The Hulings Lecture explores the relationship to nature in Latin American and Caribbean literatures.

February 2, 2010

Dr. Michèle Geslin Small, professor of English and Modern Languages at Northland College, will present her final lecture as the A.D. and Mary Elizabeth Andersen Hulings Distinguished Chair in Humanities at 7 p.m. on Thursday, February 18. The lecture, titled “Other Visions, Other Voices: Nature and the Dark Side of Machismo in Latin American and Caribbean Short Stories,” will be held in the Alvord theater on the campus of the College and is free and open to the public.

 

Dr. Small is in her final year as the Hulings Distinguished Chair in the Humanities, which she has held since 2007. Her presentation will explore the relationship between environment and human life as presented in Latin American and Caribbean literature, and will explore the idea of machismo as it is revealed in the “green literature” of Central and South America, and the Caribbean.

 

A member of the faculty at Northland College since 1972, Dr. Small holds M.A.s from the State University of New York-Albany and the University of Nice, France and received her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota-Minneapolis. She was involved in the original National Endowment for the Humanities grant in 1977 that led to the development of the Humanities in Nature curriculum at the College.

 

The material presented in Dr. Small’s final Hulings lecture represents only a small portion of her much broader research interests. A native of France, Dr. Small is a true citizen of the world and always approaches her teaching from an international perspective. She gathers many of the texts used in her research from books originally published in French or Spanish, and credits the Dexter Library at the College with assisting her in locating English translations for her research. Several of the texts presented in the Hulings lecture will be compiled in an upcoming anthology of nature-themed short stories from around the Americas and will also contribute to an upper-level literature course currently in development.

 

The A.D. and Mary Elizabeth Andersen Hulings Distinguished Chair in the Humanities was founded in 1992. Its purpose is the promotion of the humanities at Northland College through activities including scholarship, public performance, artistic creation, mentoring of colleagues informally and formally through faculty seminars and workshops, and facilitation of events that raise the visibility of the humanities such as public lecture and curricular development. Previous holders of the Hulings Chair include Ernest Partridge, 1993-1998; Judith Scoville, 1998-2004; Leslie Alldritt, 2004-2007; and Michèle Small, 2007-present.