F A C U LT Y & S T A F F
IRELAND
KEE
KUZNIEWSKI, S.J.
LAFFEY
LEVINE
11 Faculty Members Close Chapters at Holy Cross Alongside the Class of 2016 B Y E V A N G E L I A S T E FA N A K O S ’ 1 4
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n addition to bidding farewell to the seniors at the end of the academic year, the College of the Holy Cross is seeing off 11 faculty members: Hussein Adam, Mary Hobgood, Patrick J. Ireland, James M. Kee, Rev. Anthony J. Kuzniewski, S.J., Alice L. Laffey, Esther L. Levine, John E. Lincicome, Richard E. Matlak, Susan Rodgers and Charles (Chick) Weiss. The faculty, who will be jet-setting off to new adventures, shared reflections with us on their many years at the College and what will come next. Hear from some of them in this Q&A:
PATRICK J. IRELAND associate professor of English What is your favorite course to teach? My favorite course to teach is, of course, Southern Literature. Though I’m from Kentucky, a former slave state in the Union, which really is a border, not Southern, state, I was born and raised in the very area that is the setting of both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Beloved, and I have a deep affection for the work of Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor.
Where is your favorite spot on campus? This is going to sound bizarre, but there are two: the Loyola and upper Hogan parking lots. Loyola, because of the wild
turkeys that sometimes haunt the place. It reminds me of the “South Park” parody of “Braveheart,” when an army of turkeys invades the Colorado town. Upper Hogan, because from there you can see Mt. Wachusett, and on a clear day, even Mt. Monadnock, and, well, forever.
What’s next? The Mass Foundation for the Humanities has offered me a part-time gig to continue my Literature and Medicine seminars for medical researchers at a biomedical research center; I’ve run these seminars for the last 10 years at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Newton-Wellesley Hospital and UMass Medical School. I also did a variation of the seminars at Holy Cross, teaching Literature and Science and Literature and Medicine in the Montserrat program.
JAMES M. KEE professor of English Can you describe a time when your teaching and scholarship complemented each other? I cannot remember a time when my scholarship did not deeply inform and complement my teaching. In my intellectual life, I have been motivated by my conviction that the great texts and symbols of our philosophical and
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revelatory traditions have become separated from the experiences they once articulated. For this reason, they seem meaningless or illusory to many. The key to reconnecting these texts and symbols to our experiences—to enabling them once again to illuminate these experiences—is to learn how to interpret them effectively. From my days as an undergraduate, therefore, I have made “hermeneutic phenomenology” a focus of scholarly research and reflection. This tradition of thought has informed every course I have ever taught—sometimes tacitly, sometimes more explicitly. It has taught me how to help students find “lived experience” in the literature that they read.
How do you see your work as a teacher and scholar supporting/contributing to the mission of Holy Cross? For me, the intellectual life has the general form of “faith seeking understanding.” I began my graduate training in religious studies. I soon discovered, however, that my preferred method of doing theology was to interpret literary texts that had religious dimensions to them. I have tried to do this in all of my teaching and scholarship. I have never accepted the conventional distinction between an intellectual life that must be secular to be professional