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Reading and Discussion Scholar Bios |
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“Sharing Our Past — Shaping Our Future” Since 1974 |
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the classroom. Geof lives in Calais, works for the Vermont Department of Education, and has been Adjunct Faculty at Vermont College since 1991.
Jim Hogue has taught French, English, and Drama in high school, college, and acting academies since 1971. He holds a Master of Arts degree in Theatre and has attended the British American Drama Academy at Oxford. His play, The Importance of Being Wilde, has enjoyed four productions. He is a Joseph Award in Shakespearean Production nominee and his show, Cabaret Shakespeare, is the longest running and most frequently performed production in Vermont. He has been a radio programmer at WGDR in Plainfield since 1992.
Bob Johnson has had a life-long passion for the humanities and has studied them academically at the undergraduate and graduate level including graduate study as a Fellow of the National Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Southern California. After a career with the federal government in Washington he returned to Vermont where he has taught history and other humanities course for several colleges. He has years of experience leading book discussions.
Helene Lang is a retired University of Vermont professor having taught literature and literacy. Her work with the Vermont Humanities Council includes leading reading discussions since 1986, as well as giving presentations of Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Beatrix Potter for the Council’s Speaker’s Bureau. Her interests include books, authors, art, history, and multiculturalism. Years of travel enrich book discussions, but the celebration of Vermont is preeminent, demonstrated by her willingness to travel throughout the state.
Deborah Lee Luskin has been leading reading discussion programs around Vermont since 1986. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from Columbia University and has taught in a wide variety of settings, from the Ivy League to the local elementary school. She has completed two novels set in the fictional town of Orton, Vermont, and is currently writing a book about her sixteen years managing a family-owned Family Practice.
Tony Magistrale is Professor of English at the University of Vermont. He has been teaching courses in writing and American literature at UVM since 1983. Magistrale’s most recent book is Hollywood’s Stephen King (St. Martin’s Press, 2003), the first book-length analysis of the films that have been produced from Stephen King’s fiction.
Florence McCloud-Thomas writes poetry and fiction and has taught creative writing and English at the high school level. She lived in Atlanta for nine years, where her interest in Southern authors and writing about spirit of the place developed. She is interested in reading and discussing books as a way of enlarging our own particular worlds, in which we live every day. She lives in East Fairfield, Vermont.
Barbara Mieder, a former Chair of the Vermont Humanities Council, teaches German and Latin at Milton High School. She has degrees from Mount Holyoke College (A.B.), Middlebury College (M.A.), and Michigan State University (Ph.D. in German language and literature). She is an avid reader and an active library trustee in Williston. She has enjoyed participating in VHC reading and discussion groups both as a reader and as a discussion leader since their inception.
Dr. Lea Newman is Professor Emerita at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and author of books on Hawthorne and Melville as well as the recent Robert Frost: The People, Places, and Stories Behind his New England Poetry. She has published extensively in literary journals, including articles on Dante’s Divine Comedy. She taught at the University of Bologna in Italy as a Fulbright scholar and is currently vice-president of the Friends of Robert Frost.
Frank Nicosia is Professor of Modern European and Middle Eastern history at Saint Michael’s College, and coordinator of the college’s honors program. He has published widely in the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, as well as in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. He serves on the Advisory Board of the Center for Holocaust Studies at the University of Vermont, and on the Executive Committee of the German Studies Association.
Patricia Norton is a musician and poet with a summa cum laude degree in political philosophy and literary studies from Middlebury College. Her literature and music courses at the Institute of Lifelong Education at Dartmouth (ILEAD) have waiting lists each semester; she delights in exploring books and ideas with people. Patricia’s children question her in all subject areas, keeping her humble.
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