By Micah Weathers |
Contributor
Teaching and non-teaching days always have time built into them where you can do what you're passionate about. For one Augusta University associate professor, her passions fill her days.
Jennifer Trunzo, 48, an associate professor of anthropology at AU for 11 years, has a love for teaching the past through what people used rather than the written documents. Her motivation to be an archaeologist has a big role in how she teaches her classes. Trunzo teaches her classes through her passion to understand the past through artifacts rather than what was written down about the past.
“To approach history from the things people used in the past, as opposed to the documents they left behind, that is what I do,” Trunzo said.
Her passions are driven by obtaining a better understanding of the reality of the past.
“You can create an image of the past that is based more in the reality of the people who lived it day to day rather than people who lived in the past and wrote down their own ideal vision of the past; a more holistic understanding of what the past was like,” Trunzo said.
This passion to understand fills her days due to the fact that she teaches anthropology and conducts research for archaeology and anthropology.
Trunzo’s passion for her field started at the young age of two or three, according to her mother but for Trunzo, she discovered anthropology in undergraduate school. That goes to say, Trunzo obtained two different bachelor’s degrees. She obtained a bachelor’s degree in history with a minor in sociology at Geneseo State College in New York, and a bachelor’s degree in anthropology at the University of Buffalo. Trunzo then went on to graduate school to obtain her master’s degree in anthropology at the University of Buffalo and her Ph.D. at Brown University in Providence, R.I.
Trunzo, after obtaining her Ph.D., moved to Augusta for a professor's job. At the time, the university was called Augusta State University.
“When I was about 2 or 3 years old, I was sitting in the backyard at my grandmother’s house and I had taken her gardening trowel and dug a little hole in the ground," Trunzo said. "I was pulling out different kinds of rocks, pieces of glass and bottle caps, and making little piles where I would put all the rocks in one pile, all the glass in one pile. And she (her mother) came over and asked me what I was doing, and she said I looked up at her and said, ‘I’m going to be good at this someday,'” Trunzo said.
Trunzo’s passion for archaeology started as a young child, but it took her into her more mature years before she discovered that it was what she wanted to do with her life. Archaeology being a subfield of anthropology and focuses more on history through material remains.
After discovering anthropology as an undergraduate student at Geneseo State, she started reading about anthropology in her free time.
“As a history major, I discovered a type of archaeology called historical archaeology, where I could use historical documents and artifacts to learn more about the past and that was exactly what I wanted to do with my life,” Trunzo said.
In the classroom, her students like her straightforward approach to teaching.
"So far my experience with Professor Trunzo has been great," Stormy Davis, a freshman majoring in psychology, said. "She is very detailed in class and her notes are straight to the point, so there's no reason that you should fail her tests."
Dreams and goals change a lot throughout a lifetime, but in the end, your passions direct your paths. For some, it takes time to discover their passions and for others, passions are found early, but if the desire is there, your days will be filled with passion.
“If you just put your mind to it, you can do anything you want to do,” Trunzo said.
Contact Micah Weathers miweathers@augusta.edu