Faculty
Kristen Case has published essays on Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and William and Henry James, and is the author of the book American Poetry and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe (Camden House, 2011). Kristen’s first poetry collection, Little Arias was published by New Issues Press in 2015. Her second collection, Principles of Economics, was published by Switchback Books in 2019. She is the recipient of the Maine Literary Award in Poetry (2016 and 2020), a MacDowell Fellowship, and the UMF Trustee Professorship. She is co-Director of the Monson Arts Seminar and Director of Thoreau’s Kalendar: A Digital Archive of the Phenological Manuscripts of Henry David Thoreau. Her current book project is Keeping Time: Henry David Thoreau’s Kalendar (forthcoming, Milkweed Editions).
Aaron Wyanski is a composer, pianist, and educator who might be the one person on the planet that has had work premiered at Carnegie Hall and destroyed an instrument onstage at legendary punk venue CBGB and backed a Sinatra impersonator at a Florida aquarium. Wyanski combines all of this wide-ranging and stylistically diverse experience into a deeply personal creative practice exploring memory, perspective, and vulnerability. His music has been featured at New Music Miami, the Hartford New Music Festival, and Five Points Center for the Visual Arts, and he has been awarded residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Performers who have commissioned and/or premiered Wyanski’s works include: Duo Refracta, the Amaranth Quartet, Juventas New Music Ensemble, Robert Frankenberry, Krista Kopper, Roger Zahab, Yoon Sun Choi, and Jacob Sacks. Wyanski is Assistant Professor of Music Composition at the University of Maine at Farmington and co-Director of the Monson Arts Seminar.
Noelle Dubay is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at UMF. She completed her BFA at UMF in 2012 and her PhD in English at Johns Hopkins University in 2020. In addition to teaching with the University Writing Program, she has designed and taught various courses in American literature through the English Department, the Program for Women, Gender, and Sexuality, and as a Dean’s Teaching Fellow. She is currently working on a book project titled “Works like a Charm: The Occult Resistance of Nineteenth-Century American Literature,” which argues that occult practices and their representations in hegemonic literatures have been key to the consolidation of and resistance to racialized power throughout Atlantic history.