Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English Confers Masters Degrees
The Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English awarded 44 master’s degrees this summer at the conclusion of its 106th session.
Vermont graduates celebrated their accomplishments in a commencement ceremony on Saturday, August 8. Joined by director Lyndon Dominique and Middlebury president Ian Baucom, Bread Loaf dean Emily Bartels opened the proceedings with a rhetorical question for the graduates: “Are you sure you want to do this?” Leaving Bread Loaf and the intellectual community they had co-created across multiple campuses and years, she acknowledged, is not entirely easy. Yet “you are equipped to be your own Bread Loaf,” she encouraged. “You are not leaving Bread Loaf; you are extending our reach.”
The Vermont class of 2026 elected two co-presidents: Brian Hotchkiss and Donté Tates. They followed Bartels’ welcome with musings on the growth and change that accrue on journeys such as a Bread Loaf education. Sharing wisdom they had learned along the way from each of the graduates and affirming that these peers had become family, they ended by returning to words they had invoked throughout their remarks and that echoed the dean’s: “The journey continues and the circle of our family expands.”
Seniors chose Bread Loaf faculty member Michelle Bachelor Robinson, director of comprehensive writing and assistant professor at Spelman College, to deliver the commencement address. Robinson serves as curriculum coordinator for Bread Loaf’s Teaching, Writing, and Acting for Change Curriculum in which coursework empowers students to cultivate understanding and positive change in their classrooms and communities. Robinson applauded the graduates for choosing to spend their summers “climbing intellectual hills” and for choosing “books that ask more questions than they answer.” In a world that rewards certainty, “Bread Loaf rewards curiosity,” and students leave richer than when they arrived through the communal generation of knowledge, Robinson noted.
President Baucom’s remarks resonated with Robinson’s. Citing Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, he proposed that Bread Loaf graduates embody the ideal of education by bringing newness into the world through the “fusions, translations, and conjoinings” of shared discourse.
Baucom then initiated the conferring of degrees as Bread Loaf graduate and longtime summer staff member Kalli Federhofer MA ’97 assisted as master’s hooder. Following the conferring of master’s degrees, Bread Loaf graduate Rex Lee Jim MA ‘01 MLitt ‘19 received a posthumous honorary doctorate of letters. Jim, a poet, educator, and advocate for Navajo sovereignty, served as vice president of the Navajo Nation from 2011-2015 and was most recently dean of the School of Diné Studies and Education at Diné College. He had worked tirelessly through the Bread Loaf Teacher Network with Navajo youth to help them discover the power of their dreams and imaginations. Jim’s sister, Janice Jim, accepted the degree on his behalf and presented Bartels with a Navajo rug in gratitude. Dwelling in the places Jim had walked and felt at home at Bread Loaf, she shared, had brought her great comfort.
Seniors at Bread Loaf’s Oxford campus graduated the same day at the Lincoln College Chapel. Class co-presidents Rachel Noli and Judith Williams offered remarks while class poet Timothy Ree shared a poem. Bread Loaf professor Stephen Berenson gave a commencement address examining the continuities and discontinuities in the way we have read and lived across the past century. Graduates at Oxford received their master’s hoods from Bread Loaf professor Mark Turner.
Earlier in the summer, at the California campus at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, 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 25.
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.