Professor Profile: Jeremy Medina, Hispanic Studies

by Jeremy Medina
BURGESS PROFESSOR OF ROMANCE LANGUATES EMERITUS AND LECTURER IN HISPANIC STUDIES

This is part of a series on what research our professors pursue outside of the classroom. It is intended to further Hamilton’s understanding of the scientific and academic community we have on campus.

How did you get to where you are today?

I had no idea what I wanted to do while at Princeton (undergrad, ’64), but a year as a Teaching Fellow at Phillips Academy (which attracted me because I thought that I could spend time with the other fellows partying in Boston), gave me a passion for teaching (and allowed me to meet my future wife, who came to an Andover dance chaperoning a girls group). From there I pursued an MA with Middlebury in Madrid and a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania (where TA work deepened my obsession).

Why did you choose Hamilton?

My first summer job, as a teenager, was lifeguarding on the beach in Long Island. For years I sat up on the lifeguard stand with a fellow named Walter Smith, grandson of Al Smith, the presidential candidate in 1936. As we sat watching the waves and the swimmers, Walter talked endlessly about only one thing: some little, rural college in upstate New York called Hamilton. Years later (a simpler time, without MLA job lists), knowing I wanted to teach at a top, small liberal arts school, I applied to Williams and Hamilton. Williams had no opening. In February of 1968, Prof. Marcel Moraud astonished me in the Bristol Campus Center elevator by offering me a job.

How many years have you been at Hamilton?

Since August of 1968.

How has the campus changed in that time? What do you think are the best and worst aspects of this change?

Big questions! The changes have been enormous, almost unimaginable. With 600 students (male), no movie theaters or malls or Clinton stoplights, students at your house often, a welcoming committee for every new faculty member and time spent communicating face to face (no TV, internet, devices permanently connected to your ears, etc.–imagine!), every member of the campus community knew each other. There was one dean (then three), one dining hall, one secretary acting as registrar.

A greater sense of humanity and mutual respect pervaded our lives: the faculty put on a skit each year to make fun of seniors, based on Gilbert & Sullivan and material obtained by Prof. Lafe Todd’s spies (I can hear the deans singing “Three little deans from school are we…”); class sectioning was done by hand by faculty volunteers in the top of Root Hall, as Win Tolles went up and down the stairs carrying the beer; professors reported any absences from class directly to the dean each day; retiring faculty received a Hamilton chair with a personal plaque in addition to a party and a dinner at the president’s house; students worked longer hours (after all, there were no noticeable women until Kirkland College had operated for two to three years), and typed or hand wrote their papers; a Faculty Club organized daily coffee hours and monthly dinners; the Faculty Wives Club (the Hamilton faculty being 99 percent male) organized their own events and ways to get to know each other. People talked to each other.

But it was not all part of an Ovidian Golden Age: Junior faculty were not permitted to speak at faculty meetings; syllabi and tests were copied on ink-spilling stencils going around and around on a drum; one telephone served the nine or so inhabitants of Silliman (now Couper) Hall, and our secretary, Mamie Meyer, had to kick the basement furnace to get it going on cold winter mornings. Extra sections of a course were, in the case of some professors, just added on beyond a normal teaching load; the administration did not understand the value of study abroad and thus allowed the France and Spain programs to start only if they could come up with their own seed money; the academic year in Spain director and family initially lived in a horrible, cockroach-infested apartment in Madrid until the 1980s; a routine communication between Hamilton and the director of the program took six weeks (telegrams were used for emergencies); young faculty (like me) living in the Griffin Road apartments endured the cold wind whipping through the useless plastic sheets that the College installed over the windows in the winter. These apartments, of course, are now insulated and renovated and occupied happily by students.

What is different about your teaching style or methods?

I tend to be very enthusiastic, emotional and excited about the material, which seems to have a positive effect. (I cry in front of the class when reading certain poems.) My preference in literature courses is to stress close textual analysis, rather than (often baseless) discussions about abstract literary theory. My goal is to lead students to want to pick up the Quijote, rather than the latest Clive Cussler novel, when they are sitting on the beach all alone. That’s what a liberal arts education is all about, right?

What are your passions outside of academics?

(1) My wife and daughters; (2) my close friends; (3) music (voice, piano); (4) travel.

What is your specialty in your field?

Peninsular literature of the 16th, 17th, 19th and early 20th centuries. Spanish culture. Spanish art.

What research question(s) are you currently interested in?

I’ve published a number of books and a lot of scholarly articles and am currently using my semi-retirement status to take a breather from research.

What impact do you hope your work will have?

I’m hopeful that the Academic Year in Spain program, which I founded and directed for more than three decades, has had a lasting impact on the 3,000 or so past participants, particularly as regards to the knowledge which they gained concerning another culture and the comparison with their own background (i.e. a liberal arts education), the extraordinary language benefits, and the often intense personal maturation process that takes place when immersed in a foreign environment.

I hope that my classes laid the groundwork for future personal enrichment and opened doors to a deeper knowledge of Spain, its language, its people, its literature and its art.

What is your favorite Hamilton tradition?

The Oratorio Society.

If you could go back in time to when you were in college and give yourself one piece of advice, what would it be?

“Remember that a few things in life are important (such as family, friends, God), and that other things are not. Cool it about the little things.”

Which class is your favorite to teach?

I always love most whatever class I am teaching at the time. Right now I have a Cervantes seminar. If I were teaching Spanish poetry, or the history of Spanish art, or beginning Spanish, I would say the same thing.