sarah carter, whose knowledge and intelligence and wise ways had always helped me when i was in grad school, is a person whose work often makes me wish i were back in school. not that our fields have ever overlapped or that material culture and the visual arts are especially within my ken — and, i tend, afterall, always towards the abstract, non-historical types of work — but i find her ‘wormholes’ way of thinking extremely similar to my own, and her professional confidence and meticulous devotion to her work something to aspire to.

tangible things was an exhibition she had curated at harvard in the spring of 2011. that year i visited cambridge too late to see it, but the exhibition has since become a book as well as an MOOC on harvardX.

from the OUP promo page:

“The authors of this book pulled an astonishing array of materials out of storage–from a pencil manufactured by Henry David Thoreau to a bracelet made from iridescent beetles–in a wide range of Harvard University collections to mount an innovative exhibition alongside a new general education course. The exhibition challenged the rigid distinctions between history, anthropology, science, and the arts. It showed that object-centered inquiry inevitably leads to a questioning of categories within and beyond history.

Tangible Things is both an introduction to the range and scope of Harvard’s remarkable collections and an invitation to reassess collections of all sorts, including those that reside in the bottom drawers or attics of people’s houses. It interrogates the nineteenth-century categories that still divide art museums from science museums and historical collections from anthropological displays and that assume history is made only from written documents. Although it builds on a larger discussion among specialists, it makes its arguments through case studies, hoping to simultaneously entertain and inspire. The twenty case studies take us from the Galapagos Islands to India and from a third-century Egyptian papyrus fragment to a board game based on the twentieth-century comic strip.

(forthcoming december 2014)