Research

 

Since I am completely trilingual and have travelled around the world, you can understand my profound interest in other cultures. Over the years, I have developed and taught new courses: Contemporary Third World Literature, Eng 217, which includes men and women authors from Africa, Latin America, the East Indian continent, etc.; a spring seminar, Women of the Third World, Eng 233, which is a focus on women writers and women's issues in the developing nations of the world; and Literature of the Arab World, Eng 228, with novels and short stories from many countries in the Arab world. This is a 4-credit course which offers students movies, every Tuesday, each related to the book or area under study.   So, the essence of my life is the constant reading and reviewing of books -- and I love to read!  On the side of my couch, at home, there are three piles of books -- in English, in French and in Spanish -- that never go down. As some books are read and put away, others take their place: books for research, award-winning novels from my French relatives, or wonderful “stuff” that I have picked up in Latin America.

 

Beyond the study of other cultures through literature, I have another very strong area of focus: this one related to the environment. I was an instructor at the State University of New York at Albany during the Earth Day celebrations in 1970 and this “green” interest, which has always been part and parcel of who I am, led me to continue my career at Northland College. At Northland, from 2007 to 2011, I held the A.D Mary Elizabeth Andersen Hulings Distinguished Chair in the Humanities. This gave me the wonderful opportunity, with release time for research, to focus on all my "projects" and especially -- since we are an Environmental Liberal Arts College -- to do "green literature" but through the particular lenses of other cultures. I am currently teaching a brand new upper-level course on “Nature in the Latin American and Caribbean short stories (Eng 372), and am developing an anthology on that theme. My last two Hulings Public Lectures (February 18, 2010 and February 10, 2011) were entitled: "Other Visions, Other Voices: Nature and the Dark Side of Machismo in Latin American and Caribbean Short Stories" and " The Metaphoric Use of Nature for Biting Satire in Latin American and Caribbean Short Stories".