Courses 2014/15 and earlier

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...

Jill Lepore The goal of this project is to compile a day-by-day account of Charles Dickens’s travels through the United States in 1842. Dickens landed in Boston on January 22 and sailed back to England from New York on June 7. During this six-month trip...

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"...

This reading seminar introduces students to the major themes and approaches to the historical study of the media from the invention of modern newspapers in the seventeenth century to the multiplication of media today. We will examine how the meaning of...

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...

Jeffrey T. Schnapp Libraries are not mere repositories, but sites breeding strange hybrids of knowledge, people, and material things. Building on the strength of two years of work in the Library Test Kitchen, this studio will research and produce an...

In the beginning was the book. From his library the hidalgo, bent on writing himself into History, sallies forth into a world of actors, storytellers, and readers. How do books come by their power to shape individuals and their world? We read Cervantes’...

Simon Grote It has been a commonplace since antiquity that human beings are rational animals. But the notion that we also have non-rational capacities – senses, imaginations, memories, desires, and emotions – and that developing these capacities is...

Anders Winroth and Aaron Vanides Techniques and technologies of communication and information management in Europe and the Mediterranean world, from the later Roman Empire through the end of the sixteenth century. Topics include book production...

The architectural book and its readers, authors, circulation and manufacture in the early modern period.