Beautiful views are plentiful at the Bread Loaf campus in Ripton, Vt.

RIPTON, Vt. — Over the next three weeks the Bread Loaf School of English, now in its 92nd summer, will hold commencement ceremonies at each of its four campuses: Ripton; St. John’s College in Santa Fe, N.M.; University of North Carolina at Asheville; and Lincoln College at the University of Oxford in England. Eighty-nine students will receive a Master of Arts and three will be awarded a Master of Letters.

On July 27, the Bread Loaf Santa Fe campus will confer eight M.A.s and one M.Litt., and six students in Asheville will receive M.A.s. At the commencement ceremony in Vermont on Aug. 6, 45 M.A.s and one M.Litt. will be awarded, and James Maddox, former director of Bread Loaf, will receive an honorary degree. The Vermont ceremony will take place on the Bread Loaf campus in the the Little Theater at 7:30 p.m. Nearly one week later on Aug. 11, 30 students at the Bread Loaf campus at Oxford will receive M.A.s and one will receive an M.Litt.

Many of these soon-to-be graduates have studied at all four campuses during their Bread Loaf summers. Each campus has developed its own commencement traditions and each ceremony has a flavor specific to its location, from Santa Fe’s informal outdoor celebration to the traditional ceremony in Lincoln College’s 17th-century chapel at Oxford. 

One tradition observed at all four campuses is that the graduates choose an admired faculty member to be their speaker and, from the faculty or staff, a “hooder,” who adds the master’s hood to each graduate’s academic regalia during the ceremony. According to tradition, the identity of these individuals is not revealed until the day of graduation.

For more information about the Bread Loaf School of English, contact the administrative offices at 802-443-5418 or blse@breadnet.middlebury.edu.
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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 a Master of Arts or Master of Letters 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.