Fantastic Field Trips in the English Department

By Patrick Coy-Bjork ’24

A big advantage for Macalester English students is being able to access and explore the wide range of museums and events related to arts and literature within the Twin Cities. Professors at Macalester take full advantage of that and provide engaging off-campus experiences for the students in their courses. Below is a list of three such classes that partook in a field trip this past month.

“Sound, Image, Body, Words: Writing About Art” is a course cross-listed between English and Music–taught by Professors Emma Törz and Mark Mazullo. Students in this class attended the premiere of a live orchestral performance, “Ogresse,” at the Walker Arts Center. The performance included projected visual arts and lights in conjunction with the music. The students in the class had been studying different forms of art critique, and this field trip provided the students an in-person experience to think about art criticism across different mediums.

“Reading Along the Silk Roads” is a Medieval literature class taught by Professor Coral Lumbley. This course is all about analyzing and learning about the written and archeological travel records of those traversing through Africa, Asia, and Europe. In order to see some examples of such archeological artifacts up close, the class visited the Minneapolis Institute of Art to peruse their wide range of historical items on display. Each student chose one object in particular to focus an analytical essay on.

“Fanfiction and Revisions” is a Crafts of Writing course taught by Professor Matt Burgess. For one of their units, the class has been studying original Sherlock Holmes literature and fanfiction created surrounding it. With this, the students took a field trip together to the Sherlock Holmes exhibit at the Minnesota History Center. This exhibit included background information on Arthur Conan Doyle (including real drafts of Sherlock stories),as well as historical insight on how crimes were really investigated in 19th century Britain. The exhibit also featured real props from the BBC Sherlock adaptation alongside a mystery for guests to solve. Professor Burgess also brought his “International Storytelling” class to see the movie, The Woman King at a local theater to align with their class discussions.

Thank you to the Mac Professors for organizing these field trips as well as the many more past, present, and future off-campus excursions!

Thank you to Birdie Keller 25′ and Joe Petersdorf ’23 for their contributions to this article!