The 2017 NEH Summer Institute, titled “CITY/NATURE: Urban Environmental Humanities,” is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, part of a supporting 290 humanities projects across the United States. The summer institute, administered through the 91̽»¨, was awarded a grant of $179,256 to fund the program.

The summer program for teachers “responds to the call for a broader and more inclusive approach” to the teaching of environmental studies, co-organizer , associate professor of landscape architecture, wrote in a statement. “Intended for college and university faculty, the institute will explore the emerging landscape of the urban environmental humanities as it informs scholarship and teaching.”

Though the program’s readings and discussions “will engage a range of global cities, the institute will use Seattle as an urban case study throughout.” About 25 college and university teachers will attend.

Organizing the program with Way are , associate professor of landscape architecture; and , associate professor of French and Italian studies. 91̽»¨faculty joining them as guest speakers will be , associate professor in the Jackson School and director of the ; , associate professor of architecture; , associate professor of history and , associate professor of classics. Other guest speakers will include David Pellow of the University of California, Santa Barbara, William Gleason of Princeton University, Laura Pulido of the University of Southern California and Stephanie LeMenager of the University of Oregon.

“Cities are our greatest challenge and our greatest opportunity to steward the natural world,” Way said. “Humanists can help scientists and planners think about people, culture, and society in our understanding of the natural world, and scientists and planners can help humanists understand the role of the natural world in our global cultures.”

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For more information about the 2017 NEH Summer Institute, contact Way at 206-685-2523 or tway@uw.edu.

And this year’s biggest find, in which 91̽»¨student archaeologists played a support role as excavators and soil samplers at the site in Israel, was evidence of a between the Far East and the West.

A dozen 91̽»¨students participated this summer — all women, as it happened — led as usual by , associate professor of classics, who created the field school program with colleagues at Hebrew University and the University of Haifa.

Stroup said perhaps the best thing about the annual six-week summer field school is that her students, most of whom have no archaeological training, become her fellow researchers — even her teachers.

She said her students do more than merely learn about the reality of modern archaeology, “they themselves contribute to it. Whether they find a rare gemstone, as in 2009, or help solve the complex stratigraphic relations of massive industrial buildings, as they did this summer, every year our students are not merely consuming knowledge, but are adding to it.” Stratigraphy, she explained, is the relation between strata, or layers of construction phases.

A “tel” is an archaeological mound built up over centuries of human occupation. Dor was an ancient port city on Israel’s Carmel Coast and a strategic hub of the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean area for thousands of years. The field school website explains, “Dor’s inhabitants have left behind a cross-section of 3,000 years of history, including Hellenistic catapult shots, Roman jewelry, a Crusader fort, and the cannons of Napoleon’s army.”

With excavation work during the days and evening lectures taught by international experts, Stroup said the program offers “the kind of intensive, focused and personalized learning that would be completely impossible in a campus setting.”

• Read a student blog post by Nicole Aqua presented by the Stroum Jewish Studies Program: “.”

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