Course Syllabus

Jump to Today
Museum Studies 4a.png

 Syllabus

 Final Syllabus MUSE150 (14476) Role of Museums in History.pdf

Please note the following:

  • We highly recommend using the Extension School's Writing Center for assignments. You can have a trained tutor review your writing for free up to seven times per semester.  Be sure to schedule enough time in advance of assignments to for this review, and book appointments early!
  • You do not need to submit any hard copies of assignments.  Use the online Assignments area on this site for all submissions.
  • Please discuss any potential problems that you may have with an on-time submission BEFORE the deadline.  Please plan ahead when completing assignments; all the deadlines have been advertised since the beginning of the semester, so schedule your time accordingly and start early.  Extensions are only for personal emergencies and unforeseen circumstances.
  • We CANNOT accept late papers for the final assignment without a course extension.  We have scheduled the deadline to allow you the most time to work on the paper as possible, but this gives us very little time to review the papers, discuss, combine our feedback, decide paper grades, and submit semester grades.

 Information
Fall 2016
Mary Malloy PhD, Associate, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University 
Location: Sever Hall 110
Meeting Time: Wednesday 5:30pm - 7:30pm
In the ancient world, a museum was a place where ideas were exchanged. Using that definition as a starting point, this course examines the intellectual life of museums beginning with concepts of collecting and cultural property in the medieval period. We look at how traders, pilgrims, and crusaders perceived objects they brought back to western Europe; how the organization of collections into taxonomic categories influenced science in the age of Enlightenment; how natural history, anthropology, and art museums contributed to the development of those subject fields; the gulf between the "learned societies" and the P. T. Barnums; how social changes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries led to the rise of large public museums; and how museums are redefining themselves today as educational, social, and cultural institutions.
Note: On campus only.
Optional sections to be arranged.
Graduate credit $2,400.
See http://www.extension.harvard.edu


Course Summary:

Date Details Due