Numerous professional visiting artists come to campus each academic year to both display their creative talents and impart their expressive wisdom to the Hope community. They show and tell us, by virtue of their displayed talents and spoken wisdom, that the arts are important to our collective communities because they require response and engagement, making us …
Category Archives: Arts and Humanities
New Lessons in Old Norse
Few graduate schools in the U.S. teach Old Norse, an ancient language with Germanic origins, and fewer liberal arts colleges offer it still. But this past academic year, Dr. Lee Forester brought the language of Vikings and Icelanders and even Tolkien fans to a Hope classroom, using modern techniques to teach age-old, runic vocabulary and grammar.
One Artist, One Faculty, One Question
Numerous professional visiting artists come to campus each academic year to both display their creative talents and impart their expressive wisdom to the Hope community. They show and tell us, by virtue of their displayed talents and spoken wisdom, that the arts are important to our collective communities because they require response and engagement, making us …
Boston: City of History, Archives, and GLCA Research Opportunities
The GLCA Boston Summer Seminar, created and directed by Dr. Natalie Dykstra, offers Midwest faculty and students the opportunity to find historic people and places and paper that impacts independent thinking and learning.
The First Great Inoculation Debate
One of only 60 projects selected for this year’s showcase from among several hundred highly competitive applications nationwide, “The First Inoculation Debate: A Quantitative Text Analysis of the Boston Smallpox Epidemic of 1721” by Elizabeth Ensink looks at communication practices between doctors and religious leaders when a smallpox epidemic broke out in Boston.
Breaks Away: Sylvia Kallemeyn
The New Song Movement, born out of struggle, political repression and sometimes civil wars in Central and South America, was the break-away focus of Professor Sylvia Kallemeyn, associate professor of Spanish, during her sabbatical leave from Hope in 2014-15. Through the study of the folk-inspired and socially-committed music of this era first in Ecuador and then back in the States, Kallemeyn’s goal was to make these songs more accessible to students in her Spanish language classes.
Hip Hop a Hit in Japan
This past September, Professor Crystal Frazier walked into a Tokyo dance studio to teach a distinctly American art form and immediately encountered a vibe that was uniquely Japanese. A class of 40 college students stood eagerly at the ready – respectful, disciplined, hospitable. An interpreter, earnest to translate, barely needed to speak. Hip hop would be the vehicle to move bodies and relationships across cultural lines; dance would be their universal language.
Hope in Paris
Junior Katelyn Kiner is spending the 2015-16 academic year studying in Paris through the college’s IES program. A French and history major, Kiner was in Paris the day of the attacks.
Breaks Away: Linda Dykstra
If not for her grandmother, Linda Dykstra, associate professor of music specializing in voice, may have never considered vocology as a field of inquiry in her academic life and thus for her sabbatical leaves from Hope in 2007 and 2015.
Talking back to Hope Theatre
“The Christians,” the recently staged production by the Hope College Theatre Department, is a play full of questions but few answers. Seems right when delving into themes of faith and doubt. Seems right for good drama, too. Yet too many questions with not enough answers can be unsettling. So, Richard Perez, the play’s director and an …