Imagining Cities: Early Modern Urban Perspectives

Every city is a palimpsest in space and time. Architectural treatises, legal charters, novels, poems, paintings, maps, and the archeological record all provide points of entry to real and imagined urban centers. This collaborative humanities seminar considers early modern cities as varied as Rome, Seville, Peking, Mexico City, and the City of God, but seminar participants will propose their own cities of interest. This multidisciplinary archive forms a basis for collaborations in recovering and reconstructing built environments from different perspectives in text, image, and digital media, working with original materials in special collections wherever possible.