Rhodes Summer Academy

In Crafting Stories, you will study elements essential to writing sophisticated literary narratives, both fiction and nonfiction. We’ll study published stories and practice skills in characterization, plot, effective imagery, and sharp syntax. You will write several exercises in each genre, receive class and instructor feedback, and complete a story in each genre. We will end the course by creating zines (small magazines) of student work. 

Every writer has a singular voice—as poet Mark Doty puts it, “a perceptual fingerprint.” This course will help you find your own artistic fingerprint. 

This course is designed to teach through active learning many of the foundational principals of chemistry. Each day, we will have a target set of concepts to address, and every class period will involve a mixture of lecture, discussion, and problem solving. Mornings will be spent in laying out the importance of each topic, its applications to everyday life, and the solving of problems associated with those concepts. And in the afternoons, each lab is designed to allow students to further explore the topics from the morning class through a hands-on approach. Most of the labs are designed to be inquiry-based, allowing students to arrive at their own conclusions. No previous experience in chemistry is required. 

Contemporary culture is awash in digital media, whether we like it or not. In this course, we’re going to be looking “under the hood” at the underlying analog concepts and techniques that enable these digital technologies surrounding us. We will take a very broad view of “Analog,” “Digital,” and “Art,” and we will embrace "Intro" as meaning “quick dives into many topics of interest.” Along the way we’ll look at, listen to, and experience a momentous heap of relevant creative works. 

In this course, students will learn how to analyze, design, and make video games. In each day’s morning session, we will examine how these games’ four core components—gameplay (the rules), narrative (the story), visuals (the art), and audio (the sound)—work together. The goal is to understand how these elements combine to create a specific experience that will help us shape our game development. Then, in the afternoon sessions, students will learn programming fundamentals (like conditional flow control, iteration, functions, data structures, and object-oriented design) as they build a video game demo using a dedicated video game engine (Godot) and learn in a hands-on way about user interfaces, graphics, and game logic. (No prior knowledge or experience is required.) By the end of the course, then, students will have designed and built their own individual game demo to go along with the knowledge they have acquired about such games more generally!

Of particular interest to those students who are curious about the growing field of medical humanities or about the health sciences and medicine more generally, this course will introduce participants to the theories and practices of ancient medicine in the West, beginning with its origins in the Near East, Egypt, and Greece and then tracing its development into Rome and beyond. Through investigation of primary source documents—both written and artistic—students will discover the beginnings of some of the most important fields of medicine, including the diagnosis and treatments of various diseases and ailments, the systematic observation and analysis of epidemics, treatments for mental health, and even early techniques within veterinary science. Special attention will also be paid to ethics and professional conduct, including oaths, the rise of specialized healing spaces—such as sanctuaries and hospitals—and controversial topics such as eugenics and infanticide.