Two Cornell College professors will be the faculty directors of the Associated Colleges of the Midwest Newberry Seminar: Research in the Humanities during fall 2016.
Professors Rebecca Entel and Tori Barnes-Brus. The pair will be the faculty directors for the Associated Colleges of the Midwest Newberry Seminar in fall 2016.
Sociology professor Tori Barnes-Brus ’97 and English and creative writing professor Rebecca Entel will lead a semester-long course, "Novel Action: Literature, Social Movements, and the Public Good," where students will examine the connections between social reform and literature, using Chicago's Newberry Library. The seminar is based on a course the pair taught during Block 2 this year, "Reading and Writing the City: Literature and Social Justice in Chicago." Students in that course spent time in Chicago and studied reformer Jane Addams and novelist Upton Sinclair.
Students in the ACM Newberry Seminar will spend six weeks reading, discussing, and visiting sites in Chicago, then spend the second half of the semester meeting regularly with Barnes-Brus and Entel, preparing a work of original research.
A story about the seminar on the ACM website noted that while Newberry Seminar participants typically present their research in an academic paper, Barnes-Brus and Entel are going to encourage students to think about other possible avenues for presentation, such as well-developed websites and podcasts, or using digital tools that blend mapping, narrative, and interactive components. Students in the professors' Block 2 course created story maps, a digital tool that includes spatial, visual, and textual information to create an interactive narrative.
"They really are going to be a community of scholars, because they will be looking at [archival materials and subjects] that we might not really have looked at before," Barnes-Brus said of the ACM course. "So they will be coming to the group as the expert or expert-in-training, and having to think about how to present their work and share it with the group.
"To be able to take what someone else has done and constructively critique it and provide feedback is a skill that students need to learn. It will be a really important skill to have, no matter what job or profession they go into."
A full description of the seminar is available on the ACM website.
