Bread Loaf School of English Awards 49 Master's Degrees

RIPTON, VT. – The Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English awarded 49 master’s degrees this summer at the conclusion of its 106th session. 

On Saturday, August 9, Bread Loaf School of English Dean Emily Bartels and Director Lyndon Dominique, along with Middlebury’s 18th President Ian Baucom, presided over a ceremony celebrating graduates of the Vermont Class of 2025. Bartels discussed not a Shakespearean quote but a George Lucas quote—“May the force be with you”—as she opened the ceremony. “The force,” she emphasized, “is here” at Bread Loaf, where it “coalesces beautifully around a shared belief that words and ideas matter, in all their irrepressible diversity.” She asked graduates as they left the mountain to “know that the force of Bread Loaf is not only with you, it is in you.”

Senior class President Leela Woody continued the theme, noting that Bread Loaf has been a steady force for these seniors across the many changes they experienced in their personal and professional lives over the years they earned their degrees. She, too, urged the graduates to remember that Bread Loaf will always be with them.

The Vermont graduates selected Bread Loaf Professor Bryan Wolf to give the commencement address. Wolf, an emeritus professor at Stanford University, is a scholar of 19th-century American and 18th-century transatlantic art and literature. Wolf painted a picture of teaching not as a job, but as a calling. A calling, by Wolf’s definition, is “an effort to heed the still, small voice within each of us, and, in our better moments, also to heed the voices of those around us.” Wolf then used the Hudson River School artist Asher B. Durand’s landscape Kindred Spirits to demonstrate how teachers model a leap to enlightenment for their students—teaching them how to see and how to be, and also how to disrupt, to “deconstruct the truisms and conventions of everyday life.”

“We teach,” Wolf said, “to stretch the limits of our own minds,” and to “assist our students in their own self-invention.”

In his first remarks to Bread Loaf students as Middlebury president, Baucom expressed that he is just beginning to learn at the start of his tenure about the magic of Bread Loaf, a place dedicated to the study and critique of words and thoughts. At Bread Loaf, he said, the ideal, life-changing and world-shaping power of the humanities is real and alive. Baucom thanked the graduates for helping to make Middlebury and the world new through their cultivation, reimagining, and exchange of ideas.

Baucom introduced the conferring of degrees while Bread Loaf Professor Barbara Black, professor and Tisch Chair in Arts and Letters at Skidmore College, served as master’s hooder.

The same day, Bread Loaf’s Oxford campus held its commencement exercises for 23 degree-earners at the Lincoln College Chapel. Class co-presidents William Freed and Rosalie Uyola each offered remarks and Bread Loaf and Tufts University Professor John Fyler delivered the commencement address interrogating how teachers and scholars of English should respond to the moment in which we live. Graduates at Oxford selected Bread Loaf Professor Stephen Berenson as their master’s hooder.

Earlier in the summer, at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California, participants in Bread Loaf’s Summer Institute in the Global Humanities held a celebration to honor graduating seniors, while all students presented their work at an academic symposium on July 26. 

Established in 1920, 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, mostly 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 also elect to pursue an MA or MLitt degree in English. Faculty members come from eminent institutions in the U.S. and U.K. to teach and learn with the student body at sites in California, England, and Vermont.