August 6, 2024
With a new three-year, $100,000 grant from the Teagle Foundation, the Ursuline College English department and its Rust Belt Humanities Lab will reimagine its undergraduate core composition sequence. Since 2020, the College, through its humanities coursework, has encouraged students to examine the history and narratives of Cleveland as a “Rust Belt” city on the rise.
“Our students graduate with the intellectual framework to engage locally with the community as problem-solvers and critical thinkers,” explains Katharine G. Trostel, PhD, associate professor of English, unit chair of the humanities and founder of the Rust Belt Humanities Lab. “We’re building off this success to restructure these courses to add new context and pride to Cleveland’s history while creating a unifying experience for our students.”
The grant redesigns two key courses in the college’s core curriculum with enrollment of 70% of the College incoming first-year students. The other 30% of the students arrive with prior college credit and do not have to take these classes.
Trostel notes that Cleveland has been central to many of the social movements of the twentieth century: The Civil Rights, American Indian, and Environmental Movements.
She adds, “But when students are asked about the region—their hometown-- they define it as a place they want to leave. We want to encourage our students to stay in the area by unraveling the region’s past and envisioning productive Rust Belt futures. The new course structure will help them write effectively from within and about their region using a language that is both rooted in place and history.”
The grant, “Rhetorics of the Rust Belt: Framing Cleveland through transformative texts,” is funded by the New York-based Teagle Foundation’s “Cornerstone: Learning for Living” initiative.
Valentino Zullo, PhD, assistant professor and Anisfield-Wolf Postdoctoral Fellow in English and the Public Humanities, notes that the majority of Ursuline’s undergraduates focus on “the healing arts”—vocations such as nursing, social work, and art therapy.
“These professions require an understanding of the narratives—both painful and hopeful—that underpin so much of our lived experience in this Rust Belt region; the stories that we tell about place have real consequences,” states Zullo.
The Teagle grant builds off the successful work of earlier grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Cleveland Foundation, and the Modern Language Association's Humanities Innovation Grant for the College’s Rust Belt Humanities Lab.
“Our hope is to inspire students to be civic actors with particular expertise in the problems and promises of the Rust Belt,” states Trostel.
