SPRING CELEBRATION OF THE ARTS

Undergraduate students reading their prose and poetry at the 2005 Spring Celebration of the Arts included:

Jennifer Hare - Keely Hyslop - Javier Jimenez - Janice Lee - Sean Lee - Megan Ma
 Janine Megannam - Shoshana Seidman - Prayer Trairatvorakul - Alissa Walters

- with opening remarks by -
Lauren Buck and David Jonathan Lanni

Stewart Prize for Poetry
 - Sean Lee

A Message from Don Wayne

As the academic year draws to a close, and as Todd Kontje completes his tenure as Department Chair, I want to take this opportunity to thank Todd for his tireless work over the past three years and for his tremendous accomplishments on behalf of us all. Thanks, too, to Bob Cancel for his hard work as Vice Chair.

As of July 1, I will be assuming the office of Chair and I am very happy to say that Michael Davidson has agreed to serve as Vice Chair. I’m fortunate in knowing that I can count on the experience and good counsel of Todd and other former Chairs, and on the advice and support of faculty, staff, and students in the process of learning what promises to be an interesting and challenging job.

I wish you all a very enjoyable and productive summer.

Susan Kirkpatrick

It is with our deepest appreciation and admiration that we acknowledge Susan Kirkpatrick as she retires after thirty-five years in the Department of Literature. Susan joined the Literature Department in 1971, having received her Ph.D. from Harvard University where she specialized in comparative literature and peninsular Spanish Literature. In her thirty plus years at UCSD, she has not only participated with distinction at every level of the academic institution, including as the Chair of the Literature Department from 1988-1991, Director of the Women’s Studies Program, 1993-1996, and Associate Chancellor from 1996 to 2000, but she has given us, over and over again, service that has been the model of principled intelligence. As a teacher, colleague, and member of the university community, Susan leaves us as an incomparable example of leadership. Among her many other contributions to our community was her involvement in establishing the Preuss School, the university’s first charter school, on whose board of directors she continues to sit. Susan contributed extensively to the expansion of diversity on campus by her work on the Diversity Council and the Subcommittees on the Status of Women and the Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual and Transgender Affairs. Beyond the university, her professional activities have included many international societies, journals, and associations, including membership on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association.

Susan Kirkpatrick is a leading scholar of nineteenth- and twentieth- century peninsular Spanish literature and culture. Her first book, Larra: El laberinto inextricable de un romántico liberal (Gredos, 1977), was a study of the famous Spanish novelist and dramatist Mariano José de Larra. She has authored books and essays which have redefined the role of women in Spanish traditions of liberalism and romanticism, including her pathbreaking Las Románticas (University of California, 1989) and more recently, Mujer modernismo y vanguardia; 1898-1931 published by Editorial Cátedra and the University of Valencia in its Feminismos series. Owing to her publications on a wide range of topics including the novels of Rosalia de Castro, María Gertrudis Hore, Francisca Larea, José María Blanco White, Emilia Pardo Bazán, and others, Susan has been often invited to deliver distinguished lectures and keynote addresses, both here and abroad, from the Lois B. Mathews Lecture at UCLA in 1997 to a conference on gender in the Spanish Enlightenment sponsored by the University of Cadiz in 2000. She presented her work on Blanco White at the King Juan Carlos I center in New York and at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid and the London University’s School of Advanced Study.

Beyond her academic work, Susan has been a much respected and beloved teacher of Spanish literature, comparative literature, and critical theory. Her graduate students have gone on to assume positions at distinguished institutions, including Brown, Hopkins, Wisconsin, Purdue, and others. They express admiration and gratitude, as one former student who wrote of Susan: "The gift that I am most grateful for as a former student is the gift of Susan Kirkpatrick's personal example. To me, she embodies the finest personal qualities that an academic can possess: professionalism, equanimity, humility, and leadership. In my travels I have met many scholars of stature, but few are have been as down to earth and dignified as Susan Kirkpatrick."

We wish Susan well in her retirement, yet we also recognize that the Literature Department will be losing a colleague who has brought an unparalleled level of integrity, compassion, and decency to discussion and debate. She has always taken a broad view of policy, seeking to facilitate and promote discussion. Her comments at department meetings and intellectual forums are always considered and insightful. Many, many of us have benefited from her generous comments on ongoing research. As a department and section leader, she brought the department through rough times, finding solutions for difficult problems, bringing constituencies together. We will miss Susan Kirkpatrick as a colleague and friend, and we wish her every happiness in her retirement.

Dylan Sailor

Please join us in congratulating our colleague, Dylan Sailor, who has accepted a position in the Department of Classics at UC Berkeley. Dylan’s work on writers such as Livy and Tacitus not only brings new interpretive perspectives to the study of Ancient Rome, but also has implications for thinking about historiography and interpretation in relation to pressing contemporary issues of political interpretation of history and its relationship to questions of empire and imperialism.

Upon joining the Department in 2002, Dylan quickly established himself as an effective and engaging teacher, earning high praise from students not only in his smaller courses, but also in the Revelle Humanities program.

Dylan also served on a number of committees at the department and campus level, helping to recruit new faculty for Literature and also for the History Department by serving on their search committee for a historian of Ancient Rome this past fall. Dylan also participated actively in Tri-Campus Graduate Program in Classics, teaching a graduate seminar at UCLA and working with graduate students at UC Irvine. He has been a conscientious and generous colleague, and we wish to thank him for his service here and to wish him continuing success.

San Diego Open Air Book Fair

Historias!
Bilingual Book Discussion Continues with Novel by Norma Elia Cantu

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COMMENCEMENT SCHEDULE

Muir College - SATURDAY, June 11, 2005, at 8:30 am, RIMAC Field

Revelle College - SUNDAY, June 12, 2005, at 8:30 am, RIMAC Field

Thurgood Marshall College - SATURDAY, June 11, 2005, at 2:30 pm, RIMAC Field

Warren College - SUNDAY, June 12, 2005, at 2:30 pm, RIMAC Field

Eleanor Roosevelt College - SUNDAY, June 12, 2005, 9:00 am, RIMAC Arena

Sixth College - SUNDAY, June 12, 2005, at 10:00 am, Sixth College Residence Hall Quad