An article by faculty member James Longenbach appears at Poetry Foundation:

The medium of Giorgione’s Tempest is “oil on canvas”; the medium of Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed is “oil and pencil on pillow, quilt, and sheet.” Descriptions of a work of art’s medium seem to tell us everything and nothing, for our entire experience of art is dependent upon the artist’s intimacy with the medium, and yet the medium itself may seem weirdly mundane, especially when the artist harnesses everyday materials like a sheet. In the nineteenth century, the stuff from which art is made came to be called the medium because for hundreds of years the word had referred to something that acts as an intermediary, a piece of money or a messenger. The artistic medium enables a transaction between the artist and the world, and, over time, the history of those transactions has become inextricable from the medium as such, an inherited set of conventions. It’s not coincidental that it was also in the nineteenth century that the word medium was first used to describe a person who conducts a séance, a person who exists simultaneously in the worlds of the living and the dead.

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Faculty member Alan Shapiro will receive the 2014 North Carolina Award. This is the highest civilian honor the State of North Carolina can bestow. More information can be found online…

Faculty member Liam Callanan has written about his Percy Jackson-inspired family trip to Greece for The Wall Street Journal:

MY LUNGS were burning, my legs wobbling. My first outing as an Olympic athlete was not going well. Then again, I was burdened with a backpack and jet lag.

My 11-year-old daughter had decided that the best way to experience ancient Olympia—a sprawling riverside complex in Greece where the Olympic Games were held starting in the eighth century B.C.—was to run the roughly 200-yard track that Zeus’s son Hercules supposedly laid out. Under the scorching midday sun, was it a smart thing to do? No. Did it make antiquity come alive in a rush that I can feel again typing these words? Ye gods, yes.

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Faculty member Megan Staffel discusses her story “Mischief” (which appears in Issue 06 of The Common) with writer and fiction alum Helen Hooper on the inaugural episode of The Common Podcast: Contributors in Conversation.

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