Museums (395-0-1)

Topic

William Blake and the Ecologies of Empire

Instructors

Jacob Leveton

Meeting Info

Kresge 4354 Art Hist. Sem. Rm.: Thurs 2:00PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

William Blake's relief etchings, illuminated books, hand-colored prints, and poems emerged amid the American and French Revolutions, British imperial expansion, Atlantic slavery, abolitionist struggle, and the accelerating transformation of land, labor, and natural life. This graduate/undergraduate museum seminar examines how Blake's visual and poetic practices register, reproduce, and resist the intertwined forces of empire, racial formation, extraction, industrialization, religion, and political economy.

Close study of objects in Northwestern's Deering Special Collections and the Art Institute of Chicago's Prints and Drawings collection will be paired with postcolonial, critical race, and ecological theory, allowing students to test Blake's radical claims against his historical limitations and to trace the afterlives of the structures he confronted.

Students will investigate print as a material process, the image-text as a political form, and museums and archives as producers of historical knowledge.

Registration Requirements

Students must have taken at least one previous Art History course to enroll.

Class Materials (Required)

1. William Blake: Complete Illuminated Books, David Bindman, ed. Thames and Hudson, ISBN: 0500282455

2. William Blake, The Complete Poetry & Prose, ed. David V. Erdman, Anchor Books, ISBN: 0385152132

Enrollment Requirements

Enrollment Requirements: Prerequisite: Students must have completed at least 1 ART_HIST course prior to enrolling in ART_HIST 395-0.