Faculty Remarks:
Dear Brennen,
You have a face as expressive as your mind is sharp, your ear acute, yourpersistence prodigious. What fun this was for all of us—I mean Meg and Kristi and Alice, especially—in that gateway so seemingly long ago, and what a treat it was for me to see that look on your face when you landed in my office to report on your initialforay into Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove, which you had chosen for your senior thesis on faith. “Oh, Lordy, what have I gotten myself into?” your visage called out. Eight months and an unfathomable virus later, you have told us, you have shown us (Faulkner and Woolf, too), you have known James’s art in ways better than he knew it himself. Few in these changing times should ponder the profession of college English, but you will “make it”—and, as importantly, you will make it a better place. – Tom Ferraro
I didn’t meet Brennen until this semester. But I already felt as if I knew him, for he appeared to know so many other students I had been teaching. Brennen’s capacity for friendship readily expressed itself in our Wittgenstein seminar. First of all: it’s impossible not to light up when Brennen walks into a room. But also: in our class discussions, Brennen’s intellectual interventions built bridges, helped people connect in the struggle to read difficult texts. And his irrepressibly original mind showed itself in his postings and comments. Who else but Brennen would write an essay on kissing in Blade Runner? Yet he did, and still managed to turn the essay into an investigation of what it means to be called by names –named by words –one cannot recognize oneself in, and what it takes to treat someone else as a human being. I think Brennan knows exactly how to treat others not just as humans, but as friends.
-Toril Moi
I have worked withBrennenboth in an undergraduate class devoted entirely to Milton’s writings (prose and poetry) and in a graduate class on Tragedy: Shakespeare and Milton. In the former, in an outstanding class, hewas himself outstanding both in the seminar discussions and in his essays. He has an unusually speculative intellectual disposition, prepared to think into substantive existential and philosophic topics while also being able to concentrate on the minute particulars of complex 17th century texts. Unusually for me I gave his work an A+. I have not yet received his essay in the graduate class but his contributions to a very good seminar with graduate students from both ENG and DIV has been equal to those of the best graduates in the class.
– Prof. David Aers
