Humanities in Action
Career Trek to Dallas
In April 2022, a group of students participated in a Career Trek to Dallas, Texas, to visit the Dallas Museum of Art and the Kimbell Art Museum as part of Associate Professor Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi's redesigned course African Arts and Museum Politics. This trek provided students with opportunities to meet and talk with arts professionals and connoisseurs. The aim of the meetings was to introduce students to a variety of people who devote their energies to the study, collection, and promotion of art, thus expanding students’ awareness of possibilities for connecting with art professionally and personally.
While in Dallas, students met with curators, conservators, collection managers, a medical scientist, and an arts educator. Each of them spoke about their current work and how they found their way to it. Students also had the opportunity to attend a private tour with two Emory alumni who later spent time in conversation with the group to discuss their own professional pathways.
Local Trek in Oxford
In Spring 2022, Associate Professor Henry Beyerle sponsored a Local Trek at his home, where he invited 10 students and two physicians/professors from the Emory Medical School to discuss the history of professional oaths and their impact on how we define our personal and professional lives — from Roman military oaths to the Hippocratic Oath (then and now) to the Charter of Medical Professionalism.
This conversation built on the themes discussed in the course, The Romans. Another theme of the evening was the value of studying the humanities for preparing future medical students for their courses in medical ethics. It was a lively discussion and evening enjoyed by professors, guest speakers, and students alike.
Classroom Treks
Over the past year, the Mellon Humanities Pathways team has explored the value of bringing career treks into the classroom to make interactions with successful professionals more accessible to all students. In Fall 2022, Professor James Morey. who participated in both the faculty workshop and seminar offered his redeveloped course, Topics in Literary History: Script to Print to Pixels. As part of that offering, he invited a senior editor at Cambridge University Press to speak to the class in detail about the publishing industry and the wide variety of professional opportunities open to English majors.
During the Spring of 2023, Associate Professor Judith Miller offered her course, a History of Skiing, which she developed based on principles learned in the first offering of the faculty workshop for course development and syllabus design. A key element of her new course was the inclusion of two guest speakers via Zoom. One speaker is an important leader in the ski resort industry and is also involved in a non-profit organization working on issues of labor, housing, and food insecurity in the industry to promote better working conditions. Her background as a graduate of Middlebury College was of particular interest to students because she spoke about the ways in which liberal arts majors can get into private industry and build nonprofits without a business degree. The second speaker was a Ph.D. candidate whose work centered on environmental issues and conflicts between resorts and Native Americans over water rights. His work and expertise were of specific interest to students in the class who hoped to pursue careers focused on sustainability.
