Geraldine Pittman— Literature
Teaching Philosophy
While she was a graduate student at the University of Southern Illinois, Geraldine helped to establish an undergraduate Honors Program that was roughly equivalent in size to the whole of Marlboro College. It was there, she says, "that I experienced the kind of teaching that I prize here: the opportunity to work very closely with a student on a project in which we are both interested." She has based her teaching on a quotation from one of her own teachers, Mark Van Doren, "the art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery."
Geraldine’s courses range in scope from English Romantic Poetry to modern fiction, often with a focus on women’s roles, both as characters and as authors. She has directed senior Plan projects examining a wide variety of themes in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century novel. Geraldine frequently works with faculty members from diverse areas of the curriculum, exploring literature in its historical, philosophical or religious context. In recent years her courses on Latin American fiction have inspired a number of Plans involving languages and social history as well as literature.
Community Service and Professional Activities
Long active with the National Endowment for the Humanities, Geraldine is past president of the Vermont Council on the Humanities. She is also a citizen member of the Vermont Bar Association. She has studied at Columbia, Stanford and Harvard Universities. She spent the summer of 1987 as a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at Dartmouth’s Dante Institute.
B.A., Southern Illinois University, 1958; M.A., Southern Illinois University, 1965; Advanced graduate study, Southern Illinois University and Columbia University; Marlboro College, 1969 –