Course description

The history of culture is inextricably bound up with the history of media and media technology. The connection is so strong that it is hard to even conceptualize contemporary culture without reference to the emergent digital sphere. But this connection is not new to the digital: we can say much the same thing about manuscript, print, and photography, for example. In this course, we explore problems in the history of media and media technology paying special attention to the long history of “new” media since the late Middle Ages. We seek to frame the digital in a longer history and to emphasize its cultural, political, and epistemological dimensions. Readings in this course are interdisciplinary, raising questions of both history and theory and engaging with scholarship from literature, philosophy, art history, and ethnography, among other fields. Each student will research and write a paper on a selected media technology artifact.

Details

• Instructor: Professor Daniel Rosenberg
• Course Number: History 407
• CRN: 32123
• Counts as: Upper-division elective