Bread Loaf School of English Begins Summer Session in June
MIDDLEBURY, Vt. — Sunday, June 16, marked the start of the 94th summer session of Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English, a six-week residential summer graduate program under the directorship of Emily Bartels. Classes began on June 17 at two of Bread Loaf’s four campuses: St. John’s College in Santa Fe, N.M., and the University of North Carolina at Asheville. The main campus in Ripton in the Green Mountains of Vermont and the campus of Lincoln College at the University of Oxford in England will open on Tuesday, June 25.
Started in 1920, the Bread Loaf School of English offers an innovative graduate curriculum in the fields of literature and culture, pedagogy and literacy, creative writing, and theater arts. The program is tailored to K-12 English and language arts teachers, who make up 85 percent of the student body; its faculty come from leading colleges and universities in the United States and the United Kingdom. The school aims to provide in six weeks a full-time, intensive educational experience, enriched by the local culture at each campus.
Starting this June, about 420 students from 39 states and 15 countries will pursue either continuing education, a Master of Arts, or a Master of Letters degree in English. They will study with 47 faculty members in courses whose topics range from Chaucer to Joyce to Calvino; Mexican American, Native American, and African American literatures to global modernism; reading poetry, and reading and writing in a digital age, to the essay and its vicissitudes; and creative writing, to acting in the classroom, to film.
Studies will extend beyond texts and classrooms. At Oxford, for example, students in a class on Shakespeare’s First Folio will take printing classes with master printer Paul Nash. In North Carolina the Chaucer class will travel to the rare book collection of the Hollings Library at the University of South Carolina in Columbia to examine medieval manuscripts, and writer-in-residence Rich Chess will offer special creative writing workshops. In Vermont, not only will equity actors of the Bread Loaf Acting Ensemble come to classes to perform and prompt embodied interpretations of texts, they will also work with students on a production of “Our Town,” the summer’s main production, directed by Alan MacVey.
Throughout the summer, Bread Loaf students will also enjoy a diverse co-curricular program of readings, lectures, panels, workshops and other events. Across the campuses, guest speakers will include U.S. Poet laureate Natasha Trethewey, renowned Jane Austen scholar Claudia Johnson, novelist Castle Freeman, Jr., poets Martin Espada and Simon Ortiz, environmental activist Bill McKibben, and photographer Lee Marmon, among others.
The 2013 session will also mark Bread Loaf’s celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Bread Loaf Teacher Network (BLTN), Bread Loaf’s year-round professional development network designed to help students who are teachers translate what they learn at Bread Loaf into powerful projects for their classrooms at home. The BLTN program this summer will feature a series of presentations on digital story-telling and humanities and is funded by a grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.
More information is available at www.middlebury.edu/blse, 802-443-5418 or blse@breadnet.middlebury.edu.