2008 Woodie Awards
Donadio steps out of the classroom and into the spotlight
Ashley Gamell
Issue date: 5/8/08 Section: Arts
On the surface, Fulton Professor of Humanities and Director of Literary Studies Stephen Donadio seems to fit right into the academic archetype. He looks just as you would expect a person to look who has been a professor for four decades, serves as the founding director of the College's Literary Studies Program and is currently the editor of a prestigious literary magazine, the New England Review. He wears a wreath of white hair and dresses in the cardigans and tweeds of cold-weather university life. His sentences are elegant and deliberate, appearing unhurriedly and in perfect form as though Strunk and White themselves were composing them backstage.
In actuality, Donadio is a veritable cowboy of academia. He is probably the only professor on earth who instructs his students to ignore everything that has been written about "Ulysses" and pick it up as though they have found it in a hotel room. He does without the fanfare of critical literature, preferring "encounters that are without training wheels," in which "you don't have anything to rely on and you have to figure it out for yourself." This is literary study of the off-roading variety.
Perhaps one of the reasons Donadio will always be a bit of a rebel among academics is the unlikely place from which he hails. Raised in Dyker Heights, a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., he didn't see college as a possibility until Brandeis offered him a scholarship. After this initial plunge, he would never really reemerge from the collegiate world - from Brandeis he went on to get a Ph.D. at Columbia University, where he then taught for many years. It was there that he met his future wife, Emmie, now the chief curator of the College's Museum of Art. Donadio began teaching at the Bread Loaf School of English while still on the Columbia faculty. In 1977, he made the full-time transition to Middlebury College and created the Literary Studies Program, in which for the first time students could study global literary traditions at Middlebury.
In actuality, Donadio is a veritable cowboy of academia. He is probably the only professor on earth who instructs his students to ignore everything that has been written about "Ulysses" and pick it up as though they have found it in a hotel room. He does without the fanfare of critical literature, preferring "encounters that are without training wheels," in which "you don't have anything to rely on and you have to figure it out for yourself." This is literary study of the off-roading variety.
Perhaps one of the reasons Donadio will always be a bit of a rebel among academics is the unlikely place from which he hails. Raised in Dyker Heights, a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., he didn't see college as a possibility until Brandeis offered him a scholarship. After this initial plunge, he would never really reemerge from the collegiate world - from Brandeis he went on to get a Ph.D. at Columbia University, where he then taught for many years. It was there that he met his future wife, Emmie, now the chief curator of the College's Museum of Art. Donadio began teaching at the Bread Loaf School of English while still on the Columbia faculty. In 1977, he made the full-time transition to Middlebury College and created the Literary Studies Program, in which for the first time students could study global literary traditions at Middlebury.
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