Welcome

An integral part of the Center for the Arts, the Creative Campus Initiative supports cross-disciplinary collaborations that elevate the arts as a means of teaching, learning, and knowing in any area of the curriculum at Wesleyan University. Since 2006, the initiative has helped to support more than 20 courses and 60 course modules co-taught by artists, as well as commissioned works, interdisciplinary performances and installations, and extended artist residencies. This year, the Creative Campus Initiative is supporting a number of programs, including the following course integrations.

CHUM 393 Afterparty: End Times, Pleasure and Clean Up
Katie Brewer Ball, Assistant Professor of Theater and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, will host artist Ohan Breiding as part of this course. The class will focus on the relationship between aesthetics and science at the end of the world, and  explore practice-based thinking around climate change and storytelling based on the artist’s own queer and trans-feminist approach to ecological care.

CSPL306 / ENVS322 Community-Engaged Qualitative Research: The Other 1%
Amy Grillo, Associate Professor of the Practice in the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, Environmental Studies, and the College of the Environment, and choreographer Jill Sigman will conduct workshops to prepare students for deep and embodied listening before they conduct qualitative interviews within BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) farming communities in Connecticut.

HIST 278 Visualizing Firearms History: An Applied Quantitative and Archival Approach for Project-Based Exploration
Jennifer Tucker, Professor of History, Science and Technology Studies, Environmental Studies, and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Guns and Society, will collaborate with artist Glenn LeVertu, giving students the opportunity to use digital and analog drawing, filmmaking, and animation to explore new ways of conceiving of the story of guns in history and culture, using data sets on guns assembled and analyzed as part of the course.

REES 256 The Soviet Century
Roman Utkin, Assistant Professor of German Studies, Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, will arrange a workshop by Berlin-based poet and performance artist Dinara Rasuleva, founder of the Lostlingual Poetry Workshop. Students will experiment with language they have “forgotten” as they explore the cultural complexity of the Soviet experiment, its underlying ethnic diversity, and a plurality of cultural histories, including how Russian became a lingua franca (common language) of the Second World at the expense of hundreds of other languages, including Ukrainian. 

SPAN267 Image/Word: Narrative and Photography in Contemporary Spain (Spring 2025)
Olga Sendra Ferrer, Associate Professor of Spanish, will engage Jacqueline Herranz-Brooks to provide students with hands-on experience in exploring creative approaches to photographic archives. Students will go beyond the conceptual study of images and texts to develop their own creative projects using images to (re)construct the space of Wesleyan from different perspectives.

For more information, please contact Rani Arbo, Campus and Community Engagement Manager, rarbo@wesleyan.edu, 860-685-5925.