Professor Jesse Obert 

Over the past few years, scholarship in the humanities has been increasingly migrating online. Some of these initiatives began in the late twentieth century, and the pandemic no doubt helped libraries and archives find additional funding for these digitization efforts. Within this environment, museums and archives around the world have been publishing catalogs with high quality images and other interactive media, such as 3D models. The catalogs themselves are detailed and exhaustive, and they reveal just how much material culture has made its way into the storerooms of European and American museums. These objects present scholars from across multiple disciplines with a series of complex problems: how do we deal with museum objects without a reliable origin, who owns the past, and how can we use material culture responsibly?

This course asks students to find a museum collection or object, investigate its personal history, research its historical value, and reflect on the future implications of that object or collection in its current setting. We will start the semester by delving into the ethics of engaging with museum objects, explore how digitization can empower or erase indigenous histories, and then learn about the movements within digital humanities that are changing academia.

No prior experience with material culture is required. The course will be taught by the Digital World History Postdoctoral Associate, who was trained in departments of Anthropology, Archaeology, Art History, Classics, History, and Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, but students with topics in any field or region are welcome.