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Pioneering voice - Lynn Z. Bloom, English

Historian on the ground - Mark Overmyer-Velázquez, History

Pioneering voice

Lynn Bloom writes her first autobiographical work

As a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of English and the University’s first Aetna Chair of Writing, Lynn Z. Bloom has been a pioneering voice in the field of composition studies for more than 20 years.

Lynn Bloom discusses writing with students in a class at the William Benton Museum of Art. Photo by Peter Morenus

So it is no surprise perhaps that Bloom’s first autobiographical work — The Seven Deadly Virtues and Other Lively Essays – Coming of Age as a Writer, Teacher, Risk Taker (The University of South Carolina Press, 2008) — celebrates her iconoclastic style.

Bloom’s memoir is a compilation of 15 rich and colorful essays – some 18 years in the making – that describe her trials as a chronic nonconformist and female scholar; her once “forbidden” marriage to a man of Jewish descent; and her life as a teacher, wife, mother and grandmother.

Her warm personal tales are laced with humorous, insightful and often inspirational accounts of the risks and rewards she encountered as an artist living and writing on the edge, including having had her telephone tapped by the FBI while she completed the first biography of Benjamin Spock, the famed pediatrician and peace activist.

A master essayist known for her lively and provocative writing style, Bloom believes the traditional structures surrounding academic expression – her seven deadly virtues – stifle personal creativity. She urges her students and readers to avoid the traps inherent in the deadly virtues of duty, rationality, conformity, efficiency, order, economy and punctuality so often affiliated with academic prose.

“I am not out to supplant virtue with vice, though that is always tempting,” Bloom writes in the book’s introduction. “But to propose, in essay after essay, an alternative set of lively virtues to replace the deadly.

“Duty and Helpfulness have their place, though I have busted up more than one romance and quit more than one job over issues of servility, sexism and second-class citizenship,” Bloom quips in the book’s opening lines. “I would augment these with anger and defiance.”

Her other “alternate” virtues are honesty, risk-taking, independence of mind and spirit, originality, rigor, energy and having fun.

“One of the things that I would like people to take away from the book is to feel that they can take risks,” Bloom says.

“In my mind, I am always taking risks. I don’t think you ever grow intellectually if you don’t take risks…If I had done what my professors had told me to do, I wouldn’t have had a very good time. I might have gotten a job, but my work wouldn’t have been original and I wouldn’t have been happy.”

Once challenged for her innovative essay style, Bloom says she is now being called upon to write personal essays for academic journals looking to diversify.

“I find that heartening because that validates a lot of what I’ve been trying to do with routine academic submissions for the past 20 years,” says Bloom, who is teaching a graduate course in rhetoric and composition this spring.

The author of 28 books and more than 150 articles, Bloom is preparing changes for two book manuscripts, one about the history of the essay and another about the rhetoric of food writing.

— Colin Poitras

Historian on the ground

Overmyer-Velázquez Takes Students to Where History is Made

Mark Overmyer-Velázquez, associate professor of history, makes a point to his students in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Teaching students about how history has shaped the culture of a nation and influenced modern issues is often a challenge in the classroom. Students of Mark Overmyer-Velázquez, a specialist in Latin American history, however, are offered a unique firsthand opportunity to gain insights into the culture of Mexico.

For the past two years Overmyer-Velázquez, associate professor of history in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, has taken a small group of upperclassmen majoring in history to Oaxaca, Mexico, for a three-week immersion course into Mexican culture.

“Migration is the thematic focus, and I encourage them to imagine themselves as part of the global economic flow between the U.S. and Mexico,” he says.

While in Oaxaca, the students live with local families, take intensive Spanish language classes and conduct research in the city itself. They also visit indigenous artisan villages as well as a migrant village where 50 percent of the people have migrated to the United States for work.

In addition to students earning three history credits and one foreign language credit through the course, Overmyer-Velázquez notes that the real value is in these students’ personal experiences, which continue to enrich their work in the UConn classroom well after they return from Mexico.

Born in Chicago to a mother who migrated from Mexico and a German-American father from Ohio, Overmyer-Velázquez grew up in Canada, where he studied German literature and history at the University of British Columbia and worked for two years after college on an exchange program between indigenous Canadian and Mexican youth.

After earning a master’s degree and Ph.D. in history from Yale, he taught at several other schools, including Pomona College and Wesleyan University, where he finished his first book, Visions of the Emerald City: Modernity, Tradition and the Formation of Porfirian Oaxaca, Mexico (Duke University Press, 2006), which was named best book of the year in 2007 by the New England Council on Latin American Studies.

Overmyer-Velázquez, who joined the UConn faculty in 2004, now teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on the history of modern Mexico, modern Latin America and U.S. Latinos and serves as director of UConn’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

He recently started an interdisciplinary service learning program for honors students, which brings in speakers in health, law and other disciplines to talk about migration. Overmyer-Velázquez says that the program teaches the students “to think critically and places them to work in the community.”

Overmyer-Velázquez is working on his next book, Bleeding Mexico White: Race, Nation and the History of Mexico – U.S. Migration, which also will be published by Duke University Press. He is editor of Latino America: State-by-State (Greenwood Press, 2008) and of the forthcoming Beyond the Border: The History of Mexico – U.S. Migration, part of a series for Oxford University Press.

— Karen Singer ’73 (CLAS)