New Directions in Teaching and Learning

The Hereford mappa mundi (ca. 1300 CE), showing the presumed spot of the camp of Alexander the Great . . . and a unicorn!

Sarah M. Anderson

I will be a part of a collaborative Wintersession course (January 2022), sponsored by the Program in Medieval Studies, that includes a campus practicum on bookmaking and an excursion to the Morgan Library for a special exhibition, “Imperial Splendor: The Art of the Book in the Holy Roman Empire, ca. 800–1500.” Other participants include Beatrice Kitzinger (Department of Art and Archaeology), Caroline Cheung (Classics department) and Janet Kay (Department of Art and Archaeology).

In spring 2022, I will be teaching a new course called “Where Are We? Maps, Travel and Wonder,” which was awarded a 250th Anniversary Fund for Innovation in Undergraduate Education. This course analyzes two key forms that both represent and shape our world views, as well as placing us within them: the map and the travelogue. Both maps and travelogues are inscribed with their own cultural interests, chart inclusive identity and excluding difference, and picture their own fantasies of power. Read together, they expose the dynamics of place through sign-systems in which word and image collaborate.

Andrew Cole

This summer, I look forward to teaching a seminar on spatial theory and politics at Cornell University’s School of Criticism and Theory.

Autumn M. Womack

To address the transforming and transformative racial landscape that reached national attention last summer, I adapted my 19th-century African American literature survey to attend to questions of resistance, revolution and revolt. As they attended to the ways that political dissent and redress are articulated aesthetically and formally, students worked toward creating a digital humanities final project in which they mapped the political action in two 19th-century novels: Charles Chesnutt’s “The Marrow of Tradition” and Frank Webb’s “The Garies and Their Friends.” And summer 2020, I worked closely with the staff at Firestone Library to transition my Toni Morrison seminar to an online format, a project that included digitizing huge amounts of the Toni Morrison special collection, granting my students exclusive access to this incredible archive.