58 students earn master's degrees at Bread Loaf School of English commencement

RIPTON, Vt.—On August 7 at Middlebury’s Bread Loaf Mountain campus, the Bread Loaf School of English completed its 91st summer with commencement ceremonies, during which 58 students received master’s degrees.

The speaker at the Saturday night event—selected as always by the graduates—was longtime Bread Loaf School of English Director Jim Maddox. Maddox joined the School of English as a faculty member in 1979, teaching courses on the 18th and 19th-century British and European novel, James Joyce, Irish poets, and writers of the American South until he assumed the directorship of the School in 1989. This is the fourth time in his Bread Loaf career that Maddox has been chosen by Bread Loaf graduates to give the commencement address.

The “hooders,” who add the master’s hood to each graduate’s academic regalia during the ceremony, are also picked by the senior class, and this year they choose two members of the Bread Loaf faculty, David Huddle, professor emeritus at the University of Vermont and visiting distinguished professor of creative writing at Hollins University; and Paul Muldoon, Howard G.B. Clark ‘21 university professor in the humanities at Princeton University. Middlebury College President Ronald D. Liebowitz conferred the degrees.

Fifty-six students (seven in absentia) at the Vermont campus earned master of arts degrees in English, while two earned master of letters degrees—a more specialized degree for which the M.A. in English is a pre-requisite.

Earlier in the day, the Bread Loaf campus at Oxford in England conferred 21 master’s degrees; on July 21, 11 were awarded at the campus in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and 10 at the Asheville, North Carolina, campus. The total for the summer at the four Bread Loaf School of English campuses was 97 M.A.s and three M.Litt.s.

About the Bread Loaf School of English

Since 1920 the Bread Loaf School of English has offered a rich array of graduate courses in literature, the teaching of writing, creative writing, and theater to students from across the United States. For six weeks each summer Bread Loaf students, most of them secondary-school teachers, work toward an M.A. or M.Litt. and study with a world-class faculty at one of our four sites: New Mexico, North Carolina, Oxford (England), and the home campus located outside Middlebury at the foot of Bread Loaf Mountain in Vermont.