After a successful pilot year, the Odyssey Project will return this fall with a new group of faculty and students. The Odyssey Project is a yearlong, college-accredited course in the humanities offered at no cost to adults in the Champaign-Urbana community living below or slightly above the federal poverty level. The purpose of the course is to introduce students to the humanities and to help them reenter the world of higher education.

The program, which begins August 30 and runs through May, offers instruction in five discrete disciplines in the humanities: literature, philosophy, art history, U.S. history, and writing and critical thinking. The class enrolls 25 to 30 students; prospective students must live at 150% of the poverty level or lower, be 17 years of age or older, be able to read an English-language newspaper, and, in interviews with the project coordinator, demonstrate a desire to complete the course.

The course is hosted by its community partner, the Douglass Branch Library. There is no tuition fee, and books, transportation vouchers, and child care are also free to all students. Students who complete the course receive six hours of college credit, which can then be transferred to other two- or four-year colleges.

Faculty for the course are drawn from departments at the U of I, and receive release time from one course in order to teach in the Odyssey Project. This fall, Audrey Petty (English) will teach literature, and Timothy McDonough (Educational Policy Studies) will teach philosophy. In the spring, Dana Rush (Art History) will teach art history, and Jim Barrett (History) will teach U.S. history. John Marsh (English), who also serves as project coordinator for the initiative, will teach writing and critical thinking, which runs throughout the year. Kerry Pimblott (History) also joins the staff this year as graduate assistant to the program.

The Odyssey Project is a joint undertaking of the IPRH and the Illinois Humanities Council. Funding for the course is also provided by the U of I Office of the Chancellor and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

In addition to the Champaign-Urbana Odyssey Project, the Illinois Humanities Council offers courses in Chicago and Springfield. The Illinois Humanities Council’s partner in the course is Bard College in New York, which launched the Clemente Course in the Humanities in the early 1990s; the Clemente Course led to the implementation of similar community-based humanities courses in more than fifty cities across the country. Bard College continues to work with the Illinois Humanities Council on the Illinois version of the course and to oversee courses in other cities across the country; it is the granting institution of the six hours of credit that student who complete the course receive.

Faculty who are interested in teaching in the Odyssey Project in future years are encouraged to contact John Marsh at jemarsh@uiuc.edu.

The first year of the Champaign-Urbana Odyssey Project began in September 2006 with 26 students; twelve students graduated from the course on May 5, 2007. Of those twelve, ten students completed the course at a level high enough to earn six hours of general humanities credit from Bard College.

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Teaching the Odyssey Project 2007-08

James Barrett (History) – James Barrett specializes in U.S. and comparative working-class history and class, race, and ethnicity in 20th-century U.S. social history. In addition to numerous articles, he is the author of William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism and Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago’s Packinghouse Workers, 1894-1922. His current research interests focus on racial and ethnic identity and relations in working class communities and the relationship between personal and historical experience.

Timothy McDonough (Educational Policy Studies) – Tim McDonough has defended a dissertation entitled “Teaching Symbolic Rhetoric for Multicultural Education” and will receive his Ph.D. in the fall. His research areas include the philosophy of education and the development of online education. He has published an article entitled “The Fools’ Pedagogy” and has forthcoming articles on rights pedagogy and the course of “culture” in multiculturalism. He is currently serving as the Coordinator of the Ethnography of the University Initiative at the U of I.

John Marsh (English) – John Marsh is the editor of You Work Tomorrow: An Anthology of American Labor Poetry, 1929-1941. In addition to articles and reviews published in Legacy, American Literature, Pedagogy, Workplace, and Inside Higher Ed, he is currently working on a book entitled Red Scare: The Anti-Marxist Origins of Modern American Poetry, which examines the role workers and the poor played in the development of early 20th-century American poetry. He is also the Coordinator of the Champaign-Urbana Odyssey Project.

Audrey Petty (English) – Audrey Petty’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in several journals, including African American Review, StoryQuarterly, Callaloo, Massachusetts Review, and Louisville Review. Her poetry has been published in Crab Orchard Review and her essay, Late-Night Chitlins with Momma, recently featured in Saveur Magazine, was selected for inclusion in Best Food Writing 2006. She has been awarded a Hedgebrook Residency and the Tennessee Williams Scholarship at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.