Past Events

What do we mean when we talk about ecodramaturgy? How can we connect the ancient art of dramatic storytelling to our current climate moment?

Join Professor Dan Brayton and members of Australia’s one step at a time like this theatre company for this round table and talk about connections between the work of William Shakespeare and climate.

Sponsored by the Department of English and Department of Theatre, with support by Middlebury Performing Arts Council, Climate Action Program, and The Chocolate Milkshake Fund.

Professor Emeritus of English and Creative Writing, Jay Parini, will read from his poetry collections, old and new.

Remarks and awards for English and Creative Writing department seniors and their families.

Alice Kaplan, Sterling Professor of French, is a specialist of 20^th century France.  She works at the intersection of literature and history, using a method that allies archival research with textual analysis.  She is also a literary translator. 

Middlebury alums Dan O’Brien and J. M. Tyree return to the College having earned acclaim in creative writing since they began sharing their work with one another over thirty years ago as undergraduates. They are currently press-mates: Tyree has recently published his novella, The Haunted Screen with Deep Vellum, and O’Brien has published a memoir, From Scarsdale: A Childhood, and a collection of his plays, True Story: A Trilogy, with Dalkey Archive Press, an imprint of Deep Vellum.

This event was rescheduled from February 20th. 

Join us for a reading by two members of the Middlebury College community in celebration of their debut books.

Peter Beinart is Professor of Journalism and Political Science at CUNY. He is also a Contributing Opinion Writer for The New York Times, a political commentator on MSNBC, and Editor-at-Large of Jewish Currents. Over the years he served as Editor of The New Republic and wrote for publications like The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Die Zeit, and the Financial Times. He is the author of four books including The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris (Harper, 2010) and The Crisis of Zionism (Times Books, 2012).

John Elder returns to the Middlebury College community to share reflections about how poems by Emily Dickinson and the 8th-century writer Du Fu have helped him arrive at a more resolute response to this challenging moment in American history. 

Vievee Francis is the author of four books of poetry: The Shared World (Northwestern University Press, 2023); Forest Primeval (TriQuarterly Books, 2015), winner of the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Award and the Hurston Wright Legacy Award; Horse in the Dark (Northwestern University Press, 2012), winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize; and Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University Press, 2006). Forthcoming are a memoir, Ugly, and her fifth volume of poetry, Cleaning the Houses of the Dead.

Students who completed an English (literature track) thesis or a Creative Writing thesis in the 2023-2024 academic year will read from their work. Light refreshments will be served. Feel free to come and go.