Faculty News

Faculty member John Umphlett's latest sculpture, Bit Death; Life; He Blows on Them and They Wither, on view at the North Bennington Outdoor Sculpture Show (NBOSS) at the Bennington Museum through November, takes the form of a cross with angled arms–and is designed, too, for Umphlett's own entombment.

Bennington College documented its observation of 2024 total solar eclipse, including a class about the eclipse with astronomy faculty member Hugh Crowl and a trip north to take students into the center of the path of totality.

On the second Monday before opening night, rehearsal for this term’s faculty production—Sweat by Lynn Nottage—started with a fight. Student actors executed a choreographed-but-believable series of punches and holds. They threw each other across the barroom set while the assistant stage manager and fight captain Tennyson Perkins ’26 took careful notes to deliver to the breathless actors at the end of the scene.  

Then they did it again. And again. And again. Each time, they incorporated Perkins’s tweaks, and each time, the action was clearer and cleaner.  

Five Questions with Astronomer Hugh Crowl

Hugh Crowl, astronomer and faculty member in astronomy and physics at Bennington, is teaching a class this term all about the total solar eclipse crossing nearby Bennington College on April  8. Bennington will experience a 97-percent eclipse, but the class is traveling north to Plattsburgh, NY, to be in the path of totality.

The Literature discipline at Bennington College has received a grant from the Winston Foundation to fund a new course and reading from 2024 Ben Belitt Distinguished Visiting Writer Jia Tolentino.