Past Courses (Harvard and MIT)

Alex Csiszar Science doesn't just happen in the lab. Scientific results have to be communicated among scientists, and to the public. This course investigates the ways in which scientific knowledge circulates, and pays special attention to how new communications media have...

Robert Darnton A graduate seminar on the nature of censorship and the way it actually operated in Stuart England, Bourbon France, the British Raj, Communist East Germany, and regimes vulnerable to the Internet. Note: Guest Speaker Dr. John Palfrey.

Marie-Claude Felton Today we are all conscious of a technological revolution in how we read books. But this is not the first time such a major change has occurred. In late antiquity scrolls were replaced by the parchment codex (the book form as we think of it now) and in the...

Kate van Orden In this course, you become an amateur musician in Renaissance England and learn to play the viola da gamba in a consort. Through this combination of research and hands-on learning, we investigate repertory, culture and musical life circa 1600. Students learn...

Ann Blair An introduction to the cultural history of the book and its functions as both material object and text. Major themes include the techniques of book production, authorship, popular and learned readership, libraries and censorship. The course surveys developments...

David Scott Kastan This seminar focuses on the various ways in which the scripts Shakespeare wrote were turned into plays to be acted; into playbooks to be sold, purchased, and read; and, improbably given their subliterary origin, ultimately into the most iconic works of...

Lianbin Dai The central question examined in this course is how to establish book history of late imperial China as a modern discipline before integrating or globalizing it into a framework of book history of the world. Topics include: book history as an interdisciplinary...

Stephanie Frampton This course is about the power of books. From the Sumerian clay tablets of more than four millenia ago through to the spectacular emergence of the electronic text, the written word -- in all its forms -- has captivated the human mind, embodied our insights...

Daniel Smail This section offers new History concentrators an overview of the history and anthropology of material culture. Our coverage will range widely across both time and space; major themes will include things created in the deep human past as well as the habits of...

Kathryn James The influence of the book in Britain from 1475 to 1660, including both manuscript and print formats. The book as material, cultural, and political object; its role in religious, political, and social transformations of the period. Focus on objects from Yale's...

David Kastan What is "the history of the book" a history of? What in fact is a book? What does a focus on the materiality of the book offer a literary critic, or for that matter a historian? These are some of the questions this course seeks to answer as it focuses on the...

Ryan Cordell Examines innovations that have reshaped how humans share information, e.g., the alphabet, the book, the printing press, the postal system, the computer. Focuses on debates over privacy, memory, intellectual property, and textual authority that have historically...