Courses in Valley   

Your Life As A Work Of Art is a refinement of a previous class: Applying The Creative Process To Your Life, offered at OLLI UVA and The Center in 2025. Your Life As A Work Of Art focuses directly our inherent creative tools and the Seven Phases of Creation of manifesting/experiencing our intended creations. Albert presents each topic with a dash of humor and the promise of lively discussion.

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Your Life As A Work Of Art is a refinement of a previous class: Applying The Creative Process To Your Life, offered at OLLI UVA and The Center in 2025. Your Life As A Work Of Art focuses directly our inherent creative tools and the Seven Phases of Creation of manifesting/experiencing our intended creations. Albert presents each topic with a dash of humor and the promise of lively discussion.

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This course explores how Russia and others pursues its foreign policy objectives using every means available short of overt military invasion. In many cases this means propaganda, criminal elements, intelligence agencies, energy policy, cyberattack, among others. The course will explore the intellectual development of the concept of hybrid warfare, an early case study in Lebanon (2006), Georgia (2008), the main example in Ukraine 2014-2022. The course will explore how adversaries use hybrid means against NATO members, and how China employs its version of hybrid warfare.

Required reading: 

Berzinš, Janis. Russia’s New Generation Warfare in Ukraine: Implications for Latvian Defense Policy. (Riga: Center for Security and Strategic Research, 2014). http://www.naa.mil.lv/~/media/NAA/AZPC/Publikacijas/PP%2002-2014.ashx

Hoffman, Frank G. “Hybrid Warfare and Challenges,” Joint Forces Quarterly, 1st Quarter 2009, 34-39. http://ndupress.ndu.edu/portals/68/Documents/jfq/jfq-52.pdf

Maigre, Merle. Nothing New in Hybrid Warfare: The Estonian Experience and
Recommendations for NATO. Policy Brief, The German Marshall Fund of the United States, February 2015. http://www.gmfus.org/publications/nothing-new-hybrid-warfare-estonian-experience-and-recommendations-nato, accessed 26 February 2015.

Chekinov, Sergei, and Sergei A. Bogdanov, “The Nature and Content of the New Generation of War, Military Thought, № 10/2013, р. 13-24 (Сергей Алексеевич БОГДАНОВ Сергей Геннадьевич ЧЕКИНОВ “О характере и содержании войны нового поколения,” Военная Мысль). Translated by Jon White

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Given the contemporary interest in therapeutic writing, this course offers insight into why it works and how to apply it to your own life experiences. Through an interdisciplinary lens of philosophy, art, psychology, and writing, the student explores the fascinating world of personal narrative.

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This course will examine America’s role in international relations from the Revolutionary War through what some historians have termed the “second war of independence,” the War of 1812. World politics was both a source of great opportunity as well as grave dangers to the Founding Fathers, and most believed isolationism to be impractical. Managing the realities of wars, territorial disputes, and trade rivalries was a constant preoccupation of the Founding generation. In this course, we will examine the critical issues facing early American leaders and the competing strategies they designed to secure American independence in a volatile world. As we honor the nation’s 250th birthday, we will examine the stakes of international relations in its Founding period, the role they played in shaping our Constitution, and the political cleavages they helped create in the new American nation.

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This course explores the evolution of the American Civil War in Augusta County. The scene of two significant battles, Augusta County played an outsized role in the war and reconstruction. This course examines the context, trends, personalities, and events that occurred in the county between 1859 and 1869.

Suggested reading: Valley of the Shadow project.

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The goal of this class is to sharpen your eye for what makes an effective photo. One of the challenges of advancing your photography is to become a better judge of your own photographs. This will be a class inspired by the classes at the Maine Media Workshops and College in Rockport, Maine. Students will collect photographic images under different categories and from various sources like magazines, newspapers, social media, medical journals, great photographers of the past, editorial photography, advertisements, and photographic artists. The initial meeting will explain the process. Subsequent classes will have topics assigned to or chosen by the student. Students will present their collected images during class and discuss composition and what attracted them to the photos.

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An historical fact has been likened to a sack that will not stand up till you put something in it. This course will look at what three contemporary historians have put into the sack to make history an engaging and meaningful discipline. British historian, Eric Hobsbawm, examines the origins and consequences of the Industrial Revolution. German historian, Fritz Stern, explores Germany’s catastrophic descent into Nazism. British historian, Timothy Garton Ash, writes an eye-witness account of the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe in 1989. Students will have the opportunity to read key extracts from the works of these historians.

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