Challenging Collections: Critical Reflections on Collecting Through Harvard’s History

Harvard FAS

Harvard’s museum collections have often been used to interrogate the world outside of “us”: peoples, events, places, and things. In this course we will reverse that gaze and ask what the collections and the processes of collecting reveal about the history of Harvard and its institutional identity as “the” place of learning. We will unpack the historical circumstances surrounding the arrival of particular collections of photographs and objects at Harvard’s Peabody Museum: such ones related to…