Brooks Hosfeld is a Butler University 2019 graduate in History & Anthropology and Gender, Women, & Sexuality Studies (now Race, Gender, & Sexuality Studies). He currently works as the Development Director of Sprout City Farms in Denver CO.
Q: How has your experience in the HAC Department helped you after graduation?
A: My experience in what was previously just the History & Anthropology department has been foundational to the ways I see the world and approach my career. I got into fundraising through museum work, in which various museum and archive collections internships during college introduced me to grant writing. My academic writing within the department made me a very strong grant-writer, and this department equipped me to build the professional insight necessary to intersect my passions for justice and community into professional spheres.
Q: How have your Majors helped in your current position?
A: The COVID-19 pandemic moved me away from museums and into more fundraising roles through small community organizations, and I have since ended up flourishing in nonprofit development. Skill-building aside, my degrees and the support I received from Butler faculty have been essential to the ways I perceive current events, communicate with people who want to build a better future (in part by avoiding mistakes of the past), and build relationships in both personal and professional spheres. I love when I’m asked how I got into fundraising for an urban farming nonprofit, because I get to offer a surprise of saying that I was professionally trained in history and anthropology, and that every step to get me where I have been a happy, semi-intentional accident.
Q: Any plans moving forward?
A: After doubling the organization’s operating budget in three years, I am currently seeking other professional opportunities to grow. In and out of work, I root myself in community and the belief that collective liberation is possible.
Archaeology of the Dead, taught by Dr. Lynne Kvapil, was offered for the Fall 2022 semester. It focuses on the archaeological approaches to understanding death and burial, and students explore the varieties of ways humans have responded to death and the dead over time and what we can learn about the dead and the living from funerary remains. The class meets once a week, and each week generally follows the same schedule: during the week, students are assigned readings relating to the subject of the week, then they contribute their thoughts on the readings to a “Hot Takes” discussion board before class, and in class, they discuss the readings, and lectures and group discussions build off of these ideas.
Final Project Presentations 12/08/2022 (Courtesy of Lynne Kvapil)
Dr. K said, “I teach Archaeology of the Dead, but I prefer what the class affectionately calls it—Dead People Class. I had the opportunity to teach an archaeology class, which is really awesome. I’m here as part of the Classics program, and I love it, there’s so much I love about it, but there isn’t always the opportunity for me to teach about the methods side of what I do. As an archaeologist, this is such a great opportunity.”
When choosing the topic for her archaeology class, Dr. K was inspired by one of the first things she started along with her academic job at Butler, which was an archaeological project at the site of Ionia, a prehistoric Greek cemetery with “these crazy, amazing burials.” The project focused on mortuary archaeology, so she developed the class on burials in archaeology to mirror her work with this during her time at Butler. “Since I’ve been here, I’ve had the opportunity to take students to work at Aidonia. We just finished our fieldwork, and we’re studying and thinking about how to understand the burials we excavated. It made sense to me to wrap my work processing that project and thinking about burials and the things we found with students, to think not just about prehistoric Greek burials, but more broadly about what burials are, what they do, and what they mean. The wider scholarship about how archaeologists approach mortuary situations was kind of my inspiration for what the class is about.”
“A lot of what I hope students take away from this class is the methods aspect—what we do with burials and their stuff and how we do it. I loved our class conversations about how we define burials. It seems like an obvious thing, but there aren’t archaeologically specific things you have to look for to distinguish between burials and some other kinds of archaeological context.”
“There are theoretical things we can take away from burials in terms of meaning, and sometimes that can be complicated, but I’m proud of the class because I feel like they have done a great job working through some of these really tough things, things that even some graduate students struggle with. For example, the idea of personhood as a concept is complicated, but they rolled with it. It’s fun for me to see that thinking.”
Students conducting field work in Crown Hill Cemetery (Courtesy of student Danny de la Vega)
I asked several students in the class why they chose to take this class. Multiple people noted they took the class because they love Dr. K, and expressed interest in archaeology and mortuary science, as well as death and the culture surrounding death. Everyone I interviewed was very taken with the class, remarking how much they loved it despite its challenging material. Kiara Somerville, a junior software engineering and economics major with a classics minor, said, “This quickly became my favorite class of the semester and possibly one of my favorites of college in general. The subject matter is so cool and nothing that I ever would have imagined that I would enjoy or learn about. Our class discussions are also very good and weird. I also really appreciate how passionate Dr. K is about this class, and it shines through in the creativity of our assignments, which make the multiple twenty-page readings each week at least slightly bearable.” Gansey Petroff, a senior classics and psychology major, said, “I really love this class; the vibes are immaculate. Everyone is super collaborative during discussions which makes projects and difficult readings much more fun. I’m really comfortable sharing my ideas with everyone and hearing their own.” Senior Lexi Harford, an art and design major with an emphasis in art history and an anthropology minor, remarked, “This class is definitely one of my favorite classes I’ve taken in my undergrad experience. I love that everyone in this class seems as interested in the class as I do and that we all have a bit of a morbid sense of humor that makes the conversations really meaningful, and most of the time, very entertaining.”
When I asked Dr. K what her favorite part about teaching the class is, she responded, “Reading the Hot Takes makes my day because they’re so passionate about what we read, even if it’s something we don’t like. I love it and having that preface to talking about things in class is part of why I’m so excited every Thursday—people are already coming out in full force. It’s really exciting to see what people write out, literally reading their first reactions and then sorting through those feelings in their ideas in class is super exciting and really cool and inspirational.”
When asked what their biggest takeaways from the class were, I received a variety of responses. Petroff remarked that archaeology is really difficult and that it’s destructive by nature, and Somerville answered, “That I know nothing, and that the world really needs to treat human beings with respect.” Sophomore history major Cassidy Paulk said, “My biggest takeaway from the class is that death does not have to be a scary thing. This class has given me a new perspective on death. Firstly, I now view death as another transition in a person’s life. It happens to everyone, yet many people around the world feel differently about it. I have enjoyed learning about the different ideas and practices surrounding death for different people. I think that taking this class is a great decision as it gives you so many ways to widen your perspective.”
Dr. K channeled her creativity and passion for the subject into the final project, which is a culmination of everything that has been covered over the semester. She described, “The final project comes in two parts. The first part is to design a burial and a funeral to go along with it. It’s freeform, you can make it anything you want. The second part is to fast forward in time and think about how an archaeologist would approach your burial. The goal is to think about methodology, how you’d encounter it, how you would sort out your findings, how you would create meaning out of that based on what survives, and how you would ethically approach what you do with your findings. It really incorporates the big underlying themes of the class and asks everyone to be an archaeologist for this thing that they’ve created. I think it’ll be really interesting and I’m excited to see what people come up with!”
A special visit to the class by “Boaty!” (Courtesy of student Gansey Petroff)
The creativity and thoughtfulness of the class comes through with all the unique ideas for final projects. Petroff is “planning on describing a tree pod burial, which is actually how I want to be buried. It sounds super cool because you get to pick what kind of tree you want, and it would represent you in a way. Plus, it would be really hard to excavate, so I’ll have fun with the archaeological description side of things.” Somerville said, “My first thought was a clown funeral, but then I remembered that I’m absolutely terrified of clowns, but I also keep thinking about the clown funeral from Modern Family and think that doing a funeral around some random, quirky profession would be fun. Or the burial of a diehard stan of something random, like Cats the movie because I can just imagine a group of future archaeologists staring at a grave and wondering why there are plastic cat ears and a Taylor Swift poster as grave gifts.” Paulk wanted the final project to connect to something about the differences in practices of funerary customs for people of different genders, and Harford said, “I’m thinking about doing some research on how ceramic glazes are made. I’m a studio art major but also love art history, so I’m imagining cremated remains being incorporated into a slip or glaze that is used to recreate black figure-style pottery with a scene representing the life of the deceased. I wanted to do something far outside of the box that if an anthropologist or an archaeologist found it way in the future, they’d be shocked by it!” There’s no doubt that every single final project is going to be incredibly unique, and a brilliant demonstration of the things learned in this class!
Finally, I asked Dr. K if she is planning on teaching another archaeology class in the future and what it would be on. “I hope so! I pitched a class on my specialty, the Mycenaean Greeks. I haven’t gotten a chance to focus on that because I’m working on another project on the Mycenaeans as a culture and about the archaeologists who have worked with them. It’s a little bit niche, so I don’t know if it’ll go, but I figured that since I have this project coming up, it’ll be important for me to focus on that. The idea of being able to bring students into the scholarly conversation that I’m involved in is really rewarding for me and hopefully, it would be rewarding for them too. I have a ton of ideas, so hopefully, I’ll have lots of opportunities to do something like a theory class or a straight-up methods class!” Be sure to look out for more classes taught by Dr. K in the coming semesters!
To wrap this up, in the words of Dr. K, “Classics rules!”
Dr. Aegis Sluis (she/her/ella) is a professor of Latin American History in the department of History and Anthropology, and affiliate faculty in Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (RGSS) and International Studies (IS). She is also currently the Director of Global and Historical Studies at Butler University.
Areas of Research and Scholarship
Dr. Sluis teaches courses on a variety of subjects, but all deal in some way with the interplay of power, culture, identity formations and historical shifts. Her scholarship generally lands at the intersections of gender, space, and the history of the Americas. Her articles can be found in The Americas, the Journal of Urban History, and the Journal of Transnational American Studies (among others). Her first book titled Deco Body/Deco City: Spectacle and Modernity in Mexico City (University of Nebraska Press, 2016) looks at how new ideas about femininity and female bodies influenced urban reform in Mexico’s capital city in the 1920s and 1930s. Her new project, Warrior Power: Dreaming, Drugs, Death and the Search for Alternate Spirituality in Mexico during the Sixties and Seventies (tentative title), focuses on the interplay between the books and appeal of Carlos Castaneda, the history of anthropology, New Age sensibilities, popular imaginings of Mexico, and indigenismo.
Upcoming and Current Butler Courses
HST 101: An Introduction to History & Anthropology
HST 213/TI 239-HST: Exploring Latin America
PCA 267-HST: Experiencing the City
GHS 204: Contact Zones: Latin America
HST 301: Historiography
She teaches various topics in History, International Studies, RGSS, as well as directing GALA in 2018 and 2022
Professor Amanda Waterhouse is one of the IU Fellowship Doctoral students who is here at Butler teaching for the year. Next semester, she will be offering a continuation of her FYS: Student Power as well as a new course, Urban History of Latin America. Both of these course are new to Butler this year and with her specific expertise, she offers a different perspective on these issues for our current students.
Why do you feel that it is important to teach first year students about student power?
Students are often implicitly taught to accept the world as it is, or, if they want to change things, to do so through institutions in ways that do not directly threaten existing power structures. I think it is a critical part of ethical college teaching to invite students to question that belief in ways that might challenge the very institutions or classrooms in which they learn. In a more socially connected way, we are running out of time to fix the many global inequalities and harmful policies that structure our country and our world, especially related to climate change. In some regions of the world, especially in Latin America, where I did my doctoral research, student activists take on a large role in civic and political life, both historically and today. I believe that we need more young people in the United States to heed the lessons of history and hear the call of political inspiration to help build new powerful collective movements that will benefit us all.
Do you feel that your upcoming course on urban history of Latin America or your FYS course works to continue to reveal unseen histories?
My course on the urban history of Latin America aims to show Butler students the urban realities of the region, from Central and South America to the Caribbean. To many people in the United States, Latin America is largely “unseen,” even though the region’s history and politics are deeply intertwined with those of the United States. There is also a persistent stereotype that Latin America is a rural region, when in fact it is heavily urbanized. In learning about the large-scale, innovative, and often contentious reality of Latin American cities, my hope is that new questions will emerge for students about the U.S. role in the region and some of the urban problems and opportunities that might exist right here in Indianapolis.
In Spring 2022, my FYS class, “Student Power,” will cover the global history of student activism from the 1960s to today. This course seeks to make seen the often forgotten ways in which students have fought for political and social rights, changed the course of history, and shaped modern universities. Beyond recovering student history with young people embarking on their time in college, the course also tries to make visible to students their own political agency. In the last few years, I think that young people in the United States have gained a greater sense of their potential power, as movements around issues such as gun control, racial justice, and climate change have grown. By looking at historical moments when students wielded even more power, we will recover how collective movements are built, destroyed, and reborn, and what happens when young people do nothing.
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