College of Liberal Arts News

The hints inside Dr. Richard Schellhammer’s crowded campus office aren’t subtle. They reveal personal secrets: who he is, what he adores, how he fills his days. History books bloat his bookshelves. Framed trinkets of his academic expertise -- pre-World War I Germany -- hang near the desk.

As a published poet and admirer of rhythmic verse, Dr. Eleanor Boudreau pairs the recollection of her first poem with a faint chuckle of self-deprecation.

When Dr. Lesa Shaul reclines in her chair, within arm’s reach are shelves of classic literature, the poetry of Percy Shelley, William Faulkner’s streams of consciousness, the brilliance of Robert Penn Warren. For a professor of English, the cramped space seems an oasis of calm, a few square feet bloated with printed words worthy of memorization.

A mixture of serendipity and archeology, with a pinch of salt on the side, is behind Dr. Ashley Dumas’ recent Fulbright Specialist Award and her upcoming trip to the University of Rzeszow in Poland.

Somewhere amid Shakespearean comedies and Samuel Johnson poetry is where Dr. Stephen Slimp’s literary utopia exists. It’s embedded among the Nobel Prize-winning works of Herta Muller and Mario Vargas Llosa and Orhan Pamuk, the tome-like writing of Leo Tolstoy and the storytelling of novelist Miguel de Cervantes.