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 Five
School of Communications faculty members led three major Winter
Term courses abroad, traveling all over Europe.
Michael Frontani
mentored 16 students in "Studies in London," where topics ranged
from the Beatles to Jack the Ripper.
Tom Nelson
and Don Grady led the course "Culture of the Great War," an overview
of the cultural legacy of the First World War. They traveled with
29 students to sites in England, Russia, France, Belgium, Germany
and Holland.
"The students
were assigned a number of books pertinent to topics and places within
our field of study," Nelson said. "A special aspect of that assignment
was meeting two of the authors of these books - one in England and
one in France - who each gave added information to our study of
World War I. The authors are Diana Preston who writes about the
sinking of the Lusitania off Ireland and Christina Holstein who
writes about the Battle of Verdun in France."
Students enrolled
in "Culture of the Great War" went punting in England, following
the same route as the World War I poet, Rupert Brooke; talked of
archeology in the trenches of Verdun, France; composed poetry in
those same trenches based on the model of the Great War poets; and
a tackled a 10-mile walking adventure through the snowy streets
of St. Petersburg, Russia.
Vic Costello
and Anthony Hatcher taught 31 students in their course "From Gutenberg
to the Internet." The students traveled through eight countries,
visiting 12 cities as they studied communications developments and
their societal impact, from the scribal culture of the Middle Ages
to the digital revolution of the 1990s.
Among the highlights
of the journey were visits to: BBC Headquarters in London; the Gutenberg
Museum in Mainz, Germany; Wartburg Castle in Eisenach where Martin
Luther was secluded for 300 days and where he translated the new
testament into a unified German language; the door of the Old Castle
Church where Luther posted his infamous 95 theses in Wittenberg;
the remains of the Berlin Wall and the Checkpoint Charlie Museum;
Radio Free Europe headquarters in Prague; Dachau Concentration Camp
near Munich; Olympia Park in Munich, where international media coverage
of the 1972 hostage crises centered; the CERN Institute in Geneva,
where Timothy Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web protocol;
and the Lumiere Institute in Lyon, France, the birthplace of cinematography.
Students and
professors on the Gutenberg experienced a smooth trip right up until
they reached the Geneva airport to try to return home. A snowstorm
caused extensive flight delays. It was so big that it made the headlines,
and a picture of Elon students Ryan Markel, Matt Swope, Nathan Ritz
and Meredith Downen during their patient wait among piles of baggage
became part of a photo layout on the storm carried by Le Matin,
a leading Geneva newspaper.
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