Faculty at Home

• John Elder

I often found in classes at Middlebury and Bread Loaf that a group’s close consideration of a single poem could generate sustained and authentic conversations of a quality rare in daily life. My aim in this event is to share some of my related strategies and experiences as a teacher and at the same time to facilitate a rewarding discussion of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30. Sonnet 30: When to the sessions of sweet silent… | Poetry Foundation 

From 1973 through 2010, John Elder taught English and environmental studies at Middlebury College and the Bread Loaf School of English. His last four books have combined memoir with discussions of poetry and the Vermont landscape. In retirement, he and his wife, Rita, have enjoyed pursuing their shared interest in Ireland’s traditional music, she on the concertina and he on the flute and the uilleann pipes. Delving into the classical poetry of China has also become a strong interest of his.

• Murray Dry

This talk takes its points of departure from two books on the American presidency that were published in 2020.

The first is After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency, by Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith,. The authors provided a roadmap for reform of the presidency in the post-Trump era. The book was written in 2020; the authors did not consider that Donald Trump, who has steadfastly denied his defeat in 2020, would be running for re-election in 2024 while under indictment in three different jurisdictions. The indictment handed down on August 1, 2023, charged the former president with a conspiracy to subvert legitimate election results.

The other book, The President Who Would Not Be King, by Michael McConnell, addresses the relationship between the framers’ construction of the office and powers of the president and its current condition, in political and legal terms. 

Drawing on these two books, the indictments, and other materials, I will describe the relationship between the founders’ Constitution and the American Constitution today.

Murray Dry is a Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science at Middlebury College. He received his BA, MA, and PhD degrees from the University of Chicago. He offers courses in political philosophy, American political thought, and American constitutional law.
He has been teaching at Middlebury since the fall of 1968.

• Molly Costanza-Robinson

I will share work from an ongoing collaborative project in which we seek to understand the magnitude, source(s), and ecological consequences of elevated salt levels in Lake Champlain Basin streams.

Molly Costanza-Robinson is an environmental chemist who specializes in the transport and remediation of chemical pollutants in natural and engineered systems. Her recent work includes investigating lead, a potent neurotoxin, in Vermont’s school drinking water and supporting the 2019 passage of Act 66 to protect schoolchildren from lead exposure. She is happiest when she’s collaborating across scientific disciplines on policy-relevant projects … and doing anything active out-of-doors.