Having taught at UNO for nearly forty years, Dr. Owen Mordaunt will retire at the end of May. His contributions to the English department and the campus as a whole have been unforgettable for both students and faculty.
Since graduating with her Master’s in English from UNO in 2016, Alisha Limoges has forged a dynamic path in public service, working to better lives in communities across the globe.
Jody Keisner's devotion to her students and craft is evident not only in how she conducts her coursework but also in why she earned this promotion. “I invest in a class the second I start designing the syllabus for it, choosing texts and readings, and dreaming up lesson plans.”
Between being nominated for Undergraduate Student Employee of the Year, curating a presentation for The Art of Storytelling Conference in St. Paul, and balancing an English major with more minors and concentrations than one could count, life for undergrad Izzy Martin is busy, to say the least.
After six years of teaching dual enrollment courses through UNO, Joe Luther has been honored as the Dual Enrollment Educator of the Year, a prestigious recognition of his continual, unwavering commitment to his craft.
What Are You Reading?
Beneath the Surface: Killer Whales, SeaWorld, and the Truth Beyond Blackfish by John Hargrove, with Howard Chua-Eoan
When I was seven years old, I visited SeaWorld with my family and promptly determined that being a whale or dolphin trainer would be the coolest job in the world. This started a decade's long obsession with marine biology, but with nothing tangible to show for it beyond a whale-themed bedspread and lots of Lisa Frank dolphin folders. John Hargrove had a similar reaction of awe when he visited SeaWorld as a child, but pursued his dream and became a senior orca trainer at SeaWorld.
This book is part autobiography and part SeaWorld exposé, but most of all it's a love letter to the orcas Hargrove spent time with. In it, Hargrove provides an extremely extensive look into the lives of orcas in captivity and the lives of the trainers who take care of them. He wrote it after resigning from SeaWorld and choosing to speak out as an orca activist. The book covers how SeaWorld initially got the orcas, their breeding program, the training processes, the captive orcas’ dysfunctional behavior, the differences between wild orcas and captive orcas, and so much more. I loved these layers of complexity and how he showed the orcas' different personalities, especially the matriarchs he had deep bonds with: Kasatka and Takara. One of the saddest parts to read was about how SeaWorld separated mothers from their calves after only a few years (to move the young to other parks for breeding), when in the wild orcas stay with their mothers their whole lives. Upon separation, both the mother and baby would cry for days.
Hargrove also details the human deaths by orcas in captivity and exposes how SeaWorld often blamed the trainers for their own deaths. This book came out a few years after the documentary Blackfish, which was about SeaWorld trainer Dawn Brancheau's death by the orca Tilikum. Hargrove was interviewed for Blackfish and also covers the incident extensively in this book, as well as other trainer deaths by orcas. If you've seen Blackfish, I highly recommend reading this book because it provides a much more complex picture of orcas in captivity. Hargrove was instrumental in educating the general public about what goes on behind the curtain at SeaWorld and other parks.
I read via audiobook, which Hargrove narrates. For more orca-related audio content, check out "The Good Whale" podcast, written by Daniel Alarcon for Serial. It's an emotional story about the whale from Free Willy, named Keiko, and the attempt to return him to the ocean.
-- Melanie Seitzer, UNO English Lecturer
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