Past Courses (Harvard and MIT)

ENG 222-01. Renaissance Literature and the History of Media (WELLESLEY COLLEGE)

Semester: Fall

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Year offered: 2014

Sarah Wall-Randell The literary flowering of the English Renaissance was made possible by technology. The arrival of the printing press in England in the 1490s enabled a much wider circulation of literary texts, encouraging writers to influence each other and feeding the...

EALC 245. The Book in East Asia: From the Beginning to World War II (WELLESLEY COLLEGE)

Semester: Fall

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Year offered: 2014

Kristin Williams Manuscripts, books, and print technologies circulated through China, Korea, and Japan from ancient times to World War II through trade and tribute, imperial enterprises and religious movements. The course will combine book studies with readings of literary...

HAA 270y. From the Philosophy Chamber: Harvard and the Arts in the Early Republic

Semester: Fall

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Year offered: 2014

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Link: Course Website

Ethan W. Lasser and Jennifer L. Roberts This seminar will focus on the extraordinary collection of portraits, prints, books, coins, scientific instruments and non-western artifacts that Harvard College amassed between 1766 and 1820. Stored and displayed in three adjacent...

History and Literature L90bc: We the Readers: Reading Communities in Early America

Semester: Fall

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Year offered: 2014

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Link: Course Website

Jennifer Brady This seminar asks who was reading, what was read, and how reading was practiced, imagined, and used in early America. Focusing on moments when reading's potential to create or divide communities was under question, "We the Readers" considers how the mundane...

History of Art and Architecture 191x: Books and Things in the Colonial World

Semester: Fall

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Year offered: 2014

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Link: Course Website

Thomas B. F. Cummins We study the few remaining Mesoamerican Pre-Columbian, as well as the much more numerous sixteenth and seventeenth-century colonial, pictorial manuscripts. We also study the only three pictorial manuscripts of the Andes. Emphasis is on the production...

Humanities Studio 3: Architectures of the Book: Book making -- Past, Present, Future

Semester: Fall

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Year offered: 2014

Jeffrey Schnapp and the metaLAB team Contemporary speculations regarding print-plus or post-print publishing represent just the latest in the legion of mutations undergone by that most venerable and resistant of literary supports: the book. This Humanities Studio explores...

Medieval Studies 202. Latin Palaeography and Manuscript Culture

Semester: Fall

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Year offered: 2014

Beverly M. Kienzle Introduction to Latin manuscripts and the historical and cultural context of their production and use. Opportunity to work with actual manuscripts and facsimiles, transcribe previously unedited texts, and discuss problems in textual criticism. Student...

CPLT 621 01. Books, Displays, and Systems Theory (YALE UNIVERSITY)

Semester: Fall

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Year offered: 2014

Henry Sussman A status report on the book as a medium in an age of cybernetic technology and virtual reality. The contentious no-man's-land between books and contemporary systems.

CPLT 637 01. Mappings: Literature and the Spatial Imagination (YALE UNIVERSITY)

Semester: Fall

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Year offered: 2014

Ayesha Ramachandran This course begins with the premise that maps both create narratives and influence the shape and interpretation of literary texts. As historical objects, maps offer narratives about how we imagine and organize ourselves in psychological, spiritual, social...

History of Art and Architecture 147m: The Book of Hours: Pictures and Prayer in the Middle Ages

Semester: Spring

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Year offered: 2014

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Link: Course Website

Jeffrey Hamburger Taught from the collection of Books of Hours in the Houghton Library, the course will teach students how to describe and study medieval manuscripts and introduce various aspects of these richly illuminated prayer books. Special attention to the texts and...

ARTS 222 Introductory Print Methods: Typography/Book Arts (WELLESLEY COLLEGE)

Semester: Spring

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Year offered: 2014

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Link: Course Website

Katherine McCanless Ruffin This advanced studio course explores the relationship between text and image through relief printing techniques and innovative book structures. Studio projects will include the production of limited edition artist's books that focus on the...

The Encyclopedic Imagination from Pliny to Google Books (BROWN UNIVERSITY)

Semester: Spring

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Year offered: 2014

Considers the history of encyclopedic activity in various classical, medieval, and modern contexts. We will explore issues of encyclopedic epistemology, book history, the classification of knowledge, and the obsession to collect, compile, and document everything knowable and...