Professors’ Favorite Books & Films

Thanks to all of the following professors and staff for taking the time to share some of their favorite books and films. For those professors that weren't able to respond or who were left out, I apologize. However, I hope to compile another article similar to this in the future in which I hope to cover those professors who aren't included in the following list. Enjoy!

Maxine Payne (Art):

So much of this depends on time, place, what is going on in your life when you experience these things. I guess though- regardless of time, place, personal toil and trouble- the following resonate with me always:

Books: Feast of Snakes - Harry Crews; Wise Blood - Flannery O'Connor; Joe- Larry Brown

Films: Paper Moon, The Last Picture Show, Down by Law

Dr. Rod Miller (Art History):

Books: the Maisie Dobbs series (Winspear), Ideas have Consequences (Weaver), and CS Lewis' Space Trilogy

Films: Henry Poole is Here, Ordet, The Damn United

Dr. Joyce Hardin(Biology):

Books: My Name is Asher Lev, Kite Runner

Films: Waking Ned Devine, The Commitments, Cool Runnings

Dr. Joe Lombardi(Biology):

Books: "Ismael: An adventure of the mind and spirit" by Daniel Quinn, "The Future of Life" by E.O. Wilson, "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins

Film: Schindler's List

Dr. Courtney Hatch (Chemistry):

Books: The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho; The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav

Films: Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986), Dead Poet's Society (1989), The Princess Bride (1987)

Dr. Rebecca Resinski(Classics):

Books: Till We Have Faces, C. S. Lewis; A Room with a View, E. M. Forster; Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy

Films: Les Revenants (a.k.a. They Came Back); House of Flying Daggers; The Women (1939 version)

Dr. Carl Burch (Computer Science):

Books: The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas), The Cuckoo's Egg (Stoll), The Thirteenth Tale (Setterfield)

Films: Cinema Paradiso, Ikiru, The Princess Bride

Dr. Keith Berry(Economics):

Books: Brothers Karamazov, by Dostoevsky; The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein; Anything by Alastair Reynolds (Sci-Fi)

Films: The Maltese Falcon, North by Northwest, The Shining

Dr. Dionne Jackson(Education):

Books: Lessons in Living by Susan L. Taylor; Think Big by Ben Carson, M.D. and Cecil Murphy; The Shame of the Nation:  The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America by Jonathan Kozol

Films: Imitation of Life, The Laramie Project

Hope Coulter (English):

Books: I'll avoid classic blockbusters that I love and talk instead about three lesser-known books.  One is My Family and Other Animals (along with its companion, Birds, Beasts, and Relatives), by the late great British naturalist Gerald Durrell.  These are hilarious memoirs about Durrell's boyhood as an obsessed animal-lover in Corfu, Greece.  He was the youngest of four very different, much older siblings who with their widowed mother fled gray England to sojourn in pre-WWII rural Greece.  There Gerald's passion for animals ran amok.  The books are drenched in Mediterranean sunlight and wine, full of intense nostalgia for a time when the world was crowded with fascinating fauna, including the eccentric adult friends of the Durrell family.

            Another book I love is more recent:  Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss.  This too has an exotic setting--a border region of India--and it too is comic with an underlying darkness.  Desai's style is exuberant, abandoned, but carefully wrought.  Her books spans geographical distances (from India to the immigrant world of New York City) and emotional polarities as it traces the odd girlhood of Sai, the main character, and the fortunes of others tangentially related to her.  Themes of colonization, globalization, and poverty come into play, but the novel is never predictable and never polemical.

            Then there's Golden Gate, by Vikram Seth, a novel in verse.  Although I write and teach poetry, and love it, I wasn't sure I could stomach an entire novel in verse.  But Golden Gate is utterly engaging.  It's the story of a group of friends in the San Francisco area, their romantic entanglements, their connections to classical music, and even their pets.  The language is conversational, contemporary, and as you read you tend to forget that it's rhyming iambic tetrameter beating through your brain.  This unusual narrative is one of my favorite books.

Films: three I believe I'll never tire of watching:  Cinema Paradiso, Witness, Manhattan

Dr. Tyrone Jaeger (English):

Everyone in the world should read these books and see these films. I've tried to include a range of genres.

Books: Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion (nonfiction); Scary, No Scary by Zach Schomburg (poetry); Airships by Barry Hannah (fiction)

Films: Grey Gardens directed by Albert and David Maysles (documentary); The Last Movie directed by Dennis Hopper (poetry of a sort);

September 30, 1955 directed by James Bridges (fiction film filmed in Conway, Arkansas, about the day of James Dean's death that includes footage of Front Street, UCA, Toad Suck, and Palarm Liquor!)