Intersections
/
Authors
/
Elizabeth Baer

Elizabeth Baer

Vice President for Academic Affairs, Dean of the Faculty, and Professor of English

Gustavus Adolphus College

Dr. Elizabeth R. Baer has served as Vice President for Academic Affairs, Dean of the Faculty, and Professor of English at Gustavus Adolphus College since 1992. Her intellectual and research interests include the Holocaust and women’s personal narratives; her first book, Shadows on My Heart: The Civil War Diary of Lucy Rebecca Buck of Virginia, was published by University of Georgia Press in 1997. Her commitment to information technology in higher education has led her to serve on the board of EDUCOM and frequently as an information technology consultant nationally and internationally.

Published Articles

Reflection

Walls: Talk At Gustavus Adolphus College

Elizabeth Baer

No. 5 · Summer 1998

Baer’s September 11, 1997 Gustavus Adolphus chapel homily on Joshua 6 turns from the trumpets to the walls—Robert Frost’s “Mending Walls,” the walls of the Warsaw ghetto in Vladka Meed’s On Both Sides of the Wall and Margaret Zassenhaus’s Walls, the Berlin Wall coming down in 1989—and then to the autobiographical, intertextual discourse of Gustavus chapel itself as a place where misunderstandings come down. An author’s note added after the March 29 F3 tornado reports the closing line (“LET’S MAKE THOSE WALLS COME TUMBLING DOWN”) as eerily prescient: roofs, windows, and 90% of campus trees were lost, but the Chapel walls and the eternal flame in the red glass lantern stood firm.

Elizabeth Baer

Published Articles

Walls: Talk At Gustavus Adolphus College