d had with others, she was struck by how much had changed over four decades.

In particular, she thought of the number of women who are faculty now and their positions within the academy, and the waves of various attempts to fundamentally open up and change curricula and syllabi. “I found myself looking back at the examples of how I have tried to do that, and the people that I’d worked with and leaned on.”

“Be gone slavery of the kitchen.”�� Costlow holds a�� reproduction of a 1931 poster by Soviet painter Grigory Mikhailovich Shegal. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

She leafed through documents from a seminar she’d participated in when �ֲ���ý was developing courses for its new women’s studies program, decades ago, her mind on the past and the present.

“Right at this moment, I feel just how enormous the rock is that so many different people are trying to push up the hill of fundamental change,” she said — people “working to bring all kinds of diverse voices and perspectives into the classroom and the academy.”

“You sometimes wonder: Where is the arc of the universe heading?”

But then she has a troubling realization. “My high school experience in rural North Carolina was my most diverse educational experience as a student — everything got whiter (and much more male)” as she went on to college (Duke) and graduate school.

In high school, Costlow had African American teachers in math, and chemistry, and in homeroom. “I particularly would love to be able to find out if they’re still around, to thank them for the work that they did.”

As her mind flashes to the past and back to present, Costlow now is on the edge of tears. “It’s that moment where you’re thinking back over your career and how much has changed” — and how much hasn’t. “You sometimes wonder: Where is the arc of the universe heading?”

Jane Costlow on changes in higher education. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

And all those books. Some she already handed off to students at the end of the fall semester or as they stopped in to say goodbye before departing suddenly in mid-March. With the help of the building’s academic administrative assistant, Jeanne Beliveau, Costlow has distributed more volumes to students. Still others will go into boxes to be picked up by students as freebies.

Costlow has also arranged to send boxes of books of American nature writing to her friends and colleagues in the English department at Turgenev State University in Orel, Russia, with whom she’s had great interactions over the course of 30 years. “Who knows what students will pick up and read in the future to get a broad sense of not just the American classics, but of diverse voices on the natural world?”

A pile of titles Costlow has selected for her successor sits on one of her office shelves. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

She mentioned a friend, Professor Emeritus of History Dennis Grafflin, who is assembling his own archive of the teaching books of �ֲ���ý faculty as they retire. She gave him her copy of The Brothers Karamazov, falling apart, filled with notes and Post-its. “I think it’s a fabulous idea,” she said. “There is something really precious about all of those marks that you leave in a book.”

What will she miss most — or least — about �ֲ���ý? That’s ironic, she said, since the campus has already emptied, and she’s already longing for all kinds of things: “The salad bar in the Den for those days when I don’t bring anything from home; talking to colleagues; or surprising moments with students; the energy of 20-year-olds.”

She will miss “the focused attention to writing and being able to engage with students about writing because I love thinking about what makes good writing.”

She’ll miss encounters with all sorts of colleagues, some in Ladd Library, others in Beliveau’s office in Hedge. “I’ll miss that a great deal, just being able to go down and chat with her for three minutes and maybe run into David Commiskey [professor of philosophy] or somebody else in Hedge.”

What she won’t miss: “those days when everybody is low-energy, including me, but somehow I have to crank it up to try to get the students going.” She will not miss teaching at 2:40 in the afternoon. “I always found that an impossible time to teach. I guess it’s my body rhythm.”

She will not miss grading. She will not miss having to sit down with a stack of papers and contemplate “how it’s humanly possible for me to get through these papers and help students with their writing.”

But she will miss “the focused attention to writing and being able to engage with students about writing because I love thinking about what makes good writing. I’m always happy to talk with students, and a fair amount of what we do in a class is talk about what makes this work, what makes it powerful? Or why doesn’t this communicate with us?”

Costlow shares a moment with Academic Administrative Assistant Jeanne Beliveau in Beliveau’s Hedge Hall office at the start of the fall 2019 semester. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College).

Although she’ll miss her colleagues, she will not miss their departmental meetings. “The wonderful kinds of conversations that you can have with people are the ones that are sometimes extemporaneous and unpredictable.” And faculty meetings? She views them as “a necessary evil,” although “there are times that faculty meetings are where we get to say really important things to each other — that’s at least as important now as it’s ever been.”

Nor will she miss multitasking. But there are probably ways she will continue to multitask in retirement because, after all, “it’s a constant in modern life, but it’s horrible.”

“There’s this paradox: being in a super busy job, then these moments when the beauty of the campus takes your breath away.”

Then, she’ll miss her time alone on the �ֲ���ý campus, particularly those years when she worked in Hathorn Hall and would walk from Campus Avenue up the central path on the Historic Quad to her office. “How beautiful it was, these moments of quiet,” she said. “It’s the counterweight to multitasking. I love working at a place where you have to walk around to get to different places.”

It can be a healthy work environment, she said, one that allowed her time for reflection and an opportunity to admire the landscaping designed by now-retired Bill Bergevin and others. “There’s this paradox: being in a super busy job, then these moments when the beauty of the campus takes your breath away.”

And finally, she will really miss the chance to travel with students, something that she has already missed this year, as have many of her colleagues. “I’m being optimistic,” Costlow said, but she imagines she will continue to travel to Russia and other countries that she has not yet visited. “But in all likelihood, I won’t travel with students, and I’ll miss that.”

A Russian keepsake awaits packing. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

She anticipates her future with hope and pleasure, imagining it as a continuance of, not an end to, the last 35 years of her life at �ֲ���ý.

She loves to read and write. She stays in touch with friends and colleagues in Russia. She maintains connections in Lewiston and Auburn “with groups of people that I love talking with.” She’s been part of a book group for 25 years that continues to meet on Zoom during COVID-19.

One thing’s for sure: “I just want to slow myself down. And the pandemic is oddly good for that.”

“I love this community. And I’ve been restrained in the extent to which I’ve had time to give to the community because of how all-consuming �ֲ���ý can become. So I’m looking forward to having a little bit more time to give there, although a lot of people warn you as you approach retirement, not to get yourself committed to too many different things at the beginning. That seems like really good advice.”

Because of the coronavirus, some of the things she had imagined doing at the beginning of her sabbatical — such as taking a road trip to see family and friends in Virginia and North Carolina — are no longer possible, at least for the immediate future.

But one thing’s for sure: “I just want to slow myself down. And the pandemic is oddly good for that.” She has “deep, heavy, intense academic” projects that she’s working on, but she’ll take a break from those. “I kind of want to drift for a while, quite frankly,” she said. “Read whatever comes to mind. Go for walks. Garden.”

Her neighbor gave her some sourdough starter, so Costlow, a longtime baker, is growing her repertoire. And she’s returned to the piano, an instrument she played often while growing up. “It was symbolic,” she said, to clear the papers, library books, and COVID-19 masks from the piano to make space for the sheet music that has allowed her to get slowly back into Bach’s “Two- and Three-Part Inventions.”

Mostly, she says, to the extent that it’s currently possible, she wants to go on really long walks. She and her husband, David Das, assistant director for the Center for Global Education, do a lot of walking together. And she walks, socially distanced, with friends. But there’s something about solitary walking that she truly likes, and there are some great places, including conservation lands, in her neighborhood.

Costlow pauses to consider how to move these framed 1950 aerial photographs of Shackleford Banks from her office to home. “They’re images of a place I love – a really wild, undeveloped island you can only get to by boat. But they’re also images of islands that ‘drift’ — they get reshaped by water and storms. They remind me of climate change and sea level rise. How much longer will they be there?” (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“I am not going out to exercise,” she said, taking guidance from Thoreau in his essay “Walking,” in which he talked about the mindfulness that should come with a good, long walk — famously saying, “I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit.”

Mind and body together on a walk — “I’ve done a little bit of that, which is really kind of wonderful,” Costlow said, describing a long exchange of looks she had with a chipmunk. “But we don’t do that when we live lives where we internalize our clocks so intensely, and you have to go on to your next meeting. One doesn’t do that. And it’s really not healthy.”

If anyone can start out on a long walk, and do it well, Jane Costlow can. Here’s to her continued good health.

“I’m being overcome with waves of nostalgia, so I can’t do this for too long,” wrote Jane Costlow in response to a recent request to round up photographs of her 26 years of taking �ֲ���ý students to Russia. “So many amazing and wonderful students and adventures.”

Though today she is the Clark A. Griffith Professor of Environmental Studies, now in her 34th and final year of teaching at �ֲ���ý, Costlow’s academic training is in Russian literature and culture, and she first traveled in the then–Soviet Union during graduate school in the 1980s.

And since joining the �ֲ���ý faculty, she has led students to Russia on 10 separate occasions, the first in 1988 and the last in 2014.

+Costlow in Russia

Costlow poses with her students in 2006 in front of the “coachman’s cottage” on Tolstoy’s estate, Yasnaya Polyana, near Tula. The folk ensemble had just performed. (Courtesy Jane Costlow)

Fascinated by Russian history, culture, politics, people, and language, Costlow cannot imagine her life as a teacher or scholar without those experiences in Russia. “You wouldn’t be a marine biologist and not go to the ocean. [Professor of Geology] Dyk Eusden ’80 does not do geology sitting in his office in Carnegie. If you’re someone who’s interested in another culture that happens to be a living culture, you go there.”

Jane Costlow on why Russia calls to her. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

We recently spoke to Costlow about her experiences teaching and researching in Russia.

Why has teaching in Russia been important to you?

Teaching in Russia allowed me to immerse my students and myself in discovering a place that’s unlike all places— and it’s constantly changing.

True, you can learn a lot about a place that isn’t Lewiston, Maine, when you’re in Lewiston — you can study the history, language, art, and film. The revolution in technology has facilitated that. You can watch the news, you can read today’s papers, and you can read blogs, the equivalent of a kind of Russian Reddit.

But to actually go there and experience it is really diving into the pool. I’ve loved rediscovering the place when you’re introducing it to students. And so in that introduction, in that transaction, you discover new things yourself.

Which is not to say that there aren’t really tough things about going with a bunch of undergraduates to any place, and maybe particular things about Russia. Still, I’ve always loved the informality of teaching while you’re abroad.

Costlow, photographed with a mug of kvas (which is also the word on the barrel) by Peter Olson ’92 during the 1988 Short Term. (Peter Olson’92)

What are the particular difficulties of taking students to Russia?

First, there’s the visa, and with Russia, the application process is complicated. It’s not just a “get your ticket and board the plane” kind of thing.

But beyond that, there’s a sort of paradox of Russian development. On the one hand, it’s a modern, “European” country, although whether or not it’s European has always been one of the central questions of Russian identity. Moscow is enormously well-resourced now and seems not that different, quite frankly, from London or Paris or Berlin.

But once you get outside of Moscow, the levels of development can be quite different, and certainly different from what many, if not most of our students, are used to. Over the years, I felt like I needed to make sure that they understood that there were going to be certain kinds of amenities that they’re used to that they probably were not going to find.

That could include not being able to get the things that they want to eat. And Russians live in tiny little apartments. You discover that you’re in a homestay where it’s a two-room apartment with three generations — and you’re the one who’s gotten the bedroom.

This is no longer the case, but students had to deal with the inaccessibility of ATM machines or public facilities or levels of cleanliness. It’s not France. I felt like I always wanted to be clear to our students about that.

But I’ll also say the students have, by and large, been really game. They’ve been troupers. If anything, the rumors about Russia are far worse than the realities, so I think that there’s probably been a self-selection process for going to a place like Russia. Did I mention negotiating Russian trains?

Jane Costlow, our professor in Moscow, stands on the walkway over the Moscow River near the Kremlin at Zaryad’e Park in June 2018. (David Das)

Tell us about the 1988 visa incident.

Three or four days before we were set to leave for my very first Short Term in the Soviet Union, the packet of passports and visas arrived. All the students’ visas were there — but mine had been denied.

This was 1988, just my second year on the �ֲ���ý faculty and the first time that I was going back to the Soviet Union after I’d been there as a graduate student. When my visa was denied, I assumed — to the extent that one assumes that there’s actually a reason for any of this — that some bureaucrat didn’t like something in my file. Carl Straub and Jim Carignan ’61 [then dean of the faculty and dean of the college, respectively] contacted Sen. Bill Cohen’s office — he was vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time — and they were able to get me a visa.

I sometimes think that if I hadn’t gotten it, what would have happened? It was the first time I had taken students to Orel, where I would go many times later, and it’s where all of �ֲ���ý’ Russian teaching assistants have since come from.

“Letter of Gratitude” from the foreign language department at the Turgenev State University of Orel, which declares its “profound gratitude to Dr. Jane T. Costlow, Professor at �ֲ���ý College (USA), for her love of Russian literature and nature; her interest in the Orel region; her many years of collaboration with our institution; contact between �ֲ���ý students and the students of Turgenev State University of Orel which she made possible; and the creation of the position of Russian Teacher Assistant at �ֲ���ý College, a position which our graduates have occupied regularly, one after the other. We hope for a continuation of our productive cooperation and wish Jane T. Costlow success, health and well-being.”

Why did you choose Orel?

I had visited there and developed friendships there in 1984–85, when I had a fellowship in Leningrad. Orel is a small city south of Moscow in the so-called Black Earth, agricultural part of Russia. And it’s where the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, who I had written my dissertation on, was from.

In those days, it was quite unusual to get out beyond either Moscow or Leningrad. The Soviets were quite adept at restricting people’s movement beyond the capital cities. But I had asked permission to go to Orel. I found it fascinating. When I was organizing our 1988 trip, the British company helping us said they could arrange for us to go to Orel.

This was the first time I had been back since 1985. Gorbachev was in power, so things were already beginning to change a little bit. It was breathtaking for somebody who had wondered, only three years before, “How are the lives of my friends going to get any better?” In Moscow, you could see that the pictures of Leon Trotsky — for decades considered an enemy of the people — were back up on the wall. Trotsky was back in the Museum of the History of Communism!

But when the people on the street in Moscow who wanted to talk to us heard that I was taking these students to Orel, they looked at me aghast and said, “Oh my God, how can you go to Orel? There’s nothing to eat there!”

�ֲ���ý students learn to make pelmeni — Russian dumplings that consist of a filling wrapped in thin, unleavened dough — in a restaurant kitchen as part of a cultural program. (Courtesy of Jane Costlow)

Once you arrived, what was the reality like?

There may have been less to eat for some people in Orel than there was in Moscow, and that was part of the Soviet provisioning system. But the hospitality that we received was amazing.

And it started with getting off the train at 4 in the morning and arriving at a motel, where they had tea and cookies and other snacks waiting for us. The people in Orel were extraordinary: thoughtful organization, terrific teachers. And, as my interest became more and more directed towards environmental issues, my relationships with these people became more and more important.

I met Joseph Solomonovich Keselman, an English teacher at the university, who’s still a very dear friend and has taught every single group of students that I’ve taken. And Marina Shimchenok became my on-the-ground contact; she got what I was interested in. She would set up a visit to a dairy farm, or a farm that was in the process of being converted from a collective farm to a privately owned joint-stock operation.

Or we would go to a local national park or a place that made recycled toilet paper. She worked with me over the years as the Short Term became more environmentally focused.

Costlow picnicking in the town of Bolkhov in 1990 with her longtime friend and on-the-ground contact in Orel, Marina Shimchenok, who organized travel for Costlow and her students. (Courtesy Jane Costlow)

What were your goals in taking students to Russia, and how did they change over time as your scholarly focus shifted?

With the exception of 2003, when we traveled to focus more on environmental issues in multiple places, students have always had to take some language no matter what their majors. It was always absolutely key to my understanding of what it means to travel in another country that you at least try to learn a little bit of the language of the country.

My goal for the students is to develop the kind of deeper cultural understanding and growth that you get from being in a place where you’re confronted with living with a family, where you’re humbled by what you don’t know and by the paradoxes and challenging things in other people’s lives.

I’ve always wanted my students to develop friendships with Russians. Maybe that’s still a holdover from the Soviet era of sister-city projects, meeting the so-called enemy, and discovering how much you have in common and what potential that holds for making the world a better place to live.

Costlow’s students participate in a 2006 cleanup effort in Orel. (Courtesy of Jane Costlow)

Did your experiences change significantly after the collapse of the USSR in 1991?

The 1990s were a nightmare economically in Russia, so in 1993, we went to St. Petersburg, which by then had been renamed, with a group of students and only for two weeks, rather than Orel.

That was not a particularly successful trip. The teachers were not as good, and I also think that Russians’ lives were such a mess at that point that it was extremely difficult for them. That was also a period in which there was the sense of criminality. People worried about being endangered on the street, although that was never an issue for us.

And by 2000, you started to see the Putin transformation: people’s apartments were getting better and lives were stabilizing. Public spaces were becoming cleaner. There was the understanding that Putin had delivered some of that.

Was there a particular experience that stands out for you? High or low?

The low point is easy: Short Term 1999, when a student developed acute appendicitis and needed to have an appendectomy.

We were in Orel, and fortunately I had friends who had friends who were able to get us connected to the best surgeon and the best hospital and to get the medication that we needed, because none of that could be taken for granted at that point.

We had great support from Steve Sawyer [then head of the college’s off-campus study office] and from the student’s amazing parents. All’s well that ends well, and she did fine. But I actually had to stay in Russia with her while my husband, David, who was visiting with our two children, took the group to St. Petersburg and got everybody home. I stayed in Orel for the better part of a week until she had mended enough that we could get on the plane.

Post-appendicitis surgery memento: �ֲ���ý student Erica McIninch poses with her Russian doctor. (Courtesy Jane Costlow)

The high point?

There are so many of them that it’s really hard to say. They mostly involve students’ connections to their peers in Russia.

In 2006, we visited Optina Pustyn, a monastery in one of the great religious cultural centers of Russia. We’d spent the night at a house for pilgrims and then visited a women’s convent that was where Tolstoy’s sister had been a nun. And one of our students, Sami Karmout, a wonderful young man from Palestine who had to travel without a passport, saw a French Orthodox monk he knew from home.

I remember sitting outside the monastery with a group of three or four students after we’d been there for several hours, just kind of wandering around, very quietly, letting the monks go about their daily lives. We talked about what religion meant to us and what our spiritual lives were. It was a conversation made possible by that trip, and I really treasured it.

Sometimes, riding on the bus somewhere, you’d strike up a conversation with somebody over the backseat about politics or philosophy. I have a really wonderful memory of a student talking about how listening to Bruce Springsteen in Russia was helping him understand the backwoods of, kind of, depressed industrial Russia.

Costlow and some of her students, aka The Babushkas, at Optina Pustyn, a monastery that has been enormously important for Russian culture, in 2014. (Courtesy of Jane Costlow)

Things stick in your mind. In 1990 Corey Harris ’91, who’s gone on to an amazing musical career, was on my 1990 Short Term. He struck me as somebody who was an aural learner, and he picked up Russian really quickly. In those days, Soviet citizens could not have foreigners staying at their houses, so we stayed in this little motel on the edge of town.

And as far as Corey was concerned, we were served far too many beets. In Russian, the word for maybe is “mozhet byt.” Corey took to saying “mozhet, beets?” when we sat down to any meal, meaning “maybe we’ll have beets, oh goodie!” And sure enough, there would be beets, and there would be both laughs and groans.

Costlow horseback riding in the Orel region in 2014, at the Zlynskii Stud Farm, a stable that dates back to pre-revolutionary Russia. (Courtesy of Jane Costlow)

You had hoped to take �ֲ���ý students to Russia this year, for one last time. Even before the pandemic, you chose not to.

It would have been a wonderful way to end my teaching career. It would have been better than Zoom!

I ultimately decided against it because Marina, who had set everything up in the past, died quite unexpectedly two years ago. I had reached out to people in Orel — there’s actually one of our former teaching assistants who’s essentially taken over Marina’s business — and she was game for trying, but I had this feeling that it was probably better just not to do it.

Any study abroad travel that you undertake with students involves a massive amount of work. In my “no longer spring chicken” status, and especially without Marina there, I wondered if I’d be able to pull it off.

Any final thoughts about the study abroad experience?

There has been a deep decline in foreign language study at American colleges and universities. Recognizing that national reality, I hope �ֲ���ý finds a way to have a serious discussion about its importance and role in a liberal arts education.

On paper, and on balance sheets, these small classes look really expensive. We do not have, and never have had, a language requirement, and I’m not necessarily advocating one. But the study of a foreign language, in my experience and in the experience of many students, is transformational.

Costlow in 2006 with her students in front of the 18th-century Peterhof Palace, home of Peter the Great. (Courtesy of Jane Costlow)

We’re headed into — we are in — rough economic waters. And I don’t know how they’re going to handle that. But the faculty, in terms of being in charge of the curriculum, needs to ask, “What does it mean to be a college that attends to global forces if you don’t train your students seriously to speak a language other than the language that they’re born with?”

But you know, I’m an old language teacher and I would say, “More rather than less” when it comes to the study of language. It’s what I’ve done, and I think I’ve had an impact on people’s lives. I’ve taken probably a couple hundred students to Russia, and it’s really one of the things that I’m most proud of. I certainly hope the college can continue to support that kind of transformative learning.

Jack Allard ’16

Former All-American lacrosse star released from hospital after long coronavirus battle — multiple outlets

On April 17, Jack Allard ’16, a two-time All-American lacrosse player and politics major at �ֲ���ý, walked out of the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania as medical staff applauded.

Jack Allard ’16 (left) and classmate Charlie Hildebrand celebrate a big �ֲ���ý lacrosse win over Tufts in April 2016. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Allard’s dramatic story — his weeks long fight with COVID-19 — had drawn steady attention from the national media but this happy chapter was particularly well-chronicled.

Not long after first showing COVID-19 symptoms in mid-March, Allard was hospitalized in New Jersey. He was placed on a ventilator and later airlifted to Philadelphia to take part in a trial for an experimental treatment. There, his condition improved day-by-day.��

https://twitter.com/RHSBOYSLACROSSE/status/1251141155640741888

Due in part to Allard’s young age and otherwise good health, his family speaking out, and his high school and college lacrosse teams rallying around him, his story drew international attention.

“He took personal responsibility for lifting the Bobcats to national competitiveness,” wrote Lasagna. “Most importantly, his teammates will tell you that he is a better and more giving person, a more caring mentor than he is an attackman.”

Five weeks ago, former standout and All-American Jack Allard was confirmed positive for . He was put on a ventilator. Last Thursday, he walked out of the hospital. For Jack and the hundreds more who have recovered, we’re optimistic.

— Governor Phil Murphy (@GovMurphy)

From his family’s home in Ridgewood, N.J., Allard told Matt DaSilva of US Lacrosse Magazine that his story should serve as a cautionary tale.����

“We need to listen to our scientists and our doctors when they give us warnings and give us guidance,” he said. “People my age think it’s not going to hit them and, if it does, it’s going to be a slight flu. That’s clearly not true. It took me to my knees.”

Read the stories:

• “,” US Lacrosse Magazine, April 22, 2020��
• “,” USA Today, April 19, 2020��

Andrew Mountcastle

�ֲ���ý professor leads effort to print coronavirus protective gear — Sun Journal��

Steve Collins of the Lewiston Sun Journal reported on an initiative led by Assistant Professor of Biology Andrew Mountcastle to 3D-print face shield visors to protect medical personnel from the coronavirus.

The Androscoggin County Emergency Management Agency is distributing the shields, which faculty and staff from �ֲ���ý, Bowdoin, Colby, and other institutions with access to 3D-printers are creating.��

“I feel it’s the least I can do to support members of my community and state who need it most,” Mountcastle said.��

Read the story:��

• “,” Sun Journal, April 3, 2020��

See also:��

• “Shields up! �ֲ���ý helping to ease PPE shortages,” �ֲ���ý News, April 3, 2020��

Jane Costlow��

In teaching stories of disaster, hope lies hidden in plain sight — Literary Hub

Writing in Lit Hub, Jane Costlow, the Clark A. Griffith Professor of Environmental Studies, reflected on teaching a course, “Catastrophe and Hope,” during the very kind of catastrophe her students read about.��

As an added layer, this semester is Costlow’s last as an instructor before she retires. For her, there will be no opportunity to incorporate the present moment into her future teaching. But she’s trying to convey to her students that upheaval like this need not be defeating.��

“My experience of life first in the Soviet Union and then in post-Soviet Russia had convinced me … that people in extraordinarily constrained political and economic conditions make lives of dignity, lives inflected with moments of joy and commitment,” says Costlow, whose background is in Russian literature.

“I wanted my students to read a book like Zhivago because it’s about a society that comes apart, lives that are profoundly—viciously—unsettled, and yet there are forms of endurance, too.”��

Read the essay:��

• “,” Literary Hub, April 24, 2020

Ru Freeman ’94

We owe more to our young writers: On the relevance of the workshop — Literary Hub

Also in Lit Hub, writer and writing professor Ru Freeman ’94 argued that creative writing faculty and university writing departments should prioritize not the craft of writing or the parsing of prose, but helping students understand their own experiences within their society and become “fearless” writers who speak truth to power.�� ��

“We must commit, as a collective, to bringing a fierce energy to our classrooms where a few students may develop an intensity of discomfort in their intestines, but most will finally identify their guts as being part of the body they inhabit,” Freeman writes.��

“With passionate effort, our students might yet go from being a concert of crows cawing in the same register, safe within the dull shades of uniformity, to articulating the music and iridescence of a truly creative menagerie.”��

Read the essay:��

• “,” Literary Hub, April 16, 2020

Todd Nelson ’78

T.S. Eliot and Me — The Ellsworth American��

Retired high school English teacher Todd Nelson ’78 wrote a column for the Maine Ellsworth American about reading the poems of T.S. Eliot and, after a fashion, encountering the poet himself.��

Nelson lived for a time near the London home where the late Eliot had lived. Nelson took to the poet in high school and college; Eliot’s “Four Quartets” helped inspire his senior thesis on religious poets.��

“Eliot follows me, bursts from his poems informing my own arc,” Nelson writes. “It’s a life’s work fathoming Eliot’s poems. Why not? It was a life work to write them; to weave the threads of memory, history, family experience, religion, and philosophy into self-study.”��

Read the essay:��

• “,” The Ellsworth American, April 17, 2020

Anne Williams

Piecing together the history of jigsaw puzzles — multiple outlets��

As quarantined Americans turn to jigsaw puzzles to pass the time, several news outlets have turned to Professor Emerita of Economics Anne Williams, an expert on toys and puzzles, for a history lesson.��

The first jigsaw puzzles were made with scroll saws — also known as jig saws — and were intended to teach geography, said Williams, author of The Jigsaw Puzzle, Piecing Together a History.��

During the Great Depression, families used jigsaw puzzles not only for entertainment, but for income. “They set up the saw in their kitchen or their basement, started making jigsaw puzzles and selling them to their neighbors or renting them out through the local drug store,” Williams told CBS News.��

Read the stories:��

• “,” CBS News, March 29, 2020
• “,” NPR, April 5, 2020
• “,” CNBC, April 5, 2020

Phyllis Graber Jensen

Documenting history during the pandemic — UPAA��

In a roundup of the how college photographers were documenting the closure of their campuses, the University Photographers’ Association of America featured work by Phyllis Graber Jensen, director of photography and video for the �ֲ���ý Communications Office.

The �ֲ���ý photography focused on the experiences of and historic transition to remote learning in mid-March.��

Graber Jensen told the UPAA that she was guided by professional training and her instincts. “I didn’t yet have specific directions or assignments, just my usual internal, professional guidance — ‘�ֲ���ý Communications needs to document this’ — plus the unequivocal support from my boss to forge ahead.”

Read the story:

• “,” UPAA��

Henry Colt ’19

In a time of crisis, a twentysomething rookie reporter learns the value of community newspapers — Anchorage Press��

As the coronavirus sent the country into a lockdown and sent people scrambling for information, Henry Colt’s thoughts turned to his recent stint as a reporter for the Daily Sitka Sentinel in Alaska. For this 2019 graduate, the pandemic underscored the value of community newspapers.��

“Newspapers, of which more than one in five have closed in the U.S. during the last 15 years, are as vital to their communities as potlucks, concerts, salmon-sharing and marine-invertebrate-themed house parties are to Sitka. And in Sitka, few things are more vital than the Sentinel,” Colt wrote in the Anchorage Press.

“Who else will tell you that an electric fishing boat took its maiden voyage? That your neighbor just won a $50,000 grant? That an injured great horned owl passed its rehabilitation test with flying colors?

“Who else, when crisis strikes, will tell you exactly what’s happening in Seattle, D.C., and Italy — then tell you exactly what’s happening at the Backdoor Café, the Pioneer Home, and Mount Edgecumbe High School?”��

Read the story:��

• “,” Anchorage Press, March 29, 2020

Andrew Kennedy and Michelle Greene

When professors are cut off from their students, what do they do? — 207��

NewsCenter Maine’s 207 news magazine talked to professors Andrew Kennedy and Michelle Greene, whose remote class “movie trailers” were a hit among their students and thousands of people on the internet.��

https://twitter.com/Prof_AJKennedy/status/1241071316599439365?

Kennedy, an assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry, made a trailer for his course “Mechanisms of Memory.”��

“It’s like preparing for a baseball season, and you show up to your first game and after the fifth inning the umpire says, ‘Well actually we’re gonna play football now,’” Kennedy told 207’s Rob Caldwell, referring to the abrupt shift to remote learning.��

“So I was learning these new tools and learning how to make videos. I went down a rabbit hole of, ‘This is funny; I might as well try it.’”����

Inspired by @Prof_AJKennedy 's great class trailer and my own lifelong desire to be James Bond, I present Neuroethics 2020: The Classroom is Never Enough.

— Michelle Greene (@MGreenePhD)

Greene, an assistant professor of neuroscience, made her trailer in James Bond fashion. Her students appreciated a section about her new teaching assistant — her cat, Tesla.��

“To not have those in-person dialogues is hard,” she told Caldwell. “That being said, we still have deep, rich, lovely conversations.”��

Read the story:��

• “?” 207, April 14, 2020

See also:��

• “�ֲ���ý professors’ humorous movie-trailer videos brighten the move to remote learning,” �ֲ���ý News, March 27, 2020��

Mara Tieken

Coronavirus pandemic is exacerbating a rural access crisis — Bangor Daily News��

For the Bangor Daily News, Mara Tieken, an associate professor of education and expert on rural education and issues, wrote that while images from the coronavirus pandemic are primarily urban — empty streets, subways, and airports — the crisis also poses serious risks for rural communities.��

In rural areas, hospitals tend to be sparse and under-resourced, fewer rural residents than urban dwellers have internet access, food banks are running low, and newspapers that deliver important information are scaling back or closing.��

“Right now, what rural communities need most is access: to health care, to the internet, to food, to information,” Tieken writes. “This access will help mitigate the worst effects of an already deadly crisis. But what is particularly frustrating about this moment is that these inequalities were identified long before now.”��

Read the story:��

• “,” Bangor Daily News, April 22, 2020

Jane Costlow struggles to find words to convey how she’s feeling. “In a way,” she says, “I don’t know how I’m feeling.”

In her 34th and final year in the �ֲ���ý classroom, Costlow, the college’s Griffith Professor of Environmental Studies, has seen her in-person teaching career end in a way neither she, nor anyone else for that matter, could have ever imagined.

On Friday, March 13, �ֲ���ý suspended in-person classes, asking all 1,700 students — except those granted waivers through petition — to move off campus in preparation for remote learning, which began on March 23.

Costlow is no stranger to catastrophic scenarios. A day before the announcement, she led a discussion in her course “Catastrophes and Hope,” which explores disaster narratives that may serve as “dire warnings, offer glimpses of hope, spur us to change our lives, or scare us into denial.”

During that Thursday class, Costlow led a discussion of author Svetlana Alexievich’s collection of oral histories of the Chernobyl disaster, Voices from Chernobyl. She asked the students to imagine that Alexievich was interviewing them, because that’s what the author does, she explains.

“She interviews ordinary people who have lived through extraordinary circumstances. And so I asked them to write a piece as though Alexievich had asked them, ‘What was it like to be at �ֲ���ý in March of 2020?’”

The idea for the writing prompt comes from experience. “One of the wonderful and frustrating things about teaching is that you’re always being confronted with new situations and new configurations of students. You have to learn to think on your feet.”

That last day in class, Costlow gave her students another, optional, writing assignment. Instead of a traditional paper, they could pretend to be a character in Doctor Zhivago offering written advice to the paper writer.

The novel’s fictional characters had “lived through profound psychological disruptions of revolution, civil war, displacement, separation from families, famine, and epidemic,” says Costlow, “people who have had the rug pulled out from under them really big time.”

Yet Costlow believes that the novel offers “profound examples of resilience and people’s will to live and continue.” That’s why she thought it would be interesting to see if some of the students would be willing to choose this alternative to a traditional paper.

The class accomplished, yet again, what Costlow has devoted her career to doing: giving her students insight, context, and understanding. She enjoyed the session immensely despite the circumstances.

But at home later that evening, knowing an announcement to close was imminent, Costlow finally reacted. “I felt really, really sad, because it hit me: ‘Oh, I’m never going to be in a classroom with students again.’ And I was just kind of overcome. It was the unexpectedness of it that made it really intense.”

Costlow has always known that humor can help calm roiled water; she reminds her students that “what makes human beings resilient in the long run is being able to tell jokes and share some kind of morbid humor with each other.” It’s part of what gets us through difficult situations, she says.

Although she kept the humor in mind on Friday after the closing announcement, Costlow found herself challenged in unprecedented ways, as students, some quite distraught, dropped by for goodbyes and reassurances.

At top, Costlow struggles with her emotions in her office with a student on the last day of classes. Above left and right, Costlow meets with Tommy Novick ’22 of New Canaan, Conn., and Ava Gulino ’20 of Wilmington, Del. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“It was excruciatingly difficult,” she said. “I just really wanted to go into my — I’ll call it a ‘maternal mode.’  I wanted to comfort them and hug them, but it was already kind of a situation where we weren’t supposed to do that. I felt powerless to care for them in a way I might normally have tried to care for them.”

But then a helpful realization kicked in.

Above left, Michelle Desjarlais ’22 of Albuquerque, N.M., also stopped by and received a social distancing–appropriate elbow bump from Costlow instead of a hug. Above right, Dianna Georges ’22 of Clifton, N.J., received Costlow’s reassurances that they would see each other again next year. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College) .

“There’s a continuity in my relationships with them as their adviser or their teacher.” In that role, she was able to calm and reassure them. “We’re not going to sit here and talk about your thesis, but we’re going to pick up and continue doing it online. The situation won’t be that different.”

And for those who weren’t seniors, she offered the consolation that although she won’t be teaching or advising them next fall, she will still be around to connect with them. “I’m not moving to the wilds of Russia. You will see me again.”

Those goodbyes remind her of a favorite Russian proverb: “Long, long goodbyes lead to too many tears.” It’s time to move on.

As her last campus semester evaporated in front of her, Costlow suddenly realized that she might lose the chance to engage in a traditional rite of faculty retirement: giving books from her office collection to students as gifts.

On that final Friday, one student left with two volumes about Siberia. Another received Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal’s The Tragic Menagerie, a book of Russian stories translated by Costlow herself. A third received a copy of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, inscribed by Costlow. “It’s a great time to dip into a fictional world that’s completely different,” Costlow said.

At top, Costlow’s sense of humor kicks in on March 13, 2020, as she suggests some reading, Roy Scranton’s We’re Doomed. Now What? Essays on War and Climate Change, for thesis advisee Ava Gulino ’20 of Wilmington, Del. Above left and right, Costlow pulled these volumes off her bookshelves and inscribed them for students as they dropped by her Hedge Hall office. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Now working from home in Auburn, Costlow has created a backdrop for Zoom meetings with students in her two winter-semester courses. Not a digital one, but a real one. There’s an antique pie safe — a tin bureau punctured with holes to keep the pastry aerated and bug-free, and a framed black-and-white drawing of a man with a hat, sketched 19 years ago by her son, Dinesh, then 12.

The �ֲ���ý faculty had about 10 days to prepare — many for the first time in their academic careers — for remote teaching and learning. Costlow spent much of that week determining how to rearrange her syllabi, in part, by polling her students, 28 in one class, 35 in another, to get a sense of what their situations were.

Given �ֲ���ý’ international student body, Costlow knew that “synchronous classes wouldn’t work because people are really all over the place.” She arrived at her approach through “a little bit of trial and error,” along with robust support from the college’s Information and Library Services.

Slowly, she felt less unsettled. She created short PowerPoint presentations to offer introductions and context for material. She’s divided the classes, including her course “Lives in Place,” into discussion groups of five and six students who discuss reading topics and then write blogs that are both responses to the readings and reports about their day-to-day experiences.

The blogs have been unexpectedly wonderful, she says, because there are some students who have opened up on the blogs, some of those who have been very quiet in class. “There’s an interesting way in which having a different medium of communication opens things up for certain students.”

In the midst of the second week of online teaching, she’s aware of what’s changed and what hasn’t. “I still have a stack of papers I have to grade. Right? I do need to sit here and read through them.” Yet reading their papers “is where I feel like I’ll encounter each student, personally.”

During a Zoom conversation, Jane Costlow describes how she felt when she realized she had just taught her last class in a �ֲ���ý classroom. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

An unexpected benefit of remote teaching, says Costlow, is the opportunity “to get a little bit of a peek into their home lives.” To re-launch her classes, she asked students to create one-minute “re-introduction” videos about where they were and how they were feeling, and what they were experiencing.

“It was really great to see their faces and see where they are,” to be able to see their pets and their loved ones moving in the background. “That’s kind of cool. I think that you learn a little bit more about your students when you get a sense of them in the context of their family lives.”

But it’s also been clear that this new reality is, above all, stressful. Whatever their family’s circumstances, part of the stress results from “having gone off to college and become an independent adult. And then, suddenly, you’re back in high school mode, where you’re living in the house with the rest of your family.”

Remote teaching has presented entirely new challenges. A student asked her during a Zoom conference: “In your experience, has there been anything like this? Was it like 9/11?”

No, she told him. The pandemic feels very different to her “because of the time frame.” Sept. 11 was a series of events followed by shock and a subsequent “unfolding sequence of political disruptions and consequences.”

There was uncertainty after 9/11, but not interminable uncertainty of the kind we’re feeling now. We don’t have a sense of time.

As her students studied the Chernobyl disaster, they read an essay by the sociologist Kai Erikson, who describes what he calls a “new species of trouble” in the form of radioactivity and “toxic disasters.” Such events “don’t follow the law of plot,” Costlow says.

With most disasters, such as floods or fires or hurricanes — the disasters that she lived through growing up on the coast of North Carolina — there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end. “You know something’s coming. There’s confusion and complexity of whatever happens. Then the thing passes, followed by the aftermath.” Erikson’s conclusion, that toxic disasters don’t provide any sense of closure, resonated with Costlow’s students as they tried to make sense of COVID-19.

“There’s an amorphous sense of uncertainty about exactly what the disaster is and when, if ever, it was.” It certainly applied to Chernobyl, she says, but it also gave them language to consider for today’s pandemic. “Without the law of plot, there isn’t anything we can look forward to. I really can’t think of anything analogous to this in my own life,” she says.

People have been asking each other how they are doing, she concludes, and “we all kind of look at each other and say, ‘I have no idea.’ I mean, it’s kind of numbing. The structure of trying to do this semester is in some ways comforting, but I just can’t get over how strange and unsettling it is.”

She worries about her students, the college, and her colleagues. “It’s been very gratifying to see the extent to which faculty have reached out to each other online to try to provide advice, but also support for each other.”

But in the end, she says, “I don’t know. It just feels unreal.”

Various shelves and closets, both in and around Jane Costlow’s office in Hedge Hall, are filled with bound senior theses from years gone by.

Costlow selects one and reads the acknowledgement. The senior thanked Costlow for “an enlightening process” during a time when Costlow was “dealing with hard times herself. She made herself available and helped me through my own.”

Costlow wonders about the “hard times” reference. Checking the date, 2009, she remembers: “That was the year my father died.” Such touching acknowledgments are a “reminder of these wonderful students I’ve had,” Costlow says.

Jane Costlow reads the acknowledgments from a former student’s senior thesis. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The college’s Clark A. Griffith Professor of Environmental Studies, Costlow is now in her 34th and final year in the �ֲ���ý classroom. Adding it all up, she’s advised well over 100 thesis students in her career.

“The heart of the thesis experience is having a student who comes once a week and sits in your office and talks with you about this topic that they’re having the pain and the pleasure of getting to know a lot better, that they’re really diving into,” she says.

In that sense, it’s timeless, no different from when Costlow first began. “I really love the one-on-one interaction.”

Jane Costlow meets with thesis student Erin O’Farrell ’20, environmental studies major from Burke, Vt., who is writing on the photography from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico with an environmental perspective. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The one-on-one model is also intensive, making the month of March a notorious crunch time for both seniors and professors, coming in like a lamb and going out like a lion as seniors generate reams of thesis pages for their advisers in advance of the April 10 submission deadline.

As March progresses, says Costlow, faculty “get more bleary-eyed just because of how many pages they have to read.”

Easing the load somewhat in recent years is a new thesis option for environmental studies majors. Instead of a traditional independent thesis, they can choose to take a seminar course called “Environmental Writing in the Public Sphere.”

Environmental studies major Hermione Zhou ’21 of Shenzhen, China, speaks with Costlow about possible thesis topics for next year. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Costlow taught the seminar last year, guiding students in major projects including documentary film and long-form digital journalism, such as podcasts. “They’re really useful formats and genres for students to learn about producing work for which they still have to do all of the deep research” required for a traditional thesis.

One of her 2019 seminar students, Hugh Kenny ’19, produced a film about the Auburn, Maine, agricultural zone; now he’s working as a communications fellow and videographer for the Piedmont Environmental Council, a land trust in Virginia.

This semester, Grace Ellrodt ’20 of Lenox, Mass., started as one of Costlow’s thesis advisees then switched to the thesis seminar, a better fit for a project that grew out of work she’d done in Chile and Colombia investigating the public health issue of loneliness among older people. Ellrodt’s project includes a photography exhibit and website — a launching pad, she hopes, for a career in digital public-health journalism.

Grace Ellrodt ’20 discusses her thesis in Costlow’s Hedge Hall office at the beginning of the fall 2019 term. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

It’s no coincidence that many of Costlow’s thesis advisees are interested in film and photography. Costlow, who for many years taught in the college’s Russian program, teaches courses in environmental literature and over the years has expanded her interest in visual culture.

“It’s something I always did when I was teaching Russian because it’s such a fabulous way to give a rich, complex sense of the culture. And our students are really visual,” she says. “In environmental studies, we do a lot of class work in looking at documentaries and photographic traditions that have been really important in American environmentalism.”

For example, one of her current thesis students, Ava Gulino ’20 of Wilmington, Del., is focusing on the island of Antigua to explore the connection between tourism and photography. “She’s looking at how Antigua gets represented and marketed as a ‘paradise,’ and what that marketing tends to obscure or erase,” Costlow explains. “And then, within that context, she’s also looking at what it might mean to be a mindful and responsible visitor.”

Ava Gulino ’20 of Wilmington, Del., meets weekly with Costlow in her office. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Costlow herself has just finished writing a paper that is, in part, about contemporary Russian photography. “It’s a good example of how my own work and student work can overlap in some ways.”

At �ֲ���ý, the thesis experience varies enormously from one academic division to another. In the social sciences and especially in STEM disciplines, for example, thesis topics often reflect a faculty member’s research, with students becoming integral members of their adviser’s lab.

“And that’s really exciting,” Costlow says, noting how meaningful it is for students of environmental studies colleague Holly Ewing to do field research on water quality on Lake Auburn, read the literature, and then make sense of it.

For majors in the humanities, the experience and approach is different, Costlow says. “It almost always involves letting the student become the expert,” she says. “The student becomes the person who, in a way, is teaching you.” The student, in a way, becomes the “sage on the stage.”

Jane Costlow describes the joy of senior thesis advising and how she helps seniors develop their topics. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Often, her advisees will choose a subject about which she knows very little; in that situation, Costlow’s approach as adviser is to ask good questions and push back against assumptions. “It’s up to them to develop expertise and read broadly within the relevant literature.”

She worked with one thesis writer who was investigating the treatment of elephants in northeastern India. Costlow knew little about the topic and learned a lot — an experience, she says, that can mean “really stretching yourself as a teacher to think about how you can be helpful.”

The theses on the shelves in and around Costlow’s office don’t just sit there. She pulls out certain ones to show current seniors how past writers have approached a certain topic.

Costlow inspects thesis binders stored in an environmental studies area in Hedge Hall. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

One favorite was a thesis written by Patricia Noto ’12, now a landscape designer at G2 Collaborative, who explored how colleges and universities developed farms and gardens on campus. After writing an outstanding thesis, she wrote a proposal for how �ֲ���ý could develop such an operation.

Of course, there are the infamous bumps, if not complete washouts, on the thesis road.

There are the advisees who, week after week, refuse (or say they forgot) to try a new approach or resource. Costlow recalls asking a student to consult with one of the college’s research librarians. “Our librarians are incredibly valuable sources of insight — not just information. They give student tools they’ll use all their lives.”

But week after week, the student reported that he’d not yet done so. Finally, in the dying days of the semester, the student had the meeting. “Wow!” the student exclaimed to Costlow afterward. “I should have gone to see him months ago!”

Costlow chuckles at the memory. “My only regret was that I didn’t have him on video, so I could show all my thesis students.”

When it comes to evaluating and grading this pivotal capstone, the thesis is “completely unlike any other grading experience,” Costlow says.

Costlow discusses thesis ground rules with fall semester thesis advisee Lars Schuster ’20 as he embarks on his study of offshore wind farms in New England. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

With each student, she tries to have an initial conversation, an up-front opportunity to discuss what’s involved in writing a thesis and what she expects a student to do in terms of source materials and bibliography, so that she has something to return to when she needs to say, “This is really not adequate.”

That rarely comes to pass, partly because, she finds, the students are really grading themselves, “sort of playing against themselves. They’ve set a standard of what they’re capable of, and you hope they live up to it. And you hope they set high goals for themselves.

“That’s my way of saying that I have different expectations for different thesis students based on my understanding of who they are as a student.”

Costlow opens a senior thesis by Colin Schless ’04 titled “Two Roads Maine: A Study of the Nature in Healing.” (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

And then there are the students who blow off their regular meetings. At that point, Costlow isn’t going to play games. “I say, ‘You know what? You’re close to graduating. You’re grown up. If you think you can pull this off without my input, give it a try.’”

One student never came in to see her and spent the last 10 days of the semester camped out in the program’s lounge writing day in, day out. “He handed in an amazing thesis — for the first chapter and a half. Then it just fell completely apart.”

And then there are the big kahunas: the year-long honors theses. A memorable advising experience transpired last year with an advisee who investigated the concept of dignity and migrant labor in her home state, North Carolina, where Costlow also grew up.

“It was just a sheer joy to work with her,” she says, because the thesis embodied the powerful interdisciplinarity of environmental studies, incorporating political and intellectual history, ethnography, and nonfiction creative writing. The alumna has gone on to work with migrant laborers in the South.

Costlow reads a thesis acknowledgment. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

As the month of March marches toward the end of the winter semester, Costlow approaches the conclusion of her thesis advising. She opens another black binder and reads the acknowledgment: “I enjoyed our meetings where we not only discussed subjects pertaining to my thesis, but also current events, activism, and personal stories. I will miss those meetings.”

So will Costlow.

It’s Friday afternoon, Jan. 10, and for professor Jane Costlow, a difficult moment.

She has just arrived at Pettengill Hall’s Perry Atrium, where an informal campus gathering will honor the memory of Carl Benton Straub, Costlow’s predecessor as the Clark A. Griffith Professor of Environmental Studies. Straub died at age 83 in his Lewiston home on Nov. 15.

“Losing Carl is really hard,” she says. “He was just a dear, dear friend.”

Costlow knew Straub for all of her 33 years at �ֲ���ý, first as the dean of faculty who hired her, then as the faculty colleague who invited her to join the environmental studies program, and, ultimately, as a good friend and inspiration, if not quite a mentor.

“He was somebody I really treasured getting to talk with every couple of months,” she says. “I feel his absence, and as time goes by I’m going to feel it even more acutely. I need a Carl fix. I need to talk to Carl.”

And Straub thought so highly of Costlow that, before his death, he identified her as one of three individuals he wanted to eulogize him at his formal memorial service, to be held Oct. 10 in the Peter J. Gomes Chapel.

For Jane Costlow, the recent gathering for in memory of Carl Straub had pensive moments (left photo) and also laughter (right photo), where she’s flanked by Professor Emeritus of History Dennis Graflin, left, and David Das, her husband, right. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“I’m really kind of glad I have a long time to think about what I want to say,” she says, “because it’s a daunting responsibility.” At the same time, “it also feels like a fabulous invitation from Carl to reflect on his life and what he gave to �ֲ���ý.”

In Perry Atrium on that Friday afternoon in early January, Costlow was not among those who spoke about Straub, choosing instead to listen to others.

Though it was held for a sad reason, the gathering had moments of levity, notably recollections of Straub’s pointed observations about �ֲ���ý life, everything from campus landscaping to the Commencement processional.

As a whole, the event was “a fabulous reminder of how much of a role Carl played at �ֲ���ý and various other communities,” Costlow says. “He was a man of extraordinarily varied interests and friendships.”

The gathering reflected that eclecticism, with friends attending from �ֲ���ý; from the rural town of Sumner, where Straub owned property and made many friends; from the Shaker community, which he researched to understand that religious community’s connection to the land; from Maine environmental and arts organizations to which he belonged; and from the Lewiston-Auburn community where he lived.

Costlow recalls that she and Straub hit it off from the start. Like her, he was fascinated by Russian culture, and because he traveled to Russia, the two had that point of connection. “There were a number of different things that we shared, interests that we had in common.”

There were differences, too. In the classroom, Straub was a huge presence with a broad philosophical approach. “It was clear to me that I wasn’t going to be able to teach that way,” she recalls. “But it’s wonderful to have friends strikingly different from you.”

Straub’s being a larger-than-life �ֲ���ý figure made it “almost too intimidating for him to be a mentor” to Costlow. Which made us wonder about the concept of mentoring: Who has mentored Costlow in her career? Who is a  role model? And how is she mentoring younger faculty today?

You attended Duke as an undergraduate and Yale for graduate school. Who were your mentors or role models?

There were very few women as professors at Duke or Yale. For me, leaving high school meant leaving behind seeing women in the classroom, essentially. I went to a small high school in eastern North Carolina, where I also had African American teachers!  None at Duke or Yale.

And when I was a graduate student in the mid-1980s, none of my professors, in the classroom, struck me as teaching how I would want to teach. They were world-famous, Ivy League scholars, and I don’t think they were that interested in what it would mean to teach at a liberal arts college like �ֲ���ý.

Jane Costlow discusses her academic role models. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

In that day and age, nobody got any training in being a teacher. It was, “Okay, here you are, here’s the deep end of the pool, now swim.” When I came to �ֲ���ý, the people that I learned from were colleagues closest to my age, people like Georgia Nigro and Mary Rice-DeFosse.

And it was a very different age when it came to being a woman, having children, and staying at work.

I remember having a conversation in the library with Carole Taylor right after my first child was born. It had become impossible for me to write. And I was kind of freaking out because I was still untenured. She reassured me: “That’s completely natural. Don’t worry about it too much. You will be able to write again.” Those kind of short encounters made a huge difference to me.

And I remember potlucks for women on campus, staff and faculty, once a month, with those kinds of informal conversations — just debriefing, venting, and sharing. What was going on in class? What wasn’t going well? 

Joyce Seligman, who founded the writing program at �ֲ���ý, was extraordinary. It wasn’t that Joyce was mentoring or necessarily teaching us, although she had materials and insights about how to teach writing in the classroom. But she consistently gathered people together and created frameworks in which people could just share their experiences. Those were mentoring situations that for me were really, really helpful.

Now that you’re a senior member of the faculty, how do you think of mentoring? Do you actively seek to mentor young faculty? How does that play out?

It’s somewhat informal. Occasionally somebody I know will seek me out, and we’ll have lunch or sit down and talk about a classroom situation, or balancing teaching, writing, and life activities — those kinds of things.

I think listening is the most important piece of mentoring, just being able to really give the person that you’re talking to a sense that they can say whatever is on their mind, in their heart, and to focus on listening to them, not giving advice too quickly.

But like anybody who’s been teaching for a while, I can make some concrete, tangible suggestions. And that’s certainly a form of mentoring, passing on what I’ve got in my bag of tricks. The language teachers at �ֲ���ý have always been fabulous about doing that because language teachers think about that stuff: “Okay, how are we going to get our students to learn vocabulary? Well, here’s this bunch of stuff that you can do.”

Do you have an overriding philosophy for helping younger colleagues?

I want to just affirm people in being the teacher that they are. Early in my career at �ֲ���ý, I had to come to terms with the fact that I was not going to be a teacher like the late Dick Williamson. His persona in the classroom was incredibly vibrant and big, with his amazing sense of humor and energy. I could not be Dick.

But as I’ve matured as a teacher and become more experienced, I’ve realized that what’s important is to be the person that you can be. Let your personality become a persona in the classroom that works for you, and that makes you comfortable and makes other people comfortable.

And then you occasionally throw in a joke. Every once in a while I imitate a Russian babushka. And my students look at me like, “Oh my God, what has happened to her?” But it’s a moment of levity in the classroom.

The other night you moderated a Purposeful Work panel of alumni from the last 30-plus years whose careers are related to environmental work. Some of these alums you’ve known and mentored. What were your thoughts as you saw them addressing current �ֲ���ý students in environmental studies?

It was wonderful to see former students who have made their way, in very different ways, into interesting and fulfilling work.

It’s wonderful to see how they’ve grown, since we knew them in our somewhat protected classrooms, to become flexible, resilient, creative, and imaginative — and then where they’ve gone with that after graduation.

The variety of things that they’re doing is really inspirational, and I was delighted to hear��so many of them talk about the importance of storytelling and communication in their work. Everybody in every classroom at �ֲ���ý is teaching these skills, and they’re clearly important once they’re out in these very different jobs and settings.��

When Jane Costlow arrived at a buffet luncheon on the second floor of Commons earlier this fall, she was hungry in more ways than one. For a meal, yes, but also for a chance to learn about her future.

Organized by two recently retired professors, Margaret Creighton and Leslie Hill, the regular lunch gathering gives emeriti faculty and those approaching retirement, such as Costlow, a chance to share ideas about how they might enrich their post-pedagogical lives.

“The folks who are organizing this are wonderful and generous” with ideas about post-retirement opportunities, Costlow says. Yet, she later admits, attending the lunch felt a bit premature.

“I’m not thinking too much beyond next week, actually. I have a lot of commitments in the community already, so I don’t know whether I’ll be looking for additional new connections or venues through �ֲ���ý or heading in different directions.”

As Costlow’s fall 2019 semester concludes — her penultimate full semester as a �ֲ���ý faculty member and as the college’s Griffith Professor of Environmental Studies — next year still seems like a long way off. She has grading to attend to, as well as planning for the winter semester and for Short Term, plus research and off-campus obligations that further fill her schedule.

Though it’s clear that these last few weeks represent the beginning of the end of her 34-year career on the �ֲ���ý faculty, Costlow is still experiencing some firsts.

Take, for example, her presence at the annual Trashion Show in November. Organized by student EcoReps and held in the Gray Athletic Building on Nov. 20 during Harvest Dinner, the event features students modeling outfits made from campus trash as a way to raise awareness of the amount and variety of waste �ֲ���ý produces.

Invited by students, Costlow joined Associate Dean of International Student Programs James Reese and Dining Services staffer Flo Laflamme as this year’s contest judges. Costlow had never attended before, but immediately fell under the show’s spell. “As the weather gets gray outside, I love these big indoor events. It’s kind of a nice community feel,” she says. “And the level of creativity and enthusiasm on the part of the students is just great.”

This extracurricular experience reinforces her belief in the value of experiential learning. “I love the kind of surprise that can happen when you go out into the world and encounter things differently,” she says.

Such was the case on Dec. 5, when Costlow and students in her “” course went on a birding excursion to Lewiston’s Thorncrag Bird Sanctuary, led by Nick Lund of Maine Audubon, who had visited the class a few weeks earlier. 

The excitement in the woods was already palpable when Lund suddenly called out: “Follow me!” He had just spotted a pileated woodpecker, nearly the size of an American crow, atop a towering tree in the distance.

Costlow, who has led generations of �ֲ���ý students on academic trips to Russia, adores getting everyone out of the classroom when she can, whether in Lewiston or abroad. “There’s something about the constraints of sitting in chairs, even if they’re in a circle, that can really have a suppressive impact on everybody.”

And the woods offer especially wonderful opportunities for mindfulness, says Costlow, whose publications include the book Heart-Pine Russia, which explores the power of forests in Russian culture and history.

She says, “We rarely ever pay attention to only one thing at a time.” A slow walk in the woods offers time for attention — to really focus on the woodpecker, or the deer tracks, or the sounds of birds communicating with each other. That, says Costlow, is “fabulous.”

Like other �ֲ���ý professors, Costlow keeps many plates spinning simultaneously. Environmental studies is particularly busy as one of the five most popular majors of the 36 that �ֲ���ý offers. Until about a decade ago, the program typically attracted about a dozen majors each year. Interest surged in the 2010s, and today the program supports more than 30 majors annually (33 in 2019).

It’s not a coincidence that the ES program has grown alongside students’ awareness of global climate change. “They want to develop some kind of language for their feelings of concern and worry,” Costlow says. “But they also want to learn about the ways that they can address that in their future lives, whatever they end up doing.”

The program’s end-of-semester poster session is a case in point, as seniors filled a Hedge Hall classroom to present their research to professors inside and outside the program, as well as friends and visitors.

For two hours, Costlow and her colleagues work the room: asking questions, hearing what students have to say, and providing feedback. “They’ve got this fabulous energy,” she says, which makes it fun to feed off the students’ excitement about the topics in which they’ve become expert during the semester. The students don’t just possess new knowledge: Most also excel in communicating their expertise. “They can tell a story about it in a way that whoever comes in and asks them a question can get something out of it.”

As the session concludes, she’s feeling beat. “Wow! This is what students probably feel like at the end of a couple of lectures when they go to classes all day long.”

Jane Costlow shares her thoughts on who’s good at multitasking. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Once she stops teaching, Costlow realizes, such day-to-day conversations with students, exchanges filled with curiosity and excitement — whether about research, an interesting movie or book, or a walk in the woods — will mostly disappear. She won’t have three or four students in an afternoon entering her office to talks about papers, theses, and their lives.

“I’m really going to miss having that chance to talk with students, that good, good conversation,” she says. As do other professors, Costlow keeps in touch with former students through email and by writing letters of recommendation, and she looks forward to continuing those relationships.

Above left, Costlow joins the annual “Candles and Carols” service in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall. Above right, with the help of Joselyn Jaramillo ‘21, Costlow renews two books at Ladd Library, one for a scholarly essay and the other for a course she’ll teach next semester. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

As always, the semester concludes with grading papers and exams, an educator’s difficult challenge to “distill what you think a student has learned.” It’s also a time, Costlow adds, “where I feel like I kind of grade myself.” What went well? What didn’t go so well? What would she do differently?

She has taken to sometimes marking up a course syllabus, “creating a new version of it with notes in red ink: ‘Yeah, that reading didn’t work so well. It might be better to not use it or to pair it with this other one.’” She says it’s like a theater director giving notes to the actors, “except I’m giving myself notes.”

Next semester, Costlow will teach “,” as she did in the fall semester, so she has one more chance to tweak the syllabus for that course. She’s always loved that about teaching — the chance to say, “Well, that didn’t go that well this semester, but I’ll do it again, and see if it’ll go better next time.”

This past semester, however, was her last time teaching “The Question of the Animal,” and she realizes, “I’ll never get to make that course better.”

��

Let’s admit it: I’ve been Jane Costlow’s shadow — a Boswell to her Johnson — these last three months as I try to document her 34th and final year of teaching at �ֲ���ý.

I’ve followed her onto the Quad for Opening Convocation, into �ֲ���ý classrooms to see her teach, and down to Portland (and into a Trader Joe’s store) to photograph a student-led climate protest.

Little did I know that we were just getting started.

In late October, I rode the bus for seven hours to New York City to photograph Costlow presenting scholarly research about oil pollution in the Volga River in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Behind me on the ride down, a woman read her poetry aloud off her laptop (aren’t they handy?) to a stranger, an all-too-willing conversational partner who compared her poems, at length, to Yeats and then to Thoreau.

At first, I had a rosy reaction to their dialogue. What great preparation, I reasoned, for entering Costlow’s academic milieu, a heady mix of literature and history and language study — until the dialogue persisted for the full seven hours, the kind of time I wouldn’t spend even on Costlow.

But was it worth it? Yes, because I got to see how Costlow, in her final year at �ֲ���ý as the college’s Griffith Professor of Environmental Studies, continues to excel at teaching, research, and service, the holy trinity of faculty responsibilities by which professors across the land are judged and measured.

And over a recent three-week span, Costlow undertook all three with zeal.

On campus, she taught students and graded their papers.

In New York, she presented the paper “Seeing Oil: Transporting the Volga into the Modern Era” at the conference Energy, Aesthetics: Force, Flow, and Entropy in Russian Culture at New York University’s Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia.

And then, serving as chair of the college’s Philip J. Otis Committee, she orchestrated a three-day visit to campus in early November by poet and essayist Ross Gay, who visited classes, dined out with faculty and students, and delivered this year’s Otis Lecture.

(Squeezed into the mix, too, was Costlow offering commentary one Saturday afternoon on the documentary film Makala, screened at Lewiston Public Library for the Tournées French Film Festival.)

We spoke to Costlow about the pleasures and challenges of trying to manage all of these roles nearly simultaneously.

In American higher education, the triad of scholarship, teaching, and service defines an academic’s career. How do those expectations define what it’s like to be a faculty member at �ֲ���ý?

Ideally, they all feed into, nourish, and sustain each other. At �ֲ���ý, I’ve had the good fortune to teach what I really love, things that I’m intellectually and personally really interested in.

There are ways in which my teaching has led me into new kinds of scholarly questions, which is great. And there really is something about your own intellectual curiosity, and other forms of curiosity, that can be fed by your scholarship and then that comes back into the classroom.

But there’s never enough time for the scholarship that you want to do.

The service part can sometimes feel really integrated, and sometimes it’s just part of what we need to do to keep the household of �ֲ���ý College going, part of what it is to be at a liberal arts college. I find that service is more likely to sap energy than necessarily nurturing energy.

You’ve mentioned that doing all three nearly simultaneously, as you did in recent weeks, is a bad idea. Why?

It’s just too much — I don’t think that’s healthy for anybody.

And it’s not just the faculty trying to keep all these balls in the air. I have a first-year student violinist who’s very excited about everything. I heard someone ask him after class, “Oh, are you going to be playing in the orchestra?” And he said, “Well, technically, I don’t have the time to play in the orchestra. But I might try to anyway.”

And I just found myself laughing because I thought, “There it is: You don’t really have enough time to do all these things, but you’re kind of ramming more things into your day.” I worry about us trying to get too much done in too little time at �ֲ���ý.

We hear these concerns throughout American society. What might an alternative look like?

We had dinner with Ross Gay at Nezinscot Farm in Turner the other night. We do it each year: a group of faculty and students take our Otis visitor to Nezinscot for a wonderful country-farm meal. It’s just incredibly relaxed. We sit around this long table and have a sort of Thanksgiving dinner. We chat, and then at a certain point, somebody tries to ask a good question that we can all have a conversation around.

This year, we talked a lot about what an environmental studies education ought to be, about the students’ hunger for some kind of hands-on aspect to their education.

The next day, my colleague Carissa Aoki told me that on the ride back to �ֲ���ý from the farm, the students talked about how wonderful it was to sit and just talk with the faculty, just to have that big, rambling, relaxed conversation, and that we don’t do it enough. And they’re absolutely right. We don’t.

At top, before dinner at Nezinscot Farm, essayist and poet Ross Gay kicks off introductions as Costlow and environmental studies major Alexandra Cullen ’20 listen. Above left, Costlow consults with host Gloria Varney, and above right, Costlow leads the group in a moment of gratitude before dinner. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

What’s the solution?

I don’t know. Do I need to bring in donuts and coffee to my classes? Should we sit on the floor instead of at desks? There’s something about the arrangement here — the stress and the dizziness — that gets in the way of having those deep conversations. I guess I’m thinking that we just live in a world that is not conducive to reflection. And that impacts me and it also impacts my students.

How so?

For example, to write well, you really do need space to be reflective — space to empty and clear your mind and get ready to write. Do we give our students that space for deep creative work?

In that sense, for me, writing and teaching often seem incompatible. The poet Adrienne Rich said that when she was teaching, she wasn’t actually able to write poetry. It had to do with the way that being in a classroom takes the energy out of you.

One of any teacher’s major responsibilities is grading papers. I’ve seen you running to class, papers in hand. I’ve seen you hand those papers back to eager students. Presumably this process is valuable to you as well as your students.

Teaching students how to write and responding to their writing is probably one of the most important things I do as a teacher. And it’s a big task. I have pretty large classes now, and I just can’t imagine teaching without having them write papers. I need to see their writing. I need to see their ideas developed. I need to try to help them even in the context of a fairly large class. I need to give them feedback and help them develop as writers.

Has anything changed for you in the process of responding to your students’ writing?

I think I’ve learned a lot over the years about how to approach responding to student writing. But grading is a whole other thing: It’s really hard to know how to put a letter grade on a piece. I always hope that my responses to a student’s writing are more complicated and helpful than just the grade. But you know that students are going to look at the grade, and the grade matters.

I learned years ago from the Writing Workshop at �ֲ���ý to start your remarks with something positive. I think that’s something I’ve pretty much internalized. I always try to say something supportive to a student in terms of responding to their ideas, even if something hasn’t come together very well or that there’s a really interesting idea that’s kind of buried on page four.

The other thing I’ve learned is not to get bogged down in minutiae or get lost in the weeds. Try to give some general comments that can be helpful for the development of their writing.

Jane Costlow shares her thoughts on the importance of student writing. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Do your graded papers end up dripping red ink?

I don’t use red pens; I use green or purple. When I edit my own writing, I tend to have a twitchy finger: I circle a lot and make lots of marks. I try not to do that too much on a piece of student writing because everything that I’ve learned about student writing says that while the mechanics of the paper — the grammar and the like — are important, it’s a lower-order importance. You have to try to look at the overall organization: the structure and the ideas.

I continue to learn from student papers, a new take on something that I’ve been reading or a movie that we’ve been watching for a really long time. That’s exciting. Then you can also really tell when a student is engaged in what they’re writing about. It’s hard to put a name to it, but there’s this intangible feeling in the tone of the paper that you can recognize.

At the NYU conference, I saw you respond to the other scholars’ papers, and it seemed that they accepted your comments with appreciation and respect. People eagerly engaged with you after your own presentation. I saw you reconnect with contemporary colleagues and reach out to younger ones. What did that feel like?

That was a wonderful workshop because it was a relatively small, focused, and interactive gathering of scholars. We were all interested in similar issues, but it wasn’t such a narrow focus that it felt like we were all talking about the same thing all day long. I like that kind of conference, where it’s more intimate and you can actually have sustained conversations with people over the course of a day.

We have a shared language. We all speak Russian. But we also share a deep love for some of the same texts and have similar kinds of questions about Russian culture.

At top, Costlow presents her paper at NYU’s Jordan Center. Above left, Costlow receives feedback on her paper from a colleague. Above right, conference participants take a break before lunch. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

That day in particular was incredibly helpful because I’d been working on this paper all summer and was super into it. Then the semester began, and I had to basically say, “Okay, all those files have to go down on the floor, because the student papers have to come on to the desk.”

That meant that I was significantly overdue with the paper — it was commissioned for a volume of essays written mostly by environmental historians — and I didn’t know where I wanted to go with it. So, the comments that I got from people at the workshop were just amazing and really helpful.

So the image of the isolated scholar isn’t always an accurate one.

Yes, it’s a reminder that in the best situations, our work can be involved in dialogue with each other. And so as much as I like kind of going and closing the door of my study and doing a deep dive into the material, there’s something about being in conversation with other people. That’s actually true of my students as well as other colleagues, where I can get to that “ah-ha” moment and figure out my way through a writing project. That’s kind of cool.

Looping in your other New York City experience, tell us about your Saturday morning breakfast with your friend and colleague Ellen Chances at the Utopia Diner on the Upper West Side.

Ellen is a professor of Russian literature at Princeton. She’s from Lewiston, and her mother taught piano in Lewiston and at �ֲ���ý for years — Natasha was a very beloved teacher, and taught my daughter piano. Ellen’s father, Ralph Chances, was in the �ֲ���ý economics department for years, though I unfortunately never got to know him.

Ellen and I have become really close friends. We share a love of Russian literature, but we share lots of other things as well, and we actually have regular telephone conversations. Whenever I go to New York, we have breakfast at the Utopia Diner. It’s always energizing and heartwarming to see her.

Back to the question of a faculty member’s service. What’s involved in hosting a speaker like Ross Gay for this year’s Otis Lecturer?

Being chair of the Otis Committee is a wonderful opportunity, and we receive great help from a lot of people, in College Advancement in particular. But of course there’s still a lot of scheduling, logistics, and working everything out that I end up having a hand in. So on the one hand, it’s really gratifying. But there are only so many hours in the day. And it’s on top of other things.

It’s an example of a service contribution that folds integrally into my teaching and my scholarship. Service contributions don’t always do that. This service was a huge benefit for my students and for my own thinking about literature and the environment. It’s nice when it feels like you’re all kind of heading in the same direction.

In what ways did you particularly enjoy this year’s lecture?

I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so much at an Otis Lecturer, as a lot of our speakers tend to bring us perspectives about difficult and dire situations in the world, whether it’s extinction or climate change or plastics in the Pacific Ocean, those really tough issues. And those have been wonderful contributions.

But what I felt from Ross was that he was reminding us what we love and treasure — why we care about particular places and possibilities in the first place. He also, somehow, created an experience of community in that place and short time.

It was like everybody there was really with him. Having that experience of being a kind of mini-community for the space of his performance was energizing and life-giving.

For a professor in her 34th and final year on the �ֲ���ý faculty, a teachable moment can occur almost any time, even during a visit to a Trader Joe’s in downtown Portland, Maine.

��After joining last month’s Global Climate Strike on the steps of City Hall, and then eating pizza with the large �ֲ���ý contingent at nearby Lincoln Park, Jane Costlow and her fellow travelers — three first-year students she’d met that morning, plus a photographer — headed back to her Toyota Prius.

As the group’s conversation transitioned from climate disaster to more routine matters, Costlow acquiesced to the students’ unsubtle hints about stopping at the local Trader Joe’s.

A trip to a Trader Joe’s store in Portland became a teachable moment for the three young students who accompanied Jane Costlow to the Climate Strike in Portland on Sept. 20. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

It was Costlow’s first visit to the grocery chain famed for its house-brand products, among other things, and it took her back to the 1980s. As a newly appointed Russian professor, she began leading students to the former Soviet Union during Short Term, accompanying them on excursions to buy food in cities like Leningrad, Odessa, or Moscow.

“Uncannily Soviet,” she declared after entering Trader Joe’s. “Not as many flashy colors” as a typical large supermarket, “and sort of subdued — except, obviously, there’s a lot more food here.”

For Costlow, the two events, a climate protest followed by shopping for crackers and chocolate, raised questions that she really wanted to pose to her young passengers.

With the student bus at �ֲ���ý nearing capacity, Costlow waits to see if she needs to drive students to the Climate Strike. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“You go to a rally, trying to raise your voices about this extraordinarily challenging, difficult, and looming crisis. And then you do this kind of mundane 21st-century American thing of going to a national grocery chain, where there’s lots of food that’s brought in from all parts of the world, and packaged for us with more packaging than there needs to be.”

Not knowing the three students, she figured a rant wasn’t the right approach. “I didn’t want to come across as this sourpuss who was raining on their parade.” Instead, she simply engaged them in conversation.

Such as: “Do you think about what shopping at Trader Joe’s means in terms of supporting local merchants or local agriculture?” When people have raved to Costlow about Trader Joe’s, she’s responded that part of the reason she’s never patronized the chain is her desire to support local agriculture and merchants.

The conversation flowed naturally and allowed her to suggest places near �ֲ���ý that the students could visit, such as Lewiston’s Farmers Market at the �ֲ���ý Mill complex. Although the students don’t have cars, “they might have to walk, which would also be good.”

As she engaged her passengers about sustainability, “I didn’t want to come across as this sourpuss,” says Costlow. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Joining the Climate Strike allowed Costlow, once a Russian professor and now the Clark A. Griffith Professor of Environmental Studies, to reflect on her responsibility, as a professor-activist, to her students, to teaching, to research, and to the world.

And on another level, she was just happy to join the protest. “Amid all of the frustrations around this issue, it did feel wonderful to be in solidarity with other people who really care about it,” she says.

“And I do profoundly believe that there are moments when putting your body on the street, even at a really safe rally, in some ways makes a difference.”

Costlow is proud of the �ֲ���ý students, several of whom she knows well, who organized the big �ֲ���ý turnout at the Portland event. “They’re trying to juggle lots of different responsibilities and coursework. They’re trying to figure out the logistics of how you get buses, how you organize people, how to get them signed up, even how to get pizza delivered for lunch.”

Costlow connects with philosophy major Jasper Beardslee ’22 (left) of Miami and geology major Essie Martin ’21 of Newcastle, Maine, at the Sept. 20 climate rally. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Costlow knows of what she speaks. As a graduate student in the 1980s, the era of peak protest against nuclear weapons, she worked with community groups to organize trains from New Haven to New York City for a huge rally. “It’s the nitty-gritty of organizing and communicating — those are fabulous experiences our students are getting.”

Appointed as a �ֲ���ý professor of Russian in 1986, Costlow began to explore environmental topics in the 1990s. For example, an early course on country life in Russia examined how ideas about nature have permeated the Russian psyche.

In 1998, she joined the college’s nascent Program in Environmental Studies, and in 2012 she was appointed to the Griffith chair; at the time, Carl Straub, her predecessor as the Griffith professor, praised the “momentum in Jane’s academic and scholarly journey.”

At the Sept. 20 Climate Strike in Portland, Costlow responds to a speaker with Sue Inches, who led the Short Term practitioner-taught course “Advocating for Sustainability” last spring at �ֲ���ý. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Just as her academic focus has changed, so too have the global issues at stake. Back then it was the Cold War; today it’s climate change.

And while Costlow is no stranger to the teaching the topic, she says there’s still a “huge dilemma in how to communicate about climate change. Everybody gets why this is so important. But how do we communicate the urgency? How do you get people engaged? What policies are you promoting in your communication?”

She points to a pivotal class discussion this semester in her course “Lives in Place,” which explores ideas about place and sustainable living.

Talking about the impact of visual images on political movements, be it climate change or immigration, a student wondered if the proliferation of heartbreaking images, such as ones of emaciated polar bears, can really influence policy.

Jane Costlow shares her thoughts on the power of protest. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Costlow asked her students to consider the influential images created by Dorothea Lange, one of several who depicted a climate- and human-created environmental disaster of another time, the Dust Bowl.

That got the students to think about “political transformation — how artists, photographers, and writers can make a difference by creating a language for how we’re going to try to contend with these enormous problems.” Whether as a journalist or activist or engaged citizen, her students will need the tools “to try to change people’s hearts and minds.”

Back in the day, teaching about Russia, especially during the Soviet era early in her career, “felt real and tangible,” Costlow says. There was an entity: the Evil Empire. Teaching about the Soviet era was about “how people can still make lives of dignity in difficult political circumstances.”

“You can just tell that she appreciates life and nature by the way she teaches,” says Lars Schuster ’20, an environmental studies major from Simsbury, Conn., meeting with Costlow outside Roger Williams Hall to discuss his senior thesis. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Back then, Costlow’s approaches in the classroom — “I could show movies, have readings, and do exercises in class to talk about the history” — helped to demystify the issues and even reduce the tension her students felt.

But climate change presents “a different narrative arc,” she says, one that places “all of us right in the middle, trying to figure out how we can change our systems and our infrastructures so human lives, and non-human lives, can continue to flourish.”

And the narrative arc of the Soviet Union had an ending point: the USSR’s dissolution, in 1991. “I don’t think that the climate crisis is going to end the same way. It’s going to be something we’re going to live with for a long time.”

Costlow’s “Living With Animals” class, including Beaufils Kimpolo-Pene ’20 (left) and Matt Hanus ’21, breaks into discussion groups to talk about Richard Bulliet’s Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

It’s no wonder, then, that Costlow reports that climate topics in the classroom are often met with “a kind of very disturbing silence” from students, Costlow says. “I think that it derives from that sense of fear, of not knowing where we can go. And I struggle with where to go from that.”

One approach, she says, is to show examples of how communities now contend with climate change. “Sometimes those are really inspiring stories,” she says. “And sometimes they’re just hellishly depressing stories.”

It’s the day of Opening Convocation at �ֲ���ý, Sept. 3, the official beginning of the 2019–20 academic year.

For professor Jane Costlow, the day marks the beginning of an ending. After 33 years at �ֲ���ý, Costlow, the college’s Clark A. Griffith Professor of Environmental Studies, has started her final year of teaching.

Costlow personifies a sea change in higher education and at �ֲ���ý as baby-boomer professors retire from their institutions en masse. During the current decade, roughly a third of the �ֲ���ý faculty will retire, leaving behind the life of the academy to which they’ve devoted much of their adult lives.

When Costlow first arrived at �ֲ���ý, in fall 1986, she joined the Russian department, teaching language and literature.

“I remember a mild sense of panic,” she says, “because it was my first teaching job. I was really excited but I was also really kind of nervous.”

The excitement came from what she’d already learned about her new college during interviews. “I had wonderful interactions with people,” she says.

“I had a sense that students were down-to-earth. And I was meeting other faculty and I thought, ‘Wow, these are really cool people.'”

Top left, Costlow and colleague Sonja Pieck trade notes about their summers. Top right, Costlow’s “Welcome back!!!” office-door message greets students. Above, Costlow throws on her academic gown before heading to Convocation. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

It’s time for Convocation, and with a casual ease Costlow dons her academic gown and a doctoral hood that she created herself. Its colors, black and “Yale blue,” signify her Yale degree in Slavic languages and literatures.

Adding a personal touch, she dons a straw hat that has been sitting atop a file cabinet since she wore it at Commencement last May.

Then she heads out.

Ever been on a treadmill at the gym when the speed suddenly goes up? That’s what a college campus feels like as summer turns to fall.

For any educator, “that’s a huge transition,” Costlow says of switching from summer mode, when professors can, distraction-free, dig deeply into their research, to the academic year and its multiple  demands.

“You suddenly realize you’ll be in the classroom. You’ll have all these thesis students. In many ways, your time is not yours anymore,” she says. “But it’s always exciting to see your students, especially students returning from abroad.”

And it’s on Costlow’s mind that the rhythm of her life will change. “It’s just a little bit bittersweet to think, “Oh, well, this is the last time I’ll do this.”

The day after Convocation is the first day of classes and Costlow’s first session for her course “Lives in Place.”

Presenting words and images of and by writers, filmmakers, and artists, the course examines the question “What does it mean to live sustainably in place?”

Proving that even a 33-year �ֲ���ý veteran can make a mistake, Costlow makes a false step on the first day of her final year. Accustomed to teaching in a certain Hedge Hall classroom year after year, she arrives there only to see another �ֲ���ý veteran, Dana Professor of Anthropology Loring Danforth, preparing for his class.

Checking her course schedule (for the first time, she abashedly admits), Costlow races across campus to the correct classroom, in Olin Arts Center.

On a day of last firsts, the location of the class offers something different: a full circle. In 1986, Costlow’s very first class was in Olin, then a brand-new building that hadn’t even been dedicated yet (it would happen that October).

Back in Olin again, Costlow introduces herself to the class and explains her career trajectory from the Russian department to the environmental studies program — a move inspired partly by her explorations of meaning and symbolism of Russian forests. Then she hands out the course syllabus.

The document opens with a drawing of Mount Katahdin by the American Modernist Marsden Hartley (whose artwork is a notable part of the �ֲ���ý Museum of Art collection) and includes a quote from Aldo Leopold: “We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.”

At top, Costlow distributes the syllabus for her course “Lives in Place.” Above left, she crouches to write the last of four opening-day prompts. Above right, she speaks to the class. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

After writing a few initial but essential questions on the blackboard, Costlow asks her students to break into small groups and discuss the questions:

What is nature? Where is nature? Why do we need it? What kinds of nature do we need?

Like many courses taught by longtime professors, “Lives in Place” has a durable framework that Costlow leans on year after year. On the other hand, “I always mix it up a little bit,” she says.

During the semester, her students will consider how “place comes to mean something important to people in different cultures and different places, and how people can be displaced from where they feel connected.”

Displacement has “long been a central and tragic aspect of modern human lives,” she adds. “And it seems to be becoming increasingly pressing as an issue.”

Jane Costlow shares her thoughts as the new academic year approaches. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

After class, Costlow heads back to her Hedge Hall office for a late-morning appointment with Jesse Saffeir ’20, an environmental studies major from Pownal, Maine.

Saffeir has returned to �ֲ���ý after time away in different places: a winter semester in Iceland, followed by an Otis Fellowship from �ֲ���ý over the summer, which she used to travel, experience, and consider the swaths of Maine land cleared for overhead electrical transmission towers.

A tangible result of her Otis Fellowship is a book of original poetry. She gives a copy to Costlow, who accepts it with warmth and joy, as Saffeir bows her head in appreciation.