Late June, 2009: Book Review in Tolkien Studies Volume 6
The 2009 edition of Tolkien Studies has gone to press and is due to be release at the end of June, and it will contain my long review of Myth and Magic: Art According to the Inklings.

September 21, 2009: Lord of the Rings Special on the History Channel.
Starting on August 3, the History Channel will be running a ten-part series on mythology called “Clash of the Gods” on Monday nights at 10:00 PM. I will appear in the episode on Tolkien and his relationship to myth and mythology, which is scheduled to air on 9/21 (check local listings).

October 10, 2009: The Music of the Hobbit: A Lecture/Performance
On this weekend in October, Howard Shore and his orchestra will be performing the soundtrack to the Fellowship of the Ring film live at Radio City Music Hall in NYC. In conjunction with this event, I will be giving a talk on music in the Hobbit alongside Kirsten Cairns, the Director of Opera Studies at The Boston Conservatory, who will be performing dramatic readings and singing some of the songs from the book that I will be lecturing about. We are still sorting out some of the small and comparatively unimportant details (such as exact time and location).

April 11, 2009: Sixth Annual Tolkien Conference at the University of Vermont
This conference, the only annual scholarly conference dedicated exclusively to Tolkien studies, is always a good time. This year, I presented a paper titled “Tolkien’s Thoery of Gender in the Silmarillion.” I was especially delighted this year to present my paper alongside my thesis student, Elizabeth Bateman ’09, who also read a paper: “’Not All Tears Are an Evil’: Tragedy and Consolation in The Lord of the Rings.” Liz did a great job at her first conference!

October 23, 2008: “Tolkien and the Environment” Talk
Another former student, Shannon Holste, ’07, and I collaborated on a talk at Washington College on Tolkien’s perspective on environmental issues. If you’d like to hear the talk, you can listen to it through WAC’s iTunesU page (click the "Audio" tab at the bottom to find it).

September, 2008: Article in Tolkien Studies Volume 5
My first published article on Tolkien, “The Myth of the Ent and the Entwives,” appeared in Tolkien Studies 5. In the article, I look at what makes the story of the Ents and Entwives so powerful, spending most of my time on a close reading of the “Song of the Ent and the Entwife” that Treebeard sings for Merry and Pippin.

May 28, 2009: Third Annual Washington College Jousting Tournament
Not a Tolkien-related event, but my favorite event of the year at the college. My students and I have been rediscovering the noble sport of wheelbarrow jousting. Check out the photos of this year’s tournament, and the video coverage of the 2008 tournament.