Northland College Faculty
Faculty are at the heart of Northland College. Click below to view individual profiles and to learn more about our incredible faculty.
Michele Small
Title: Professor of English and Modern Languages
Office Location: Wheeler 426
Phone: (715) 682-1330
Email: msmall@northland.edu
At Northland Since: 1972
Education
- Ph.D., University of Minnesota
- M.A., State University of New York at Albany
- M.A., University of Nice (France)
- B.A., University of Nice (France)
Northland College Program Website: Spanish
Profile
I love that Northland College is a small school where you know your students by their names and where you can do your job the way you think it should be done: in depth, giving 100%, expecting the same in return, and reaping the rewards as you see real progress in the students' growth and development -- "Cameo work" is what I call it! At Northland, students receive a lot of personal attention from many very warm and caring people. In addition, our environmental liberal arts mission has made us unique in the nation, so they are exposed to an incredibly wide variety of areas for such a small institution. This is also a place where any student can become involved in all kinds of things: from tracking wolves in the north woods to being on a college-wide search committee and having a vote that counts. Students have a lot of "say" here: they can make real change and it shows. Away from Northland College, I travel. I have been raised all over the planet and the nomadic lifestyle is a part and parcel of who I am.As a professional, I am a French native, professor of English, specialized in the medieval period (particularly Chaucer which felicitously blends my two cultures) and also linguistics. I also teach "Spanish for Proficiency and Fluency": a service program I have developed at Northland College. To find more information on Spanish, go to www.northland.edu/spanish.
Research
Since I am completely trilingual and have travelled around the world, you can understand my profound interest in other cultures. Over the years, I have developed and taught two courses: Contemporary Third World Literature (Eng 217) which includes men and women authors, and the spring seminar, Women of the Third World (Eng 233), which is a focus on women writers and women's issues in the developing nations of the world. Convinced that I am that cultural myopia is becoming more and more dangerous to everybody's health, I have just offered a new course on the "Literature of the Arab World". So, the essence of my life is the constant reading and reviewing of books -- and I love to read! On the side of my couch, at home, there are three piles of books -- in English, in French and in Spanish -- that never go down. As some books are read and put away, others take their place: books for research, award-winning novels from my French relatives, or wonderful stuff that I have picked up in Latin America. Beyond the study of other cultures through literature, I have another very strong area of focus: this one related to the environment. In fact, for the last four years, I have been the holder of the A.D Mary Elizabeth Andersen Hulings Distinguished Chair in the Humanities. This has been a wonderful opportunity, with release time for research, to focus on all my "projects" and especially -- since we are an Environmental Liberal Arts College -- to do "green literature" but through the particular lenses of other cultures. I am in the process of creating a new upper-level course on the theme of "The Environmental Literature of Other Cultures in the Americas-Latin America and the Caribbean" and am developing an anthology for the course. My last two Hulings Public Lectures (February 18, 2010 and February 10, 2011) were entitled: "Other Visions, Other Voices: Nature and the Dark Side of Machismo in Latin American and Caribbean Short Stories" and " The Metaphoric Use of Nature for Biting Satire in Latin American and Caribbean Short Stories"
