Comings and Goings

It has taken an extra good while this year, it seems, but summer has (meteorologically speaking) at last arrived — Nature’s first green was gold, as always, but it was also cold! The biggest cause for celebration, though, would be our 2011 graduates: the Department salutes those 126 students who received their B.A. degrees this past Spring and those 33 graduate students who received their M.A. or MFA degrees. Congratulations, as well, to our four Mortar Board Outstanding Seniors — Jacob Kahn (Creative Writing), Stephen Scheier (Film Studies), Tara Udall (English Teaching), and Nathan Miller (Literature) — and those students who were recognized with departmental scholarships and awards during the 2010-11 academic year (Jacob Kahn, Jamie Rogers, Zachary Carlson, Brett DeFries, Theodore McDermott, Hannah Soukup, Mehgan McKenna, Alice Bolin, Nathan Miller, and Troy Smith).

We look forward to working with our new and returning students when the Fall semester classes begin on August 29; descriptions and reading lists for nearly all of those classes are available on our courses page. The Department is also excited to welcome back Professor Joanna Klink after her time as the Briggs-Copeland poet at Harvard University, as well as two new colleagues: Dr. Quan Ha, a specialist in Vietnamese and ethnic-American literature, will join our Literature faculty in the Fall, and the esteemed journalist and novelist David Gates will join our Creative Writing faculty.

We wish everyone a happy and restorative summer. If you’re looking for reading recommendations, be sure to visit our Faculty Top Threes page, where, once again, members of our Literature faculty have revealed three things they’ll be reading this summer!

Eric Reimer
Assistant Professor

Season of Mists

“Where are the songs of Spring? Aye, where are they? / Think not of them,” Autumn, “thou has thy music too.” Keats would surely have felt that this autumn in Missoula, one of the most glorious in memory, would have done honor to his great ode. And we even had a super harvest moon on the evening of the equinox. In any event, greetings from the mid-point of the semester! We have just a few announcements to share with you. First of all, the course descriptions for the Spring 2011 semester are now available on our courses page. Please note, too, that the Literature and Research Colloquium has two more presentations scheduled for this semester: Benjamin Adams (M.A. candidate, English) will present on November 19th and Professor Nat Levtow (Liberal Studies) will present on December 3rd; see our LARC page for more details and, eventually, for the Spring schedule. Finally, see the new installment of Faculty Top 3s in the Literature program’s pages, as our faculty respond to the question, “if you could rescue any three literary characters from their fates, who would they be and why?” Cheers!

Eric Reimer
Assistant Professor

Commencements

In The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie’s narrator at one point asks “how does newness enter the world?” At this moment, we know newness enters the world through the line of English graduates we proudly watched file out of the University Center Ballroom on May 15, and also through the launch of this redesigned website and its accompanying blog. A disclaimer at the outset: this is “the Chair’s blog” and I am most certainly not the Chair. With our current Chair — my colleague, Professor Jill Bergman — out of the country at the moment, though, I figured I might mind the shop on this one occasion, if only to welcome you to our new website as it goes live and, on behalf of the entire faculty, to wish you a restorative and fulfilling summer.

Regarding those graduates, by the way, there were just over one hundred Bachelor of Arts degrees awarded in English, as well as sixteen M.F.A. degrees in Creative Writing, thirteen M.A.s in Literature, and six M.A.s in Teaching. We salute them — and we’ll miss them! We also congratulate our four recipients of the Outstanding English Seniors distinction — Stephanie Swigart (Teaching), Adam Tew (Literature), Brent Thorsen (Film Studies), and Lena Viall (Creative Writing) — and the almost two dozen students who received various special scholarships for the 2010-11 academic year. You can read more about this year’s Commencement and see a few pictures in our May 2010 department newsletter.

And the website: wow, it has taken a year to get it to this point! We hope you like it. With the Fall semester still somewhat safely distant, for now you may want to check our “Faculty Top Threes” page to see what our faculty is reading this summer. And please stop by this blog space on occasion, too, especially during the academic year, as it will no doubt be used to announce departmental events and readings, as well as to mark the accomplishments of our students and faculty. Happy and safe summering to all!

Eric Reimer
Assistant Professor