2026 MIS Course List
MIS Block A: May 18-30, 2026
ETP 3500: Sound and Sustainability // Matthew Burner
Session I : Block A
This class will explore sounds of the natural world, joining an ongoing project called “Morven Soundscapes”. A time of dramatic annual change, the late spring and early summer is a terrific time to study sound and sustainability in Virginia. Students will use provided sound field kits and learn software for analyzing and interpreting their own recorded sounds. Students will learn about ecoacoustics theory and principles of sustainability identified through sound. We will explore biophonic and geophonic sounds, and study human-nature interaction in this vast and diverse landscape. This is a 10-day seminar.
COMM 3570/GSVS 3559: Sustainable Ventures in Working Landscapes // Mark White
Session I : Block A
This class will explore how nature and business intersect—developing real-world sustainable business models rooted in the land itself. Can we create profitable, sustainable ventures that restore ecosystems? How do we balance commercial opportunities with responsible land use? What does business look like when it works with nature instead of against it? You’ll tackle these questions and more as you research and design a sustainable business inspired by Morven’s natural resources. This hands-on, place-based course uses the estate’s forests, fields, and working landscapes as a living laboratory to explore business models that create value by preserving, rather than extracting, natural resources. This is a 10-day seminar.
MIS Block B: June 1-13, 2026
PLAP 3160/GSVS 3160: Politics of Food // Paul Freedman
Session I : Block B
How and what we eat is basic to who we are as individuals, as a culture, and as a polity. This course looks at the production and consumption of food in a political context. Food politics and policies have critical implications for the environment, for public health, and for social justice and political equality. Ultimately, we will examine the ways in which the politics of food represents both a reflection and a distortion of fundamental democratic principles. We will also examine a number of current issues confronting food politics and the food system in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the current presidential administration. This is a 10-day seminar.
LAR 3500: Reading & Regenerating Morven’s Cultural Ecologies // Elizabeth Meyer & Michael Geffel
Session I : Block B
Discover the early-stage practices of regenerating ecosystems at Morven. Through fieldwork exercises and close looking (multi-sensory recordings, photo-sampling, 1:1 hand drawings, and temporary installations), students will document several transects along the “ancient road” trace through Morven. Final projects range from a field guide of Morven’s rural cultural ecologies (fields, hedgerows & croplands in transition to regenerative agriculture) to designed experiments in adaptive land management.This is a 10-day seminar.
Course is co-taught by Professor Elizabeth K. Meyer, Morven Sustainability Lab Faculty Director, and Michael Geffel, Practitioner Fellow, UVA Environmental Institute
DANC 3460: Movement & Environment(s) // Kathryn Schetlick
Session I : Block B
In this 10-day practice-based course, we will critically reflect on how we move through, in, and with our environments and develop strategies for activating an ecological conscience that challenges a human-centered worldview. Through collective reading and writing exercises, embodied and perceptual practices, and reflective dialogue, we will explore how somatic and artistic approaches shape our ecological understanding. By the end of the course, we will create personal and group practices in collaboration with Morven —its land, more than human inhabitants, and layered histories—that rehearse new ways of living with precarity on a damaged planet.
Course counts for the Artistic, Interpretive, & Philosophical Inquiry discipline.
2026 MIS Professors
Matthew Burtner, Music
Matthew Burtner is an Alaskan-born composer, sound artist and eco-acoustician whose work explores embodiment, ecology, polytemporality and noise. His music has been performed in concerts around the world and featured by organizations such as NASA, PBS NewsHour, the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the BBC, the U.S. State Department under President Obama, and National Geographic. Burtner holds the position of Eleanor Shea Professor of Music at the University of Virginia where he Co-Directs the Coastal Future Conservatory. He also is founder and director of the Alaska-based environmental music non-profit organization EcoSono.
Paul Freedman, Politics
“The Morven Summer Institute has definitely been one of the most exciting opportunities of my teaching career. To be able to come out to a place away from Grounds, a place that is situated in such a beautiful landscape, and have the chance to talk about, read about and connect with ideas about food, the environment, and sustainability, just makes sense.”
Paul Freedman is Director of the Environmental Thought and Practice major at the University of Virginia, and Associate Professor in the Department of Politics. Freedman teaches courses in media and politics, campaigns and elections, environmental politics, and the politics of food. He is the recipient of the UVA Alumni Board of Trustees Teaching Award and was the first Edward L. Ayers Advising Fellow. Freedman is a member of the University of Virginia Committee on Sustainability and a co-lead of the UVA Sustainable Food Collaborative. Since 2000, Freedman has been an election analyst for ABC News in New York.
Elizabeth K. Meyer, MSL Faculty Director, Landscape Architecture
Elizabeth K. Meyer, RLA, FASLA, is the Merrill D. Peterson Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia School of Architecture. She is also the Founding Director of UVA’s Center for Cultural Landscapes, and the Inaugural Faculty Director of UVA’s Sustainability Lab at Morven. Meyer’s scholarship about aesthetics and environmental ethics, about sustainability and beauty, has influenced the practice of landscape architecture nationally and internationally.
Meyer joined the UVA faculty in 1993 after a decade of design practice and teaching at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Since Meyer’s graduate studies in landscape architecture and historic preservation at UVA (MLA 1982) and Cornell (MA 1983), she has been fascinated by the thick description of landscapes—places replete with cultural memories and biophysical processes. This perspective has afforded her opportunities to research, interpret, plan and design significant projects such as the UVA Academical Village, Bryant Park NYC, the Wellesley College campus, the St. Louis Gateway Arch Grounds, and First Lady Michelle Obama’s White House Kitchen Garden expansion. She is honored to lead the new Morven Sustainability Lab (MSL), to launch the MSL strategic plan and Morven cultural landscape resource inventory and to collaborate with university and community partners on new research, curricular and programming priorities.
She has served in several leadership roles, including the UVA School of Architecture Dean, the Vice-Chair of the US Commission of Fine Arts, the Chair of Dumbarton Oaks Garden and Landscape Studies’ Senior Fellows, and Harvard Graduate School of Design Visiting Committee.
Kathryn Schetlick, Assistant Professor, Dance
Katie Schetlick is a dance artist and educator who summons movement to challenge static, singular notions of “the human” and “the body”. In her research, creative work, and teaching, she centers on embodied learning, collaborative scholarship and making, and active reimagining through praxis.
Appearing as installations, movement scores, site-responsive performances, choreographed walks, and dances, Katie’s work, often in collaboration with other artists and scholars, has been presented in Brazil, Egypt, Poland, the Netherlands, Austria and several cities in theUnited States. Active and ongoing collaborations include projects with Zena Bibler and with Conrad Cheung and Anna Hogg as part of the artist collective, nonhumanities.
Katie holds an MFA in Dance from Hollins University, a Masters in Performance Studies from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and a BFA in Dance with a minor in Anthropology from the Ailey/Fordham BFA program.
Mark White, McIntire School of Commerce
Mark White teaches courses in business sustainability and financial management at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce. His research explores how financial decision-making can drive sustainable outcomes by aligning profitability with long-term ecological benefits. A former Fulbright Scholar, he is a passionate advocate of international education and has led students on more than 30 study-abroad experiences, including two voyages on Semester at Sea. He is currently the Carl P. Zeithaml Bicentennial Associate Professor of Commerce.