School of English To Confer 70 Master's Degrees on Three Campuses This Summer
MIDDLEBURY, Vt. — The Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English, now in its 96th year, is conferring 70 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 8, on the respective campuses. In Santa Fe, where Bread Loaf students start classes two weeks earlier than the other sites, Commencement took place on July 25.
The ceremony on each campus is tailored to the traditions of each locale. In Santa Fe, for example, the ceremony often 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 occurs in the Burgess Meredith Little Theatre.
On 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. Tradition holds that the class president at each campus also speaks and presents the class gift to the school.
Seventy students are expected to earn their master’s degrees in English this summer: 37 Master of Arts (M.A.) and two Master of Letters (M.Litt.) degrees at Ripton; 16 M.A. degrees at Oxford; and 14 M.A.s and one M.Litt. at New Mexico. Candidates for the master’s degree typically take courses for four or five summers, and students are free to 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 Arts will be conferred at the ceremony in Vermont upon Andrea A. Lunsford, a Stanford University professor and former director of the university’s program in writing and rhetoric. The Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor of English is a pioneer in the field of writing studies with more than 45 years of teaching and in excess of 20 books to her credit.
For more information about the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English, consult the website or contact the administrative offices at (802) 443-5418 or blse@breadnet.middlebury.edu.
The Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English
The 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 either the M.A. or M.Litt. degree in English, while faculty come from eminent 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.