A Deep Dive into the Life of Bob Swoap
Harley Woods | September 30, 2021
Quinn Bonney
Harley Woods interviews Bob Swoap.
Professor and student-favorite, Bob Swoap, has long been a member of the Warren Wilson College (WWC) and Asheville community. In part to draw in students to the psychology major and attend Ecstatic Dance, Swoap opened up about his history and how he got started at (WWC).
“Asheville is home for me,” Swoap said. “We’ve lived here since 1998, and I grew up in Texas, but I don’t really think of that as home anymore.”
Here Swoap refers to his wife, Christine Swoap, whom he met while doing a postdoctoral behavior medicine fellowship at Duke University.
“She was at Duke for another reason, and she and I both quit our jobs and we basically travelled for two years,” said Swoap. “At one point we ran out of money. So my first job after my postdoc was a ski instructor at Winter Park, Colorado. It was out there that I realized that if I don’t get back into academia that the gap would be too long.”
After his two-year gap in the academic arena, Swoap landed a job in Philadelphia at Widener University. Although he liked the job, Swoap thought Philadelphia was too crowded and began his search for another job.
“The one here at Warren Wilson came up. I did not know really anything about it. I knew about mountains from when I was in undergrad, but then the more I learned about Warren Wilson the more I was intrigued,” Swoap said.
One of the prospects of WWC that interested Swoap was the triad: academics, service and work. The beautiful campus and welcoming student body were two other important factors in his decision to come to WWC.
Among Swoap’s work at WWC, he is a professor of counseling psychology, health psychology, sports psychology, intro to psychology and capstone courses.
“Currently I’m supervising ten students in their senior capstone projects. They are all really interesting and fun to help with, but the one that’s probably closest to my interests ... was by Samantha Hoyle,” said Swoap.
Hoyle is a senior soccer player and a Resident Assistant (RA) in Ballfields B.
“We have a thriving major in psychology and expressive arts therapy. I would encourage students to come talk with any of (the psychology major advisors) about our interesting classes et cetera,” Swoap said.
Swoap is very engaged with events and groups on campus. He said he liked to participate in anything that allowed him to connect with students outside of the classroom.
“I work with some of the teams here, I do sports psychology with the teams,” said Swoap. This semester I’m a student in the West African drumming ensemble, so I like when I have the chance to do things like that. It’s really engaging, it really helps keep me vibrant and excited.”
In the spring of 2021, Swoap approached Bassam Shawamreh, who was a student health ambassador at the time, about organizing and facilitating Ecstatic Dance events. Since then, Swoap has hosted Ecstatic Dance biweekly.
“During the pandemic one of the big problems was that students were not getting enough movement; they were not getting a lot of movement in a community,” Swoap said. “There was a lot of isolated screen time because so many people were online. At that point we came up with the idea in the spring to create a community-oriented dance, and I had done ecstatic dance but I had never really facilitated it officially.”
Each Ecstatic Dance involves a theme which asks each attendee to set their own personal intention. During the duration of the dance, attendees are asked not to speak to each other in conversation on the dance floor. If they wish to interact, they are allowed to smile, laugh and express themselves vocally without words.
“It’s a really respectful space,” said Swoap. “I love it because creating the playlists, facilitating the dance and then kind of seeing how students and the community react to that is really rewarding.”
The music at the dances goes through a series of five rhythms: slow movement, staccato sounds, chaos, lyrical and stillness.
“I use Spotify and I probably have thousands of songs now that I draw from,” Swoap said. “On my playlists I have all five of those as discreet lists — and I listen to music pretty much all the time. So then I begin to piece it together in a way that kind of feels like it will flow and help the dance move along.”