Student Testimonials
“The Gull Island Institute revealed to me the power of a comprehensive educational experience. By working on and studying the land we occupied, I considered questions I never have before about place, human responsibility to the natural world, and labor. I made amazing friends and found myself surrounded by natural beauty that inspired and informed my learning. The whole month was marked by a joyous atmosphere of curiosity.”
Leo Egger, Student
Buzzards Bay Term '23
Yale '23​
Faculty Testimonials
The Gull Island Institute is unlike any other academic institution I’ve been a part of.
My time there and conversations with students, both in the classroom and beyond it, helped me think about how to approach teaching in a way that emphasizes how reading classic texts can be enhanced by attention to urgent contemporary questions and vice versa, and that encourages everyone to show up in the classroom as their full selves.
Alyssa Battistoni
Assistant Professor of Political Science at Barnard College
Gull Island Buzzards Bay Term Faculty
Gull Island offers an incredibly valuable experience not only for students, but also for teachers who can observe, engage, and learn from each other.
I continue to draw on the teaching styles of other faculty I met at Gull Island and am deeply grateful for this completely unique and important pedagogical exchange opportunity.
Margiana Petersen-Rockney
Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, University of Montana
Gull Island Buzzards Bay Term Faculty
Screaming black-backed gulls, sideways rain from an early June nor'easter, and probing discussions of Borges, Genesis, and Hesiod: a week of seminar at Gull Island Institute's Buzzard Bay Term was an extraordinary experience in place-based liberal education. As we inquired together into how to live well in a place, we experimented with doing so: circling the cast-iron stove, sharing our stories of place, and working together to reflect on the entangled lives we live.
Professor of Political Science and Fairbanks Professorship in the Humanities, Bryn Mawr College
Gull Island Buzzards Bay Term Faculty
I have been looking for ways that my work in climate science can evolve so that it makes more of a contribution towards the public good.[...]
​
The Gull Island project seeks to bridge that divide and address the kinds of questions I am asking in a radical way: by building a new kind of institution from the ground up, and connecting humanistic and scientific concerns not just through scholarship, but through embodied practices that allow deeper and more direct connections to each other and to the planet.
Adam Sobel
Professor of Applied Physics and Math; Earth and Environmental Sciences, Columbia University
Gull Island Faculty
Over the past few years, I have been navigating the tension between a career in fundamental scientific research and the urgency of the social and environmental challenges that communities close to me and around the world face.
Teaching at Gull Island was transformative for me in navigating this tension. Through place-based educational activities, the course brought everyone – students and instructors – into a community that was able to interrogate ideas in a way that was simultaneously creative and grounded, bridging the abstractions of both the sciences and humanities and some of the most pressing civic challenges.
Mara Freilich
Assistant Professor of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences, and Applied Mathematics
Gull Island Buzzards Bay Term Faculty
Attending the Gull Island pilot expanded my understanding of traditional knowledge – a concept my own organization is trying to incorporate into practice [...]
​​
The Gull Island Program has great potential to empower and encourage young people to work in areas of public service where they can have a huge impact.
Marit Larson
Chief of Natural Resources Group,
New York City Parks
Gull Island Faculty
