FYRP 101     First-Year Seminar: Creating Place  (4)

This course considers both how natural chemical processes shape our surroundings and how place is created by the intentional manipulation of matter to create objects of everyday use as well as of symbolic, cultural, or artistic importance. While developing an understanding of place-making broadly, the course focuses on both nature's creation of place and the role of art and cultural materials in defining place. Field trips and plenary lectures allow students to explore the local and regional context of place formation, engage in the practice of place-making, and synthesize knowledge across disciplines. Capstone projects provide opportunities for in-depth exploration. This course is not repeatable for credit. Open only to new first-year students.

FYRP 102     First-Year Seminar: Place, Memory, and Preserving Tradition  (4)

This course examines the history of German-speaking communities in the area, including what brought the communities here, what elements of the "home" culture were maintained, and how memories and connections have been preserved across generations. Students engage these communities through historical records and through conversation with community members, while also reflecting on practices of cultural preservation as a form of identity and means of place-making. Field trips and plenary lectures allow students to explore the region, engage in the practice of place-making, and synthesize knowledge across disciplines. Capstone projects provide opportunities for in-depth exploration. Open only to new first-year students.

FYRP 103     First-Year Seminar: Photography of What is Not Seen  (4)

This course considers ways in which photography relays experience and shapes our understanding of place. Photography can both enhance and reduce experiences of time, space, and place. The course considers how photography touches on the human condition and how the photographer attends and is sensitive to the subject/object relationship. This course explores what is seen and not seen when making and looking at a photograph. In the process, fundamental relationships are identified between photographic expression and a sense of place. Through a close study of place in its numerous meanings, the course transits from what it means to be a consumer of the lens-image to being a producer of a photograph and how image and place write and rewrite each other. Field trips and plenary lectures allow students to explore the region, engage in the practice of place-making, and synthesize knowledge across disciplines. Capstone projects provide opportunities for in-depth exploration. This course is not repeatable for credit. Open only to new first-year students.

FYRP 104     First-Year Seminar: The Ecology of Place  (4)

This course explores how the natural environment has influenced human interactions, past and present, and how these interactions have shaped ecosystems on the Cumberland Plateau as well as the economy, culture, and health of communities in this region. Field trips and plenary lectures allow students to explore the region, engage in the practice of place-making, and synthesize knowledge across disciplines. Capstone projects provide opportunities for in-depth exploration. This course is not repeatable for credit. Open only to new first-year students.

FYRP 105     First-Year Seminar: Mountain Music Up and Down Sewanee Mountain  (4)

The music of Sewanee, the surrounding Plateau, and the Southern Appalachians resounds with the interplay of locals and outsiders. In the songs heard here--from bluegrass to traditional ballads, from shape-note hymns to string bands--musicians incorporate far-flung styles while cultivating local traditions. In the words of a well-known video featuring this music, no matter where the musicians get their start, eventually they come "Down from the Mountain." In this course students listen to, study, and interact with these musicians and their music. Field trips and plenary lectures allow students to explore the region, engage in the practice of place-making, and synthesize knowledge across disciplines. Capstone projects provide opportunities for in-depth exploration. This course is not repeatable for credit. Open only to new first-year students.

FYRP 106     First-Year Seminar: Walking in Place  (4)

Class readings, journal work, and discussions are based on the canon of literature on walking and environmental awareness. Authors include John Muir, Wendell Berry, Edward Abbey, Colin Fletcher, and Mary Oliver. Extensive walking and regular visits to a place of contemplation are required. Field trips and plenary lectures allow students to explore the region, engage in the practice of place-making, and synthesize knowledge across disciplines. Capstone projects provide opportunities for in-depth exploration. This course is not repeatable for credit. Open only to new first-year students.

FYRP 107     First-Year Seminar: Founded to Make Men--a History of Sewanee Manhood  (4)

An examination of the history of the ideal of the "Sewanee man," which shaped the social, academic, religious, and athletic life of the young men educated here through the University's first century. The course explores how key places, rituals, and institutions molded the ideal's meaning. It emphasizes the importance of persons excluded from the category--women, African Americans, and local mountain population--in maintaining and challenging the "manhood" ideal. Field trips and plenary lectures allow students to explore the region, engage in the practice of place-making, and synthesize knowledge across disciplines. Capstone projects provide opportunities for in-depth exploration. This course is not repeatable for credit. Open only to new first-year students.

FYRP 108     First-Year Seminar: Water is Life  (4)

Place is defined in many ways, perhaps most of all by geography. The physical features of a place—its geology, hydrology, and biota—influence the social and cultural activities of human life superimposed on the landscape. This course examines geographical features on Sewanee's Domain and further afield to see what lessons they can teach us about the earth and about ourselves. Field trips and plenary lectures allow students to explore the region, engage in the practice of reading a landscape, and synthesize knowledge across disciplines. Independent projects provide opportunities for in-depth exploration. Open only to new first-year students.

FYRP 109     First-Year Seminar: Land and Life  (4)

Place is defined in many ways, perhaps most of all by geography. The physical features of a place—its geology, hydrology, and biota—influence the social and cultural activities of human life superimposed on the landscape. This course examines geographical features on Sewanee's Domain and further afield to see what lessons they can teach us about the earth and about ourselves. Field trips and plenary lectures allow students to explore the region, engage in the practice of reading a landscape, and synthesize knowledge across disciplines. Independent projects provide opportunities for in-depth exploration. Open only to new first-year students.

FYRP 110     First-Year Seminar: Clothing, Textiles, and the Identity of Place  (4)

Clothing and textiles are not only a necessary part of everyday life but also physical artifacts that communicate meaning, belonging, and tradition within the cultures that create them. Sewanee and the surrounding area is uniquely suited to explore this aspect of material culture through clothing ranging from present-day vestments, robes, and class dress to the Klan robes, Confederate uniforms, and Cherokee "tear" dresses of the past. The course also examines current usage and manufacture of clothing in the local community as well as the impact of textile waste. Field trips and plenary lectures allow students to explore the region, engage in the practice of place-making, and synthesize knowledge across disciplines. Capstone projects provide opportunities for in-depth exploration. Open only to new first-year students.

FYRP 111     First-Year Seminar: "Your Place or Mine?" The Tension of Place in Narrative and Story-telling  (4)

This course examines the many aspects of "place" revealed by the stories told about it. The readings illustrate disparate views of those born and those who choose to move into an environment. Students learn how stories shape and expose the culture of place through images of the land, language, and common legends and analyze the tensions evoked by different cultures living in close proximity. Field trips and plenary lectures allow students to explore the region, engage in the practice of place-making, and synthesize knowledge across disciplines. Journal response and revision lets students integrate their own narratives into the story of this place. Capstone projects provide opportunities for in-depth exploration. This course is not repeatable for credit. Open only to new first-year students.

FYRP 112     First-Year Seminar: A Landscape for Memory  (4)

This course pursues a deeper understanding of the ways human action and the natural environment have shaped and been shaped by one another. Students explore the area's background, current status, and ongoing possibilities, from the deep time of geology to the era of human history and prospects for future development. Field trips and plenary lectures allow students to explore the region, engage in the practice of place-making, and synthesize knowledge across disciplines. Capstone projects provide opportunities for in-depth exploration. This course is not repeatable for credit. Open only to new first-year students.

FYRP 113     First-Year Seminar: Practicing Place  (4)

What do rituals do in relation to space and relationships? How do people map out their territory through ritual and what can we understand of those maps? Students examine place-making rituals at nearby Buddhist temples such as alms-rounds and circumambulation and analyze the rituals they experience at Sewanee that sacralize places here--from signing the Honor Code to walking the Perimeter Trail. Field trips and plenary lectures allow students to explore the region, engage in the practice of place-making, and synthesize knowledge across disciplines. Capstone projects provide opportunities for in-depth exploration. This course is not repeatable for credit. Open only to new first-year students.

FYRP 114     First-Year Seminar: The Psychology of People in Places  (4)

Places are powerful, not just for where they exist, but for how they impact our mental processes and behavior. This course examines how psychology is embedded in places like Sewanee, at once dynamically interacting with and creating norms, histories, cultures, environments, educational practices, and social groups. Field trips and plenary lectures allow students to explore the region, engage in the practice of place-making, and synthesize knowledge across disciplines. Capstone projects provide opportunities for in-depth exploration. This course is not repeatable for credit. Open only to new first-year students.

FYRP 115     First-Year Seminar: Here and There, Now and Then  (4)

This course considers Sewanee in the twenty-first century in light of ancient texts about place and placelessness, especially Virgil's Aeneid. Field trips and plenary lectures allow students to explore the region, engage in the practice of place-making, and synthesize knowledge across disciplines. Capstone projects provide opportunities for in-depth exploration. This course is not repeatable for credit. Open only to new first-year students.

FYRP 116     First-Year Seminar: Making a Place for Literary Imagination  (4)

In this course students reflect on forms of literary expression—stories, poems, and nonfictional accounts—that most vividly color and capture humanity's sense of place. How we imagine and write about sites that matter to us not only records them but truly helps to create them—as storied places, not just spaces on the map. Reading will focus on American texts, those evocative of scenes close to home in Sewanee as well as farther away. Open only to new first-year students.

FYRP 117     First-Year Seminar: Community Narratives of the South Cumberland Plateau  (4)

This course introduces students to people, places, and events that helped shape the history, culture, and environment of the South Cumberland Plateau. Students explore multiple cultural, historical, and political narratives that tell the story of the region. Particular emphasis is placed on the role of historical and current land-use in shaping local environmental attitudes and perceptions. Field trips and plenary lectures allow students to explore the region, engage in the practice of place-making, and synthesize knowledge across disciplines. Capstone projects provide opportunities for in-depth exploration. This course is not repeatable for credit. Open only to new first-year students.

FYRP 118     First Year Seminar: Memory, History, and Story - Site Specific Devised Performance  (4)

Students in this class explore the histories, stories, and sites of the South Cumberland Plateau, University Domain and surrounding areas in order to create devised, site-specific performances. Devised performance techniques in this course use collaboration-from performers, designers, and researchers to create the performance outline/script- and locations that are specific to the telling of the stories selected by the students. The course culminates with a performance of the material created by students. Open only to new first-year students.

FYRP 119     First-Year Seminar: Building Place—The Architecture and Art of Sewanee  (4)

The campus of The University of the South has a distinctive style. Its appearance is the result of accident as well as deliberate planning and place-making, and the meaning of that appearance is slippery. This course examines the art and architecture of Sewanee in order to consider how architecture and art objects produced, collected, and displayed on campus have been used to shape understanding of our community and this place. Field trips and plenary lectures allow students to explore the region, engage in the practice of place-making, and synthesize knowledge across disciplines. Capstone projects provide opportunities for in-depth exploration. Open only to new first-year students.

FYRP 120     First-Year Seminar: The Local Place and the Forces of Globalization  (4)

This course explores forces of globalization to understand the complexities of local place. It examines how this place is influenced by trade, migration, health issues, environmental pressures, human rights, and the global rise of populism. Field trips to international businesses, groups addressing global health, and human rights organizations will illustrate how the geographic and political borders of place are relatively porous and the identities of people within those places are shaped by local and global forces. Journals, student-led discussions, and a capstone project provide the opportunity to link readings on globalization and place to observations and investigations about the local community. Open only to new first-year students.

FYRP 121     First-Year Seminar: Medieval Sewanee  (4)

An exploration of Sewanee’s medieval roots, as well as its “medieval” present, from the way it builds its buildings to the way in manages its forests and its noble “domain.” Students will experience various forms of medieval culture, including Old English riddles, Gothic cathedrals and French romances, and explore the way that Sewanee continues the millennium-long tradition of university education. Students will examine texts in our archives, works of art in local museums, and even Sewanee’s pre-modern history on its domain. Open only to new first-year students.

FYRP 122     First-Year Seminar: Anthropologies of Place  (4)

Explores cross-cultural similarities in imagining “place,” from the Indigenous Australian Dreamtime to the Irish Dindshenchas and Native American place-naming. This course examines patterns in how people “story” their local environments around the globe, designating some landscapes, mountains, trees, and waterholes as the dwellings of supernatural powers and others as dangerous thresholds to good and bad “other worlds.” Students examine how beliefs about place foster specific behaviors and understandings of identity, kinship, and religion, and how cross-cultural similarities in these understandings might offer lessons in socio-ecological resilience and environmental stewardship as the human population approaches 8 billion. Field trips, plenary lectures, and capstone projects allow students to explore the region, engage in the practice of place-making, and synthesize knowledge across disciplines. Open only to new first-year students.

FYRP 123     First-Year Seminar: The Stories We Share: An Exploration of Place-Based Storytelling  (4)

How does place shape our personal stories and the stories we tell? Through readings from dramatic literature we will explore how place helps shape both personal and fictional narratives and the way specific places are defined and perceived. We will investigate and challenge the assumptions made about the South as we envision our role in the evolution of modern Southern identity. Using personal interviews and story- circles we will engage with community members to learn how immigrant culture, history, and geography have shaped their personal and political narratives. Through guided writing exercises, students will create their own personal narratives as well as narratives based on interviews and local exploration. The course will culminate in a devised theatre piece, performed by students, that incorporates the personal and the fictional while reflecting on the discoveries made about ourselves and others. Open only to new first-year students.

FYRP 124     First-Year Seminar: The Mythology of Place on Stage and Screen  (4)

This course investigates how plays and films have portrayed our region’s history. The course will include visits to a variety of nearby locations, followed by an examination of how actual events have been converted into dramatic narratives. Students will consider how plays and films can distort history, and at the mythology of the Cumberland Plateau, Tennessee and the South as a whole. Members of the class will also create short performance pieces as a way of wrestling with these questions. Open only to new first-year students.

FYRP 125     First-Year Seminar: The Idea of Home: Ecology, Economics, and Nativity  (4)

In this course, students use the concept of “home” as a lens for seeing the connections between landscape, ecology, economy, history, and notions of human meaning. In a home, all these lines converge and materialize as property, shelter, family, lifestyle, and neighborhood. At once geographical and ideological, home is where our preconceptions and desires meet the realities of a landscape, where human ambition and nature mingle and entwine. This field- and service-based class uses southern Appalachian life as a case study of the rich – but often unnoticed -- conversation between landscape and culture. Open only to new first-year students.

FYRP 126     First-Year Seminar: Community Health: Global and Local  (4)

Health care access is necessary for human flourishing. This course examines the underlying moral and sociological frameworks on health, access to health care, and the extra-clinical social determinants of health. Alternative national approaches to these topics are examined alongside an introduction to local methods. The course proceeds by integrating philosophy and sociological readings with dialogue with local health care providers. Field trips and plenary lectures allow students to explore the region and synthesize knowledge across disciplines. Capstone projects provide support of local communities and development of the students' sense of social responsibility and civic efficacy. Open only to new first-year students.

FYRP 127     First-Year Seminar: Reimagination and Regeneration of Place  (4)

This course investigates the concept of a thriving living landscape - both natural and social – in which students will explore systems of agriculture, ecosystems, and human communities through a regenerative lens. Regeneration involves not simply looking forward, but an understanding of our past and its consequences, a process of renewal, restoration, and growth. Emphasis will be placed on our approaches and practices of agriculture, ecosystem and species management, and student/institutional social engagement. Field trips, plenary lectures, and service-based activities will engage students in an experiential understanding of the topics. Independent projects provide opportunities for in-depth exploration. Open only to new first-year students.

FYRP 128     First-Year Seminar: Community-Based Philanthropy  (4)

Today “Big Philanthropy” has an outside influence on American life, on institutions, and on community growth and development. This course introduces students to an alternative—”Community Philanthropy”—in which local people, supported by outside donors, identify and define the projects and organizations that build a resilient community. Students will explore multiple strands of American philanthropy, and they will gain first-hand knowledge of a rural mountain community, its challenges, and the ways in which it can move toward flourishing in a collaborative way. Students will participate in a grant program that contributes $30,000 to community non-profit organizations. Open only to new first-year students.

FYRP 129     First-Year Seminar: Locating Slavery's Legacies at Sewanee  (4)

An exploration of how slavery and its legacies of discrimination and injustice marked the andscape and people of Sewanee, from its pre-Civil War roots in the slave-holding South through the university’s integration in the 1950s and 1960s. The course also considers how African Americans living in Sewanee challenged second-class citizenship and contributed importantly to the life of the university. Field trips and plenary lectures allow students to explore the region, engage in the practice of place-making, and synthesize knowledge across disciplines. Capstone projects provide opportunities for in-depth exploration. Open only to new first-year students.

FYRP 130     First-Year Seminar: The Artist as Collector  (4)

The impulse to collect and accumulate is human, and most everyone collects something whether they know it or not. This course will consider why people collect and what truths can be revealed through the study of collections from the historical and place-based to the personal and seemingly meaningless. Visits to the University Archives, regional museums, flea markets, homes and local collections of oddities will give insight to why people collect and what collections reveal about their owners and the places they reside. In this studio-based course, students will generate their own collections that may include drawing and sketching, taking pictures, writing, object-making, gathering and more. Open only to new first-year students.

FYRP 131     First-Year Seminar: Taking (from) Place(s): Collections Local Knowledge in the History of Science  (4)

Collecting, naming, and organizing local knowledge(s) were important activities to practitioners of the sciences in the past. This course takes a close look at natural history collecting and its entanglements with colonizing projects, the history of capitalism and the displacement of indigenous peoples since c. 1500. Using special collections materials and engagement with regional natural history collections, it considers the legacies of historical links between collecting and appropriation, while also introducing students to ongoing efforts to respond to these legacies by contemporary curators and scholars. Open only to new first-year students.

FYRP 132     First-Year Seminar: Displacement and Belonging in Narratives of Historically Excluded Communities  (4)

This course examines the experience of (un)belonging reflected in diverse forms of cultural expression—literature, visual art, music—by historically underrepresented communities in the US. Students reflect on these cultural products as vehicles to channel the experiences of displacement and social exclusion, claim social justice, and celebrate traditions. Working primarily on Latinx and Afro-Latinx production and the local community, students will also explore other voices connected to the experience of exclusion. Field trips to community-building and human rights organizations will foster a deeper experiential understanding. Open only to new first-year students.

FYRP 134     First-Year Seminar: From Sewanee to Selma: Identities, Stories, and Civic Engagement  (4)

We all have our stories, and those stories shape who we are, what we believe, and how we engage with others. This course allows students to consider and reflect on their own identities and the lived experiences they bring with them as new members of the Sewanee community while also examining the lived experiences of diverse community members in both Sewanee and in Selma, Alabama. Through local travel as well as a group trip to Selma, Alabama, students will engage in hands-on learning through relationship building, service-learning, and public history collection. The course will culminate with a group project supporting the Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation. Open only to new first-year students.

FYRP 135     The Indigenous Domain: Native Histories and Futures  (4)

This course places Indigenous topics at the center of the Domain, introducing students to the history of the Native South and building conversations about the ongoing importance of Native America. Course content will feature readings on Indigenous worldviews and lifeways; our local history of Cherokee Removal; policies of erasure and strategies of Native resilience; and Indigenous representation in modern film and media. Coursework will include a collaborative project on the Bell Route of the Trail of Tears. Course discussions will focus on current topics including land acknowledgments, Native representation and inclusion, and allyship through Sewanee’s Indigenous Engagement Initiative. Open only to new first-year students.