Fred Erdman is a Ph.D. Candidate in Philosophy at the University of Dallas. He holds a B.A. in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College and an M.A. in Philosophy from Duquesne University.
Leta Sundet is a Ph.D. student in English Literature at the University of Dallas. She holds a B.A. in Liberal Arts and Culture and an M.A. in Theology and Letters from New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho. Her current research interests include Jane Austen and Isak Dinesen.
The late Dr. Louise Cowan dedicated her life to teaching and establishing programs and institutions that would carry forward the liberal arts tradition. Among her many accomplishments at the University of Dallas, Dr. Cowan designed and established the Braniff Graduate School’s doctoral program, the Institute of Philosophic Studies, and its Master of Humanities. In addition, she served as dean of Braniff twice, from 1973–77 and 1998–99, and as director of the IPS from 1973–77 and again from 1997–99. A recipient of the highly distinguished National Endowment of Art’s Charles Frankel Prize, Dr. Cowan bestowed an astonishing collection of her life’s work to the University of Dallas. This assortment of papers contains over fifty years of teaching and writing. At present, the University is undertaking a project to archive this collection to make it available to scholars and students. This class lecture from her papers is one of many that Dr. Cowan wrote on the topic of the lyric. Known for her penetrating intellect and masterful reading of literary texts, Dr. Cowan continually prompted students to consider the deepest levels of meaning embodied in poetic language as she does in this talk on the paradigm shift from analogy to metaphor and its effect on poetry. The first part of the lecture details the difference between the analogia entis characterizing the Middle Ages and the shift to metaphor in the seventeenth century. The talk then turns to consider some of the features of analogy in Donne’s “Valediction Forbidding Mourning” and ends with a broad reflection on modes of figuration, which undoubtedly elicited lively conversation among students in the class. As the work on organizing and cataloguing her surviving work continues, we hope to share some of her writings through this journal. Though not directly involved with the founding of Ramify, Dr. Cowan and the program she designed shaped the spirit of the journal; the editors are deeply grateful for her dedication to Braniff and to the liberal arts. We hope that this journal is a continuation of her vision.
Rhett Forman is a Ph.D. candidate in Literature in the Institute of Philosophic Studies at the University of Dallas. He earned his B.A. at St. John’s College and has also studied at the University of Costa Rica and at the University of New Orleans’ Ezra Pound Center for Literature in Dorf Tirol, Italy. His research interests include Modernist poetry and liberty in the epic, while his creative work explores the interchange between mythology and history.
Moryam Van Opstal is a Ph.D. candidate in Politics at the University of Dallas, where he also received his M.A. He holds a B.A. in Political Science from Hillsdale College and is writing his dissertation on Cicero’s dialogues.
Jake Crabbs is a member of the Illinois Bar. He holds a J.D. from the John Marshall Law School in Chicago, Illinois and a B.A. in the Liberal Arts from St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. In 2014, he was a visiting scholar at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. His current research interests are in Illinois civil procedure and the intersections between the study of law and the liberal arts.
During Spring 2017, Erika Kidd is the Patricia H. Imbesi Saint Augustine Fellow at Villanova University. She is also assistant professor of Catholic Studies at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on pagan and Christian visions of happiness, Catholic visions of redemption, and Augustine’s Confessions. She received her B.A. from Baylor University, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Villanova University. She publishes primarily on Augustine and the Augustinian tradition, and she has a long-time interest in those philosophers who write philosophy in the form of confession. Dr. Kidd would like to thank James DeMasi and the Braniff Graduate Student Association for their invitation to deliver a plenary address at the third annual Braniff Conference in the Liberal Arts; that address served as the first version of this article.
Jamie Lobstein is a Ph.D. student in philosophy at the University of North Texas. He holds two bachelor’s degrees from Tarleton State University in Political Science and History, respectively. He also holds a Master of Humanities from the University of Dallas. His research interests include identity and place, and any common metaphysical grounds that exist between science and aesthetics.
Gary Borjesson earned his B.A. in Philosophy from Whitman College, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Emory University. He served as a Tutor on the faculty at St. John’s College in Annapolis from 1999–2013 before returning to school to earn an M.A. in Mental Health Counseling. He now works as a Psychotherapist and Clinical Coordinator for a residential treatment program in Oregon. In 2012 his first book was published, Willing Dogs & Reluctant Masters: On Friendship and Dogs. This paper was delivered at the 3rd Annual Braniff Conference in the Liberal Arts at the University of Dallas in January 2017.