Professional development is important to the faculty at Gustavus Adolphus College. It’s why the College created the John S. Kendall Center for Engaged Learning to support faculty in achieving their potential as teachers and scholars. Gustavus faculty members are also finding professional development opportunities through outside funding from organizations such as the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
Since the summer of 2013, four Gustavus faculty members have participated in NEH Summer Institutes, which are two to five week development programs designed to extend and deepen knowledge and understanding of the humanities; contribute to the intellectual vitality and professional development of the participants; build communities of inquiry and provide models of civility and excellent scholarship and teaching; and link teaching and research in the humanities.
The benefits of faculty attending such Institutes and Seminars can not only be experienced by the faculty members themselves, but eventually Gustavus students as well, as faculty members work their knowledge and experiences into the courses they teach.
Professor Greg Kaster with a sculpture of Abraham Lincoln in front of the New York Historical Society.
Professor of History Greg Kaster was one of about 30 faculty from around the country selected to participate in an NEH Institute this past summer on “The Visual Culture of the American Civil War” at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. The Institute introduced participants to photographs, cartoons, patriotic envelopes, quilts, drawings, paintings, sculpture, and other visuals created during the Civil War. The Institute also included several off-site visits to the Brooklyn Historical Society, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the New York Historical Society.
“My own research for the Institute focused on images reflecting the centrality of slavery, abolition, and emancipation to the war,” Kaster said. “Attending the Institute will allow me to create a visual culture component in my seminar on the Civil War, which I have been teaching since arriving at Gustavus in 1986.”
While Kaster was in New York studying visual culture of the Civil War, Associate Professor of English So Young Park traveled to Florence, Italy, for a four-week NEH Summer Institute on Dante’s Divine Comedy. The Institute was led by Yale University professor Peter Hawkins and UC-Davis professor Brenda Schildgen and included guest lectures from leading Dante specialists based in the U.S. and Italy. Besides lectures and discussions, the Institute also featured trips to Florentine cathedrals, museums, and neighborhoods significant to Dante’s life and works.
Park’s main reason for applying to the Institute was to develop a semester-long seminar on Dante and his world for Gustavus students and the English Department.
“There are currently no courses offered at Gustavus on Dante as the major focus,” Park said. “The Divine Comedy is essential reading for undergraduates, because it explores the relations between justice, love, and exile, while giving students full access to the ideas and visual arts of the late medieval world. Dante’s poem invites interdisciplinary study, as well as engaged, communal reading.”
Associate Professor of Classics Yurie Hong spent much of this past July in Athens, Greece, participating in the NEH Summer Institute “Mortality: Facing Death in Ancient Greece.” The group of 25 scholars spent mornings visiting libraries, museums, and archaeological sites in Athens, while afternoons were spent reading and discussing primary and secondary texts.
Professor Yurie Hong in Greece.
“Participation in the Institute has been transformative for my teaching and research,” Hong said. “I am currently working on a book about childbirth in archaic and classical Greek literature. This seminar enabled me to make closer connections between the concepts of birth and death in ancient life and to conduct crucial research on tombstones erected for women who died in childbirth. In addition, I have been able to help students in both Historical Perspectives and Introductory Greek envision more clearly how the topography of Athens was a vital part of how Athenians interacted with their allies, their enemies, and each other.”
In the summer of 2013, Assistant Professor of Scandinavian Studies Kjerstin Moody attended a three-week seminar titled “The Centrality of Translation to the Humanities: New Interdisciplinary Scholarship” at the University of Illinois’ Center for Translation Studies. The Institute brought together 25 humanists in fields spanning languages and literatures, history, theater, religion, and cultural studies, working in a diverse variety of languages ranging from Arabic to Urdu.
Kjerstin Moody
Together the group studied and discussed the levels on and ways in which translation takes place in all humanistic interactions and endeavors. In addition to daily readings, discussions, and presentations, each seminar participant undertook an individual project related to their particular interest in and practice of translation as scholars and as teachers. Moody’s time at the Institute has led to an article and excerpted translation forthcoming in a special edition of the academic journal Scandinavica dedicated to the contemporary Swedish filmmaker, poet, and author Lukas Moodysson. She also plans to teach an “Introduction to Translation” course at Gustavus in the coming couple of years.
“The chance to work together for three weeks in an intensive setting with bright and generous colleagues from across the U.S. who share an interest in both tangible and intangible aspects of translation and ideas related to intercultural learning, communication, and exchange was both intellectually stimulating and affirming,” Moody said. “What we discussed together and learned from each other at the Institute will continue to inform my work at Gustavus for years to come.”
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Media Contact: Director of Media Relations and Internal Communication Luc Hatlestad
luch@gustavus.edu
507-933-7510