Sewanee Encounter

Place & Place-making

Thinking like a forest: sustainability, community & place

Taught by Eric Ezell, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies

Through immersion in Sewanee’s Domain and its network of community leaders, students work together to explore local community- and place-based solutions to global environmental issues. By exploring local examples while also gaining fluency in the many dimensions of our global ecological crisis—from how we get our food and water to the impacts of biodiversity loss, pollution and climate change upon ecosystems worldwide—students will confront difficult questions about how meaningful change happens, how their own lives contribute to both problems and solutions, and how small places and local communities matter in the grand scheme.

Be Here Now: Poetry and Place

Taught by Jennifer Michael, Professor of English

This course explores our place in the world and on the Domain through three complementary activities: reading, writing, and meditation. We will read together a wide selection of poems offering diverse views of “nature” and our relationship to the earth. Mindfulness meditation (a secular form adapted from Buddhist practice), both in and out of class, will foster deep awareness not only of these texts but also of our surroundings. We will also engage in other contemplative exercises, both indoors and outdoors, across the Domain. While some of these exercises invite us to turn inward, they lead us back to community, as poetry does. Through journal-keeping and poetic experiments as well as formal essays and presentations, students will articulate their discoveries and hone their skills as readers and observers, both of poetry and of the natural world.

Time Travel on the Cumberland Plateau

Taught by John Willis, Jessie Ball duPont Professor of History

This course examines the ways human actions and the local environment have shaped (and been shaped by) one another across centuries. Students will explore the background, current state, and future possibilities of the area, from the deep time of geology to the present day. Field trips, readings, journaling, class discussions, and lectures let students explore the region and begin to find their place within it. Assessments will be based on reflective writing, participation, and a final group project.

Stories and Story-telling

Events and Identities: How Documentary Theatre tells the Story

Taught by Jennifer Matthews, Professor of Theatre

Listening to a story can engender empathy and understanding about experiences we ourselves have not lived. How do we choose to tell the stories of real events and the people who experienced them? Documentary theatre explores creating narrative using interviews, journals, and newspapers that documents an event, and investigates how identity shaped personal relationships with those events. Students in this class explore the histories, stories, and sites of the South Cumberland Plateau, University Domain and surrounding areas in order to create documentary devised, site-specific performances. Devised performance techniques in this course use collaboration—from performers, designers, and researchers to create the performance outline/script—and locations that are specific to the telling of the stories selected by the students. The course culminates with a performance of the material created by students.

Heroes, Villains, Victims: Stories, Politics and Policy Outcomes

Taught by Amy Patterson, Professor of Politics

This course will investigate the role of stories in politics. Political decision-makers, advocates, and the public all use stories to understand issues, to convince others of their position, and to make policy decisions. As shortcuts for interpreting information, stories can shape opinions, preferences, and perceptions of risk, and they often have more sway than scientific studies. Their impact revolves around what the story emphasizes (its heroes, villains, and victims), who tells the story, and how the story resonates with cultural beliefs and the audience.
The course will investigate the stories around several policy issues (e.g., public education, housing, food insecurity, health). Students will first learn about these issues on the South Cumberland Plateau and the policies around those issues. Then students will examine stories that decision-makers, advocates, and those affected tell about these issues. To do so, students will engage in some of the following ways: observe school board meetings, serve with literacy programs, meet with housing and health experts, partner with local free clinics, and/or assist at food banks. Students will also read and/or listen to policymakers’ debates on these issues. Finally, students will tie their "story of self" as a global citizen to the "story of us" as part of a final project on the issue, its story, and their own place within that story. Assessments will be based on reflective writing, participation, and a final project.

How the Bible Matters

Taught by Eric Thurman, Associate Professor of Religious Studies

An introduction to the critical study of religion that places the history of the University of the South within the larger cultural history of the Bible. The Bible examined as an anthology of ancient texts, a material artifact, a transmedia storyworld, and cultural capital. The interpretation of the Bible explored as a collective process of meaning-making through rhetoric and ritual. Particular attention paid to the visual and material culture of the University’s campus (place names, inscriptions, memorials, monuments, art work, family bibles), institutional discourses (the motto, commemorative ceremonies, hymns, sermons, speeches, college policies), and popular culture (film festivals, sports teams, local biographies, folk art). Overall, the course invites students to develop a more expansive understanding of what the Bible is and a more critical approach to how the Bible has been used within the University gates and beyond.

Memory and Truth

Memory of Peace and Conflict

Taught by Mila Dragojević, Professor of Politics

How do states and societies remember political violence? How, and whether, are peace initiatives or nonviolent resistance efforts commemorated across different historical and cultural contexts? Building on the vast and growing interdisciplinary comparative research, political activism, and art on memory studies, truth and reconciliation, and transitional justice, the course will introduce students to various ways in which certain events, individuals, and initiatives connected to conflict and peace are remembered in memorials, museums, monuments, and other commemorative spaces and practices.

The course includes lessons, open questions, and dilemmas that international and U.S. examples offer to scholars, political leaders, and peace activists. Students will learn about different ways in which states and their leaders have transitioned from violence to peace, dealt with injustices, remembered political violence, and ultimately, chose a particular path in the process of integrating their divided societies. They will have an opportunity to work in teams on researching the case of their choice in more depth and presenting their research at the end of the class.

The Power of “Facts”: Architectures of Truth, Then and Now

Taught by Stephanie Batkie, Teaching Professor of English

This seminar invites first-year students to explore how humans have constructed, categorized, and authenticated knowledge across cultures and centuries. Together, we will explore how forms of knowledge are not neutral or timeless, but are rather deeply embedded in the historical, social, and political contexts of their creation. The myth of singular, objective truth is a pervasive (and often comforting) one, but in this class we will examine how structures of power influence what is considered "true" across disciplines, from the humanities to the physical sciences.

Our readings will draw from a wide range of sources. From medieval bestiaries to Wikipedia, from royal archives to TikTok "stitch incomings," we'll examine how different societies have built their own architectures of truth—and whose voices have been amplified or silenced in the process. We might consider readings from classical philosophical works (Plato's Republic, Nietzsche's On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense) to contemporary critical theory (Foucault's ideas of power-knowledge, Derrida's "Archive Fever," and Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). We'll use the history and development of the book to analyze primary sources like 18th century encyclopedias, Victorian scientific journals, Cold War propaganda, and current social media content moderation policies. Case studies might include the construction of race in 19th-century anthropology, the role of archives in shaping national histories, and the politics of "truth" in contemporary debates over climate science and misinformation. We will also investigate what architectures of truth are at work here at Sewanee, looking at the University Archives, the seminar classroom, tutoring centers, and tools like the textbook or class notes.

Jerusalem: Histories of the Real and Imagined Holy City

Taught by Nicholas Roberts, Professor of History

A sacred space for three great religions, the contested future capital of two nations, a place of longing for millions around the world, Jerusalem is one of the world’s great cities. This course looks at the history, geography, and religious significance of the Holy City, while also considering how Jerusalem has functioned and continues to function as a city of the imagination. Over the course of this First Year Experience, we will investigate the city’s place in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, its symbolic importance for Muslim and European imperialists, its status as a major tourist and pilgrimage destination, and its significance in Israeli and Palestinian nationalism. This class aims to investigate the place of truth and memory in the construction of historical narratives and will include comparisons with the construction of historical narratives about Sewanee, the South, and other places with contested histories.