The Pre-College Experience at the Sewanee Summer Music Festival includes introductory classes in several collegiate courses of study. Have your curiosity be inspired to delve further in your collegiate studies! *For the summer of 2026, introductory classes and professors included:
Stream Ecology
Stream ecology students will evaluate stream health by evaluating the macroinvertebrate community present in a Middle-Tennessee Stream. Students will also field sample local fishes. Students will be in aquatic environments and will get to handle aquatic animals.
Visiting Assistant Professor, Biology. Professor Wells is a fisheries biologist. His research work includes conservation, ecology, and management of Southeastern fishes of North America. Recent work by Wells has focused on the Endangered Pygmy Madtom (Noturus stanauli). Current work focuses on crayfish ecology on the Domain. Wells teaches ecology, field biology, and ichthyology.
Sewanee’s History is American History. Why that matters
Sewanee: The University of the South today is a small liberal arts college, but throughout its history it has been at the vital center of the nation’s great political and social conflicts. Located on land taken by force from the Cherokee tribe, the University was founded in the late 1850s at the peak of national division over the “slavery question,” and whether the future of the United States would include a place for bondage within its territories. The University’s founders — a small group of Episcopal bishops and well-placed laymen in the southern Episcopal church — sought to build a mighty educational institution that would protect and promote the interests of a civilization based on human bondage. After the Civil War’s end and emancipation, the University, though still small, took an outsized role in shaping the future of race relations in the “Jim Crow” American South. This class will reflect on how the history of a small college in Tennessee can reveal much about the history of the nation as a whole.
Woody Register teaches post-Civil War U.S. history and serves as director of the Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation.
Register graduated from Sewanee in 1980 and received his doctorate in history in 1991 from Brown University. He came to Sewanee in 1992 and teaches courses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American society and culture, popular culture, and gender.
Register’s research ranges widely in the history of popular culture, gender, consumer culture, business, and social welfare in the early twentieth century. His most recent work concerns the history of friendship, social reform, and masculinity, which he examines through a history of the lives of four boys — “street toughs” — who in the 1890s were “rescued” from the slums of New York City and put through the George Junior Republic, a juvenile reform program near Ithaca, New York. This recent work has been assisted by the Appalachian College Association, the Associated Colleges of the South, the Central New York Humanities Corridor Visiting Scholar Program, and the University of the South Faculty Development Fund. An article drawn from this research, “Good and Everlasting Friends: Letter-Writing and Friendship in ‘Boy-Saving’ Reform Endeavors in Progressive-Era America, 1896 to 1906,” will appear later this year in the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth.
Read his full bio here: https://new.sewanee.edu/our-faculty-staff/woody-register/
Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads in Them: Marianne Moore’s “Poetry”
In 1919, Marianne Moore began a poem entitled “Poetry” with a disarming declaration: “I, too, dislike it.” Together, we’ll explore this dense and imaginative lyric, which combines Moore’s remarkable command of form with sardonic humor in order to pull her poem — and poetry itself — inside out.
A Sewanee University faculty member since 2013, Ross teaches Milton, Shakespeare, Renaissance Literature, and English Drama to 1642, as well as Texts and Contexts of the Early Modern World in the interdisciplinary Humanities program. His essays have appeared in Studies in Philology, Spenser Studies, Ben Jonson Journal, SEL, and in several edited collections. In May 2022, he was a Lindsay Young Visiting Regional Faculty Fellow at the Marco Institute for Medieval & Renaissance Studies at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. As the college’s pre-professional teaching adviser, he especially welcomes conversations with students interested in pursuing careers as educators.
To Infinity and Beyond
How do you grapple with a concept like infinity? The trick is to sneak up on it. 150 years ago, an insightful German mathematician Georg Cantor presented an argument about infinity that led to controversy among mathematicians. philosophers and theologians. With only some logic and basic counting, we’ll explore Cantor’s clever idea to explore infinity and beyond.
Emily Puckette began her career in mathematics by teaching and training teachers as a volunteer in the Peace Corps in Gabon in Central Africa. Her mathematical fields of interest are probability and analysis, and her pedagogical focus is engaging students in mathematics through active-learning techniques in the classroom.
* Course specifics subject to change.