As of the first of the year, our colleague Jim Maddox has retired as director of the Bread Loaf School of English. Emily Bartels, who was a Bread Loaf faculty member from 1995-2000 and has been associate director since 2001, will succeed Jim as director.
Jim has taught at the University of Virginia and George Washington University, and served as the Dean of Graduate and Special Programs at Middlebury—as well as director of Bread Loaf from 1989 until 2010.
Jim has administered multiple grants for Bread Loaf from the NEH, Gates Foundation, DeWitt Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, Carnegie Corporation, Rockefeller Foundation, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation. By successfully procuring funding from these major foundations he has made it possible for teachers from rural and urban public schools not only to attend the Bread Loaf program but also to use the new skill sets they acquired at Bread Loaf in their own classrooms.
In collaboration with Dixie Goswami, a longtime Bread Loaf faculty member and professor emerita at Clemson, he has put the Bread Loaf Teacher Network on the map as a powerfully innovative, international professional development community, dedicated to revolutionizing education year-round.
Jim added to Bread Loaf’s core campuses in Vermont and Oxford two new program sites in Santa Fe, New Mexico (1991), and Asheville, North Carolina (2006), with curricula tailored to their unique cultural locales.
As director, Jim Maddox has been especially committed to extending the reach and range of the program. From the beginning of his term, he has worked to increase the diversity of Bread Loaf’s students and faculty, reaching out to applicants from Historically Black Colleges and Universities, for example, and establishing the Alexander Twilight Scholarship to recognize students who themselves further the cause of diversity in their lives, scholarship, or teaching.
Jim holds a B.A., summa cum laude, in English from Princeton University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Yale. His many publications include Joyce’s Ulysses and the Assault upon Character, “ ‘Eumaeus’ and the Theme of Return in Ulysses,” “Lovelace and the World of Ressentiment in Clarissa,” and “Interpreter Crusoe,” along with many book reviews, papers, and presentations.
Above all, Jim Maddox has made Bread Loaf a place where collaboration and creativity thrive. In his famous opening day addresses, he might quote a slogan from a mayonnaise jar or relate a history of Bread Loaf’s benefactor Joseph Battell (a different version each summer). Whether he was diving for the oyster at the annual square dance or playing “Old Capulet” in the Bread Loaf Acting Ensemble’s production of Romeo and Juliet, whether he was discussing the finer points of plants, Proust, or Indian pots over a Bread Loaf meal, or strutting his stuff in a Bread Loaf bocce ball tournament, Jim Maddox brought extraordinary life and energy to the program. Summer after summer, he would invite major scholars and artists (Seamus Heaney, Tony Kushner, Julia Alvarez, Stephen Greenblatt, David Henry Hwang, and John Ashbery) to share their work with the Bread Loaf community. He introduced courses on jazz, ballads, opera, and hip hop into the Bread Loaf curriculum, and opened the door to the much needed development of peer-run Writing Centers across the Bread Loaf campuses.
This month also marks the departure of Lucy Maddox. Like Jim, Lucy has taught as a beloved Bread Loaf faculty member since the 1970’s. Professor emerita of English at Georgetown University, Lucy has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in a number of areas, including American Indian literature and modern and contemporary American literature along with core courses for the American Studies program and she was the editor of American Quarterly, the journal of the American Studies Association, from 1994 until 2003. Her publications include Nabokov’s Novels in English (University of Georgia Press); Removals: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Politics of Indian Affairs (Oxford University Press); Citizen Indians: Native American Intellectuals, Race, and Reform (Cornell University Press); and “Susan Fenimore Cooper and the Plain Daughters of America.”
Always open to new ideas, new courses, and new projects, Jim Maddox has run the Bread Loaf School of English with inimitable intelligence, grace, and wit. As his legacy, he leaves behind a thriving community of scholars and learners that is as diverse as it is creative and absolutely top of the line. Now the largest English literature graduate program in the United States, with about 500 students across four campuses, the Bread Loaf School of English awards about 90 M.A. and M. Litt. degrees every summer.
We will have more news to share with you in the near future about Emily Bartels, Jim’s successor, who in addition to her work at Bread Loaf is a professor of English at Rutgers.
But for now, all of their Middlebury colleagues, longtime and new, wish Jim and Lucy Maddox the very best.
Ronald D. Liebowitz