College Honors Two Faculty Members With Named Professorships
Armfield Professor Brenda Flanagan in a presentation to students.
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5/2/2006
Contact: Bill Giduz 704/894-2244 or bigiduz@davidson.edu
Davidson has honored two faculty members with named professorships. At Spring Convocation recently, Brenda A. Flanagan became the inaugural holder of the new Edward M. Armfield, Sr. Professorship, and Ralph B. Levering was named as the new holder of the college's Vail Professorship.
In announcing Flanagan's award, Vice President for Academic Affairs Clark Ross described her as “a committed and dedicated teacher, a scholar and creative writer, and a compass for compassion and justice.”
Flanagan joined Davidson's English department in 1996, and becomes the college's first African American professor to hold a named professorship. She teaches courses in creative writing, African American literature, and Caribbean literature, and directs the Ethnic Studies Concentration.
She was overjoyed at the honor. “I really don't think I've been as excited about anything in my life,” she said. “It's something I never dreamed of, or expected. It's most rewarding to know that people in the academy have been watching and paying attention to my work, and value it so highly.”
Flanagan has published more than seventeen short stories, poems, a play, a novel entitled You Alone Are Dancing(University of Michigan Press), and a collection of short stories entitled In Praise of Island Women and Other Crimes (KaRu Press). She has also become active in the past three years as an American cultural ambassador through the U.S. State Department, traveling abroad to present programs on American literature and culture, and to read her own work. She has made several such trips to countries including Libya, Tunisia, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.
She is making another trip for the State Department this month that will take her again to Libya, and also to Kuwait. She has been gratified in the role to meet people abroad and help bring them to the attention of domestic audiences. She recalled meeting women in Chad who requested her help in revealing their plight to the Western World. Flanagan brought back their poetry, and was able to arrange for it to be printed in a London-based literary magazine. “They were delighted. It gave them some hope,” she said.
Born and raised in Trinidad, she came to the United States in the late 1960s. She studied at The University of Michigan with aspirations of becoming a writer. She completed a B.A. in print journalism in 1977, then earned a master's degree in educational technology-journalism. In 1986, she earned a Ph.D. in public health education.
While working on her degrees, Flanagan taught English and wrote fiction. She won three major Avery and Julie Hopwood awards for novel, drama, and short fiction. “Regardless of the academic program I was in, I have always thought of myself as a writer,” she said. “I've been writing short stories and poems since I was a child.”
She is currently at work on another novel about two young women who come to the United States from Trinidad during the 1960s and get caught up in the Civil Rights and Vietnam peace movements. She is also writing a book on Czech surrealist writers. This summer she will work on both projects, and will continue work on her novel at Headlands, in California, as a recipient of a North Carolina Writer's Residency.
Her professorship honors the memory Edward M. Armfield Sr. ' 37, recipient of the Distinguished Alumnus Award and inductee in the athletic Hall of Fame. Armfield served as a member of the Board of Visitors, and a volunteer with the Alumni Association and Annual Fund. Established by his wife, Adair Phifer Armfield, and the foundation which bears his name, the Edward M. Armfield, Sr. Professorship recognizes excellence in teaching and scholarship.
Vail Professor Ralph Levering
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In introducing Ralph Levering as the college's new Vail Professor of History, Vice President Ross called him “someone who lives daily the values of this College: compassion, honor, rigor, and excellence. He is a fine teacher and an excellent scholar.”
Levering's research focuses on the Cold War and on the role of public opinion and the news media in the making of U.S. foreign policy. He has taught a course entitled "The Vietnam War" for about ten years, and a course about the Cold War for the entire twenty years he has taught here. He has written or coauthored eight books in those areas, including The Kennedy Crises: The Press, The Presidency, and Foreign Policy, and a 1994 volume entitled, The Cold War: A Post-Cold War History. His most recent work, Debating the Origins of the Cold War; American and Russian Perspectives, appeared in 2002.
He also served a three-year term on the governing council of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations in the late 1990s.
He said he is most proud of having won two teaching awards from students, and is most appreciative for the open mindedness Davidson students bring to the classroom. “It's a wonderful place to teach,” he said. “Students are willing to be challenged, and open to changing their minds. I like to expose them to different viewpoints, and lead them to make up their own minds on issues.”
Levering is currently working on two projects. One is a book about reaction of North Carolinians to the coming of the Cold War during the period of 1945-1948. He is also working with college Archivist Jan Blodgett on a history of the college and the town of Davidson. Blodgett is responsible for researching the era to 1939, while Levering covers the latest seven decades.
Born into a Quaker family near Mt. Airy, N.C., Levering was a Morehead Scholar at UNC Chapel Hill, graduating in 1967, during the height of the Vietnam War. He registered as a conscientious objector and went on to graduate studies at Princeton University. From 1970-1972 the draft board assigned him to alternative service at the Children's Hospital of the District of Columbia. During that time he received a graduate fellowship to earn his master's and Ph.D. degrees at Princeton. After teaching at three other colleges, he joined the Davidson faculty in 1986.
The Vail Professorship was established at Davidson in 1977 in honor of James D. Vail III and his family.
As with all named professorships at Davidson, Levering and Flanagan will receive an annual stipend for study and research. Levering said his will support a student research assistant this summer to help with interviews for his Davidson history project. It will also allow him to travel to Australia in August to deliver two talks comparing and contrasting U.S. intervention in Kosovo with U.S. intervention in Iraq.
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Flanagan will use her stipend to extend her research opportunities in the Czech Republic. In addition to writing about the country's surrealist literary figures, she wants now to tell the story of women's experiences under Communism. She has conducted some informal interviews on previous trips, and the development fund will allow her to travel there regularly, and employ a translator to conduct the project formally.
Davidson is a highly selective independent liberal arts college for 1,700 students. Since its founding by Presbyterians in 1837, the college has graduated 23 Rhodes Scholars and is consistently recognized as one of the leading liberal arts colleges in the nation.
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