PAST SUMMER SEMINARS - 2009
Interpreting Historical Images for Teaching & Research
The Center for Historic American Visual Culture (CHAViC) at the American Antiquarian Society is pleased to announce that its first summer seminar was held in Worcester June 15-19, 2009. The topic of the seminar was focused on Interpreting Visual Materials for Research and Teaching.
CHAViC is committed to enabling graduate students, faculty members, museum educators and other non-academic professionals to learn about the history of American visual materials and demystifying their use. This seminar enabled participants to take advantage of the AAS collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century prints, maps, sheet music covers, and ephemera of all kinds. There were guided tutorials as well as hands-on explorations of a topic of specific interest. Topics included colonial prints, antebellum images of Native Americans, western landscape photography, chromolithography, and the etching revival. Participants were able to pursue research in the AAS collection as a part of the seminar.
The focus of the workshop was on learning about printmaking processes and the publication of prints of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, how to access images from the web and to incorporate them in a meaningful way into the curriculum, and how to develop image-based student activities and projects. Guest scholars focused on specific topics which will serve as exemplars for the students in the workshop.
About the Faculty
David Jaffee, professor of early American history and material culture at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, will lead the seminar. He is the project director of two National Endowment for the Humanities grants to develop multimedia resources for the teaching of U.S. History.
Among the Guest faculty members will be Paul Staiti of Mount Holyoke College, Joshua Brown, Executive Director, American Social History Project, at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, Lucia Knoles, professor of English at Assumption College, Sally Pierce of the Boston Athenaeum, and Georgia Barnhill, Director of CHAViC and curator of graphic arts at AAS.