Bread Loaf School of English Will Confer 86 Master's Degrees
MIDDLEBURY, Vt. — Middlebury’s Bread Loaf School of English, now in its 95th year, will confer 86 master’s degrees and one honorary doctorate at Commencement exercises in Ripton, Vt., Oxford (U.K.), and Santa Fe, N.M., this summer.
The Ripton and Oxford Commencement ceremonies will take place on Saturday, August 9. At Santa Fe, where students start classes two weeks earlier than at the other campuses, Commencement took place on July 26.
The ceremonies on each campus are tailored to tradition. In Santa Fe, for example, the ceremony takes place under the expansive New Mexico skies; in Oxford the graduation occurs in Lincoln College’s 17th-century chapel; and at Bread Loaf in Ripton, where the school was founded in 1920, Commencement happens in the Burgess Meredith Little Theatre.
At all three campuses the graduates choose an admired faculty member to deliver an address and a member of the faculty or staff to place the master’s hoods on each of the graduates. The class president at each campus also speaks and presents the class gift to the school.
Eighty-six students are expected to earn their Master of Arts degrees in English this summer: 47 at Ripton, 24 at Oxford, and 15 at New Mexico. Candidates for the master’s degree typically take courses for four or five summers, and the students decide which of the three campuses they wish to attend in any given summer.
In addition to the master’s degrees, an Honorary Doctor of Letters will be conferred at the ceremony in Vermont upon Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theatre in New York City. The renowned director and producer taught courses in theater at the Bread Loaf School of English from 1997 through 2000, and again in 2002-2003. Eustis is a professor of dramatic writing, art and public policy at NYU.
For more information about the Bread Loaf School of English, consult the website or contact the administrative offices at (802) 443-5418 or blse@breadnet.middlebury.edu.
The Bread Loaf School of English
The Bread Loaf School of English is one of Middlebury’s summer residential graduate programs, offering courses in literature and the related fields of literacy and pedagogy, creative writing, and theater arts. Students, most of whom are K-12 English or language arts teachers, come from across the United States and beyond for one or more summers of intensive continuing education.
Students may elect to pursue an M.A. or M.Litt. degree in English. Faculty come from distinguished colleges and universities in the U.S. and U.K. to teach and learn with the student body at distinctive campus sites in Vermont, England, and New Mexico.