Dr. James Bogan, Curators’ Teaching Professor of art history and film at the University of Missouri-Rolla, is the 2005 winner of the University of Missouri System Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching. He was selected from nominations submitted by all of the university’s four campuses and received the award at the May 25 Board of Curators meeting in Columbia, Mo. Bogan will devote the $15,000 stipend to teaching, research, and student development.

James Bogan

"UMR has been a remarkable place for me to learn, to grow, to teach," says Bogan, who has taught at UMR since 1969. "I have been encouraged to try anything ever since I got here. Each one of my department chairs has gone to bat for me, so I could pursue new courses, new methods and new travels. Furthermore, UMR students are smart, hard working, and more ready for experiment than the engineering stereotype might suggest."

Bogan, who is also a poet and a filmmaker, earned his Ph.D. at the University of Kansas. His dissertation on William Blake drew him simultaneously into art and literature. Since then he has integrated various disciplines into courses like Poets and Painters, Script to Screen, and The French Revolution, which he team taught for many years with Dr. Jack Ridley, Curators’ Teaching Professor emeritus of history.

Bogan is the UMR director of the Missouri-London Program, and has taught Art History and directed the program in London. In 2002 he taught Michaelangelo Meets the 20th Century at Teikyo University-Holland.

The UMR Film Series, which he initiated in 1975, has screened more than 800 films in Rolla and hosted filmmakers like Les Blank, Ryan Wylie and Ken Burns.

Bogan’s scholarly publications include the experimental anthology, Sparks of Fire: William Blake in a New Age, published by North Atlantic Press in 1982 and co-edited by Fred Goss.

In 1986 Bogan was a Fulbright Fellow at the Federal University of Para in Brazil. While there, he shot T-Shirt Cantata, a poetic documentary about the people of the Amazon, which won a CINE Eagle award.

His prose and poetry have been published widely in magazines, but he believes radio is more accurate to poetry than a book, and many of his works have aired on such public radio programs as All Things Considered, Market Place, and The Savvy Traveler. Ozark Meandering, a book of maximal poems and prose, was published by Timberline Press in 1999 in a letterpress edition and is known as the last hand-made book of the 20th century.

In collaboration with Frank Fillo, Bogan produced, directed and edited Tom Benton’s Missouri, a half-hour documentary about Benton’s most ambitious mural. The film won numerous awards, including Best Short Feature at the Great Plains Film Festival in 1992. In 2002 he was invited to construct a three-ton Celtic Double Spiral Space Centering Vehicle for the Third Exposition of European Fantastic Art in Eben-Emael, Belgium.

Bogan has served as president of the Missouri Partners of the Americas. A Kellogg Foundation Fellowship in International Development put him in the company of 40 other dynamic leaders from the United States and Latin America and allowed him to make a Portuguese language version of Tom Benton’s Missouri, and tour it in Brazil.

Bogan’s current projects include The Adventures of the Amazon Queen, a film about boats on the Amazon; Virtuous Amusements and Wicked Demons, a book of poems on art; and the exploration of the Ozarks by foot, kayak, and bicycle.