{"id":2317,"date":"2019-08-20T09:00:25","date_gmt":"2019-08-20T13:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/?p=2317"},"modified":"2019-08-16T08:32:59","modified_gmt":"2019-08-16T12:32:59","slug":"poetic-connections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/2019\/08\/20\/poetic-connections\/","title":{"rendered":"Poetic Connections"},"content":{"rendered":"

A decade ago, Javier Padilla \u201910<\/a> took modernist poetry courses, studied Celtic literature, and went on an extended study trip to Ireland as a Colgate student. He majored in English, writing his honors thesis with professors Michael Coyle<\/a> and Peter Balakian<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Today, Padilla resides across the street from where he lived his senior year \u2014 only now, he\u2019s an assistant professor of English and calls his undergraduate advisers his colleagues.<\/p>\n

Padilla joined Colgate\u2019s faculty last fall,\u00a0 <\/span>specializing in Irish and postcolonial literature. This spring, he taught the first iteration of the course Ireland: An Introduction to Irish Studies, which showcases Irish writers, playwrights, and poets from the 19th century.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy expertise is poetry,\u201d Padilla says. \u201cI love close reading and how a poem can be such a rich vehicle of cultural expression.\u201d<\/p>\n

Born in Nicaragua, Padilla has always been infatuated by the interactions among literature, language, and culture. \u201cOne of the clich\u00e9s about Nicaragua is that it produces a lot of writers; it\u2019s a poet-heavy culture,\u201d Padilla says. \u201cI started writing poetry at a young age.\u201d<\/p>\n

He applied to college in the United States, inspired by the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath. At Colgate, a sophomore-year trip to Ireland with Coyle and Professor Morgan Davies fostered Padilla\u2019s interests in that country.<\/p>\n

\u201cI fell in love with Irish culture, and the late-blooming nationalism really spoke to me,\u201d he says. \u201cI saw a lot of similarities between Nicaragua and Ireland in so far as they are both extremely literary cultures.\u201d<\/p>\n

After graduation, Padilla attended Princeton University to earn his master\u2019s degree and was awarded a summer fellowship endowment to study W.B. Yeats in Ireland. When he returned to Princeton as a PhD candidate, Padilla wrote the first chapter of his dissertation on Ireland. His first published academic articles also addressed modernity and colonial mentalities through Yeats\u2019s poetry.<\/p>\n

Through Colgate\u2019s Inventing Ireland course, Padilla continues to explore these themes. He emphasizes how the literature\u2019s nationalist sentiments helped Ireland maintain its own cultural identity in the midst of a struggle for self-governance and Britain\u2019s colonial presence. \u201cThe Irish Literary Revival was important not just for Ireland, but also for other countries in the throes of colonialism \u2014 African countries and Latin American countries,\u201d Padilla says.<\/p>\n

The first part of his course shows how modern Irish literature is bringing back old works. \u201cThere\u2019s this continuity in which even after the Irish language was snuffed out, it was revived. After all these Celtic legends started to disappear, they were revived,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Padilla hopes the class will eventually include the extended study trip to Ireland that he once participated in. He hopes students can experience the importance of Irish literature in the age of Brexit, where the border between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland is a contested issue and colonial mentalities remain.<\/p>\n

\u201cLiterature is an ongoing experience,\u201d Padilla says. \u201cAll these problems that are part of Irish history are still with us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yeats addressed these problems by envisioning Ireland as a place of enlightenment in \u201cInto the Twilight,\u201d writing, \u201cCome, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill.\u201d As for Padilla, he has returned to Colgate\u2019s beloved hill to contribute to a community of learning and revive his own history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After graduating from Colgate a decade ago, English professor Javier Padilla ’10 has returned to the Hill to share his passion for Irish literature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1221,"featured_media":2215,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[52,376,421,422,94],"coauthors":[246],"class_list":["post-2317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-discover","tag-engl","tag-english","tag-ireland","tag-nicaragua","tag-poetry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/palXSH-Bn","amp_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2019\/05\/20190516_javier_padilla_rios_376.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1221"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2317"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2390,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2317\/revisions\/2390"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2215"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2317"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=2317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}