_LFP Update_ Archives List Printable Version
__LFP Update__2.2
Welcome to the _LFP Update_, an e-publication from the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts to keep LFP representatives and others informed about the activities of 1) LFP National Network institutions, 2) present and former Lilly Fellows and, 3) the LFP office at Valparaiso University.
In this issue:- New Lilly Fellows Selected
- Spotlight on Mentoring Programs
- Upcoming Summer Seminar for College Teachers at Calvin College
- The Online Directory of Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowship Applicants
- Undergraduate Research Conference held at Calvin College
- Meet Brennan O'Donnell, Member of the LFP National Network Board
- From the Colloquium
______New Lilly Fellows Selected ______
This year the Program received 98 applications from prospective candidates in humanities and arts disciplines vying for one of the three Postdoctoral Fellowships the Program awards each year. A selection committee of six Valparaiso University faculty, with Project Director Mark Schwehn and Program Director John Steven Paul, winnowed the number of candidates to 25 semi-finalists and then to six finalists who visited the Valparaiso University campus on February 2-4. We are now extremely pleased to announce that the committee's three choices have each accepted the Lilly Fellowship offer. The 2007-2009 Lilly Fellows are:
Bryan Stewart, who earned his BA from Grove City College in Religious Studies, an M.Div degree from Covenant Theological Seminary, and a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia. Stewart has specialized in the study of the New Testament and Early Christianity, and his Dissertation, "Priest of My People: Levitical Paradigms for early Christian Ministers," offers an examination of the appropriation of a Levitical priestly paradigm for the Christian minister in the third- and fourth-century Church, with specific attention to early Christian politico-theological ecclesiology and a comparison with New Testament and sub-apostolic trajectories.
Justin Poché, who earned a B.A. in history at Louisiana State University, an M.A. in history at the University of Notre Dame, and who will earn his Ph.D. in history at Notre Dame in May. Poché specializes in American political, social and religious history, and his dissertation, "Religion, Race, and Rights in Catholic Louisiana, 1938-1970," examines the complex way Catholicism shaped politics and racial consciousness in South Louisiana in the twentieth century.
Matthew Lundin, who earned a B.A. history and philosophy at Wheaton College, and an A.M. and Ph.D. in history from Harvard University in June, 2006. Lundin's major field is the history of Early Modern Europe, with an emphasis in the social, cultural, and intellectual history of early modern Germany. His dissertation, "The Mental world of a Middling Burgher: The Family Archive of Cologne Lawyer Hermann Weinsberg (1518-1597)," explores a sixteenth-century Catholic townsman's attempts to make sense of his age's political and religious uncertainty
One more word on the Fellows selection process. This year again, the number of applications received from scholars in the disciplines of art, music, theatre and foreign languages and literatures continues to be relatively low. I would welcome your wisdom about why this is and how the LFP staff might work to increase those numbers.
______Spotlight on Mentoring Programs ______
Mentoring Programs have been among the most popular and successful of all LFP initiatives. Mentoring Programs provide funds to nurture new and junior faculty at Network institutions and strengthen the commitment of all faculty to institutional mission. Well-constructed mentoring programs encourage new faculty as well as veteran faculty to understand and share the ethos of the school, to grow to love the questions that the institution holds dear, and to consider the importance of fundamental matters concerning the relationship between higher learning and the Christian faith. Such programs also seek to renew and deepen the commitment of the whole institution and its leaders to those central intellectual and spiritual matters.
The LFP awards $12,000 to grantees, many of whom received additional financial support from their school to institute new mentoring programs or to extend or enhance faculty development plans already in place. Our hope is that the LFP grants provide the means to start mentoring programs that will then be sustained by the universities. This has been the case at three recently funded and completed programs at Concordia University-Nebraska in Seward, Nebraska, Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina, and Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, which were granted funding by the LFP National Network Board in fall, 2004, and which ran their mentoring programs during the 2005-2006 academic year.
In the case of Eastern Mennonite University, LFP Representative Marti Eads (LF 01-03) was awarded funds for a pilot program that were combined with contributions by the university to enhance the existing faculty development program. The pilot program aimed to fight faculty attrition, to integrate new faculty into the university community, and reinvigorate discussion of the university's aims and distinctives among senior faculty. The program accomplished these aims by initiating a colloquium series that included group readings and presentations by key university officers along with one-on-one mentor pairing. The funding paid for meetings, mentor stipends, administration expenses, and, by far most important, release from one course each semester of the first year for the new faculty. According to Eads, this release time was the most important factor in the program, as it afforded the new faculty time not only to gain their bearings but to participate actively in the mentoring program. The pilot program was a great success, and as hoped, Eastern Mennonite University has decided to continue funding the program.
To apply for a grant for a Mentoring Program at your school, please visit http://www.lillyfellows.org/mentor_programs.htm; the deadline for application for a Mentoring Program grant is October 15.
___ The Online Directory of Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowship Applicants ___
Each year, the Program receive scores more applications from highly qualified post-doctoral students than can possibly move to the on-campus interview stage. When the committee composes a cohort of Fellows it applies a complicated calculus of factors that includes discipline, Christian denomination, and gender. It is inevitable that highly qualified candidates who have indicated their desire to teach in church-related institutions will not be interviewed. In order to provide Lilly Fellows National Network representatives with access to this rich pool of post-doctoral scholar-teachers we have created an on-line directory of applicants categorized by discipline.
___ Undergraduate Research Conference held at Calvin College ___
Using funds remaining from a previous LFP grant, Calvin College sponsored Exploring Your Vocation in Christian Academic Institutions, September 22-24, 2006, an undergraduate conference designed for undergraduates from LFP Network institutions to ponder the academic vocation, particularly in church-related schools. 27 Undergraduates from 12 Network schools attended the conference, attending plenary addresses by National Network Board member Patrick Byrne, Professor of Philosophy at Boston College, Dr. Debra Rienstra, Associate Professor of English at Calvin College, and Dr. John Steven Paul, Professor of Theater at Valparaiso University and Director of the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts. The students also attended discussion groups led by graduate students. Former National Network Board member Dr. Susan Felch, Professor of English at Calvin College , supervised the conference. Reflecting on the conference, a number of attendees noted that, along with the information presented, experiences shared by faculty and graduate students, and the time for discussion and honest reflection, the ecumenical atmosphere of the conference was especially striking. As with so many LFP-sponsored events, this conference provided a space for Protestants and Catholics to worship together and pursue common goals with a genuine spirit of collaboration and community.
____ Meet Brennan O'Donnell, Member of the LFP National Network Board ____
Over the next few editions of the LFP Update, we would like to introduce you to some of the members of the 9-member National Network Board, which directs the LFP National Network of 84 schools
Brennan O'Donnell was selected for the LFP National Network board at the board's fall meeting in 2004. O'Donnell has a Ph.D. in English and American Literature and Language from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and since 2004 he has been Dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill, Fordham University ; prior to this appointment, O'Donnell taught in the English Department at Loyola College in Maryland, where he also directed the College's honors program. O'Donnell has served on number boards in higher education and is the author of The Passion of Meter: A Study of Wordsworth's Metrical Art (The Kent State University Press, 1995) and Numerous Verse: A Guide to the Stanzas and Metrical Structures of Wordsworth's Poetry (University of North Carolina Press, 1989). From 1994-2000 he edited a semi-annual magazine, Conversations on Jesuit Higher Education.
Since moving to Fordham in the summer of 2004, O'Donnell has been working (ever so slowly, according to him, and in the odd hours stolen from planning, budgets, and hiring) with fellow National Network Board Member Paul Contino on a book on contemporary American Catholic writers. O'Donnell and Contino began thinking about this back in 2001, when they teamed up with former National Network Board member Jane Kelley Rodeheffer on a national conference on Andre Dubus. (The conference was first dreamed up at a Lilly-sponsored event, a Network Exchange Program at Christ College, Valparaiso.) After that event, which produced a special issue of the journal Religion and the Arts ("The Work of Andre Dubus," Religion and the Arts, 6, 1/2 [2002]), Rodeheffer began work on a book on Dubus and Contino and O'Donnell began thinking about a book on other writers who are writing first-rate fiction grounded in a vision that is in some way recognizably Catholic. Among the writers they are including in the study are William Kennedy, Alice McDermott, Ron Hansen, Tobias Wolff, Valerie Sayers, Oscar Hijuelos, Larry Woiwode, and Charles D'Ambrosio. Contino and O'Donnell gave a talk on this project at the 2006 Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing.
______From the Colloquium ______
In the past few weeks, the Lilly Fellows Colloquium has turned its attention to teaching. We've read and discussed St. Augustine's "On the Teacher" and Philip W. Jackson's "Real Teaching," both in Everyone a Teacher, an anthology edited by Mark Schwehn. We've also read sections of Ken Bain's book What the Best College Teachers Do (Harvard 2004). In the epilogue to that book, Bain quotes John Sexton, president of New York University, who took the oath of office as the fifteenth president of New York University in 2002. Sexton called for a new kind of professor in the twenty-first century.
"We must recast our notion of what it means to accept the title of 'professor,' he argued. The concept of the tenured professor as the ultimate independent contractor" must give way to the view that faculty members in the university embrace community responsibilities for the "entire enterprise of learning, scholarship, and teaching." (175)
Is this, as one of the members of the Colloquium opined, just something that presidents can be expected to say? Perhaps, and as long community responsibilities are articulated as abstractions and windy platitudes, there may be no reason to expect that the independent contractor model will indeed give way. On the other hand, the forthright expression of institutional mission grounded in tradition, the articulation of commitments flowing from that mission, and the genuine and persistent invitations to serious conversation about mission, tradition, and commitments will do more than most inaugural addresses to transform independent contractors into members of the community.
--John Steven Paul