UVA Cohort
For the next four years, you will live and learn at the University of Virginia. Participating in the UVA cohort offers you the unique opportunity to explore your new home from all four perspectives of the Engagements pillars. In doing so, you will get to know UVA intimately as: a physical landscape; a space of historical significance; an institution steeped in tradition; an organization embedded within local and global communities, and a home to a wide variety of people who have left their mark in documented and undocumented ways.
Unlike every other university in the United States, UVA is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a designation that it shares with Thomas Jefferson’s nearby plantation, Monticello. The unique history of this university provides an equally unique opportunity for intellectual exploration. We will ask questions about who and what gets remembered, memorialized, and archived at UVA, and by whom? We will consider student identity and power. And we will evaluate how both memorialization, power, and identity have changed over time.
Across the four quarters of the Engagements, the UVA cohort will use the Grounds themselves as our classroom. We will spend class time in UVA’s library archives, walking across Grounds, and hearing from guest lecturers. Students will also get the opportunity to go on field trips, including visiting the Monacan Nation at Amherst, Virginia, visiting Thomas Jefferson’s home of Monticello, and spending time at various sites around Charlottesville.
As with other Engagements classes, the UVA cohort will orient you to intellectual life at the university while allowing you to develop a community of peers. The cohort experience gives you the unique opportunity to be with the same group of 35 students throughout the whole year, providing a chance to cultivate community with your peers and professors over the four quarters of the Engagements as you delve deep into UVA as an academic topic.
To apply
Answer the following prompt in your pre-enrollment survey (100 - 150 words):
If you had a full day to spend in any library in the world, what subject areas would you explore and why?
Courses
Engaging Differences: Who do you think you are: Ancestry, Archives, and the Stories You Carry
Naseemah Mohamed
Every family has a story. But not every family’s story has made it into the official historical archive. In this course you will use genealogical research, dig through archival records, interview a family member or chosen-family elder, and place your family history within broader historical moments. These methods open into one of the central questions of the Engaging Differences pillar: how has human difference been celebrated, produced, imposed, recorded, and resisted across time? Over seven weeks you will learn to read archives and their absences, to conduct oral history interviewing, and to situate family stories, your own or those of an ancestor you have chosen to inherit, within larger structures of difference: racial, ethnic, national, cultural. We will work with primary documents at UVA Special Collections, including Jefferson family genealogies, and take a field trip to Monticello to understand how ancestry is read, researched, and memorialized. We close the course by building individual ancestral monuments, poster-board montages that together form a collective class installation.
Ethical Engagements: You are on Monacan Land
Catherine Walden
This course offers students the opportunity to consider what they have learned from the previous three courses in light of the experiences of local Tribal Nations. UVA stands on the ancestral lands of the Monacan Indian Nation, a federally recognized sovereign Nation headquartered in Amherst, Virginia, one hour south of Charlottesville. Through the lens of ethics, this class will explore the history and present-day situation of the Monacan Nation. You will learn directly from citizens of the Nation through guest lectures and a trip to the Monacan Museum and cultural center, and think critically about their voice(s) and narrative(s) in relationship to more dominant narratives both past and present. The class also will explore UVA’s relationship to the Monacan Nation over time, from Jefferson to today. We will consider how we, as individuals and as an institution, might build and maintain an ethically constructive relationship with a Nation that, despite colonization, discrimination, and efforts to silence its people, has maintained a powerful sense of community, culture, and identity.
Engaging Aesthetics: The Aesthetics of UVA
Wendy Smith
Consistently ranked as one of the most beautiful college campuses in America, the University of Virginia is a UNESCO World Heritage Site revered for its architectural style. Prospective students dream of living and learning here among the white columns, antique red bricks, and verdant gardens. UVA owes its reputation as a renowned example of American Neo-Classical architecture to Jefferson and his preference for styles from the Ancient Classical world invoked to reference ideals such as restraint, integrity, power, and reason. But what other values are associated with Neo-Classical architecture? Does this style represent the same values to everyone in our community, or does it feel different depending on your own identity? In this course we will explore how our aesthetic preferences have been (and are being) shaped by our politics, perspectives, and values. We will visit different parts of UVA’s grounds to discuss how design choices were made to express and reinforce specific ideologies. Students will also identify places of dissonance, where UVA’s historical aesthetic is at odds with its current aspirations. After taking this course, walking through Grounds will never be the same.
Empirical and Scientific Engagement: On These Grounds: UVA's Spatial History
Gillet Rosenblith
In this course, students will learn to use the empirical methodologies of historians in the context of UVA’s built environment. Each week will include a walking tour of Grounds based on a particular chronological moment and/or theme. We will consider what observations we can make as we move through space. How do these observations underscore or complicate evaluations of different kind of evidence, including written documents, oral histories, archaeological finds, etc.? How do any evidentiary alignments or discrepancies reveal the strengths and limits of empiricism? Students will leave this course with a better understanding of their home and place of work for the next four years. They will also leave with the skills to engage the empirical tools historians use.