José Vergara and Students from 360° Publish Interview with Ernestine Hayes
While at Bryn Mawr, Associate Professor of Russian José Vergara has invited guests, such as poet Julia Nemirovskaya and translator Boris Dralyuk, 2015 Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich, writer and researcher Darya Tsymbalyuk, author Elizabeth Rush, musician John K. Samson, and writer and filmmaker Warren Cariou, to speak with his classes, either in person or on Zoom.
“At some point, years ago, it hit me that bringing guests into my classes could be a transformative, dynamic element of teaching,” says Vergara. “From my perspective, these conversations open up the texts and topics that my students and I discuss in completely new ways; students are able to make personal connections that they wouldn’t otherwise. That is, they learn more about the writers or artists, and they themselves relate to the material differently as a result of these meetings.”
Last year, as part of the 360° course Energy Afterlives, Vergara and students in his Coal, Oil, Nuclear: Narrative Afterlives class, got the opportunity to meet and interview Ernestine Hayes, author of Blonde Indian and The Tao of Raven, during a nine-day trip to Southeast Alaska. The student interviewers were Ella Allan-Rahill '26, Lindsay Damon '25, Kira Elliott '24, Sarah Fernandez '26, Maya Hicks '26, Isabelle Stid '26, Aashna Dolwani '24, Nisha Marino '24, Miya Matsumune '26, Clio Morbello '26, Bryn Osborne '24, Emma Rideout-Mann '25, and Aidan York, HC ‘24.
The students collectively transcribed the conversation, and Vergara pitched it to several publications. It was picked up by Atmospheric Quarterly, and the interview, “If We Yield, We Find Our Essence: A Conversation with Ernestine Hayes,” appeared in volume 1.2 of the publication in July 2024.
José Vergara is a scholar and teacher of Russian language and literature. He is the author of All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature, co-editor of Reimagining Nabokov: Pedagogies for the 21st Century, and project director of Encyclopedia of the Dog: An Annotated Edition of Sasha Sokolov's Between Dog and Wolf. His writing and interviews have appeared in Literary Hub, Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Music & Literature, and World Literature Today.