Activities

This page will feature will feature recent publications and/or activities sent in by members of the Boston College Retired Faculty Association membership. Retired faculty are encouraged to submit any recent publications or activities by sending information about them to either Bob Taggart (ҴýARF President) or Peter Olivieri (Website Editor).

Current Listings include :

James Bernauer, S.J.
Rebecca Valette
David Northrup
Jeffery Howe
Dennis Taylor

(Scroll down to see them all.)

Auschwitz & Absolutionby James Bernauer, S.J. has recently been published by Orbis Books. Fr. Bernauer gave a presentation, based on the book, to the ҴýARF in February, 2023. A book-launch event will be held on Thursday, January 25 at 5 PM, both in-person and via Zoom. More information can be found at: https://www.instagram.com/p/C17ECWQLwnz/. Please note that if you are interested in the in-person event, the location has now been changed to Room 107 at 245 Beacon St.


Valette Book

CLITSO DEDMAN, NAVAJO CARVER
His Art and His World
REBECCA M. VALETTE

“Rebecca Valette’s history of the life of the early to mid-twentieth-century Diné trader, architect, and master wood carver Clitso Dedman is a fascinating work—well written and beautifully illustrated. Empathetically written in consultation with descendants, it also uses an amazing array of print and archival sources, which would-be writers of poorly documented Indigenous life histories will appreciate. The book’s thorough inventory of Dedman’s carvings and their dispositions will interest students of Indigenous art marketing and collecting as well.”—Klara Kelley, coauthor of Navajoland Trading Post Encyclopedia

Rebecca Valette’s Clitso Dedman, Navajo Carver is the first biography of artist Clitso Dedman (1876–1953), one of the most important but overlooked Diné (Navajo) artists of his generation. Dedman was born to a traditional Navajo family in Chinle, Arizona, and herded sheep as a child. He was educated in the late 1880s and early 1890s at the Fort Defiance Indian School, then at the Teller Institute in Grand Junction, Colorado. After graduation Dedman moved to Gallup, New Mexico, where he worked in the machine shop of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway before opening his first of three Navajo trading posts in Rough Rock, Arizona. After tragedy struck his life in 1915, he moved back to Chinle and abruptly changed careers to become a blacksmith and builder.
At age sixty, suffering from arthritis, Dedman turned his creative talent to woodcarving, thus initiating a new Navajo art form. Although the neighboring Hopis had been carving Kachina dolls for generations, the Navajos traditionally avoided any permanent reproduction of their Holy People, and even of human figures. Dedman was the first to ignore this proscription, and for the rest of his life he focused on creating wooden sculptures of the various participants in the Yeibichai dance, which closed the Navajo Nightway ceremony. These secular carvings were immediately purchased and sold to tourists by regional Indian traders. Today Dedman’s distinctive and highly regarded work can be found in private collections, galleries, and museums, such as the Navajo Nation Museum at Window Rock, the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, and the Arizona State Museum in Tucson. Clitso Dedman, Navajo Carver, with its extensive illustrations, is the story of a remarkable and underrecognized figure of twentieth-century Navajo artistic creation and innovation.

Rebecca M. Valette is professor emerita of Romance languages at Boston College and an internationally recognized expert in language methodology, testing, and applied linguistics. She and her husband, Jean-Paul Valette, have curated several exhibitions of Navajo textiles. They are coauthors of Weaving the Dance: Navajo Yeibichai Textiles (1910–1950) and Navajo Weavings with Ceremonial Themes: A Historical Overview of a Secular Art Form.

Available from Bison Books.

SAVE 40% ON THIS BOOK WITH CODE 6AF23 In the United States or Canada please order online at nebraskapress.unl.edu/bison/ or call our distributor Longleaf Services at 1-800-848-6224. If ordering outside of North America, a 30% discount can still be obtained. Please call Combined Academic Publishers in the United Kingdom at +44 (0) 1423 526350 and use the discount code CSFS2022


David Northrup (History) presented a paper on "West Africans' Transatlantic Voyages and Trade,1000–1800," at a symposium co-sponsored by the New England Regional World History Association and Tall Ships America at the Northeastern Maritime Institute, Fairhaven, MA, on 28 October 2023.


Jeffery Howe. Ҵý's McMullen Museum of Art received two generous gifts of paintings this fall. Jeffery Howe (Art, Art History and Film) researched and wrote detailed labels for a number of thesepaintings. The gifts were from the Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch and Charles Hack Collections, respectively. Copies of the labels and photographs of the paintings may be found at and at


Dennis Taylor publishedShakespeare and the Elizabethan Reformation: Literary Negotiation of Religious Difference(Lexington Books: Rowman & Littlefield) in late 2022. He has now resumed a very different project, a scholarly edition of Thomas Hardy’s novel,A Laodicean, for Cambridge University Press.