Francisco Nahoe

Francisco Nahoe

In the Fall of 2004, having just completed the Dartmouth MA in Comparative Literature, I enrolled in the ThM program in Biblical Studies at Harvard Divinity School. At the time, I lived in Andover where I was Roman Catholic chaplain at Phillips Academy and an instructor in English until 2006 after which I moved to Our Lady of Czestochowa Friary in South Boston where I stayed until I finished the program at Harvard in 2007.

Thereafter, I return to my Franciscan Province of California and Nevada and worked in the formation of Franciscan postulants in Bay Area until 2010, when I took up residence in Nevada as rector of Saint Thomas Aquinas Cathedral in Reno. My term of office kept me at the Cathedral until 2015. After that, I taught English to Franciscan postulants in Vietnam and now serve the Order as promoter of the Franciscan Vietnam Mission, a position that requires multiple preaching engagements across the Western United States from May to October of every calendar year.

During my time in Reno, I enrolled in the PhD program in English Literature with a focus on Renaissance Studies at the University of Nevada and am now scheduled to defend my dissertation on the Italian Verse of Milton this Fall. In the meantime, I have accepted a full-time assistant professorship in Rhetoric at Zaytuna College, the nation's first Muslim liberal arts college and the newest member of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley CA.

The Dartmouth MA program re-awakened in me the ambition to pursue doctoral studies and showed me ‹ step-by-step ‹ how it might be achieved given the unusual circumstances of my ongoing commitments as a Franciscan friar and Roman Catholic priest. Also, the program gave me a thorough foundation in critical theory which, despite the general lack of enthusiasm for theory in the current state of the academy, nonetheless provides an astonishing array of critical tools for investigation into almost any imaginable field of inquiry in Literature and Rhetoric. Finally, Dartmouth put me in the company of smart peers and generous professors whose insight, encouragement and guidance have benefitted me throughout my time ever since: Ehud Benor, Gerd Gemünden, Amy Lawrence, Monica Otter and Irene Kakandes, our program director at the time, among others.