Kristen Agar, senior accounting major, has been on the Monitor for the past four years and served as Editor-in-Chief this year.

“The Monitor has taught me so much over the past four years,” Agar said. “I started out my freshman year wanting to be just a photographer. I thought my writing was awful. I owe so much to the staff members before me who encouraged me to push myself and helped cultivate my writing. They gave me the chance and helped me find my potential. I attribute all my success to them.”

For Agar, she will miss the people she has met at Jewell.  

“The thing I will miss the most about Jewell is absolutely the people,” Agar said. “The friends I’ve made are incredible. There truly is a special community of achievers at Jewell, and I will miss being challenged and inspired by these people.”

Agar will use her accounting major after graduation in a position at the KPMG office in Kansas City.

“I will be working as a tax associate in their [KPMG] Global Mobility Services department to provide tax services and consulting to companies who operate internationally,” Agar said.

Erin Melton, senior Oxbridge Literature and Theory major, served as the Monitor’s Chief Copy Editor for the past year.

Melton spoke about the inspiration the Monitor provided her over the years.

“The Monitor has always been a place for me that was really inspiring,” Melton said. “This has always been a place of a lot of really powerful, strong women in leadership positions. I’ve always felt a lot of camaraderie with the other ed staff members. It’s just always been a fun place to come together with people.”

Melton plans to work and then start a masters program in London.

“I will be moving to La Crosse, Wisconsin, to do a year with their Habitat for Humanity,” Melton said. “And then in September of 2019 I’ll start at a masters program at the London School of Economics and Political Science.”

Brianna Steiert, senior Oxbridge Molecular Biology major, spent the past year serving as the Monitor’s Features Editor and Managing Editor.

“If you had asked me in high school if I would join a newspaper staff in college, I would have said no,” Steiert said. “I joined Monitor with no newspaper experience, yet it became one of my favorite activities in college. I became more confident in my writing and learned to have a stronger appreciation for news both local and international.”

Steiert will miss the people at Jewell she gets to see every day when she graduates.

“It will be weird to not sit down at a table of ten people for dinner or to walk into a building and not see anyone I know,” Steiert said.

Steiert has no definite plans for after graduation, but has applied for jobs in her field and looks to pursue a masters or doctorate in either microbiology or immunology.   

Jesse Lundervold, senior chemistry and studio art major, served as Lifestyle (now Arts and Culture) Editor this year.

“I’ve been on the Monitor since first semester of freshman year,” Lundervold said. “It was a wild ride. It was the first year we had went digital and I just remember as a first year being incredibly intimidated by the ed [editorial] staff.”

Lundervold will miss the atmosphere of the Monitor, specifically, and Jewell, in general.

“Getting to know the ed staff more and having the Monitor being a very integral and incredibly positive part of my time on campus will be definitely something that I will miss,” Lundervold said. “I’ve met incredible peers and colleagues at Jewell and have such a great support system of current students, former students that I met and have since graduated, as well as outstanding and incredibly supportive faculty.”

Lundervold will attend a chemistry doctoral program at the University of California, Davis in the fall.  

Drew Novak, senior political science major, served as the Monitor’s Perspectives Editor this year.

“The Monitor has helped me refine my writing skills and has taught me the virtue of writing concisely. Beyond that academic influence it has had on me, I have also learned how to give Kristen a hard time,” Novak said.

Novak will miss the professors he has had at Jewell and the close friendships he has gained.

“I will miss the professors the most at Jewell,” said Novak. “I owe them a great deal of credit for molding me into the student and individual I am today. They have instilled within me a life-long passion for learning. Furthermore, I will also [miss] my dear friends Rylan, Trey and Conner and all the wonderful memories I have made and shared with them.”

Novak plans to travel after graduation and pursue graduate work next year.

“Following graduation, I will be traveling to Oxford, England, and the Amalfi Coast in Italy,” Novak said. “After returning to the United States, I intend to take a year off to substitute teach and then I intend pursue graduate work in security studies or international relations.”

Jake Marlay, senior biology major, served as Sports Editor this year.

Marlay said he learned that, “if you attack anything with a passion and a positive attitude you can motivate not only yourself but others to accomplish their goals.”

Similar to his fellow seniors, Marlay will miss the people he has met at Jewell the most.

“I’ve met so many great people in every nook and cranny of this little school on the hill that I will remember and forever cherish my time with them,” Marlay said. “I’ve met some of my best and lifelong friends, mentors, future leaders and innovators, and inspiring people right here on this campus.”

After graduation, Marly will begin coaching football at Fort Scott Community College.

“My plans after graduation are to begin coaching football at Fort Scott Community College in Fort Scott, Kansas,” Marlay said. “I start in the summer and will be special teams assistant coach there. From there I hope to just climb the coaching ladder and follow my dream, be the next Bill Snyder.”

The Faculty Award is a time-honored tradition at Jewell, given to one senior each year who best exemplifies the ideals of a liberal arts education.

Thirty-seven seniors had the required 3.75 GPA and were consequently eligible for the Award. Still, the application requires much more than good grades.

Dr. David McCune, assistant professor of mathematics and the 2018 Faculty Award Committee chair, outlined two main qualities the Committee looks for in applicants.

“First, academic excellence … Past recipients have done things like present their work at conferences, receive significant scholarships based on academic achievement, be a co-author on a publication, etc. Second, as part of the application process an applicant must write an essay stating what she thinks the selection criteria for the Award should be and how she fulfills those criteria. Since the Award goes to the senior who ‘most exemplifies the ideals of a liberal arts education,’ we are interested in seeing an applicant think through what that means,” McCune said.

The Award is extremely well-respected on campus, and each of the applicants kept this in mind when deciding to apply. The sacredness of the Award was a driving factor for finalist Seki Anderson, senior biochemistry and Applied Critical Thought & Inquiry major.

“I decided to apply for the award as soon as I found out I was eligible because Jewell takes this award seriously, and I like the mission behind the award. I learned about the Faculty Award and what it meant to be a Faculty Award finalist my second year of college,” Anderson said. “At previous Honors Convocations, I was awestruck hearing about all the versatile accomplishments the finalists had accumulated in just four years. I was (and still am) not sure if I was involved enough to have equivalent academic accomplishments, but I set myself the goal of reaching the GPA requirement to be eligible to apply for the Faculty Award.”

While Anderson anticipated the application since her sophomore year, Erin Melton, senior Oxbridge Literature & Theory major, didn’t foresee herself applying for the award.

“Honestly, when I first saw the email, I was almost certain I wouldn’t apply. I didn’t think I had any of the qualifications I needed other than the GPA. But when I read the application essay prompt, I realized it would be really fun for me to write on that topic. So I decided to apply to write a fun essay,” Melton said.

The application process for the Award is rigorous in order to discern the best recipient. After a thorough review of the paper applications, which include the applicants’ leadership positions, awards, service activities, career goals and essays, the Committee picks six to ten semifinalists. The semi-finalists must get two letters of recommendation and go through an interview process. After considering the letters of recommendation, paper applications and interviews holistically, the council picks five finalists and, later, one winner.

For Caris Boegl, senior Oxbridge Institutions & Policy and international relations major, the application process has given her a way to reflect on her journey at Jewell.

“Articulating to the award committee what changed in me as a result of my time at Jewell was enjoyable,” Boegl said. “It helped me remember all the ways I have grown intellectually and as a leader while here on the Hill.”

The interview process was nerve-wracking for the finalists. Anderson was intimidated by the six-professor board of interviewers and felt the questions that tested her thought process were the most difficult part. Aware of the intensity of the interview process, Grace Miller, senior psychology and Spanish major, entered the process intent on not letting her anxieties inhibit her.

“Right before I received the email that said I had made it onto the interview round, I had this calming thought of ‘I just need to try my best.’ What this meant for me was that no one else’s opinions, nor thinking about what someone would ‘want’ to hear was going to affect my answers or what I said during the interview,” Miller said.

After they received the email that informed them that they were finalists, most were shocked. Each finalist was honored to be chosen among other accomplished students. Jesse Lundervold, senior chemistry and studio art major, described the strangeness of being selected, since she has admired the Award and its significance since her first year at Jewell.

“It’s very surreal to know that I have been selected as a finalist. I still very much remember seeing the Faculty Award finalists on stage my freshmen year and hearing about the variety of achievements each of them had earned,” Lundervold said.

 “To know that I am now in that same place is very weird because it definitely does feel like I am a senior in college. Being a finalist has been one of my personal goals since I was a first-year at Jewell and I am so honored to be a finalist with four other outstanding women.”

All finalists are female, as Melton proudly pointed out.

“I think this is an important platform from which to note how rare it is that any group being thus celebrated is all, or even mostly, women, so, again, that is what I’m most excited about with regard to being part of this group,” Melton said.

The five women intend to pursue ambitious and diverse paths after their graduation from Jewell. Accepted as a City Year AmeriCorps member, Seki Anderson will be mentoring local primary or secondary students. Interested in working with refugees from the Middle East, Caris Boegl plans to attend a two-year program at Georgetown University, pursuing a degree in Arabic studies and with the aim of achieving fluency in Arabic. Jesse Lundervold, still unsure of which school she will attend, plans to attain a Ph.D. in chemistry. Erin Melton will be accepting an AmeriCorps position doing fundraising and marketing for Habitat for Humanity in La Crosse, Wisconsin, until 2019. Afterward, Melton will attend the London School of Economics and Political Science where she will study International Social and Public Policy. While Grace Miller has no concrete plans now, she wants to apply her interests in psychology and statistics to one of her passions – helping her community.

The winner of the Award will be announced April 20 during the Honors Convocation in Gano Chapel at 7 p.m.

Photos by Sofia Arthurs-Schoppe. Feature photo courtesy of William Jewell College. 

“One of [Fulleda’s] plays has been previously translated to French and German and maybe Italian but never to English, even though it has been performed in the U.S. in Spanish. So I started with telling him I would be happy and interested to translate [Ruandi] to English, that was a few years ago, which he was thrilled about, without really knowing what I was getting myself into,” Lisenby said.

Working to translate “Ruandi” was Lisenby’s first experience in literary translation. The play has been performed in the U.S. and Europe in French, German and Spanish. Lisenby hopes his English translation will eventually lead to its being performed for English-speaking audiences. He has spoken with Chris McCoy, associate professor of theatre, and Nathan Wyman, professor of theatre, regarding the William Jewell College Theatre Department doing developmental readings of his translation so the play can become stageable.

Translating a literary work comes with a particular set of challenges. Lisenby states that no work has an innate translation. There is a range of possibilities when attempting to interpret a work in a language other than the one in which it was originally written.  

“Part of what makes a text a literary text as opposed to a non-literary text is the possibilities for interpretation of that text, that literary texts lend themselves to multiple interpretations. You can’t necessarily produce the same possibilities for interpretation because any given word has a constellation of connotations in a language and a so-called ‘equivalent’ in another language has a different constellation of connotations in that language,” Lisenby said.

Lisenby attempts to approach works he is translating by first understanding the socio-cultural context in which they were originally written. Literature can be read and interpreted in different ways depending on cultural perspectives, but Lisenby works to translate words or phrases that reflect the writer’s experience when the work was written.

In “Ruandi,” the titular main character is a 12-year-old Cuban slave boy who escapes from the plantation to a “palenque,” a slave community in the Spanish Caribbean. While the play takes place in the 1840s, it was written by Fulleda in the 1970s in Cuba under the Castro regime. Lisenby states that he has to take into account the culture in which Fulleda was writing “Ruandi” and what certain words or phrases likely meant in that context. Reading the play in the 1970s, under “the most repressive decade for freedom of expression since the 1959 Castro revolution,” can create an entirely different interpretation of the work than what the author intended.

“This play comes out addressing issues of racial inequalities in late 20th century Cuba through a filter of historical fiction. In translating the play, I have to think about how certain words and terms and scenes should be rendered given the cultural politics of the original writing of the play,” said Lisenby.

Many students have at one point or another read a translated text. Lisenby believes that these works allow monolingual speakers to engage with different cultures and realize that the world operates and functions in many languages.

“Different languages aren’t just different ways to describe the world. Different languages are different ways to experience the world. Experiencing the world in a different language is not just experiencing the same thing with different words. It is a different experience,” he said.

Lisenby’s translation of “The Lagoon” by Cuban writer Abilio Estévez will appear in the June queer issue of the magazine Words Without Borders and will be his second published translation. He has been a fan of Estévez’s writing for many years. He stumbled upon the short story in an anthology of LGBTQ+ Cuban fiction and found it “deeply captivating.”

Lisenby is focusing on seeing his English translation of “Ruandi” being published for theatre. He will be searching for another project after that, which might be a Cuban novel or short story collection over the next few years. For more information on the impact of translation and how languages shape how the world is experienced, Lisenby recommends a New York Times article about the first woman to translate “The Odyssey” and an episode of the National Public Radio (NPR)  podcast “Hidden Brain.”

Photo by Talia Zook.

“Towards the end of the [art history] class, the teacher started showing impressionism and post-impressionism, which I was familiar with. But this art historian had gone on and on about how this [painting] is at the Musée d’Orsay, and this one’s in the Louvre and this one’s in New York. I kept thinking, ‘Someday I’ll go to New York, someday I’ll go to France and I’ll get to see these things,’” Nore said.

At the conclusion of her six weeks on the University of Kansas campus, Nore traveled with a friend to Chicago with plans to visit the Art Institute of Chicago. As she walked through the galleries Nore happened into the room that displayed “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” by Georges Seurat, a post-impressionist painter. Nore turned around to see Toulouse-Latrec’s “At the Moulin Rouge” and Van Gogh’s “Bedroom at Arles.” She was so emotionally overwhelmed with actually seeing the paintings that she had learned about in class that she worried the museum guards would think she was on drugs.

“And when I saw these things I was overcome by emotion, and I sat down and started crying. I would spin around and I’d look at the other one and start crying again. I kept twirling, I was having an epiphany of a major size about how art had the capacity to change life, to change people. I learned what an aesthetic experience was and how it’s more than just mental, it is body, soul and spirit,” said Nore.

“Sunday Afternoon at the Island of La Grand Jatte,” Georges Seurat (photo courtesy of overstockart.com)

It was this epiphany that sparked in Nore the decision to become an artist. Upon graduating high school in 1970, Nore traveled from her small Nebraska hometown to Kansas City to attend the Kansas City Art Institute (KCAI). She decided to major in painting and printmaking while also taking art history and ceramics classes. Nore completed her undergraduate degrees in 1974, but eventually went back to school to receive her masters in ceramic sculpture and a masters of fine art in ceramics and art history from Texas Woman’s University.

While attending KCAI, Nore was able to complete the required number of hours to teach grades K-12. She taught at inner city schools in Kansas City, Mo. before becoming a faculty member at Park University. Nore became the chair of the department and remained at Park for three years. During that time, she had her son Joel and decided with her husband to move to England for a year in order for him to take advantage of a career opportunity.

“While I was [in England], I got to travel and see all the art history all across Great Britain,” Nore said. “I took slides and ending up with just thousands of slides that I brought back and used [in the classes I taught] all the way up to the point where I switched to digital.”

These slides can be seen in the piece “Adieu Art History” currently on display in the Stocksdale Gallery.

Upon arriving back in the U.S., Nore learned of an opening in the art department at William Jewell College. The department was looking for a candidate to teach painting, printmaking and art history and to run the Stocksdale Gallery. Nore remembers having a vivid dream of brick buildings on a hill and meeting someone that reminded her of her father. When Nore arrived on campus soon afterwards, she realized that the buildings matched those in her dream and that the older gentleman she had spoken with was actually Donald Johnson, then chair of the art department. Nore was offered the job later that day and has been a faculty member for 30 years.

Nore knew from very early in her life that she wanted to become a teacher.

“When I was a sophomore my dad had a conversation [with me], a come-to-Jesus moment, where he asked me ‘What are you going to do when you get out of school?’ and I said back ‘teaching,’” Nore said. “But KCAI didn’t offer teaching credits and within a month of making that decision, KCAI teamed up with Park University so that KCAI kids could take their education hours and student-teaching through Park.”

Nore remains very grateful and humble that she has been able to pursue the passions she had when she was younger. She believes that it is extremely rare for someone to know what they want to do and be able to do that as a career. For Nore, the students that she has worked with have made her decision to teach completely worthwhile. Nore recounts that the art history minor she created has propelled students to graduate studies in art history and how teaching students to mat and frame their own work has led them to careers in galleries.

“It’s extremely rare that something you loved to do back when you were 19 years old can be what your vocation has been now that you’re 66,” Nore said. “It’s really an amazing thing.”

Nore has known that despite her passion to teach that she would forever continue to create art. She has called herself a “teaching artist” who regularly works on her own artistic projects while also being a full-time faculty member.

Nore’s retrospective show “Nano Nore: 5 ½ Decades of Art” is currently open in the Stocksdale Gallery on the top floor of Brown Hall. It chronicles Nore’s artistic life from sixth grade to the present. Drawings and paintings from Nore’s years in high school and college flow into different series from parts of her life, including multiple trips to Norway and three series of woodcut prints. Displayed at the center of the prints is the piece Nore created to celebrate the inauguration of Jewell’s President Dr. Elizabeth MacLeod-Walls.

The show displays a range of media including printmaking, oil paint, sculpture and watercolor, as well as a wide variety of styles. Nore is not afraid to confront difficult themes. Many of her pieces reflect upon her religion, her divorce and self-realization. One section of the show features “imagined roads,” which Nore stated equated to her searching for a path and understanding the road she has walked during her life.

“Enclosed Garden” is a large installation piece in the center of the gallery. Nore first created this piece in 1995 and has rebuilt it for her retrospective.

“[The piece] is a story about the hero’s journey,” Nore said. “It follows the quest, the idea that you find yourself in a new place and your eyes have been opened enough that you know you’re not going to live the status quo any longer.”

The piece itself has four stages that describe how the self goes through trial and despair, and is ultimately destroyed, in order to be resurrected again. The ruby slippers that are a part of the piece represent how one can represent the transformation that has occurred. The center of the installation is a pedestal with a ceramic piece mounted on the top.

“You travel up through the pedestal, with peacock feathers representing eternity and you see the heart covered in feathers,” said Nore. “I ran a sculpted fish through the middle of it. ‘Ichthus’ is Jesus Christ, God, Son, Savior, is the shape of the fish. I really saw that the heart would be pierced through by the Christ principle for me.”

The artwork in the retrospective continues in the drawing and painting room at the bottom of Brown Hall.

Nore will be retiring this year at the age of 66, having spent the last three decades as a member of the art department. She has been invited by a former student to travel to Italy in June. Nore hopes to continue her world travels and making art well through her retirement.

The end of the art department at WJC was an unexpected event for Nore, especially as it happened to coincide with her retirement. She hopes that there will eventually be art courses offered again and for the Stocksdale Gallery to continue to be used by the community in the years ahead.  

Photos by Emil Ostafiiciuc.