Course Descriptions & Faculty Bios

Storytelling for Impact: Culture, Context, and Change

Netta Avineri

Storytelling and storylistening are a central part of how individuals, groups, and communities engage with one another across contexts. Storytellers seek to make an impact for a particular audience—educating, persuading, connecting, advocating, sharing, entertaining, and relating.

In this interactive, hands-on course, we will take an applied linguistic anthropological approach to the role of stories in contexts of change at individual, interpersonal, institutional, and global scales. We’ll work with a rich set of tools—ethical observation, conflict mapping, notetaking and notemaking, interviews, discourse analysis, and linguistic landscapes—to examine stories of change, the media through which they travel, and the cultural values, norms, and perspectives they carry.

Using the framework of storyframing, storyforming, and storytelling, we will then create our own culturally-informed stories of change—guided by principles of audience design, conflict transformation, sensitivity to genre, and scale of impact. Join us—and discover the stories that move communities, shape ideas, and spark meaningful change.

• View or download the welcome letter and homework from Netta Avineri.

Netta Avineri is Executive Director of the Kathryn Wasserman Davis Collaborative in Conflict Transformation and Professor of Intercultural Communication. She is an applied linguistic anthropologist whose research and practice focus on ethical university-community partnerships, storytelling for impact, and language and social change.

Netta has two decades of interdisciplinary expertise that bridges individual, institutional, community, and government sectors for common collective commitments. She has published several books on critical research methodologies, language and social change, and heritage language socialization, and is Series Editor for the Critical Approaches in Applied Linguistics book series. She served as the inaugural Public Affairs and Engagement Chair for the American Association for Applied Linguistics, and is an Executive Board member for the Society for Linguistic Anthropology.

Our Expanding Universe

McKinley Brumback and Noah Graham

How did astronomers discover that the universe is expanding? What are dark energy and dark matter and what do they have to do with the possible fate of the universe? This introductory astronomy course will present an overview of our expanding universe including the results that led to this discovery and the implications it has on the formation and eventual fate of the universe. Topics will include examining how astronomers measure distance across space, the infamous Hubble’s Law, the age of the universe, and more. Students can anticipate lectures that mix historical results with modern astronomical discoveries to shed light on what we know and do not know about the cosmos. Students should expect to see quantitative reasoning in class, but mathematical proficiency beyond algebra is not required. Night-time observations with portable telescopes may be offered as the availability of equipment, and the weather allows.

• View or download the welcome letter and homework from McKinley Brumback and Noah Graham.

McKinley Brumback is an Assistant Professor of Physics. She completed her PhD in physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College and then traveled the United States for postdoctoral research positions at Caltech and the University of Michigan. She uses observations from NASA and ESA X-ray observatories to investigate how matter behaves close to neutron stars, and in particular, her research focuses on reverberation mapping of neutron star X-ray binaries and the effect of super-Eddington accretion on pulse profiles.

Noah Graham is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Physics at Middlebury College.  Specializing in theoretical and computational physics, he teaches a wide variety of courses and labs, including introductory and upper-level electromagnetism, mathematical methods including wave mechanics, differential equations, and complex analysis, computational physics, statistical mechanics, general relativity, and quantum mechanics.  His research focuses on fluctuation effects in quantum field theory, with applications to Casimir forces in nanotechnology, solitons in particle physics, nonlinear dynamics in the early universe, and quantum phenomena in curved spacetime.  Prior to arriving at Middlebury, he completed his Ph. D. in theoretical physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles.  He also worked as a Research Engineer and Research Scientist at Dragon Systems, Inc., where he was part of the team that created Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the world’s first large-vocabulary continuous speech recognition system, and his research emphasizes techniques for making abstract problems in quantum field theory amenable to computational methods.

Are we Living the “Good Life”? How Would We Know If We Were?

Jonathan Miller-Lane

One of the important claims about the unique benefits of a liberal arts education at a residential college is that it prepares graduates to be both knowledgeable in a particular academic area of focus as well as be capable of contemplating and constructively engaging the bigger questions we face as individuals and as humans sharing one planet. One of those central questions is how to live a “good life.” Aristotle used the word Eudaimonia, usually translated to mean “human flourishing,” as the true goal of education. If that is true, then, as the late NYC mayor Ed Koch (1924–2013) might have asked, “How we doin’?”  Did a liberal arts education inform our understanding of the “good life” and how would we know if it had?

We will begin our exploration of this question with Aristotle’s articulation of Eudaimonia from Book One of his Nichomachean Ethics. Then, we will engage several more recent essays that explore the meaning, purpose and limits of a liberal arts education before we delve more deeply into two short books. The first is Toni Morrison’s The Origin of Others in which she explores our human tendency to “other” fellow human beings. How do we live a good life together if this is what we do? The second short book is Rafe Martin’s text Endless Path, a short collection of, and commentary on, Jataka Tales—stories of past lives of the Buddha. We will engage these stories and the lessons they offer us as another avenue into contemplating the meaning and possibility of living a good life.  Who knows where we might end up!

As the child of a diplomat, Jonathan was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and grew up in the Middle East and North Africa. A two-year family stint (1974–1976) during middle school at Waterford/Kamhlaba School, in the country of Eswatini, fundamentally changed his life and set him on a trajectory of exploring the role of education in human culture. The central question of his work is, “How should we educate students in a diverse, multi-cultural democracy for life in that democracy?” What does it mean to engage that question as a Path that is only and ever made my walking, rather than as an achievement to protect?  How do we learn to constructively engage the freedom and uncertainty that is part of democratic life in a diverse republic?  During his upcoming sabbatical, during the  2026–2027 academic year, and with funding from the Whiting Foundation, Jonathan will visit sites on the Civil Rights Trail across the South. And thanks to funding from the Middlebury Conflict Transformation Collaborative, he will be exploring book banning conflicts in public schools and public libraries.

• View or download the welcome letter and homework from Jonathan Miller-Lane

Mammal Tracks and Tales 

Alexis Mychajliw

There are over 6,000 mammal species alive today— and you are one of them! In this course, students will learn about the biological qualities that make a mammal a mammal, from the evolutionary histories locked deep in our bones and genes to the unique behaviors that mammals display across habitats around the planet. Students will have hands-on learning experiences with skull casts and will build a field-based mammal tracking skillset they can apply in their own backyard, including practicing the use of camera traps. Class discussions will center on topics of popular interest including the evolution of venom, ancient DNA and de-extinction, surviving the dinosaur mass extinction, island evolution, zoonotic disease spillover, and the La Brea Tar Pits. The class will include animal-tracking in nearby woods and participants should be able to walk up to two miles on uneven ground.

• View or download the welcome letter and homework from Alexis Mychajliw

Alexis Mychajliw is an Assistant Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the La Brea Tar Pits & Museum, Hokkaido University in Japan, and the University of Oklahoma. She earned a BS from Cornell University (2012) and a PhD from Stanford University (2017). She has coauthored 40+ scientific articles and received research support from the National Science Foundation and National Geographic. She is a deputy chair of the IUCN’s Small Mammal Specialist Group, where she guides the conservation of shrews, hedgehogs, and moles globally. In her spare time, she rescues domestic rats.

Robert Frost and the Nature of Vermont

Jay Parini

Robert Frost was, perhaps, the greatest American poet of the twentieth century, and he usually set his poems somewhere “North of Boston,” which was the title of his second book.  Vermont, in particular, was a subject of his work, as he lived there for many years, with a home near the Bread Loaf campus in Ripton. His poetry can well be described as a field guide to the flora and fauna, and to the people — farmers, mostly — who live in Vermont.  In this course, we’ll look at many of his key poems, from “Mending Wall” through “‘Out, Out-‘,” “The Wood-pile,” “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” “Birches,” “The Road Not Taken,” “After Apple-Picking,” “Home Burial,” “Design,” and “Directive.”   We will examine poems very closely, pausing to listen to his exquisite phrasing.  There will be comparisons to the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was a major influence on Frost.  In particular, we will talk about Nature (1836), a major early book by Emerson that Frost loved.

• View or download the welcome letter and homework from Jay Parini.

Jay Parini is the Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing emeritus and currently serves as Writer in Residence.  He is a poet, novelist, biographer, and critic. His many volumes of poetry include New and Collected Poems: 1975-2015.  His nine novels include The Damascus Road, Benjamin’s Crossing and The Last Station, which was made into an Academy Award-nominated film in 2009, starring Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer.  His memoir Borges and Me was recently turned into a film. He has written biographies of John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, William Faulkner, Gore Vidal, and Jesus.  His other publications include Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Changed America and Why Poetry Matters.  His reviews and articles appear regularly in The New York Times, The Guardian, and elsewhere.

Documentary & Truth in an Age of Doubt

James Chase Sanchez

Recent Pew Polling shows that more Americans trust documentaries to tell them the truth than network news. In this course, students will learn how documentaries often blur the line as “truth-telling” artifacts, focusing on how they employ evidence, emotions, and editing to frame different versions of truth. Using scenes from Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1988), Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine (2002), and Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935), we will explore how documentaries play with this slipperiness—sometimes for the sake of truth and sometimes to propagandize.

• View or download the welcome letter and homework from James Chase Sanchez.

James Chase Sanchez is an Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric. He recently published his third academic book, Countermemory (2025), which explores how communities and publics (de-)construct public memories that challenge accepted narratives. James is also a documentary producer. His first film, titled Man on Fire, won an International Documentary Association Award in 2017 and aired on PBS via Independent Lens in 2018. Sanchez recently produced a short, titled The Spiritual Advisor, which was bought by Rolling Stone Films and Documentary+ and has a feature investigative documentary, titled In Loco Parentis, set to premiere in 2026.