" Explore the future through modeling, reading, and discussion in an open-ended seminar! Our fields of interest will include changes in science and technology, culture and lifestyles, and dominant paradigms and societies."
Critical review of works, theories, and polemics in architecture in the aftermath of WWII. Aim is a historical understanding of the period and the development of a meaningful framework to assess contemporary issues in architecture. Special attention paid to historiographic questions of how architects construe the terms of their "present." Required of M.Arch. students.
Historical Methodology will introduce the student to historical research methods and familiarize the student with the tools and techniques that historians use to study the past. The student will learn about the process of modern historical inquiry and gain a better understanding of the diverse resources that historians use to conduct research. The first four units will focus on research methodology and examine how and why historians conduct research on the past. Later units will examine how different historical resources can be used for historical research. By the end of the course, the student will understand how to conduct research on past events and be familiar with the variety of physical and electronic resources available for historical research. Upon successful completion of this unit, the student will be able to: Demonstrate an understanding of basic historical research methods and identify necessary research skills; Develop historical research topics, identify primary and secondary sources, and conduct research using these sources; Identify fundamental writing skills and assess how historical subjects may be best presented to various audiences; Define the meaning of historiography and identify important historiographic trends of the past century; Compare and contrast basic historical research practices conducted with library, archival, and online resources; Identify and assess possible career choices that depend on knowledge and understanding of historical research practices. (History 104)
This seminar offers a review of recent historiographical approaches within the history of science. Students will read a wide variety of recent studies covering topics from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries. Emphasis will be placed on the intertwining of epistemology with institutions in various settings.
This subject investigates the special relation of women to several musical folk traditions in the British Isles and North America. Throughout, we will be examining the implications of gender in the creation, transmission, and performance of music. Because virtually all societies operate to some extent on a gendered division of labor (and of expressive roles) the music of these societies is marked by the gendering of musical repertoires, traditions of instrumentation, performance settings, and styles. This seminar will examine the gendered dimensions of the music -- the song texts, the performance styles, processes of dissemination (collection, literary representation) and issues of historiography -- with respect to selected traditions within the folk musics of North America and the British Isles, with the aim of analyzing the special contributions of women to these traditions. In addition to telling stories about women's musical lives, and studying elements of female identity and subjectivity in song texts and music, we will investigate the ways in which women's work and women's cultural roles have affected the folk traditions of these several countries.
General study of modern architecture as a response to important technological, cultural, environmental, aesthetic, and theoretical challenges after the European Enlightenment. Focus on the theoretical, historiographic, and design approaches to architectural problems encountered in the age of industrial and post-industrial expansion across the globe, with specific attention to the dominance of European modernism in setting the agenda for the discourse of a global modernity at large. Explores modern architectural history through thematic exposition rather than as simple chronological succession of ideas.
We will doggedly ask two questions in this class: "What is history?" and "How do you do it in 2010?" In pursuit of the answers, we will survey a variety of approaches to the past used by historians writing in the last several decades. We will examine how these historians conceive of their object of study, how they use primary sources as a basis for their accounts, how they structure the narrative and analytical discussion of their topic, and the advantages and limitations of their approaches.
