Updated 12/15/22
HIST 948/HSHM 780 History Beyond the Archive
Instructor: Nana Osei Quarshie
M 9:25am-11:15am HQ C03
This course focuses on three broad themes. First, we examine the social construction of “the archive.” What forms of knowledge accumulation constitute a historical repository? Second, we examine the role of the archive in the interplay of ethnography and historiography. How do ethnographic history, historical ethnography, and history of the present differ? Lastly, we examine the necessity of the archive and consider various alternative grounds upon which history can be constructed. What might it mean to imagine a history (or a history of science, medicine, and technology) beyond the archive?
HSAR 631 Art Writing after the “Great Resignation”
Instructor: Pamela Lee
M 1:30pm-3:20pm LORIA 358
Following the devastating impacts of COVID-19, millions of workers retired or quit their jobs, a tacit protest and retreat known in the mainstream media as “The Great Resignation.” In the wake of the pandemic and ongoing, linked catastrophes—the murder of George Floyd and the afterlives of chattel slavery, climate emergency, and accelerating income inequality—this seminar takes on the current prospects of art writing and criticism. We question both the stakes and practices that constitute an adequate response to the contemporary moment; and explore experimental approaches to writing. Topics and methods include counter-archives and counter-narratives; auto-fiction, gossip and critical fabulation; and themes of burnout, quitting, striking, opacity, disappearance, misrecognition and refusal. Collections at the Beinecke, Yale University Art Gallery and other sites on campus are engaged. Writers include: Acker, Black, Byrd, Chee, Coulthard, Crary, Bellamy, Hartman, Hong, Huxtable, Kraus, Marriot, Moten, Myles, Nelson, Preciado, Simpson, Syms. Graduate students from across the University are welcome, particularly artists, poets, and critics. Regular writing workshops in seminar. Enrollment is limited and by application only: please contact instructor in advance of registration. Experience in art history or art criticism recommended.
EALL 600/EAST 640 Sinological Methods
Instructor: Pauline Lin
F 1:30pm-3:20pm
A research course in Chinese studies, designed for students with background in modern and literary Chinese. Students explore and evaluate the wealth of primary sources and research tools available in China and in the West. For native speakers of Chinese, introduction to the secondary literature in English and instruction in writing professionally in English on topics about China. Topics include Chinese bibliographies; bibliophiles’ notes; specialized dictionaries; maps and geographical gazetteers; textual editions, variations, and reliability of texts; genealogies and biographical sources; archaeological and visual materials; and major Chinese encyclopedias, compendia, and databases.
ENGL 597 Writing Identity
Instructors: Kathryn James and Peter Stallybrass
Th 9:25am-11:15am LC 319
This collections-centered course will focus on six texts (Shakespeare’s Hamlet, King Lear, and 2 Henry VI; John Cleland’s Fanny Hill; the diary of Thomas Turner; and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl), moving out from specific passages to explore a wide range of original collections across Yale University and its libraries, with a particular emphasis upon the legal systems in England, Scotland, and the United States. The main topics that we address are orality and literacy (and the relation between written law and “time out of mind”); censorship (and the regulation of written and printed texts); suicide (and coroner’s inquests, where the investigating juries were drawn from a wide range of people below the ranks of the gentry, many of whom could not write); inheritance (and challenges to primogeniture, including ultimogeniture [when the youngest child inherited] and gavelkind [when property was divided between the children]); the role of the parish in policing and in the operation of the Poor Laws; passports and identification documents; slavery (and the successful suit of Joseph Knight, a slave, freeing him from his Scottish master in 1778); marriage, adultery, incest and bastardy; abortion and infanticide (the latter sometimes argued for as the right of the patriarch, appealing to Roman law); the treatment of the murder of a husband by his wife as not only murder but also petty treason; animal trials (only ending in Europe in the eighteenth century); authorship and anonymity (and the legal attempts to register the “author,” whether publisher, printer or writer, so as to hold him or her accountable); and forgery (including the Donation of Constantine; the work William Henry Ireland, the most famous forger of Shakespearean manuscripts; and the recent forgery of a complete copy of Galileo’s Siderius Nuncius). The materials will range from the 1390s to 2000, with a concentration on texts from 1530 to 1850. We also train students how to read a variety of English scripts (including black letter, italic, and secretary hand) and introduce them to recent advances in forensics in literary studies (including the analysis of DNA to identify both the specific animals used for parchment and the physical remains of authors [especially their hair]).
CLSS 624/MDVL 621/ENGL 521/HIST 532/EMST 621 Advanced Manuscript Studies
Instructor: N. Raymond Clemens
M 1:30pm-3:20pm LC 212
This course builds on the foundation provided by MDVL 620 by focusing on both regional Latin hands and the vernacular hands that grew from the Latin tradition. The backbone of the course is Middle English paleography (no prior experience needed), but the course surveys French, Italian, Hebrew, and German hands as well.
Prerequisite: MDVL 620 or MDVL 571 or equivalent study of Latin paleography strongly suggested.
CLSS 840/HSAR 567 Introduction to the Digital Humanities for the Premodern World
Instructor: Holly Rushmeier
TTh 1pm-2:15pm
Designed around a series of hands-on, skill-building activities and punctuated by contextualizing lectures, this course introduces a variety of digital humanities methods, tools, and debates of relevance to the study of the premodern world. To provide continuity and a common reference point, activities and demonstrations are oriented around the archaeological site of Dura-Europos (Syria) and allow students to engage firsthand with data, artifacts, and archival materials from the site. Sample topics include introductions to Python and JavaScript; basics of front-end and back-end web development; photogrammetry; Linked Open Data (LOD); digital gazetteers; controlled vocabularies; web annotation; applications of machine learning. No previous digital humanities training or coding experience is required of students registered for the graduate HSAR/CLSS course numbers.