The Troutbeck Symposium Turns Five

Wednesday–Friday, April 22–24 | Amenia, NY

The Troutbeck Symposium started during the Covid lockdown as a collaboration between two teachers, Salisbury School history teacher Rhonan Mokriski and Marvelwood School film teacher Ben Willis, who figured that if students couldn't go anywhere, they might as well dig into what was already around them. The result was "Coloring Our Past," a series of student documentaries about overlooked African American history in the northwest corner of Connecticut and the Hudson Valley. One of them, about a local family's five-generation ties to the region, won Best Student Film at festivals in Maine and Louisville. From that, the Symposium grew.

This year's gathering, the fifth, runs April 22–24 at Troutbeck in Amenia, with the public portions on Wednesday and Thursday. It now involves fourteen schools, from Hotchkiss and Kent to Housatonic Valley Regional High School, Webutuck, and — new this year — Poly Prep, the first New York City school to participate. A parallel cohort has been working with the Wassaic Project. The students spend the school year in archives, interviewing community members, and working with local historical societies, then come to Troutbeck to present films, artworks, and research to a live audience.

The work has expanded in scope over the years. A Marvelwood student named Wyatt Lee made a short film as a sophomore about Marcus Garvey that went on to win awards at multiple film festivals before he expanded it into a 40-minute feature as a senior.

A Salisbury School senior traced his family's connections to the area back five generations, discovering that a great-great-uncle had worked at the Troutbeck estate itself, ferrying the likes of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston from the Wassaic train station. Earlier student research led to a historical marker commemorating the Amenia Conferences of 1916 and 1933, two early NAACP gatherings that took place at Troutbeck when the property was owned by civil rights activists Joel and Amy Spingarn.

The symposium opens Wednesday evening with a student art exhibition and remarks from this year's returning guests, including Hasan Kwame Jeffries, a historian at Ohio State who served as lead scholar and primary scriptwriter for the $27 million redesign of the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis and hosts the Southern Poverty Law Center's podcast Teaching Hard History.

Also returning is Christina Proenza-Coles of UVA's American Studies department, who has called the Symposium "the most important, most productive, most meaningful, and most promising program I have been involved with in my career."

Thursday is a full day of student presentations and screenings. Friday closes with sessions for educators, including a working session led by Michael Morand of Yale's Beinecke Library built around the question "How do you know that?" — a deliberate response to what AI is doing to students' relationship with evidence and sourcing.

Troutbeck, 515 Leedsville Rd., Amenia, NY. Details at troutbeck.com.