Over the past several months, Thoreau College has marked several milestones in our growth and development. As of this year, we are now able to offer transferable college credits for our summer and gap semester programs through a new partnership with Prescott College. And this summer we will be welcoming several students from Oberlin College and Stanford University to Wisconsin as interns and participants in our July Driftless Field School program through exciting new partnerships with those schools. Find out more about Thoreau College and apply to the Metamorphosis Gap Semester on our website www.thoreaucollege.org

On this episode of the podcast we meet two people who have had a big impact on the growth and development of Thoreau College while exploring our unique Scholar-in-Residence program which enables scholars (or artists) to participate in Thoreau College as teachers and mentors for up to a year at a time while working on major research and/or creative projects of their own.

Benjamin Bernard-Herman was the 2023-2024 Thoreau College Scholar-in-Residence and is currently serving as a Thoreau College Faculty member as one of the lead instructors of our 2025 Driftless Field School summer program. He is a PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at the University of Illinois-Chicago whose dissertation research is focused on the spiritual and ethical beliefs and ideas that inform the lives and decisions of people engaging in small scale agriculture here in the Driftless Region, including members of the Amish community and back-to-the-land movement, and practitioners of biodynamics.

Julia Buskirk was the 2024-2024 Thoreau College Scholar-in-Residence, as well as a past participant in our Fellowship program in 2021. A native of Milwaukee and a graduate of UW-Madison, Julia has spent the past year teaching and mentoring Thoreau College students while conducting archival and oral history research for her forthcoming historical novel which is focused on agriculture and ecology here in the Driftless Region during the era of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s.

Learn more about our Residency program here: https://thoreaucollege.org/residencies/