Katherine Cottle ’95 Explores City’s Sounds and Immersive Learning

Katherine Cottle ’95, assistant professor of writing at Goucher College, took part in a weeklong residency funded by a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Landmarks in America History and Culture grant.

 “Cincinnati Sounds: Exploring a Musical City’s Spaces, Places, and Sounds” was a faculty-led project at the UC College-Conservatory of Music that invited scholars, educators, and humanities professionals for an immersive experience “to explore how Cincinnati landmarks shape—and are shaped by—music and sound,” according to the University of Cincinnati.

Over the summer, participants went on site visits and tours of landmarks that included a steamboat, libraries, and public murals and took part in discussions and presentations on instrument making, local history and storytelling, and the music of social justice, with the goal of honing their own tools for research and teaching.

“As an interdisciplinary writer and researcher, I was very interested in learning about the connections between cities and their sounds,” says Cottle. “Cincinnati Sounds highlighted the importance of experiencing and researching auditory routes and networks in mapping a city’s landscape and history.”

Cottle is bringing that kind of interdisciplinary and experiential learning to Goucher next summer with an intensive course abroad (ICA) called Discourses of Independence—Exploring the Freedom Trails in Spain. Cottle and Jeanie Murphy, professor of Spanish and Latin American studies, will take students to Barcelona and Portbou, Spain, for a personal and research-oriented approach to immersion writing while exploring routes to freedom used during the Spanish Civil War and World War II. Goucher alumnae/i and Edenwald residents are also invited to participate in portions of the course. See the program brochure for more.