Arts & Humanities at the University of Vermont

ARTS&HUMANITIES ATTHEUNIVERSITY OFVERMONT

WHY THE UNIVERSITY OFHERE? VERMONT WHY NOW?

BIG QUESTIONS AND THE COURSES THAT EXPLORE THEM

S ART • Egypt, Iran, Turkey: A what defines beauty? • Introd and Late Renaissance Art • Ph of Environmentalism • what Medical Ethics • Buddha Leg e Science Fiction • Bicycles, Gl ability • how do you create a the Digital Age • The Mexican Violence in China • Islam and what is our place Anthropology of Glob the Americas • Latin Jazz Nation in the United States •

S eeing the Sacred the Co Alternate Paths • duction to Logic • Italian High hilosophy of Science • History is the meaning of life? end in Art • Victorian lobalization, and Sustainjust society? Writing for Revolution • Virtue and d Modernity • Screenwriting in the natural world? al Health • Archaeology of Immersion • Race and Shakespeare in Practice

“The whole point of this book is what it is to make art and write in this contemporary moment. What it means to respond, to act, to do, and how important that actually is.”

J A N E K E N T, S T U D I O A R T S

JANE KENT, ART, a printmaker whose work is in collections such as the Whitney Museum and the Library of Congress, recently had her mezzotint print “Blackout” featured in the 2018 collection It Occurs to Me That I Am America: New Stories and Art.

FACULTY VOICES

“The whole point of this book is what it is to make art and write in this contemporary moment. What it means to respond, to Distinguished act, to do, andscholars and how important that actually is.” accomplished artists across

JANE KENT, ART, Her mezzotint print the multiple disciplines of “Blackout” is featuredthe in the 2018 humanities, UVM faculty collection It Occurs tobring Me That deepI Am experience and America: New Storiesbroad and Art. perspective to the front of the classroom.

MA JOR JACKSON, ENGLISH

R AY V E G A , M U S I C

“The public performance of poetry is one of the great signifiers of democracy in action.”

MAJOR JACKSON, ENGLISH, author of four collections of poetry, has received multiple literary honors, including finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award.

“Artists are funnels. I’m grabbing elements of this and that, throwing them in. Whatever comes out, that is who we are.

But we need to tap from a river with a lot of depth.”

RAY VEGA, MUSIC, has performed with many jazz greats, including on three Grammy-winning albums with Tito Puente’s Orchestra.

“It’s about how you move in the world in an ethical way that acknowledges disparities and provides access to real human SCHOL A

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ABBY MCGOWAN, HISTORY, teaches “Nepal: Changing Communities— the Forbidden Kingdom of Mutang,” a summer study abroad course that explores globalization, environmental change, and cultural preservation.

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their lives is so obvious and so exciting for students.”

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conditions. The breadth of information they see impacting

LIVE IT.

LEARN IT. At UVM, we believe that the strongest academic experience is forged by experiences both inside and outside of class.

In our Liberal Arts Scholars program, live, learn and study with some of the best students at UVM, in one of the university’s most challenging and intellectually rigorous first-year programs. Explore the range of creative arts through Arts Scholars. Delve into the big questions that have occupied thinkers for centuries in Humanities Scholars.

The Liberal Arts Scholars Program includes: Arts Scholars Earth and Environment Scholars Humanities Scholars Social Science Scholars

It’s an atmosphere that helps students form deeper connections with faculty and keep the conversation going, well after class is over.

“If there’s a big project coming up, we bounce ideas off each other or help problem solve,” says Liberal Arts scholar Erin Bundock. “It’s a really great way to ground yourself, especially as a first-year student in the larger college setting.”

D R A C U L A , T H E AT R E R E H E A R S A L

Find countless ways to engage the arts and humanities outside of class — from Film Club to the Creative Writing Guild to the Jazbaa Bollywood dance group. Some of your options:

15 Department of

Music and Dance ensembles open to all UVM students

A RT I ST B O O K M A K I N G, A RTS S C H O L A R S P R O G R A M

1

135-

internationally competitive debate team, the Lawrence Debate Union year-old student newspaper, the Vermont Cynic, winner of national awards and launchpad for distinguished journalism careers

4+ student-run

a cappella groups

5 annual theater

productions, with auditions open to all UVM students

92% of UVM students

report engagement in research, internships, and other experience-based learning.

21ST

CENTURY SKILLS

UVM arts and humanities alumni take career directions you might anticipate and also less-likely paths. Intellectual rigor, creativity, comfort with ambiguity and change, facility in written and spoken communication—and, in some cases, the will to face a blank canvas or step onto a stage— are fundamental to education in these fields. And, post-graduation, they’re foundational to a wide array of 21st-century careers.

But don’t just take our word for it.

A Google dive will turn up articles from Forbes to Fast Company to Business Insider that discuss how employers in multiple sectors, including tech, seek the skills liberal arts grads bring to the workplace. As Steve Jobs once said, “It’s in Apple’s DNA that

technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the results that make our hearts sing.”

“There are a lot of possibilities for lawyers right now, and I want to make sure I use my law degree to help ease some of the unrest in our society today.”

LUKE APFELD ’14, Third-year student at Berkeley Law, graduating in May 2018.

POLITICS

NARRIC ROME ’94, vice-president of government affairs, Americans for the Arts MADELINE MURPHY HALL ’10, program officer, U.S. Department of State

MEDIA

JEFF BUCKLEY ’00, housing policy advisor, San Francisco Mayor’s Office

LAURA BERNARDINI ’95, CNN Washington’s director of coverage LYDIA HORNE ’16, editorial assistant, WIRED

WIL TIDMAN ’95, vice president and executive producer at GoFundMe Studios.

BUSINESS

BROOKE GLADSTONE ’78, co-host of National Public Radio’s On the Media

MEREDITH ROSE BURAK ’07, director of international relations for Asana Group, a human resources consulting firm

JON KILIK ’78, leading film producer, projects include The Hunger Games trilogy MIKE GORDON ’87, bass player for Phish

ARTS

MARGOT NORTON ’04, Curator, New Museum, NYC

RICKY STRAUSS ’88, president of marketing at The Walt Disney Studios ALEXANDER NEMEROV ’85, noted art historian, professor at Stanford University

EDUCATION

WILL ALEXANDER G’06, National Book Award for young adult fiction, on faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts TRACIE EBALU ’13, 2017-2018 Fulbright Fellow researching refugee populations and mental health in Germany

SASHA FISHER ’10, co-founder, Spark MicroGrants, empowering rural communities in Africa JESS PEABODY ’02, community director for Conscious Capitalism International JOHN AUSTIN ’07, director of education and outreach for The Garden Project in San Francisco

NON-PROFIT

THE OLD Billings Library, dedicated 1883, is just the atmosphere—soaring ceilings and stone fireplaces and wood-paneled walls—you would expect at a public ivy university. As one of our alumni reminisced, “You felt a sense of presence. That was what a library was supposed to look like. Surrounded by those books, I’d settle right down to my studies.” When renovation is completed in fall 2018, this generation’s UVM students will be able to do the same. Billings will be a hub for the humanities, home to Library Special Collections, the Carolyn and Leonard Miller Center for Holocaust Studies, the UVM Humanities Center, and Center for Research on Vermont.

B I L L I N G S L I B R A RY

F A C U L T Y- L E D S T U D Y A B R O A D I N N E PA L

7+ artist studios, from

ceramics to printmaking to photography

&THE NEW

11 private practice

rooms, each with baby grand or upright pianos

20,000+ objects that

span the history of civilization housed in our on-campus Fleming Museum

1 open-stage on-campus theater, with a costume shop, scene shop, lighting lab and classroom space

4 music creation

spaces, including a piano lab, a music technology lab, a recording studio, and music library

1 million+ books,

300,000 ebooks, 130,000 serials titles, 300 databases and electronic resources, and 26,000 multimedia materials in our three on-campus libraries.

22,000+ square-feet B A I L E Y H O W E L I B R A RY

of renovated galleries, studios, classrooms, and performance space in the Taft School, opening fall 2018.

BEAT

Burlington— BTV your academic ecosystem.

Walk through the city, and you’ll feel it.

The arts matter here. And across Vermont, citizen democracy is alive and well.

Burlington and Vermont are living classrooms for our students that inspire Burlington, Vermont is a rare American them: to launch a run for public office even city. Built on a human scale, anchored by a before graduation; to help refugees study culturally and economically vibrant downtown, to become citizens; intern Burlington surrounded by a bigto blue lakeat and mountain City Arts, whose headquarters and ridges. Our hilltop campus is withingalleries a mile stand adjacent to City Hall. of national businesses, local start-ups, arts organizations, federal offices, and non-profit In this vibrant community, you’ll find your agencies. Together, they’re the fabric of favorite small bookstore, vintage record this celebrated city that provides countless shop, and coffeehouses with the quiet to opportunities to put lessons of the classroom settle into reading a classic novel or start into action. writing your own.

BURLINGTON, VT

R ADIO BEAN COFFEEHOUSE

Partial list of arts venues in Burlington Partial list of arts venues in Burlington

F LY N N C E N T E R F O R T H E P E R F O R M I N G A RT S

HUMANITIES AT WORK IN Our faculty and student scholarship often finds direct application to the critical issues facing our planet and society. What are the greatest challenges faced by resettled refugees? How are children impacted by the rising frequency of natural disasters? What lessons does Vermont’s Town Meeting tradition hold for today’s American democracy? The toughest questions demand the sharpest minds.

THE WORLD

Classics professor John Franklin teams with David Carlson, UVM coordinator of student veterans’ services, to teach two courses in which military veterans explore Homer’s Odyssey and Illiad. The ancient texts provide vets with a chance to reflect on and relate to the timeless narratives and bond tightly as a classroom community as they navigate their own homecomings.

Not long after a 7.6 magnitude earthquake devastated Nepal in April 2015, Emma Squier ’17 sat in a UVM classroom 7,000 miles away, studying the effects of the natural disaster on the Nepali people. A year later, she would be living among them in the hardest-hit villages learning first-hand how they were surviving.

Squier, a sociology major and art minor, interviewed and photographed women for a research project about their experiences in the earthquake’s aftermath. She turned this work into a book chapter, co-authored with her professor, sociologist Alice Fothergill, an international expert on the disproportionate effects of natural disasters on vulnerable populations such as women and children.

Sociology professor Kathy Fox leads UVM’s new Liberal Arts in Prison Program.

Bringing college-credit courses to incarcerated Vermonters could play a critical role in reducing recidivism. The program also creates experiential learning opportunities for Fox’s UVM students, giving undergrads a perspective-challenging view into the lives of those in prison.

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