Dr. Robert Erle Barham is an Associate Professor of English and has been on faculty since 2012. Photo courtesy of Covenant College Marketing and Communications.
Covenant’s professors are more than teachers. Many are also researchers, writers and speakers. But with a full teaching schedule each school year, professors are not always able to devote time to their work outside the classroom.
At the beginning of this semester, Dr. Robert Erle Barham, associate professor of English, went on sabbatical. The purpose of sabbaticals is to free professors from certain kinds of academic work (in this case, teaching) so they can focus on other academic interests.
“Usually this means a faculty member will pursue research or writing exclusively for a semester, which would not otherwise be possible,” Barham said.
Sabbaticals are not only personally meaningful to professors, but they also provide benefits to the college and improve a professor’s teaching and contribution to their discipline’s scholarship.
Throughout his time away this fall, Barham has been busy working on a new book on the nature of voice in literature and life. He says that this project was “prompted by some cassette tapes mailed to my father by friends and family during the Vietnam War when he was serving in the military.”
Barham’s new book fits with his love for writing about the themes of childhood, community, memory and rural life. Those who know him (and students who have taken his classes) are aware that his work as an academic is deeply impacted by his childhood roots and growing up in rural Louisiana. His childhood home was filled with books, and both of his parents were avid readers. Being raised in a small farming community, reading and writing were ways in which Barham experienced the larger world around him and made sense of his town and the people that filled it.
As Barham has been working on this project, he has also been balancing writing and family life with three children. He spends much of his time working during the bookends of the day–early in the morning or late at night. His work space is filled with kids’ things, and his home is filled with their voices; however, Barham says he draws much inspiration and delight from his children, who daily show him new ways of seeing the world.
While Barham’s sabbatical has been full, he admits that he has missed the Covenant community.
“I have missed the classroom especially—talking with students about ideas, books, writers and language,” he said.
Barham will return this spring, and students can look forward to taking his classes in which he always starts with his staple phrase “It’s about that time” and pictures of his kids’ newest adventures. He will be teaching Cultural Heritage of the West II, English Composition, Advanced Composition, and a literature course on the Renaissance.