Hope College | English

Kathleen Verduin

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VERDUIN, KATHLEEN, Professor (1978).

Education: B.A., Hope College (1965), M.A., George Washington University (1969), Ph.D., Indiana University (1980).

Interests: American Literature (esp. 17th-19th Centuries); Medievalism; Reception of Dante; Modern Fiction; Herman Melville; Stephen King.

Selected Works: Co-editor, A. James Prins: A Life in Literature (2007); Associate Editor, Studies in Medievalism, 1982-1999; True Things: The Writings of R. Dirk Jellema (1996); Numerous shorter works on Dante, Emerson, Forster, Fuller, Hemingway, Lawrence, Medievalism, Melville, Puritanism, Sayers, Updike, and the Dutch in American literature.

Distinctions: Provost's Award for Excellence in Teaching (Hope, 2005); Organizer, with Leslie Workman, International Conference on Medievalism (1985-2000); Co-organizer, Four-week Summer Institute on Medievalism, University of York (UK, 1996, 1998); Annual Sessions on Medievalism, International Congress on Medieval Studies (1982-89); Hope College Faculty Development Grants (1981, 1983, 1985-87, 1992, 1998).

Publications:

with Christopher James Prins, editors, A. James Prins: A Life in Literature (Holland, Michigan, 2007).
Jim Prins, a professor in Hope College’s English Department from 1946 to 1981, was legendary for his impassioned courses on the classic novels of the United States, England, continental Europe, and Russia. This book collects Prins’s public writings—the famous “Last Chance Talk,” literary essays and reviews, a chapter from his dissertation on Bleak House, and a 1975 interview—but also a treasury of his carefully prepared lecture notes, where former students will hear his voice again. Memoirs and poems by colleagues, friends, and family complete the volume.

Studies in Medievalism. (Cambridge, UK: Boydell & Brewer, continuing).
Founded by the late Leslie J. Workman and produced at Hope College from 1983 to 1998, this pioneering series established "medievalism"--in Workman's definition, "the continuing process of creating the Middle Ages"--as a new and important academic subject, comparable in scope to classicism and Romanticism. Now edited by the noted medievalist Tom Shippey, Studies in Medievalism continues to explore all facets of the Middle Ages as an idea in western culture since whenever the Middle Ages may be said to have ended (roughly c. 1500) and a significant influence on postmedieval art, architecture, literature, religion, popular culture, and scholarship.

True Things: The Writings of H. Dirk Jellema (Holland, Michigan, 1996).
Professor Dirk Jellema's untimely death in 1993 deprived Hope's English Department of a beloved poet, teacher, and friend. This memorial volume collects Jellema's poems, reviews, "As I See It" columns, and a rich harvest of personal correspondence in his inimitable style: gruff, skeptical, but always warm-hearted, compassionate, and, as in his deprecating way he liked to put it, "all like that." The craft of writing, the struggle for faith, and the mixed blessing of Dutch heritage predominate as themes. Memoirs and poetic tributes by colleagues and students complete the book.