Fall 2024- ARCH2184: Material Culture and the Bodily Senses: Past and Present

How do the senses shape our experience? How many senses are there? How do ancient and modern art and material culture relate to bodily senses? What is material and sensorial memory, and how does it structure time and temporality? Using media and objects, including archaeological and ethnographic collections at Brown and beyond, this course will study how a sensorial perspective on materiality can reshape and reinvigorate research dealing with past and present material culture. Furthermore, we will explore how sensoriality and affectivity can decenter the dominant western modernist canon of the autonomous individual.

ARCH 2117/HMAN2401V: Marking Meaning: Visual Signs, Language, and Graphic Invention

To be human is to make many marks: tags and emblems of identity, memory aids that direct and guide human action, and writing that records the sounds and meanings of language, or that might exult in the purposively meaningless asemic script. This process reveals the powers of human invention and facilitates and deepens the “graphospheres” that envelop human life. Visible, concrete signs form an environment from which people construct and construe meaning. This collaborative humanities seminar addresses the nature of graphs from past to present. Topics include: the technology of graphs; their many precursors and parallel notations; their emergence, use, and “death”; their development over time, especially in moments of cultural contact and colonialism; their setting and presence as physical things; the perils and possibilities of their interpretation; acts of grapholatry and graphoclasm; and the nature of non-writing.

CLAS2822M/COLT2822M: Thinking through Comparison: Han and Roman Empires

This seminar introduces students to comparative methods in the study of antiquity, with a focus on Han China and the Roman Empire. We will consider how and why we do comparative history, through the examples of the Han Chinese and Roman Empires. Sessions will consider existing examples of comparative work on these two ancient cultures from the eighteenth century to today, asking what questions the scholars involved were asking and what methodologies they brought to bear to answer them. Using a balance of ancient and modern readings, we will ask what the purpose of comparison is and what methodologies comparisons demand, as well as conducting our own comparative research informed by the most recent scholarship on both civilizations. No knowledge required of ancient European languages or ancient or modern Chinese languages.

ANTH 2515: Material Matters. Prof. Robert Preucel (Anthropology, Haffenreffer Museum)

In the past decade there has been a growing interest in the study of material culture as an explicitly interdisciplinary endeavor involving the fields of anthropology, archaeology, art history, literary theory, museum studies, and philosophy, among many others. These perspectives exhibit a range of approaches to interrogating how people make things, how things make people, how objects mediate social relationships, and how inanimate objects can be argued as having a form of agency. This graduate seminar is designed to encourage reflection upon material culture and its influence in shaping our lives.