Tangible Things: Discovering History Through Artworks, Artifacts, Scientific Specimens, and the Stuff Around You

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شعار المنصة
متاح الآن إلى 2024-04-18
20.00 ساعة تعليمية
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الإنجليزية
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Have you ever wondered about how museum, library, and other kinds of historical or scientific collections all come together? Or how and why curators, historians, archivists, and preservationists do what they do?

In Tangible Things , you will discover how material objects have shaped academic disciplines and reinforced or challenged boundaries between people. This course will draw on some of the most fascinating items housed at Harvard University, highlighting several to give you a sense of the power of learning through tangible things.

By “stepping onto” the storied campus, you and your fellow learners can explore Harvard’s astonishing array of tangible things—books and manuscripts, art works, scientific specimens, ethnographic artifacts, and historical relics of all sorts. The University not only owns a Gutenberg bible, but it also houses in its collections Turkish sun dials, a Chinese crystal ball, a divination basket from Angola, and nineteenth-century “spirit writing” chalked on a child-sized slate. Tucked away in storage cabinets or hidden in closets and the backrooms of its museums and libraries are Henry David Thoreau’s pencil, a life mask of Abraham Lincoln, and chemicals captured from a Confederate ship. The Art Museums not only care for masterpieces of Renaissance painting but also for a silver-encrusted cup made from a coconut. The Natural History Museum not only preserves dinosaur bones and a fish robot but an intact Mexican tortilla more than a century old.

In the first section of the course, we will consider how a statue, a fish, and a gingham gown have contributed to Harvard’s history, and you will learn the value of stopping to look at the things around you.

In the next section, we will explore some of the ways people have brought things together into purposeful collections to preserve memory, promote commerce, and define culture.

Finally, we will consider methods of rearranging objects to create new ways of thinking about nature, time, and ordinary work.

Along the way, you will discover new ways of looking at, organizing, and interpreting tangible things in your own environment.

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المدربين

Sarah Carter
Sarah Carter
Sarah Anne Carter is the Visiting Executive Director of the Center for Design and Material Culture and Visiting Assistant Professor in Design Studies in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She previously served as the Curator and Director of Research at the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. While at Chipstone, she collaboratively curated many innovative museum exhibitions, including Mrs. M.-----‘s Cabinet at the Milwaukee Art Museum and Florence Eiseman: Designing Childhood for the American Century at the Museum of Wisconsin Art, and directed Chipstone’s Think Tank Program in support of progressive curatorial practice. Carter’s recent book Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World (Oxford University Press 2018) was published last fall. She is also co-author of Tangible Things: Making History Through Objects (Oxford University Press 2015) and co-editor with Ivan Gaskell of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture. From 2010-2012, she was a Lecturer in History and Literature at Harvard. Carter received her Ph.D. in American Studies and her MA and BA in History from Harvard University, as well as an MA from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture.
Ivan Gaskell
Ivan Gaskell

Ivan Gaskell is Professor of Cultural History and Museum Studies at the Bard Graduate Center. His work on material culture addresses intersections among history, art history, anthropology, and philosophy. His principal scholarly concern is to mobilize non-written traces of the past to illuminate aspects of the lives of human actors that would otherwise remain obscure. As well as writing individual historical case studies on topics ranging from seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings, to Roman baroque sculpture, Native American baskets, and Congo textiles, Gaskell works on the philosophical plane of second order questioning. While on the faculty at Cambridge University, he collaborated with the late Salim Kemal to edit a ten book series of multi-author volumes, Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and the Arts. He has also organized numerous experimental exhibitions at Harvard University, where he taught and curated between 1991 and 2011. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of eleven books, and have contributed to numerous journals and edited volumes in history, art history, and philosophy.

Sara Schechner
Sara Schechner
Sara Schechner, Ph.D. is the David P. Wheatland Curator of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University. She is a historian of science, specializing in material culture and the history of astronomy. At Harvard, she is a member of the History of Science Department and has been on the faculty of the Museum Studies program. She brings over thirty years of museum and academic experience to the Harvard community.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is the author of Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Early New England, 1650-1750 (1982) and A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812(1990) which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1991 and became the basis of a PBS documentary. In The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Making of an American Myth (2001), she has incorporated museum-based research as well as more traditional archival work. Her most recent book is Well-behaved Women Seldom Make History (2007). Her major fields of interest are early American social history, women's history, and material culture.