About the blogger

I'm Victor Luftig, academic dean for the Spring 2012 voyage of Semester
at Sea. At home at the University of Virginia I serve two main roles: I
teach in the English Department, mainly 20th century English and Irish
literature, and I report to the Provost as Director of the Center for
the Liberal Arts (www.virginia.edu/cla), which provides programs for
K-12 teachers. For six years my wife and I have taught UVA students in
Ireland during the January term, and last summer, my 18th as a member of
the faculty of Middlebury College's Bread Loaf School of English, I
taught at the Lincoln College, Oxford campus.

I've been preparing for my Semester at Sea role for about two years. My
chief responsibilities up until now have been hiring and preparing the
faculty and the "inter-port" visitors.

So when people ask me--as they often do these days--what I'm most
excited about in relation to the voyage, I think of a combination of
places and people: about what it will be like (for example) to travel on
the Amazon with Profs. Robin Doughty and Jenna Lawrence, each of whom
has done research there; about what it will be like to travel between
South America and West Africa with Mohammed Sheriff Ghale, the Ghanain
musician who'll be helping all of us to use music to make connections
between those regions; to visit Ghana with Prof. Chandrashekhar Ranade,
who did important work there as a World Bank economist; to approach Cape
Town with Profs. Donna Lefebvre and Marc Zimmer, who've taught there in
the past; to head towards Asia with Senator and Mrs. Charles Robb, who
have profoundly important connections to Vietnam and the history of its
relations with the United States, as well as to other places on our
itinerary; and so on.

And when I think of what I'm most eager to do as dean, it would be to
create situations in which students can draw on these
connections--occasions when students are talking about what they've
learned by seeing the places through these experts' eyes and through
their own, when students are processing this knowledge with pleasure,
when the voyage's fun and its learning become indistinguishable from one
another.

I write this in a valley in central Vermont. There was, apparently,
about a foot of snow up at the Bread Loaf campus, and we'll head there
today, I think, about as far away from some of the places we'll soon be
sailing to as one can get. But I'll be going there with friends who
know the place well, so it will be some of the same fun, only in a
colder climate.