Course Description:

This course explores the surviving objects of the ancient Greco-Roman world, and the histories of their creation, excavation, organization, public interpretation, and preservation in museum and library collections. From Sumerian tablets and Egyptian monuments, ancient Greek papyri, Islamic scrolls, late-antique and medieval books, to the revival of Greek and Roman traditions in the art, architecture, and print culture of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, we will learn how these objects helped shape and transform our understanding of the ancient world over two millennia, up to the formation of the great antiquities museums of the modern era. Supplementing our readings, we will engage with theoretical texts from thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Mary Carruthers, and Sara Edenheim, as well as fiction by Jorge Luis Borges, in order to examine how archives are structured and what their explicit and implicit agenda may be. By reflecting on how archives shape institutional knowledge more broadly, the course makes parallel forays into comparative traditions, reading archives and institutional knowledge in Ancient China, Imperial Japan, New Spain. This hands-on course leverages ancient and early modern objects and texts in Baltimore, including the Walters Art Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Archaeology Museum at JHU, and the rare book and manuscript collections of the Sheridan Libraries at JHU.

Offered Fall 2025, Johns Hopkins University