Academic Courses & Programs

Audrey Sprenger, Ph.D

I am an ethnographer who has lived and worked in South Asia, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Denver, London, Central America and New York City, as well as some of the most rural parts of Canada, the United States and Mexico. I make my home in Florida, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia.

My recently completed book about the modern cultural myth of Jack Kerouac, The Beauty Parts, was researched and written with support of the Charles Warren Center for American Studies at Harvard University and was based on my play about Kerouac, Reports of My Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated, created for and archived at the Reorb.it Project.

I have been teaching my own original academic courses and programs since I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the mid-1990s and am currently teaching for the Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Department at the University of North Florida and the Behavioral Sciences Department at Edward Waters College; the Sociology Department at the University of South Florida; the Humanities and Behavioral Sciences programs at Santa Fe State College in Gainesville, Florida and the Behavioral Sciences Department at Hillsborough State College, Dale Mabry and Plant City campuses. Between 2011 and 2016 I developed and taught introductory and undergraduate honors curriculum for courses in social documentation (with a specific emphasis on sociological, anthropological and geographical theory) for Purchase College-SUNY, the College of Mount Saint Vincent and the College of Mount Saint Mary, as well as several small colleges in the State University of New York system located in rural, upstate New York.

Between 1992 and 2010, I traveled around the world as a faculty member for the University of Virginia's Semester At Sea Program; taught on the sociology, geography, law and gender studies faculties at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Denver; directed a London Study Abroad Program and taught urban studies at City College in London; developed a northeastern border studies and rural sociology curriculum at the State University of New York, College at Potsdam; helped develop and teach an interdisciplinary lecture series at Brown University; and helped develop a free, university-accredited adult and continuing education program for the Denver Public Library.

My cross-country sociology and documentary making course, Jack Kerouac Wrote Here, Crisscrossing America Chasing Cool, has been featured on National Public Radio, The News Hour With Jim Lehrer and in the Chronicle of Higher Education, The Denver Post, The Denver Westword and The Lowell Sun. In addition to this academic work I have also produced large public events for Shakespeare's New Globe Theatre, Rocky Mountain PBS, Masterpiece Theatre, the Nation magazine, the Denver Art Museum, the Wyoming Arts Council and the 2008 Democratic National Convention; and have worked as a curator, script doctor and occasional commentator for public radio and television.