Interdisciplinary Innovation

Two New Departments Reflect Agnes Scott’s Commitment to Learning Across Disciplines

BY DONNA WILLIAMS LEWIS

Making connections across disciplines is central to the liberal arts experience. At Agnes Scott College, two new departments are transcending traditional academic boundaries to offer students exceptional preparation in the fields of neuroscience and the creative arts.

The Department of Creative Arts, launched in 2023, takes a holistic approach to studying the arts with five concentrations within the major: dance, digital media, music, theatre and visual practices. Also in 2023, Agnes Scott’s neuroscience program and Department of Philosophy merged, creating an enhanced neuroscience major that pairs cutting-edge science with a course of study rooted in ancient times.

The professors who helped conceive the new majors see them as incubators of students whose more broadly based knowledge will give them an advantage as they progress in their fields.

ONE MAJOR, MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES

Annie Louise Harrison Waterman Professor of Theatre

Toby Emert, co-chair of the Department of Creative Arts, says the new department offers students a more integrated perspective on what it means to be a creative in contemporary culture.

“More and more artists are working across disciplines and working more collaboratively,” Emert says.

Students majoring in creative arts take four required courses: Observation and Reflection in the Creative Arts, an introductory class that covers all five discipline areas; Research in the Creative Arts, which prepares students for a successful capstone experience; Creative Arts Forum, in which students develop ideas for a final project and learn from working arts professionals; and Creative Processes and Practices, in which students plan and produce their capstone project. Their other coursework may come from the spectrum of all five disciplines, but they are required to take 26 hours of advancing levels of classes within their chosen area of concentration.

“The idea is to give them some grounding in several areas within the discipline,” says Emert.

Claiming Her Place: Nga Than ’13 Machine Learning Engineer, TikTok

“At Agnes Scott, guided by the school’s ethos of global leadership, I learned to embrace uncertainty and make bold decisions. These values inspired me to pursue unique, oftentimes non-linear career paths. After a decade in social science research, I pivoted to machine learning engineering. Though not an engineering major in college, my STEM foundation at Agnes Scott gave me the confidence to keep up with AI’s rapid developments and tackle real-world challenges in my current role.”

Creative arts majors with a concentration in theatre, for example, are required to take classes in performance, acting, stagecraft, writing and playwriting. They must also participate in at least two productions.

Emert notes that the new department was partially born of pragmatism. The college’s former separate arts departments faced uncertainty several years ago over whether retiring staff would be replaced.

“We are a small place with limited resources,” he says. “If we were going to be a smaller faculty, how could we be a mighty faculty? We saw the possibilities in helping students think more generatively about what a career in the arts might be.”

A “mammoth undertaking” was put in motion to convert all of the arts departments and their majors into concentrations offered within a single major and minor. The new major challenges students to “think beyond what they may have conceptualized as the possibilities of their interest areas,” Emert says.

“It asks them to imagine how that interest can grow, expand, develop, be more exciting and also be more challenging,” he says. “I think, in a lot of ways, that is what the liberal arts are designed to do. They push us to have a grander, broader, more nuanced, more thoughtful perspective on the possibility of humanness.”

An Intentional Pairing

Bonnie Perdue, associate professor of cognitive neuroscience, helped facilitate the merger of neuroscience and philosophy into a consolidated department now co-directed by Jennifer L. Larimore, associate professor of biology, and Harald Thorsrud, professor of philosophy.

Perdue believes the new department “epitomizes what you want from a liberal arts education, where you are bringing together very different perspectives to try to understand fundamental questions of human existence.”

“What we have articulated to our students is that you are going to be a more competitive candidate for a graduate program or a job because you will come out more well-rounded in how you think about questions and how you might answer them,” Perdue says.

Traditionally, neuroscience majors take biology, chemistry, data analysis and psychology classes in their quest to understand the biological basis of behavior. Now, philosophy classes such as Introduction to Logic are built into the neuroscience core curriculum and students are choosing electives such as Metaphysics, Existentialism, Ethics and Life’s Meaning.

Ethics in particular is critical for anyone going into a medical field, doctoral program or scientific career.

Agnes Scott neuroscience majors have gone on to a wide variety of post-graduate programs, including medical, optometry, veterinary and law schools.

“There’s usually an implicit expectation that you pick up exposure to ethics along the way or experience it embedded into other courses,” Perdue says.

By taking an ethics course rooted in philosophy, Agnes Scott neuroscience majors will have intentional and explicit training that sets them apart and should help them in their careers.

“The way we’ve conceptualized this merger is that philosophy is one of the oldest ways of trying to answer questions about the human experience and neuroscience is one of the newest ways of trying to answer these questions, but they center on these same core ideas,” Perdue says. “By bringing them together intentionally and having students think about these questions of the mind, the self, consciousness, perception, ethics and more from both a philosophical perspective and a neuroscientific perspective, we are aiming to cultivate holistic thinkers and well-rounded students.”