Museums are crucibles, places where public memory, identity, and cultural values are debated, hammered out and refined. This First-Year Seminar examines this premise through guided discussion, close looking at exhibitions past and present, written reflection, and visits that go behind the scenes of many of Baltimore's history, art, industry, and science museums. Just what is a museum and how does it compare to other sorts of cultural institutions? What responsibilities do museums have to their communities? to their collections? How do they balance the two? How are they adapting to broader social, economic, and cultural changes? And what is their future? Learn how to decode museums. Discover the varied roles they play in the life of a city like Baltimore.

• Days/Times: W 10:30AM - 1:00PM
• Instructor: Kingsley, Jennifer P
• Room: Hmwd House Wine Cllr
• Status: Canceled
• Seats Available: 12/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

This First-Year Seminar examines the intersections of queer theory, performance studies, and LGBTQ history with a focus on “queer worldmaking:” the ways in which performances—both theatrical and everyday rituals—can establish oppositional publics and politics. We take an interdisciplinary approach to historical research, considering embodied memory, gesture, and ritual as methods for learning, preserving, and transmitting cultural knowledge. Case studies include the ballroom and voguing scene in Baltimore and beyond, migratory street youth subcultures, drag performance, and queer nightlife.

• Days/Times: T 12:00PM - 2:30PM
• Instructor: Plaster, Joseph
• Room: BLC 4040
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 1/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course invites art-curious students to rewrite the material histories of art objects and museums. We will explore hidden narratives and overlooked traditions in art history, non-visual senses and experiences of art making, and the role of reinvention in art museums. Over the semester, we will examine and respond to a range of objects, performances, and writings that think through the public “matter” of art. Course discussion and writing projects will pay special attention to questions of what it means to make and practice a socially engaged art. We will approach writing as both a personal and a social project. We will concentrate on the personal aspects of writing--including expression, habit, transfer--as well as the social aspects of writing—including exploration, persuasion, and convention. This course is site specific. The Baltimore Museum of Art will serve as our archive and object of study.

• Days/Times: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Russell, Arthur J.
• Room: Gilman 277
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 0/12
• PosTag(s): ENVS-MAJOR, ENVS-MINOR

For survivors of the worst atrocities in recent history, remembering is seen as both a moral and political duty. The command to “never forget” has become a popular refrain in the aftermath of these traumatic events. But how should the memory of these mass traumas be carried forward in the public sphere? What forms of commemoration are the most effective, accurate, or enduring? And how might new technologies impact how we remember collective traumas in the future? Using the Holocaust as our central case study, we’ll examine the remembering of trauma in a range of public “memory sites,” including oral testimonies, memoirs, photographs, monuments, and museums. And we’ll discuss how new technologies, including virtual reality and holographic technology, will impact Holocaust memory going forward. At the heart of the course will be a series of writing assignments designed to help students reflect on the future of Holocaust memory. Students will be asked to write in a variety of styles and genres, from op-eds to scholarly arguments, and from video essays to rhetorical analyses. These writing assignments will help students reconsider what writing is, how to do it effectively and ethically, and how to become better at it. The class will include field trips to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC. All first-year students who have taken Reintro and all students at the sophomore level or above are welcome.

• Days/Times: TTh 3:00PM - 4:15PM
• Instructor: Wexler, Anthony Charles
• Room: Maryland 104
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 0/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

From embellished silver pens and abolitionist secretary desks to contemporary artists manipulating historical postcards and making fax collages, this course will explore the materiality, technologies, and aesthetics of written communications from the 18th century to the present. This research-centered course will engage directly with objects in the Baltimore Museum of Art collection, in preparation for an upcoming exhibition. Topics include the development of specific decorative arts and designs in conjunction with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century postal and bureaucratic history, letter-writing as a mode of resistance, strategic illegibility and asemic writing as a form of critical artistic practice, and the importance of mail art as conceptual and institutional critique. Includes hands-on work in the museum and class visits with BMA curator Dr. Leslie Cozzi.

• Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Brown, Rebecca Mary
• Room: Gilman 177
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 1/5
• PosTag(s): HART-MODERN, MSCH-HUM

This course explores the surviving “objects” of the ancient Greco-Roman world, and the histories of their excavation, organization, and preservation in museum and library collections. From ancient objects and sculptures, ancient Greek papyri, scrolls, and late-antique and medieval books, to the revival of Greek and Roman traditions in the Renaissance and Enlightenment, we will learn how these objects help shape and transform our understanding of the ancient world over two millennia, up to the formation of the great antiquities museums of the modern era. This hands-on course will take advantage of ancient objects and texts in Baltimore, at the Walters Art Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, as well as the Archaeology Museum at JHU and the rare book and manuscript collections of the Sheridan Libraries at JHU.

• Days/Times: W 3:00PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Havens, Earle A; Michalek, Martin William
• Room: BLC 2043
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 5/15
• PosTag(s): MLL-ENGL

This course surveys museums, from their origins to their most contemporary forms, in the context of broader historical, intellectual, and cultural trends including the social movements of the 20th century. Anthropology, art, history, and science museums are considered.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Kingsley, Jennifer P
• Room: Gilman 17
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 16/25
• PosTag(s): HIST-EUROPE, ARCH-ARCH, PMUS-INTRO, MSCH-HUM, ARCH-RELATE, CDS-SSMC

This course critically examines the role of exhibitions in shaping cultural narratives and public understanding of people and places across the globe. Students will explore the history, theory, and practice of exhibiting cultures in museums, galleries, and digital platforms. Topics include curatorial ethics, representation and identity, postcolonial critiques, audience engagement, and the impact of emerging technologies on exhibition design. Through case studies and hands-on projects, students will analyze how cultural heritage is displayed and interpreted, considering issues of appropriation, authenticity, and inclusivity. The course culminates in a final project where students conceptualize and design their own cultural exhibition proposal.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Roome, Kristine
• Room: Smokler Center Library
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 6/15
• PosTag(s): CDS-SSMC, ARCH-RELATE

Digital media play an increasingly significant role in museums from how museums share and narrate their collections online to the use of AI to catalog things and create metadata about them. This class explores critically how digital tools work to tell stories and invites students to unpack the resulting museum narratives. Students will learn by doing, creating a digital exhibit of five museum objects using Omeka and later transforming their exhibits by creating data of their own design to tell a new story about their objects. This new narrative will apply critical perspectives considered in the course such as, but not limited to, repatriation, critical cataloging, and geo-politics.

• Days/Times: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: McGinn, Emily
• Room: BLC 4040
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 8/15
• PosTag(s): PMUS-PRAC, MSCH-HUM, ARCH-RELATE

Independent research under a faculty mentor.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Kingsley, Jennifer P
• Room:  
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course will explore the American art museum as a distinctive cultural and political idea. Tracing its origins to the ancient world, the American art museum was descended more immediately from institutions created during the European Enlightenment, but differing with regard to overall mission and civic purpose. This course will explore the various roles played by museums in American society, focusing on programmatic content, organizational design, funding and operating practices, and the particular issues that have arisen in recent years in the areas of cultural property restitution, collection development, special exhibitions, governance and funding, and the larger question of civic purpose.

• Days/Times: M 4:30PM - 7:00PM
• Instructor: Weiss, Daniel H
• Room: Gilman 55
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/15
• PosTag(s): HART-MODERN, ARCH-RELATE, AGRI-ELECT

Documenting & Digitizing Black Louisiana: Sources, Tools and Contexts is an experiential, team-based, community-engaged undergraduate seminar that combines secondary literature on the history of colonial Louisiana as well as the digital humanities, with intensive deep readings of a selection of translated documents. Seminar sessions will include gatherings with research teams of faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students, with a special emphasis workshops, with and hosted by scholars at JHU and beyond (including team members at Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans. Students with interests in Black history, in multimedia content creation, in digital infrastructure, in manuscript documents, in translation and languages, in public history, social justice and community engagement will find much to learn in this course.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Burri, Margaret N; Johnson, Jessica Marie; McGinn, Emily
• Room: Macaulay 101
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 15/18
• PosTag(s): HIST-AFRICA, HIST-LATAM, HIST-US, ARCH-RELATE, AGRI-ELECT

A sweeping historical engagement with fakes, lies, and forgeries from the ancient world to the digital age, explored through JHU’s Bibliotheca Fictiva collection of rare books and manuscripts—the largest research collection on this subject in the world. Topics include ancient papyri, biblical apocrypha, medieval manuscript forgeries, archaeological and textual forgeries of the Renaissance, false travelogues of the Age of Exploration, pecuniary forgery in the 19th century, art forgery, and the advent of “fake news” in the digital era.

• Days/Times: M 11:30AM - 2:00PM
• Instructor: Havens, Earle A
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

American museums today face ongoing practical, political and ethical challenges, including economic difficulties, technology and globalization, ongoing debates over the ownership and interpretation of culture and pressure to demonstrate their social value. This course considers how museums are answering these challenges and projects into the future. In addition to class discussions and group work, we will visit a number of different cultural institutions to discuss best practices in interpretation, how culture is represented in a variety of manners, the history of collection acquisition, analyze visitor experiences, how sites approach advocacy and civic engagement, among other topics related to the weekly readings.

• Days/Times: F 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Forloney, Robert
• Room: Gilman 300
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/15
• PosTag(s): PMUS-INTRO, ARCH-ARCH, CES-ELECT

This course will introduce you to the theoretical and practical underpinnings of the conservation profession: who gets to be a conservator, where we work and how. There will be a hands-on opportunity to apply theoretical knowledge to document and stabilize items from JHU Special Collections. Topics include but are not limited to: what are the origins of the conservation profession and how has it evolved? What challenges do conservators face today? How do conservators contribute to institutional goals of preservation, access, research and learning?

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Jarvis, Jennifer
• Room: BLC 5015
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/10
• PosTag(s): PMUS-INTRO, PMUS-PRAC, ARCH-ARCH

This course aims to make the object a focus point for understanding museums and what they do, and to consider the museum as a site for investigating the interaction between humans and things. At the center of the course is a tension between the idea that things are subject to human will, on the one hand, and indications that things can and do evade human attempts to control them, on the other. Readings from scholars across many disciplines, from anthropology to political science, will stimulate our looking, thinking, and discussion. Every session includes hands-on activities to help us think through the key concepts of the readings.

• Days/Times: T 4:30PM - 7:00PM
• Instructor: Kingsley, Jennifer P
• Room: Krieger 304
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/10
• PosTag(s): ARCH-ARCH

Oral Histories are a means by which history is both generated and preserved. Talking to and recording people in their own voices is immensely valuable but also brings challenges. This course equips students with the theoretical framework, methods and an awareness of the ethics of making and interpreting oral histories and provides hands-on experience researching, designing and creating an archival record of our time to professional standards. Our project focuses on Baltimore's Confederate monuments. We will interview key stakeholders in debates that led to their removal and in ongoing conversations about what to do with them now.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Roome, Kristine
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 6/15
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM, CDS-SSMC, ARCH-RELATE

This course addresses the historic role of the African American cemetery as sacred and political space, with important links to other Black institutions. Operating in partnership with Mount Auburn Cemetery in Baltimore, owned and operated by the Sharp Street Memorial United Methodist Church, we will visit the cemetery and related locations in Baltimore throughout the semester. Our collective goal is to research and share stories that further the interests of these important and vulnerable sites.

• Days/Times: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Dean, Gabrielle
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/8
• PosTag(s): PMUS-PRAC, ARCH-RELATE, MSCH-HUM, CDS-SSMC

How do art curators solve the puzzles posed by the collections they care for? This course invites students to work hands on with a collection of early modern paintings recently donated to the university. Students will learn to investigate art like a curator, from material and technical examination through provenance research and the reconstruction of object contexts. Students will share their research findings with public audiences in the form of an exhibition to be installed in the renovated MSEL library.

• Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Kingsley, Jennifer P
• Room: Hmwd House Wine Cllr
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/10
• PosTag(s): PMUS-PRAC, ARCH-RELATE

Taking its name from the work of scholar Katherine Verdery, who investigates why and how certain corpses took on a political life in post-Soviet Eastern Europe, this course examines ways that human bodies have been collected, displayed, concealed and disappeared across cemeteries, museums, universities and other sites. We will trace various valuations (and devaluations) imposed on bodies across the life course and examine how some bodies are made to matter more than others in both life and death. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives across anthropology, Black studies, history of medicine and more, we will engage with case studies from across the globe, from the 18th century to the present day.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Hester, Jessica Leigh; Lans, Aja Marie
• Room: Gilman 55
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/12
• PosTag(s): HIST-US, HIST-EUROPE, CDS-SSMC, ARCH-ARCH, MSCH-HUM

Independent research under a faculty mentor.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Kingsley, Jennifer P
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): n/a