The Arts
Students in the Arts at Antioch are makers! From foundations to senior projects, they are engaged in creating works in media (documentary and animation), visual arts (2D and 3D) and performance (experimental theatre and performance art), which are provocative, relevant, beautiful, and innovative. Students also actively engage in making change. They see the potential for art as an important social practice that moves the audience to think differently, feel with others, and find new ways of living.
Faculty members in the Arts Division are practitioner/scholars, active in their fields. They recognize the complex ways that artistic mediums and discourses converge, complement and resonate with each other in communities of artistic practice and social activism. The lines between disciplines blur as students create installations that incorporate performance, animations made from drawings, sculptures that are performed, and media that is whimsical as well as real world.
In addition to studios and classrooms, the Arts Division takes full advantage of the curricular resources available on campus and off, including prestigious arts co-op opportunities at Creative Time, The Kitchen in NYC, Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, Ken Burns’s documentary studio, Chicago Public Radio, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Denver Open Media, Children After School Arts Program, and Mujeres des Artes Tomar in Buenos Aires. On the Antioch campus, students are fortunate to have access to Antioch’s own WYSO—an NPR affiliated radio station renowned for excellent journalism, original programming and community engagement—giving students myriad opportunities for practical professional experience through the Miller Fellowship program, the Community Voices courses and beyond. Additionally, students interact with regional and national artists within the beautiful Herndon Gallery and the Foundry Theater main stage and experimental theater spaces. Curriculum lives within these spaces where students are encouraged to put their theoretical investigations and personal practice to work.
At the end of four years, students design and create a personal culmination of their work here at Antioch; a senior project. These projects are shared with the public and are always interesting and often amazing!
The Humanities
The Humanities Division at Antioch values the diversity of histories and stories, ideas, and questions. We engage globally and locally, interrogating the boundaries of traditional canons, seeking to engage traditions beyond divisions of North and South, East and West. We cross borders and examine boundaries. We believe that the study of History, Literature, and Philosophy opens us to worlds of human experiences and provides us with a better understanding of ourselves and our world, its past and future, and our place within.
The Humanities Division seeks to provide students with a solid grounding in historical knowledge, clear writing, and clear thinking in order to enable students with the means to do the creative and intellectual work they love. Within the Humanities Division, students have done independent research-based and creative projects on a multitude of topics, including Turkish immigrant communities in Dayton; racial discrimination in housing; Chicana feminist literature; rural trans poetry; Books to Prisons projects and the Dayton Correctional Institute; Marxist philosophy; the thought of Walter Benjamin; and a comparative study of Hannah Arendt, Saul Alinsky, and Aristotle.
While the Humanities Division emphasizes texts and contexts, we also seek to conjoin knowledge and action and to connect ideas and experiences. Examples of this include students leading community reading groups at the public library; classes that link the study of the Yoga Sutras to yoga practice at the Wellness Center; activities that integrate the Antioch Farm into the study of philosophy, history, and literature; and participation in the historic 50th Anniversary of the Freedom Summer in Mississippi. Humanities students’ co-op experiences—like studying at the Zen Center in Colorado, teaching at the Arthur Morgan School in North Carolina, or serving as a researcher for ESL and immigrant issues in the Dayton Public Schools—are deeply linked to the academic projects that they choose to undertake; reciprocally, the coursework that Humanities majors engage with at Antioch makes them articulate, informed, and valuable assets for the organizations that they work for.
The Sciences
The Science Division at Antioch College offers a curriculum through which students learn foundational concepts of science in a setting that blends experiential learning, intellectual rigor, and transferable technical skills. Our programs feature small classes and newly renovated labs, with lots of faculty interaction and opportunities to investigate new areas of interest. Antioch Science students learn the tools of the trade of Science: how to make systematic observations, develop hypothesis-driven questions, investigate and critique relevant literature, write research project proposals, and complete a wide variety of projects using on- and off-campus resources.
The Science experience at Antioch is strengthened by outstanding co-operative education opportunities that allow students to apply what they’ve learned in the classroom to the “real world”, and to bring those co-op experiences back to campus to inform their academic programs. Simply put, well-chosen science co-op experiences can accelerate student success in transformative ways. Science co-op jobs are diverse and interesting opportunities for student learning and growth, for example: interning at the City of Dayton Water Quality Lab, working as a Marine Educator at the ForFar Field Station in the Bahamas, interning in various doctor’s offices and medical colleges, and working as a veterinary assistant rehabilitating injured animals.
Our programs encourage students to connect with their passions through independent work that builds on a strong foundation of courses. One hundred percent of our full-time faculty have terminal degrees in their fields, and many of them work with students to offer Independent Studies (SCI 299) and Independent Research courses (SCI 297/397), so that students can work to pursue topics in greater depth. We have outstanding assets used by faculty in students for teaching and research, such as Glen Helen Nature Preserve, The Antioch Farm, renewable energy systems (1 MW solar array and geothermal field), and well-supplied laboratory, field equipment, and computer labs.
Senior Science Research Projects reflect the diverse interests and abilities of our students. The Division is committed to supporting student work by providing opportunities to fund student projects. We proudly celebrate the achievements of our Science majors with a public research forum, and encourage sharing project outcomes with the public as well.
The Social Sciences
The social sciences at Antioch College encompass three fields of study: cultural anthropology, political economy, and psychology. An energetic teaching faculty invites students to develop critical, comprehensive, and interdisciplinary perspectives on the nature of society, human experience and behavior, interpersonal relationships, and power relations. Using a variety of methodologies and modes of inquiry, these fields focus on the interplay between self and other, individual and society, micro and macro levels of analysis, and theory and practice.
Social Science majors apply what they learn in the classroom through experiential education opportunities ranging from the highly regarded Prison Justice practicum, to day trips exploring urban development in Cincinnati, to designing, implementing and evaluating campaigns to increase sustainable behavior on campus. Social science students actively practice what they learn in the classroom through rewarding co-op experiences domestically and around the world.
Recent co-ops included: The White House, Office of Presidential Correspondence (Washington, D.C.), Casa Juan Diego Immigrant Services (Houston, TX), Paralegal Assistant, Outten and Golden (NYC), Civil Rights paralegal (Chicago), Tea Farm Ethnographer (Wazuka, Japan), Clinical Assistant, Hollywood Detox Center (L.A.), Humanize not Militarize intern, American Friends Service Committee (Chicago), Researcher, GLCA Library of Congress Research Initiative (Washington, D.C.), and Community Development intern, La Isla Foundation (Nicaragua).
Through these applied theory experiences, students leave Antioch ready to lead their generation in taking on the major challenges facing humanity in the twenty-first century.