Department website: http://krieger.jhu.edu/museums/
The Program in Museums and Society is concerned with the institutions that shape knowledge and understanding through the collection, preservation, interpretation, and/or presentation of art, material culture, heritage, or natural and scientific specimens. It focuses on the role of museums (broadly defined) and their collections in societies past and present, including their historical, cultural, intellectual, and political significance.
A minor in Museums and Society complements study in a range of fields, including but not limited to anthropology, archaeology, history, history of art, and history of science and technology. Many courses include visits to or focused work in local and regional institutions, including on-campus collections (Archaeological Museum, Homewood Museum, Evergreen Museum and Library, and the Sheridan Libraries).
Whether they are researching a historical artifact or debating the obligations of public institutions, students in the program are challenged to approach their discipline from a new angle. While some may choose to pursue a museum career, the program has the larger goal of encouraging critical, careful thinking about some of the most influential cultural institutions of our day.
For current course information and registration go to https://sis.jhu.edu/classes/
Courses
“Fake News” is everywhere in both past and present. Explore that history first-hand throughJHU’s rare book collection of literary and historical forgeries spanning millennia of human history.Students learn how to examine and investigate rare books.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This hands-on course deals entirely with JHU’s collections of rare books and manuscripts as a springboard to build skills in the close visual and physical examination of rare books and manuscripts. You will investigate the technological and aesthetic transformation of textual artifacts from ancient papyri to Gutenberg imprints to digital surrogates, and contribute to the accumulation of historical clues about their meaning and significance as material cultural objects. You will learn what goes into curating and conserving book and manuscript collections today, and how to evaluate the quality and significance of collections. Materials/topics will include ancient Babylonian cuneiform and Egyptian papyri; medieval illuminated manuscripts; incunabula; Renaissance illustrated books of the Scientific Revolution and Spanish Golden Age; cheap print and unique ephemera; early books by and about women; forgeries; and “digital humanities” initiatives at JHU. Students will make regular visits to the Special Collections Reading Room in the BLC throughout the semester.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
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. Crosslisted with Archaeology, History, History of Art, International Studies and Medicine, Science & Humanities.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Museums face practical, political and ethical challenges, including economic difficulties, debates over interpretation of culture and pressure to demonstrate social value. This course considers how museums are answering these challenges.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Introduction to queer & trans politics and culture in the period immediately preceding the gay liberation movement, from the early to late 1960s, focusing on intersections of race, sexuality, and gender. Course examines how we have come to narrate queer & trans history and investigates the ways archival practices shape conceptions of queer & trans life. Students learn research methods as they draw on and contribute to the university’s digitized archival collections.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course introduces students to a blend of public history, queer studies and transgender studies. Students learn oral history and archival research methods as they draw on and contribute to the university’s archival, museum, and library collections.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Students will learn current procedures for surveying, cataloguing, documenting and rehousing collections using objects from the Archaeological Museum. This is a hands-on practicum course working closely with museum staff.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This practicum course critically considers current art and history museum education practices and explores social justice discourses through museum visits, visitor studies, and museum learning strategies.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course introduces students to the field of conservation and historic preservation through the study of books and library materials, paintings, objects and sites. Lecture topics include: methods of manufacture, agents of deterioration, preservation initiatives, conservation treatment and ethics, and conservation science. A hands-on component will introduce students to triage and stabilization of collections at the George Peabody Library.
Area: Humanities
We explore the possible futures of cultural heritage and museums in times of accelerating climate change, pandemics, armed conflict and political and social turmoil by examining past and contemporary events.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This hands-on course explores interpretive strategies for historic sites and culminates in the production of original, research-based, outdoor interpretive exhibits on the Homewood Campus.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
How are museums responding to the pressures to be more equitable, inclusive, and accessible towards public audiences and their staff? Students go behind the scenes of the Smithsonian, Baltimore Museum of Industry and Baltimore Museum of Art to meet with working groups and staff charged with transforming their institutions. Includes site visits, hands-on experiences and research on best practices.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This community-engaged course will address the historic role of the African American cemetery and its present dilemmas. Operating in partnership with Mount Auburn Cemetery in Baltimore, owned and operated by the Sharp Street Memorial United Methodist Church, and the Laurel Cemetery Memorial Project, in tandem with classes at Morgan State University and Coppin State University, our collective aim is to further the interests of these local sites by researching and telling stories with community and biographical relevance.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
What role did the colorful surfaces of sculptures, vessels and textiles play in the ancient world? We examine historical texts and recent scholarly and scientific publications on the technologies and meanings of color in antiquity, and use imaging and analytical techniques to study polychromed objects from the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Course will examine the collecting behavior of Americans. Students will explore how collectors have defined the holdings of the nation’s museums, galleries, and libraries and used objects to shape taste and status in the U.S.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
When museums shut their galleries in response to the global pandemic they saw a surge in digital audiences and engagement, athough not everyone can access digital content equally. Continued public health risks bring new challenges to digital interpretation, while universal access as well as embedded racial and gender bias remain significant issues. Students research what works and what doesn't in digital interpretation for art museums, centering social equity and accessibility in their assessment, and develop principles and guidelines for the museum's digital interpretation strategy.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
From psycho-spiritual autobiographers to mystical bi-locating nuns, convent crèche-keepers to choristers of sacred music, from rock-star-status mystics to the hidden careers of women printers, engravers, and miracle-makers, this course will explore the remarkable intellectual, cultural, and imaginative contributions of women who found refuge, agency, and power within alternative lives.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Gertrude Stein was a writer who was disparaged, yet wildly popular; a celebrity as well as an object of scorn; openly yet invisibly queer. Reading selections of Stein’s writing and that of her friends, lovers, and enemies, we will study her networks, art collection, and cultural status, and work extensively with rare books and archival materials, to explore these dilemmas. Student research will be incorporated into a major exhibition at the George Peabody Library in spring 2024.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The course examines recent controversies in the conservation of major global art works and sites, raising questions concerning the basic theoretical assumptions, practical methods and ethical implications of art conservation. Cross-Listed with History of Art and Anthropology
Area: Humanities
Go behind the scenes of the Baltimore Museum of Art's Education Department and develop and implement programs for college students in conjunction with an exhibition about women and art in early modern Europe.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Students examine select texts and archival materials related to Emily Dickinson, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Edith Wharton, Ida B. Wells, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sui Sin Far, Alice Duer Miller, and Zora Neale Hurston. Students interrogate how these writers navigated the constraints of gender, as informed by race and class, in the decades before and after the 19th Amendment and consider literary collecting in relation to gendered cultural politics.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course will explore the landscape history and current arrangement of the area around JHU’s Homewood campus, including Evergreen Museum, coinciding with the bi-centennial of the birth of Frederick Law Olmsted whose design firm played a central role in developing plans for and around JHU. The course will culminate in a student-produced exhibit for a public audience.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Students learn to conduct, analyze, and interpret their own oral histories as they contribute to a wide-ranging project documenting queer worldmaking in the Baltimore-Washington D.C. region. We engage with scholarship from performance studies, queer of color critique, LGBTQ history, and public humanities to consider the politics of storytelling and the promises of public-facing oral history projects. Students have the option of developing podcasts, multimedia projects, and public humanities proposals as their final assignment.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
A material cultural exploration of the Vatican from the founding of St. Peter’s basilica in antiquity to the establishment of the Vatican Library and Museums in the Renaissance and Enlightenment.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Students investigate the Baltimore Museum of Art’s American art collection and its presentation to the public alongside current scholarship on American art to develop strategies for a new permanent collection display that aligns with the museum’s commitment to artistic excellence and social equity. M&S Practicum. Co-taught with BMA curator Virginia Anderson.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Students go behind the scenes at JHU’s own Evergreen Museum and Library to investigate how historic sites design spaces for learning, community engagement, leisure, as well as for exhibitions and special events. Students consider the history of Evergreen and its inhabitants and create concepts for how to engage communities in that history and story. Multiple class meetings take place at the Evergreen Museum.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Examines the history of African art in the Euro-American world, focusing on the ways that Western institutions have used African artworks to construct narratives about Africa and its billion residents.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Investigates collaborative humanities methods that foster democratic participation among publics more broadly conceived than the academy, including participatory action research, collaborative oral history, indigenous research methods, interactive theater, participatory archival practices, and cooperative models for connecting art, artists, and audiences. Course focuses on queer, trans, and Black histories in Baltimore, includes excursions to local cultural institutions, and is co-taught by prominent public humanists, artists, and activists from Baltimore and beyond.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
As part of an ongoing collaboration with the Baltimore Museum of Art, students are invited to contribute to a special exhibition about touch and tactility in 20th century American art. Research artists such as Jasper Johns, Yoko Ono, Betye Saar, Felix Gonzalex-Torres, create thematic installations, and conceptualize museum interpretation to activate the tactile dimensions of art.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Independent research under a faculty mentor.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
The Capstone allows students to develop and carry out their own, hands-on research project in a museum, collection, archive, or other living resource. Final projects must involve some form of public presentation (exhibition, lecture, poster, web-based, etc.) and a work of self-reflection (journal, brief paper, blog, or other). Projects must be approved and overseen by a supervising faculty member and approved by the Program's Director, in keeping with the University's Independent Work Policy. Instructor permission required.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
The Capstone allows students to develop and carry out their own, hands-on research project in a museum, collection, archive, or other living resource. Final projects must involve some form of public presentation (exhibition, poster, web-based, etc.) and a work of self-reflection (journal, brief paper, blog, or other). Projects must be approved and overseen by a supervising faculty member and approved by the Program's Director, in keeping with the University's Independent Work Policy.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.;AS.389.201;AS.389.202
Cross Listed Courses
Anthropology
This course will grapple with the social and cultural dimensions of contemporary ecological problems through a local, project-based approach. Coursework will be organized on a studio basis in partnership with a local environmental organization, Friends of Stony Run. Continuing a collaborative project initiated in the fall of 2019, we will work together to develop interpretive materials for the Stony Run stream and urban watershed adjoining our campus.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Classics
This seminar investigates the Eastern Mediterranean as a space of intense cultural interaction in the Late Bronze Age, exploring how people, ideas, and things not only came into contact but deeply influenced one another through maritime trade, art, politics, etc. In addition to class discussion, we will work hands-on with artifacts from the JHU Archaeological Museum, focusing on material from Cyprus.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
English
Students interested in black print culture will engage in intensive archival research, both collaborative and individual, using the Sheridan Library’s Rare Book and Manuscript collections. Texts include poems, printed lectures, pamphlets, novels, periodicals, ephemera, correspondence, etc., alongside relevant critical and theoretical reading.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
First Year Seminars
From the women who created the Museum of Modern Art in New York City to the "Because of Her" working group across the Smithsonian’s museums, this First-Year Seminar investigates the hidden women of many distinct social positions, racial and ethnic identities whose labor shaped the museums we know today and considers how museums tell the stories of women, including transgender women, in the arts, sciences, and history.
Area: Humanities
Using maps from the 17th century to the present, students in this First-Year Seminar will explore the historical and contemporary landscape of their new hometown -- Baltimore. These primary sources will show how Baltimore was invented and developed in popular imagination to become the most vital port on the US Eastern Seaboard, but also a symbol American post-industrial decline. Students will have the chance to map how they see Baltimore, by learning and applying Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and converting geospatial data into visual stories. With the goal of fostering a deeper understanding of this complex city, and a student’s place in it, the class will include explorations outside of the classroom. The course will culminate with the creation of a small exhibit whose content and venue will be decided upon mutually by students during the course of the semester.
Area: Humanities
Despite its association with distant regions and time periods, Islamic art has a flourishing presence in today’s America, represented by rich museum collections, modern buildings designed in historical styles, and vibrant scholarly networks. This seminar explores how we, from the vantage point of twenty-first-century Baltimore, might experience works of Islamic art in ways that are informed by their own cultural contexts while also acknowledging the challenges involved in bridging this gap. We will spend much of the course engaging with objects and architecture in person, with visits planned to the recently reinstalled Islamic galleries at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, the Islamic Center of Washington, DC, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. You will be invited to handle artifacts in person and to try your hand at calligraphy, one of the most distinctive and esteemed Islamic artforms. In the classroom setting, we will read and discuss translations of primary sources written by historical practitioners and consumers of Islamic art, along with examples of modern scholarship that seek to understand the Islamic tradition from a variety of perspectives. As well as learning about such perspectives, you will be encouraged to develop and share—in presentations and written assignments—your own ideas about Islamic art, building on the close, firsthand encounters that run throughout the seminar.
Area: Humanities
History
How do museums represent the world? The course will focus on the colonial legacy of museums and complicate discourses of decolonization by looking at a range of case studies. We will study the world’s fairs, artworks, artifacts, collections, curatorial practices, exhibition histories, repatriation requests, and exhibitionary modes of display, in order to analyze their relationship to histories of decolonization, temporality, translation, untranslatability, spectatorship, provenance, and the life of objects.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
History of Art
The development of archaeology in the Middle East – its history of explorers, diplomats, missionaries and gentlemen-scholars – profoundly shaped the modern world, from the creation of new museums and the antiquities market to international relations and terrorism.
Area: Humanities
This course offers a critical introduction to modernist painting and its eurocentric art history by focusing on the work and reception of Pablo Picasso. At the center of the course is Picasso’s celebrated yet controversial painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon of 1907. Our point of departure is the recent rehang of the New York MoMA’s historical Cubism gallery. For decades, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was positioned there as the prescient “masterwork,” surrounded by other cubist paintings. In 2019, however, the painting was thought-provokingly juxtaposed with Faith Ringgold’s work American People Series #20: Die of 1967, a figurative painting responding to civil rights struggles in the United States. What occasioned this curatorial intervention? Why does Picasso’s painting remain such a point of contention in exhibiting modern and contemporary art today? And what other curatorial and art historical strategies might be used to continue to decenter the canon? We will deepen our discussions with close-looking and collaborative visual analysis of paintings in the Phillips Collection and the National Gallery in Washington D.C. as well as local collections. We will also consult online collections and, in our course readings, consider formalist, social, feminist, and decolonial approaches to modern art. No prior familiarity with Picasso or modern art is necessary. Students from all fields are welcome.
Area: Humanities
Through an examination of colonial exhibitions, the rise of national, regional, and archaeological museums, and current practices of display and representation in institutions, we will explore how the image of South Asia has been constructed in the colonial, modern, and contemporary eras. We will engage with the politics of representation, spectacle, and the economies of desire as related to colonialism and the rise of modernity. Readings from postcolonial theory, museum studies, anthropology, history, and art history.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This seminar explores the technologies of colonial power, from small ephemeral watercolor images of religious processions to massive multi-volume photographic projects documenting the “people of India,” and extending to the establishment of new urban and architectural spaces, archaeological museums, and art schools, the circulation of diplomatic art collections, and the commissioning of survey data. We will engage with the anti-colonial movements of resistance and uprising that took place across this century, examining the central participation of modern artists with these political movements, and explore the way this period fundamentally shaped the foundations for the study of South Asian art and archaeology. Readings will include colonial and postcolonial theory, Orientalism, historiography; we will be actively working with materials in the library’s Special Collections.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
The Antioch Recovery Project is an ongoing, iterative research lab course dedicated to the study of mosaics from the city of Antioch-on-the-Orontes and its surroundings (modern Antakya, Turkey). Led by principal investigator Jennifer Stager, ARP works in collaboration with a number of experts at Hopkins and in the Baltimore area, as well as with the global community of Antioch researchers to explore the mosaics across three distinct moments: ancient Antioch, the early 20th century excavations, and collection afterlives. No experience necessary.
Area: Humanities
Interdepartmental
The Dutch East India Company, or VOC, is historically and art historically well documented and firmly understood. But the Dutch also had significant holdings to the west via the Dutch West India Company, or WIC. They operated and held outposts in the present-day United States (New York/New Amsterdam), Caribbean (Surinam, Curaçao, Bonaire), Latin America (Brazil), and West Africa. Despite the abundance of materials associated with the WIC from this wide geography, these have been scarcely assessed by art historians, and a defined and comprehensive corpus has never been assembled. This class will act as a research lab in which to do so. In research teams, students will map artworks and objects created from that broad, transnational cultural ambit—categories that might include maps, landscape paintings, still life paintings featuring American flora and fauna, botanical illustrations, plantation architecture, luxury objects made from precious raw materials gathered in the Americas, the urban environment of slavery—and develop individual research questions around them.The class will run with a partner lab in the form of a course led by Professor Stephanie Porras at Tulane University. The course will feature speakers; and there is potential for funded travel to conduct research. We will start at the ground level; no previous knowledge about the field is required. Students from all disciplines are welcome.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Modern Languages and Literatures
The museum boom of the last half-century has centered largely around museums dedicated to the culture and history of identity groups, including national, ethnic, religious, and minority groups. In this course we will examine such museums and consider their long history through a comparison of the theory and practice of Jewish museums with other identity museums. We will study the various museological traditions that engage identity, including the collection of art and antiquities, ethnographic exhibitions, history museums, heritage museums, art museums, and other museums of culture. Some of the questions we will ask include: what are museums for and who are they for? how do museums shape identity? and how do the various types of museums relate to one another? Our primary work will be to examine a variety of contemporary examples around the world with visits to local museums including the Jewish Museum of Maryland, the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the National Museum of the American Indian.
Area: Humanities
This seminar will be concerned with resonances between collectors, artists, poets, and other hallowed figures of modernity, and their less celebrated doubles: hoarders, bibliomaniacs, ragpickers, and gleaners. We will examine the material practices and psychic mechanisms that define these identities and authorize distinctions between them, as well as the historical contexts from which they emerge. More broadly, we will grapple with the relationships between objects and narrative. We will ask how the human-object practices of collecting, hoarding, gleaning, scavenge, misuse, and fetishism change when performed in the immaterial realm of language, and what these practices look like as rhetorical and narrative strategies.
Area: Humanities
Near Eastern Studies
This course will present the Egyptological collections of the musée du Louvre in Paris, room by room, as in a real visit. From the Predynastic period, in the 4th millennium BC, to Roman time, the iconic “masterpieces” of this world-renowned art museum, as well as its little-known artifacts, will allow us to explore the history and material culture of ancient Egypt. We will also learn to observe, describe and analyze archaeological objects, in a global manner and without establishing a hierarchy between them, while questioning their place in the museum and its particular language. The objective will be to go beyond the objects themselves and answer, in fine, the following questions: What do these objects tell us about the men and women who produced them, exchanged them, used them, and lived among them in antiquity? What do they also reveal about those who discovered them in Egypt, several millennia later, about those who collected them and sometimes traded them, and what does this say about the relations between Egypt and the Western countries over time? The courses will be complemented by one visit to the JHAM and one visit to the Walters Art Museum; Dr. Aude Semat, curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) will also give a lecture about the Egyptian Collections at the MET.
Area: Humanities
Archaeology was born out of Western Colonial endeavors into Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas. Large scale excavations conducted by the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States resulted in the removal and transfer of valuable (culturally and monetarily) material culture from local stewards and stakeholders to the West. To this day the discipline of archaeology is still saddled by its colonial past and the Hollywood interpretation of archaeologists as saviors of ancient treasures. Today, most interaction between people and ancient objects is facilitated via the museum. In this course we will explore 19th- 21st century archaeological and museum practices and the role they play in modern narratives of identity and representation in the America and the Middle East. Students will engage with the historical, legal, economic, and ethical implications of archaeology and analyze how political, religious, cultural, and academic institutions have leveraged archaeology and cultural artifacts to reify and legitimize their pursuits and ideologies.
Area: Humanities
King Tut, Napoleon, Champollion, Ozymandias, Nefertiti: the history of Egyptology is filled with big characters, huge monuments, and glimmering objects. But it is also made up of colonialist practices, looted sites, and forgotten scholarly contributions. “Up the Nile” examines the antiquarian, colonialist, racist, Western-centric, and patriarchal roots of modern Egyptology and Nubiology, and addresses how scholars and enthusiasts alike are continuing to grapple with these lasting legacies and biases. This class investigates how the Egyptians and Nubians thought of their own histories, as well as how other ancient cultures viewed the cultures of the Nile. It moves roughly chronologically, tracing understudied and marginalized voices from the Islamic, Medieval, and Ottoman periods into the 20th and 21st centuries. It examines the origins of scholarship, modern collecting, Egyptomania, and museums, delving into the problems and repercussions that still haunt us today. “Up the Nile” will engage with important and difficult aspects regarding Egyptology’s and Nubiology’s colonialist, racist, and sexist past and present. It asks: who decides who writes history, then and now?
Area: Humanities
Study of Women, Gender, & Sexuality
Introduces students to 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—have the ability to establish alternative views of the world. Case studies include the ballroom scene in Baltimore and beyond, migratory street youth subcultures, and queer nightlife. This course also offers a unique lens on the archive and historical research by approaching embodied memory, gestures, and ritual as systems for learning, storing, and transmitting cultural knowledge.
Area: Humanities