The Courses

Six Credits

Finding real passion for your learning can be tricky in any given semester, because you have so many different classes to take and so many responsibilities outside of school. Enter The Catalyst. With us, you will be taking two courses that relate to our classroom cities in vitally important and exciting ways. (Meanwhile, you and your fellow students will be freed from work commitments and all of the other distractions of a typical semester.) The dynamism of our program’s academics is its beauty. In each of our cities, our faculty will give you the wide-angle view of the European classroom you meet each day, from the Renaissance to the Holocaust. While your two Elective Courses will be your summer’s telephoto lenses, bringing your classroom cities and your material into a special focus that only specific disciplines can help you to attain. You will take one of these three-credit courses in London/Paris and the other of them in Berlin/Prague. Students who come on The Catalyst receive credits approved and administered by the University of West Florida. If you’re not a student at UWF, no worries. Our credits transfer to any university or college in the USA, but you should still print up the syllabi below for the classes you want to take with us and discuss these with your academic advisor(s).

  1. First Session Electives

    First Session Elective Courses: London and Paris

    Choose your first-session Catalyst elective course so that the disciplinary and intellectual direction you take feeds your passion and advances the goals you’ve set for your Catalyst journey. All courses are three credit hours and are taught in London and Paris, during the first two weeks of The Catalyst. You must take one of these courses but may not take more than one.

    • ART/scope: Museum, Street and Public Art in History and Today (ART3905)

      Is there a more head-spinning way to experience the scope of art in society than by chasing beauty for half a month throughout London and Paris’ streets and museums? When you’ve cut back and forth all over these great cities with us, you’ll sure to agree that no learning has ever been more eye-popping than this.

       

      Museums as Classrooms

      Lovers of art will tell anyone to get a new bucket list if their life plans don’t include serious learning in the museums we use for our class: The British Museum, The Tate Britain, The National Gallery, The Tate Modern, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Louvre, and the Picasso Museum. You’ll feel the same after you’ve mastered the museums of our cities and the historic architecture that dots your way through London and Paris each day. Like art lovers across the ages, you’ll duck into your favorite pub or cafe after a busy day of seeing incredible beauty and proclaim to your new friends: “I was there in the mix! We had class right there!” 

      Street Art

      If you love to learn about art and the creative process as you stand face-to-face with masterpieces from the past, you’ll relish searching all over London’s Shoreditch neighborhood for the latest work by Banksy. You’ll follow the famous Parisian taggers who argue with obvious power that their outsider art is more important today than anything featured in posh galleries. Stake out the banks of the Thames in the evening when the young graffiti artists head to the South Bank Skate Bark to lay their spray paint claims to greatness.

      War Memorials: The D-Day Beaches

      Finally, you’ll experience how we teach art and its creative processes as a dynamic and gut-punching energy that has always stood at the heart of what civilizations depend on for social identity. We use architectural monuments and public art all over London and Paris to tease out this argument. Then you’ll take a look at the role art has always played in making physical and creative statements that have reached for the embrace of eternity. You’ll feel this eternal touch inside of and around Notre Dame Cathedral. And you’ll experience it when we have our field exercise on the sands of Omaha Beach and the Normandy battle sites from World War II. This is where we explore how gravestones, sculpture, and other elements of public art have been used to give a call of remembrance to the hell on earth that was our world when fascism and Nazism were stopped by young soldiers who died in the millions.

      The Requirement: From Art Theory to Art Practice

      Welcoming art majors and non-majors alike, our class will expose you to new ways of seeing as you also explore how so many generations before you have defined and fulfilled the expanding scope of art. Get ready to explore your own artistic scope as you work individually and with your fellow students on what our course calls “The Requirement.” This unique element of our class will be done mostly on our day crossing the English Channel from Portsmouth, England to Normandy, France–and then in conjunction with our experience together on the D Day beaches. You’ll use photography, pen and ink, watercolor, charcoal grave rubbings from the American Battlefield Cemetery or beach sand and debris from Omaha Beach to make “The Requirement” a piece of personal artistic response to what many students call the most moving learning day of their lives.

    • ART–ShutterSPEED: Telling your Visual Story through Art Photography in London and Paris (ARH4955)

      When students finish college and go on to their busy professional lives, plenty of things are forgotten from four years on campus. This course will see to it that almost nothing you see and do on your study-abroad summer with us will fail to live into the future. Because if there’s ever been a time when sophisticated visual story telling has mattered to the brands we love and the brands we are, that time is now. In our course, you’ll take two weeks to learn how to see beauty all around you and to capture that beauty. London and Paris will be your classrooms each day, as our class uses museums, galleries, streets, parks and outsider art/street art to change forever how you use your own visual fluency and images to tell the story of your life and of the world around you. Warning: your Instagram and Snap followers might just come to hate you after seeing the world of London and Paris through your images. Click here to the the Shutterspeed 2017 syllabus (1)

    • ENGLISH–Shakespearience: Finding the Literary and Historic Bard in England, France and Beyond (ENL4224)

      William Shakespeare has been rightly called the greatest writer in the English language. What’s less know about is the sweep his works have enjoyed for centuries beyond the English speaking world or the merry olde England where he was the ultimate “player.” In our class, you’ll read his plays and sonnets and attend productions of his works, as you seek each day to understand who Shakespeare was and why his genius has spoken so powerfully for centuries to both the powerful and the oppressed.

      The Seamy London of Shakespeare’s Age

      Part of searching for Shakespeare will mean walking along the once-seamy South Bank of the Thames in London, wherein the “Bard’s” era bawdy theatre, fire eating, and bear baiting were popular amusements to enjoy before going to The Globe for a performance of Hamlet. We’ll tour the incredible Globe ourselves and then queue up for a live play, as we stand like the “groundlings” did to take in the lyrical genius of an iconic play.

      Shakespeare’s Birth Place and Home: Stratford

      Your course will take a day to visit Stratford-upon-Avon, where Shakespeare was born and died. What can we learn about the writer from his own will and testament? How can we understand his genius more intimately by seeing where he lived and wrote? Part of our search will also feature the green spaces of London and what it feels like to sit in them and passionately unpack some of the most lyrical and hilarious lines ever written in our native tongue.

      Now He Belongs to the Ages: The Global Shakespeare

      Finally, our course will take a global view on the majestic legacy of the international settings and controversial play stagings that have been the history of many of Shakespeare’s works. We’ll explore how his history plays, in particular, were performed all along the western front in France during World War One. You’ll also learn about the life that his works enjoyed in France under the Nazi occupation, as covert performances became resolute reminders that eventually liberation from and victory over Hitler would come. We’ll also take a look at how he imagined a great city like Paris–where we’re quite sure he never visited other than in texts and images–with sufficient clarity and conviction to write it as he needed it to be written for his plays to be effective.

      So do come with us and get your hands dirty as we muck around the dig sites of the old Rose and Curtain theaters. While we also clean our hearts of some of the clutter and confusion that we all carry with us in life. From London to Stratford to Paris, we’ll search for clarity and the eternal in our quest to know the sources and the scope of William Shakespeare’s stunning genius and literary reach.

       

    • HISTORY: In the Time of Blitzkrieg: World War Two in London, Paris and on the D-Day Beaches (HIS4955)

      Today, the bustling and charming streets of London and Paris seem forever removed from their terrible history when Hitler ruled almost all of Europe. Your time in this class will bring the terrors of that time back to life. Each day will show new ways of seeing the still-living brutality of the Blitzkrieg that overran France in 6 weeks and threatened to do the same to the United Kingdom. You’ll walk in the indelible shadows of history and memory with us as we explore the origins of the war and then trace its terrifying course.

      The Blitz: When it Rained Bombs in London

      You’ll be astonished to learn the scope of the Nazi air attack on London and how it nearly brought about the surrender of the UK. You’ll also learn what the leadership of Prime Minister Winston Churchill meant to his fellow countrymen and the fortunes of Hitler’s plans to subjugate the British. Your Blitz walk with us will culminate at the Imperial War Museum where the plight of London in 1940 and 1941 can feel so real to some that there’s an emergency evacuation door inside the museum’s “Blitz Experience.”

      The Holocaust in France: The Vel d’Hiv Roundups of Jews in 1942

      When you’ve begun our week of learning in Paris, you’ll walk the quiet streets where the Jewish ghetto thrived for centuries. As you’ll have your feet on the cobblestones of what has occupied France from June 1940 until August 1944. What was occupation like? How did the Holocaust happen to French Jews? What did the French do to resist the Nazi occupation? Who were the heroes and who were the martyrs? Each day you’ll use your notebook and smartphone to engage with the treachery, villainy, and murder that came to be matters of life and death in the time of blitzkrieg and occupation.

      Omaha Beach: The Blood-Sand of Liberation

      There’s no feeling as a learner to match what it is to stand above Omaha Beach in the American military cemetery as you walk with us where the brave soldiers of D-Day fought and fell to launch the liberation of the European continent. In this course, you’ll have that experience as we connect the UK and France finally to our own soldiers and the valiant fight that was Operation Overlord and the liberation of France.

       

    • HISTORY: Raiders: Hunting for the Heart, Soul, and Society of the Ancient World in London and Paris Today (HIS4955)

      To paraphrase many a historian prior to lecture: “Today’s class will turn in both brutal and beautiful directions.” Your class with us features two intensive weeks of this adage in high resolution. As you focus on the stories of blood spilled in war, the sacrifices made to gods long forgotten, and the treasured monuments erected to memorialize the heroic dead, you’ll make London and Paris your living classrooms. Each day, you’ll get up-close-and-personal with the artifacts and creations and their poetic and brutal efforts to offer homage to eternity left behind.

      Walking the Boundaries of the Ancient World

      While traversing the busy metropolitan streets of what were once only colonies of an ancient empire, we will meditate on what urban life was like 2,000 years ago. Not only will we read about gladiators and the politics of Roman games, but we will also do so in the ruins of an arena, the very place where gladiators fought and died. We will retread the steps of the followers of the mysterious god Mithras as we walk through his temple, brought to life by the latest technology. We will read the work of Julius Caesar on his war with the ancestors of the French, while gathered in the famous cafés of Paris. Standing before the tomb of Napoleon, we will discover how his conquest of Egypt in the 18th century lit the spark of Europe’s obsession with “exotic” ancient Egypt.

      Hieroglyphic 101: The Rosetta Stone

      As we walk through the celebrated halls of the Louvre in Paris and the British Museum in London, we will reconstruct the histories of the ancient past through its remains. Our course would not be complete without experiencing the physical dominance of Hammurabi’s Code, one of the oldest law codes in the world, or gazing upon the imposing, colossal statues of Akhenaten, Egypt’s heretical king. Using the most famous royal decree from antiquity, the Rosetta Stone, we will learn to read some basic Egyptian hieroglyphs. From there, we turn our attention to the controversial Elgin Marbles, taken from the Athenian Parthenon, a symbol to one of the world’s first democracies.

      Come uncover the ancient past and experience for yourself the world of the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians. The sacred and the profane will both be in your view, and so will the brutal and the eternally beautiful.

    • PSYCHOLOGY–Mindfulness: Theories and Practices of Positive Psychology in Europe Today (PSY3095)

      Vast bodies of research have shown that the negative stories we tell ourselves are contrary to our own wellness. Similarly, it’s well documented that higher expressions of personal and collective wellness can correlate with the mindful practice of everyday life. This course explores how positive psychology is understood and developed in the UK and France by various governmental and institutional entities today.

    • PSYCHOLOGY–Madness: Psychopathology in European History and Today (PSY3905)

      Madness has been conceptualized in many ways over the centuries. From the iconic statues of “Raving and Melancholy Madness” that stood outside of Bedlam in the 17th century to the fits and poses of the “hysterics” in Charcot’s La Salpetriere. Then on to the mute soldiers of the Great War suffering from “shell shock” to modern day notions of “mental illness.” This class travels to these historic institutions and takes a close-up look at the connections between trauma and the development of human problems over the centuries. The course also explores what social psychology teaches us regarding the development of historic political movements like the French Revolution? This course will use social psychological concepts to analyze these movements, the coming to power of individuals like Napoleon, and Robespierre and the various methods and workings of propaganda during the eras of the two world wars. An analysis that informs not only the past, but current political movements and world leaders as well, Hysteria–as we explore trauma, propaganda, and leadership, will definitely not be your typical psychology class. But then, London and Paris are far indeed from you normal classrooms, and neither are the D-Day landing beaches, where we’ll study first-hand the battlefield context for what would be called “battle fatigue” in the era of World War Two.

       

  2. Second Session Electives

    Second Session Elective Courses: Berlin and Prague

    Choose your second-session Catalyst elective course to complement what you studied in London and Paris. All of our second session courses are three credit hours and are taught in Berlin and Prague, during the second two weeks of The Catalyst. You must take one of these courses but may not take more than one.

    • ART–MultipleEXPOSURES: Art and Travel Photography (ARH4955)

      Our world today is swollen with images on every platform imaginable. Yet most of these photographs lack any value as art. And most don’t even expand the social media reach they’re meant to achieve. Why? Because they fail one or all of the basic tests of composition, dynamism, technical integrity, or artistic vision. In our class, you’ll use the amazingly vibrant cities of Berlin and Prague as a cultural context for what you’ll learn each day about the art of taking evocative and powerful travel photographs. With the skills you’ll acquire in our class, your own work as an artist, blogger, media influencer, or brand driver will be markedly enhanced.

      Image Capture: The Street is your Studio

      After technical work each day, you’ll start your apprenticeship to photographic art in the streets of Berlin and Prague. No cities in Europe have seen more change in their tortured histories than these. And because the streets, buildings, and monuments reverberate with this hard history, so will the images you capture and produce. Whether your shooting list on any given day is about transportation, food, shopping, historical monuments, sports or nightlife, the street will be your studio. While some of your fellow students will have 35m cameras and maybe even multiple lenses, others will be using just their Smartphone in conjunction with editing software. Our mantra will be simple: it is vision and technique and not the equipment that will get your images hung on walls.

      Image Production: Your Smartphone and a Good Cafe

      If hyper compelling photos are sometimes just snapped, more often the photos we truly appreciate are carefully produced using editing software. In our course, you’ll download powerful editing apps to your Smartphone and/or tablet. With these tools, we’ll work with you to identify, frame, and manipulate your raw images to become powerful photographs you’ll highlight in the professional portfolio our course will have you create. The very best of these art photographs will then be further culled and produced to become story-telling elements in the travel photography blogs you’ll produce for key assignments in our class.

      Art Photography and You: This Class and your Career

      While many of our students will be art majors, you may not be. That’s perfect. Our course believes that the clear-headed vision needed to capture and craft art and travel photographs is related to the same skill set that helps a person write plainly and with potency. It’s also in the wheelhouse of anybody who wants a career that touches even the edges of marketing, brand development or media.

    • HISTORY–In the Garden of Beasts: Nazism and the Holocaust (EUH4905)

      Few classrooms can compare to Berlin and Prague when it comes to studying Nazism and the Holocaust. Berlin was the epicenter of the New Order that Hitler built, and the vestiges of the 1933-1945 era remain very present here.  From the museum that stands today where Gestapo Headquarters were in the Nazi era to the roll-call field at Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, our class will walk the terrible trail that was the path of the Nazis and their war against the Jews and others whom the regime deemed “undesirable.” From Berlin, we will go as the Nazis did and follow their swath of occupation and murder East to the jewel of former Czechoslovakia: Prague. It is the city where Hitler and Himmler installed their most trusted and brutal soldier, General Reinhard Heydrich, to govern the conquered city and the “protectorate” of which it was the centerpiece. Prague is also where the covert mission “Anthropoid” crystallized in 1942 with the assassination of Heydrich. We will study how the Nazi occupation worked as we also explore how resistance movements grew up in Prague and elsewhere. We’ll take as our classroom such hallowed places as the village of Lidice, the Cathedral of St. Cyril and St. Methodius, and Prague Castle itself. Click here to review the 2017 syllabus for Nazism and the Holocaust Syllabus (1) (1)

    • Bully Pulpit: Business Branding, Public Relations and Principles of Mass Communication (MMC2000 or MMC3905)

      In its long and sometimes terrible history, the city of Berlin has known claims of fake and real news more fully than almost anywhere on earth. Our class will walk right into the darkest history of propaganda and a state-controlled media as we explore media history in Berlin during the Nazi and Soviet-bloc eras. We’ll also explore the counter history to those repressive eras, as we interrogate how liberation struggles and resistance movements used media under the Third Reich and when the Berlin Wall cast its horrible shadows all across the globe. Then we’ll explore what media has become in its modern moment in Europe, as we use edgy content companies, PR firms, radio and TV stations and more as our roving classroom scours Berlin and Prague to learn how the brightest brands and the most effective media strategies are being developed every day. This course meets General Education Breadth requirements in the Social Sciences for students at the University of West Florida.  For students who are Comm majors, you will register instead for MMC3905

    • ENGLISH–Being and Nothingness: Camus, Mann, Kafka and Literature of Survival in the Age of Auschwitz (LIT3191)

      Fascism. Communism. Totalitarianism. Nationalism. Existentialism. Cubism. Dadaism. Surrealism. To the student of culture in the 20th century, it would seem that the century was driven by belief systems and movements that controlled art and politics. The individual caught in the force and current of these movements often had few options for survival; the currents of destruction and terror and isolation seemed overwhelming. This course examines these historical forces, but more importantly, it looks at the human response to these historical forces: the attempt on the part of the individual to maintain some semblance of routine and normality, the attempt on the part of the individual to maintain some sense of self and individuality, and the attempt on the part of the individual to maintain some sense of meaning and purpose. Click here to review our Being and Nothingness Syllabus 2017 (1) 

    • PSYCHOLOGY: Sexuality and Gender (SOP3905)

      The pink triangle was born in Nazi Germany as a means of identifying gay people to discriminate against, round up, and eventually murder in the 1940s. Yet as this class will show, the sometimes brutal cultural and the medical and state politics of sexual orientation and gender identities were not born with Hitler. Before and after the Nazis, sex and gender roles have been hotly contested aspects of social life in Europe and beyond, and remain so to this day.

Faculty

Professors are selected to join The Catalyst because of their expertise in our teaching fields and because of their vast experience in global research and education. That Catalyst routinely draws top professors from 5-6 different academic institutions in the USA. If you’d like to learn more about how you can join our faculty in a future summer, contact Dr. Doug Mackaman, Director of The Catalyst.

Dr. Felicia Morgan is Associate Professor of Marketing at UWF. A specialist in consumer culture and marketing behavior, Dr. Morgan is known for her love of literature and the arts as they relate to spaces of consumer behavior in Europe. if you’ve never had class at Kensington Palace and enjoyed high tea there, you’ve missed learning from Dr. Morgan. If you don’t know your way around the most lush and amazing outdoor markets in Paris? You didn’t take Dr. Morgan’s class. And if you failed to learn how central pubs and cafes are to the social and marketing lives of UK and French citizens? That’t not Dr. Morgan’s fault.

Dr. Julia Troche is an Egyptologist. Her primary areas of interest include ancient Egyptian social history and religion, but she also conducts research on the histories of the ancient Near East and the Classical world. She has worked as an excavator, field surveyor, and epigrapher at Abydos and Luxor in Egypt, and at Petra, Jordan. Before coming to Missouri State, Dr. Troche taught undergraduate and graduate courses on ancient Egyptian art, history, religion, and hieroglyphs at her alma mater, UCLA.

Additionally, Dr. Troche has helped develop education outreach materials and programming: she co-curated the exhibition Uncovering Ancient Egypt: Ancient Crafts, Modern Technologies in 2014, worked with PublicVR to help build an exemplar of a virtual ancient Egyptian temple, and continues to write articles for the young adult history and archaeology magazines Calliope and Dig.

A personal and professional advocate for study abroad, Dr. Troche studied abroad in Paris as an undergraduate and credits that experience as critical to her decision to become a scholar.

Dr. Mickey Wadia has been teaching Theater courses abroad for many years and has served in London on multiple occasions as a campus coordinator for large study-abroad programs.  He is a Distinguished Professor in the Languages and Literature department at Austin Peay State University and specializes in the works of William Shakespeare. 

Dr. Bryan Brinkman teaches in the Department of Classics and History at Missouri State University. Dr. Brinkman received his PhD in Ancient History from Brown University in 2016. While completing his degree, he held fellowships at the German Archaeological Institute and the University of Cologne.

His work focuses on forms of popular communication—both written (e.g. graffiti) and oral (e.g. acclamation)—in antiquity, especially the Roman Empire. He has publications in Brill’s Companion to Classical Receptions and The Landmark Julius Caesar. He is also working on a monograph that explores collective vocalization in Roman history.

Dr. Ashley Thompson is Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota Duluth. A veteran of study abroad program learning, coordinating and teaching, Dr. Thompson has the following as her main research themes:

Attitudes, Judgments, and Motives related to Romantic and Sexual Behavior
Gender Differences in Romantic and Sexual Experiences
Variables Influencing the Endorsement of a Sexual Double Standard
The Influence of Stereotype Threat on Gender Differences in Emotional Intelligence

Dr. Thompson is the director of the Sexuality and Relationship Science Lab at UMD.

Dr. Thompson also has a passion for applied research in social and organizational settings. Consequently, Dr. Thompson has numerous consulting experiences in which she assisted with the development, implementation, analysis, and dissemination of  campus climate surveys and other related program evaluations.

Dr. Carolyn Pritchett Assistant professor of Psychology at the University of West Florida, where she teaches general psychology, neuroscience, neuroanatomy, cognitive science, and affective neuroscience.

Dr. Pritchett specializes in biological psychology and neuroscience. She conducts research into feeding behaviors; the role diet and gut-brain hormones play in behavior and psychological well-being; and obesity, diabetes and gastric bypass (weight loss surgery).

She received a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Samford University, master’s in psychology with a concentration in cognition and neuroscience from the University of Missouri, and doctorate in neuroscience from Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine before being a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. John Bloodworth teaches Mass Communications and media at the University of West Florida.  Beloved by his students for his approachability and passion in the classroom, John had a first career in corporate law and marketing strategy as a business executive with Coca Cola. John has previously taught Mass Communications in Edinburgh to study abroad students. His research has focussed on music and youth culture in times of 20th century political rebellion.

Dr. Douglas P. Mackaman is Distinguished Visiting Professor of European History and Global Programs at the University of West Florida and founding director of The Catalyst and The Village Programs. Previously,  Dr. Mackaman was tenured full professor of French History and Global Studies at The University of Southern Mississippi, where he served as Director of The British Studies Program and was also founding Director of both The Abbey and The Compass Programs. Dr. Mackaman has written widely in the cultural history of Europe from the 18th century onward and has been teaching US students abroad since 1996. Dr. Mackaman consults widely in global program development. Dr. Mackaman is well known by generations of students as being a professor who can mostly out-walk anybody when the goal at hand is learning a European city.

Dr. Richard Seefeldt is Professor of Psychology at The University of Wisconsin River-Falls, where he is a counseling psychologist who teaches courses in General, Abnormal, Personality, and Clinical Psychology. His research interests have focused on addictive behaviors, social cognitive aspects of evaluation and relationships, and the history of madness. Dr. Seefeldt has taught study-abroad students all over Europe for more than a decade. His knowledge of our Catalyst cities is without peer, as his familiarity with the old rehearsal spaces and first live venues of the greatest punk bands in history.

Dr. Andrew Woolley is Professor of English at Southwestern Adventist University, where he also is Director of Honors. Dr. Woolley has been teaching US students abroad regularly since the early 1990s, with London, Athens, Rome, Venice and Paris as his more recent abroad “classrooms” of choice.  A class with Dr. Woolley is a life lesson in every sense, and no student who has learned from him abroad will ever forget his gentle genius and incomparable wit.

Dr. Travis Tubre is Professor and Chair of Psychology at The University of Wisconsin-River Falls and Senior Lecturer at the Center for Human Resources and Labor Studies at the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota. Dr. Tubré has taught US students abroad in England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Scotland. His students wax fondly about his infectious enthusiasm and the unending passion he has for our teaching cities in Europe.

Dr. Darren Bernal is Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina Asheville. He teaches counseling, group psychology, multicultural psychology, community psychology, abnormal psychology, and cultural psychology. Bernal’s research focuses on socioeconomic status, social connectedness, mindfulness and well-being. If you take his Catalyst course, you’ll walk the great parks and cityscapes of both London and Paris. As you explore what the built environments, museums and green spaces of these places do every day to encourage a mindful and positive encounter with social life. And will you adopt the practice of yoga? Will you take to meditation? Dr. Bernal is well known for bringing students into touch with a holistic way of living. His students adore these gifts.

Dr. Joni Henry Noble is Professor of Art and Photography at The University of Louisiana Monroe, where she also lives and works as a practicing and well-known visual artist. Dr. Noble’s recent honors as an artist include the presentation of her work in the famed Summer Exhibition of the British Royal Academy in 2015.  She has been teaching students in Europe regularly for a decade and is one of the founding professors of The Catalyst Programs. Dr. Noble specializes in bringing the practices of art to life, and with her beloved Europe as a muse this process catches fire each summer on The Catalyst.