This story is part of Humanities in Practice, a Franklin College of Arts and Sciences series exploring the value of the humanities in work and everyday life. 

“We went to Monk’s House and I ate one of Virginia Woolf’s apples!” Maya Alandete (BA English ’23) wrote during a study-away semester in England. “It was a tart, pink-fleshed apple—the most flavorful I’ve ever tasted.” 

The visit to Woolf’s home reminded Alandete, then an English major in the University of Georgia’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, of a garden thousands of miles away on Sapelo Island, Georgia. There, she had learned how food can carry the history of the Gullah Geechee people who have cultivated the island for generations. 

The connection between the two gardens stayed with Alandete after graduation. It also helped shape her career in community agriculture and education, where she draws on the humanities to help young people understand the relationships among food, land, and culture. 

UGA’s Interdisciplinary Field Program, or IFP, nurtured Alandete’s interest in the role of food and agriculture in people’s lives. During the eight-week traveling course in geology, ecology, and anthropology, students studied the landscapes and communities they visited across the American West. 

Their travels began on Sapelo Island, where they learned about the Gullah Geechee community and efforts to preserve its culture through food. They worked in a garden planted with Sapelo Island red peas, bird’s eye peppers, squash, and indigo. 

The experience showed Alandete what plants can reveal about a place. The crops reflected the history of the people who had tended the land and the traditions they had carried forward. 

Later that year, she encountered similar questions through literature during a semester in Oxford, England. She studied Jane Austen, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Shakespeare, often spending evenings reading in the Bodleian Library. Over eight weeks, she wrote 16 essays on British women’s writing, Shakespeare, and modernism. 

“I’ve never had such intense, immersive experiences with literature before,” she wrote at the time to Rebecca Crouse, her high school English teacher. “It makes me feel so much more deeply in touch with the world. It’s very emotional.” 

Literature asked Alandete to imagine lives shaped by circumstances different from her own. Close reading helped her consider how history and culture influenced those lives, while discussions with classmates and faculty exposed her to interpretations she might not have reached alone. 

At Monk’s House, her Oxford studies converged with her experience on Sapelo Island. Woolf’s garden offered a physical connection to the writer she had been studying. The crops on Sapelo carried the history of the community that cultivated them. Each landscape could be read for evidence of the people who had lived there. 

Alandete eventually added a minor in horticulture through UGA’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. After graduating, she worked for food-security nonprofits before becoming the Young Urban Farmers coordinator at Athens Land Trust. 

There, she teaches high school students about sustainable farming, food culture, land use, entrepreneurship, and history. The program encourages students to consider how the food they grow connects them to their community and to earlier generations. 

Her English education remains central to that work. Close reading taught her to look beneath the surface and recognize the experiences that shape a subject. Writing gave her practice turning what she learned into stories and lessons that others could understand. 

“There are very few times in life after college where you get a chance to completely immerse yourself in the world of words, those that you read and those that you write,” Crouse wrote in response to Alandete’s letter from Oxford. 

Alandete has carried that attention to language into her work with food and land. Whether she is reading a novel or helping students tend a garden, she looks for the human stories a place contains—and teaches others how to recognize them. 

The new Franklin College of Arts and Sciences 1801 Lecture Series begins Tuesday, Sept. 8, with science communicator and “Ologies” host Alie Ward. The free public event, focused on science, storytelling, and the joy of curiosity, will take place from 3–4 p.m. in Room 271 of the Richard B. Russell Special Collections Libraries. The series and the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences forthcoming Applied Humanities Certificate are supported by the Teagle Foundation Cornerstone Learning for Living initiative.