When Dr. Lupe Arenillas accepted a position at NMU in 2010 she found that Marquette wasn’t quite what she was expecting. Arenillas grew up in a big family and lived in Buenos Aires, Argentina until she was eight years old. As a university student she received her Bachelor’s degree from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in a city with a population over three million. Prior to her arrival at NMU Arenillas also spent a year in California. Marquette stood in stark contrast to her time in big cities.

“For me it was like a big leap of faith because I was expecting to live in a big city, in a bigger place or in a more diverse place,” Arenillas said. “I didn’t want to be in the Midwest,” she laughed.

Despite her reservations Arenillas accepted a position in the Department of Languages, Literatures and International Studies, because it was the first position offered to her. She understood the value of a tenure-track position and didn’t want to let that opportunity slip away. Once she arrived, she was pleasantly surprised, and she is now a tenured associate professor. 

“I really liked my colleagues immediately,” Arenillas said. “I really liked them, and it felt like a warm place in the sense of the people, and that for me is super important.”

As a professor at NMU Arenillas has taught a variety of upper and lower level courses including some classes in the Honors program.

“I teach many different classes,” Arenillas said. “Mostly the advanced Spanish courses in Latin American film, culture and literature but I also occasionally teach the elementary and intermediate levels for the Spanish language.”

In addition to teaching at NMU, Arenillas’s research has been published in multiple journals. Her research focuses on Latin American documentary film and literature. In 2016 she co-edited a book titled Latin American Documentary Film in the New Millenium. She studies documentary film from Argentina and Chile in order to explore questions related to memory, materiality, temporality and justice. She also studies how film can be used to tell stories in ways that are unlike other media.

“I like to see traces, you know,” Arenillas said. “Traces of the past in the present, the traces of memory from one generation to another. I wrote about, for example, a documentary that focused on buildings and how buildings change with time, and then I traced the history but also how the documentary can tell the story in a different way than a novel, for example.”

Arenillas loves to travel and says studying documentary film can sometimes be like travelling through time. Of course, she can’t really take a trip to the past but she has done plenty of exploring in the present. She shared some examples of places she has visited.

“I travelled quite a lot in Europe,” Arenillas said. “I spent some time in Portugal doing research on Mozambiquan poets, and I’ve been in Switzerland and many, many places in Latin America. I like to go to Puerto Rico.”

Arenillas doesn’t only travel for her own benefit. She is involved in the NMU in Salamanca program started by Dr. Michael Joy. The program sends a group of students to spend a month in Salamanca each May, although this year’s trip was cancelled due to the pandemic.

“The program is wonderful because it has an academic, a cultural and a social focus,” Arenillas said. 

Students take classes from professors at the University of Salamanca, as well as from the NMU professors who join them on the trip. Arenillas has participated in the program three times, and says Salamanca is a lively town that provides plenty of opportunities for students to explore. She enjoys spending time in Salamanca just as much as the students do.

“I feel like I have a little life there because I went three times, so I spent three months there,” Arenillas said.

As much as she loves travelling, Arenillas finds joy in returning home as well.

“I like the feeling of returning because that gives me a sense of also, ‘I have a home,’” Arenillas said. “I like to move with a base.”

Although she was nervous about coming to the Upper Peninsula for the first time, Marquette has since become that base for her. She loves her friends and colleagues and she says she has received much support for her research which makes her very happy. She is glad she accepted the position at NMU and plans to settle down here for a while.

“The U.P. grew on me,” she said. “It really grew.”

Two NMU professors have teamed up to create a course exploring the connection between the arts and sciences. Taimur Cleary is an associate professor of drawing and painting, and Jill Leonard is a professor of biology. On the surface, those two disciplines may seem wholly unrelated, but Leonard and Cleary have discovered a strong overlap between their respective fields.

Their work together began almost by accident. Leonard was contacted by The Grand Rapids Art Museum, who had commissioned artist Alexis Rockman to create some art based on the Great Lakes. Rockman was traveling to speak with knowledgeable scientists and learn more about the lakes.

“The origins of this class are, I don’t know, four or five years in the making from Jill asking me if I knew who Alexis Rockman was, and I did,” Cleary said. “He’s a really cool, very famous painter.”

Cleary and Leonard collaborated to host an event at which Rockman spoke to NMU students. The professors also contributed to A Dive Into the Great Lakes Cycle, a series of modules and interactive text that explores Rockman’s work from both scientific and artistic perspectives. This prompted the professors to discuss the overlap between arts and sciences, which sparked the idea for the class they are developing now. The course is an asynchronous, online general education class. The class will not only highlight the connections between art and science but also encourage students to apply what they learn about art and science to other fields.

“It’s really designed for any student,” Leonard said. “So you can be a science student, you can be an art student or you can be any other major on campus.” On the most basic level art and science are united by two concepts: Creativity and problem-solving. Leonard used herself and Cleary as an example.

“Whether he’s trying to paint something and figure out the best way to approach it and express what he wants, or I’m trying to figure out what’s going on with the ecology of my fish, in both cases we have to be creative and come up with new ideas and be open to new approaches,” Leonard said.

For Cleary, research is an important part of art, both in teaching and in his own work. “If you’re a professional and you care about what you do, you have a research practice,” Cleary said.

Leonard is quick to point out what may seem like a subversion of expectations.“If you didn’t notice, the artist just told you to do research and the scientist told you to be creative,” Leonard said.

Of course, the two professors see this as yet another example of how their respective disciplines intertwine. The course is the first of its kind to be offered at NMU. The title will be “INTT 222: Art Meets Science.” The asynchronous online format of the course works well for both professors.

“We did an online teaching fellowship over the summer to support making it an online class, so we got some good support there,” Cleary said. “The class doesn’t exist yet with students in it, but it’s coming into existence as an Educat shell.”

Once the course is underway in the summer, the professors are eager to see how students react and interact with the class. The class will place an emphasis on discussion, which is especially important given the course’s online format. Unlike classes that were forced to move online due to the pandemic, INTT 222 has the benefit of being built as an online course from the very beginning.

“It’s different than what we’re doing online now,” Leonard said. “It’s a designed online course, always intended to be that way.”

Without the pressure of suddenly adapting to the Internet, the course material can make use of the less time sensitive nature of online learning. “It’s the kind of thing where students can move at a little bit of a different pace and interact with each other in very different ways,” Leonard said.

In fact, the greatest challenge Leonard and Cleary faced when creating their class was finding the time to do it. Both professors have busy schedules. Teaching the course online is the most convenient option for both of them.

That said, Leonard and Cleary aren’t opposed to teaching the class in person. “Every once in a while I allow myself to daydream and believe that we’re teaching it in person because it would be even cooler to be able to teach it in person at some point,” Cleary said.

If and when that day will arrive remains to be seen. For now, Leonard and Cleary are looking forward to teaching the class together for the first time in the summer semester. There is some anticipation as they navigate uncharted waters. “The way students will interact, that’s the joy of it,” Cleary said. “That’s the experiment and the variable that I can never fully understand and just research and prepare for.” Leonard agrees. She is excited to see how students react to the course and interact with one another. “This is an experiment for me,” Leonard said. “I just want to see what happens with it and I hope it will be well received.”

More information about INTT 222: Art Meets Science can be found on Leonard’s website.

Dr. Linda Lawton has been a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science since 2011, but her love of math goes back to her childhood. She grew up in the Texas Panhandle. Her family often took trips around the country when her father traveled for work. Lawton’s spot behind the driver’s seat meant she had a good view of the speedometer.

“I was fascinated by the numbers and I was fascinated by the mile markers,” Lawton said. “I had a watch with a second hand and I would do all sorts of mental calculations about how fast we were going, how many seconds it took between mile markers.”

Lawton fostered her love of numbers throughout her years in school. Now, her ability to perform quick calculations in her head is a great resource for her as a professor. It is a skill that impresses students, and can also help break the ice with a new class.

Conversation is another great way for students and faculty to connect, as Lawton discovered during her time teaching at the University of Illinois. She recalls a class in which her students knew each other and enjoyed learning together. The atmosphere in the classroom was fun for everyone, herself included. Lawton carried an appreciation for a relaxed teaching environment with her to NMU.

“I can get material across in class if I’m allowed to be informal, if I’m allowed to joke around,” Lawton said. “That works for me.”

In addition to math skills, Lawton wants students to leave her classroom having gained two other qualities. The first of these is a sense of humor. Lawton’s laugh is contagious.

“I’d rather laugh than cry, so I’ll try to find something funny,” Lawton said. “Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I usually just tell them, ‘Hey, you know, laugh. You’re a captive audience, sorry,’” she laughed.

She also wants her students to develop what she calls a non-hatred for math. Sometimes students come into her class with one question on their minds: Why am I here? In response, Lawton incorporates math problems that will be useful to her students in the future.

When she was a graduate student at the University of Illinois, Lawton taught quantitative literacy classes. She understands the importance of finding practical and enjoyable ways to apply mathematical concepts to her students’ lives.

“If math isn’t your thing or it’s not going to be in your field, let’s find some things where it’s going to be useful for you, or let’s find something very interesting,” Lawton said.

For Lawton, this is one of the most rewarding parts of teaching.

“I like talking to students,” she said. “I like seeing those light bulbs come on and working with them.”

Throughout her years teaching math classes, she has found ways to encourage those lightbulb moments.

“It’s very common in a math class for a student to come up with a paper and say, ‘What did I do wrong here,’ and point,” Lawton said. “Which then becomes a dance between trying to get them to understand what should have been done versus what they did. And if you can get them to phrase the question rather than point, then often they will answer it for themselves.”

Helping students help themselves has a couple of benefits. First, if students can explain their mistakes, those mistakes are more easily understood and less likely to occur in the future. Second, having students articulate their problems aloud is beneficial for Lawton, who is blind.

She describes her blindness as having pixels missing from her field of vision. Her condition, which is unnamed, developed in adulthood and has presented some challenges in the classroom.

“I can’t wander around and peek over shoulders and go, ‘Oh, wait, you dropped a three,’” Lawton said.

With limited visual input, communication becomes much more important.

“I have to make sure my class is kind of trained to talk to me,” Lawton said. “I tend to be rather interactive anyway. I usually walk in the first day with my white cane.”

Lawton seeks to be approachable for students and colleagues alike. To that end, she utilizes her sense of humor.

“It makes them more comfortable with me,” Lawton said. “And that’s also why you’ll see me in tie dye a lot, and I’ll make the joke that it’s just so I can see myself walking down the hallway.”

She enjoys teaching at NMU and living in the Upper Peninsula. However, she did not always plan to live here. While she was teaching in Illinois, she began working in the actuarial field. She was teaching classes to help students enter that field, so she figured she would benefit from firsthand experience. Lawton worked as an actuary for 4 ½ years before deciding that she wanted to teach again. As she searched for teaching positions, she discovered the UP. When she learned about the job opportunity at NMU, she mentioned it to her husband, who became very excited.

“I showed it to him and he just started jumping up and down,” Lawton said. “He said, ‘Do you know where that is?’”

Her husband was familiar with the area, having hiked across Pictured Rocks as a teenager. He was happy to go back to the UP, and she was happy to go back to teaching.

“I like my students up here,” she said. “I think they’re great.”

Lawton has established a strong rapport with many of her students. Ryan Meister is a senior and an economics major. He has had several classes with Lawton. Especially during the pandemic, Meister appreciates Lawton’s enthusiasm for teaching both in the classroom and during office hours.

“I can tell that Professor Lawton sincerely cares not only about her students’ success, but about communicating abstract concepts in a lucid manner,” Meister said.

Lawton is currently teaching several classes, including calculus 1 and 3 and statistics 1.