Arts Scholars have the unique opportunity as first-year students to take a writing course with a poet, combined with a hands-on art-making course and a course from Dance. This small cohort of students shares a passion for creative expression and a drive to improve and expand their creative outlets, and they have their own section of these in-demand courses. A few Arts Scholars are theatre, music, or art majors, but we often see a wide variety of majors such as neuroscience, history, computer science, and undeclared.
Classes proposed for 2026–27
Arts 1020 – Perspectives on Art Making (Fall)
Perspectives on Art Making is an introduction to contemporary art practice. We will explore the making, presenting and analyzing of art works in a variety of media and formats. This may include: drawing, three-dimensional construction, collage, photography, painting and digital/video art. The work produced within this class demonstrates how hands-on creation and collaboration are integral to making. This course prepares students well for upper-level college art courses.
English 1027 – Writing: The Manuscript (Fall)
This workshop will focus on the reading and writing of the creative manuscript. We’ll explore a selection of books published within the last ten years, which may include Robin Coste Lewis’s To the Realization of Perfect Happiness, Ronaldo Wilson’s Carmelina: Figures, Julian Delgado Lopera’s Fiebre Tropical, Terrance Hayes’s So to Speak , and Nicole Sealey’s The Ferguson Report: An Erasure.
What can these collections tell us about contemporary American writing? What does each manuscript demand of the reader? The writers we’ll read work in a diversity of forms, drawing on radically different schools and traditions. What’s your artistic lineage? Who are your literary ancestors? You will be encouraged to explore these questions. Over the course of the semester, you will compose your own 15-page manuscript. Expect to generate new pages each week, explore various perspectives on revision, and contribute meaningfully to workshop, supporting the evolution of your classmates’ writing. A dedication to craft, aesthetic innovation, and risk-taking is expected of writers in this course.
Taught by Eve Alexandra, Professor of English and Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies
Dance 1020 – Environment and Performance (Spring)
This non-traditional dance course explores the relationship between the human body, environment, and performance. The course orients itself around the processes of the body, as it moves, witnesses, and discerns to uniquely perceive ‘environment’ as a multi-layered body of history, geography, and identity and ‘performance’ as a social-political and transformative structure. The goals of the course are to heighten an individual's sensitivity to naturalistic practices that help build relationships to space, time, biography, and context. The class offers perspectives of how performance can function as a vital way of seeing, as well as being, within specific and rapidly shifting environments.
Taught by Julian Barnett, Professor of Dance
Students
“The Arts Scholars program was more than just academics. It was a safe space. A space of relief. But also, a place of joy, acceptance, and growth. It was a fun place where creative minds came together to do more than make art. It was an outlet where we could express ourselves freely through all the classes we took together. I was nervous going into college, and this was a tight-knit community that I knew I could fall back on that would help me in my transition to college life.”
- Dean I., Social Work Major
Meet the Faculty
