Below you’ll find a list of the latest graduate course offerings at UD that engage significantly with material culture. Don’t forget to also check out the amazing grant opportunities sponsored by CMCS.
Fall 2025 COURSES
UAPP429 – Historic Preservation Theory and Practice
Professor Fesak
Analysis of the theory underlying historic preservation in the United States and globally, including its history and evolution over time. Examines the impact of preservation laws and public policies, and the strategies and regulations for identifying significant structures, sites, and cultural heritage worthy of preservation.
*Course counts towards the graduate Certificate in Historic Preservation.
UAPP454 – Architecture of Everyday Life
Professor Morrissey
Understanding and interpreting everyday buildings and landscapes by seeing the built environment through a physical lens (material, construction, style and plan) and social lens (gender, class, race) and from the perspective of multiple disciplines.
*Course counts towards the graduate Certificate in Historic Preservation.
ENGL/HIST/MSST/MCST 674 – Archive Theory
Professor Helton
Colonial archives, curio cabinets, scrapbooks, databases: once understood primarily as sources, archival objects are now subjects of inquiry in their own right. In this course we will trace the “archival turn” in the humanities while immersing ourselves in collections. Through readings in theory and practice, we will consider how interpretations of the archive in one field reframe archival questions in another. We will ask: How do archives shape our inquiries and imaginaries? What gets saved or lost, and why? What are the ethics and constraints of archival research? How can we work both along and against the archival grain? This cross-disciplinary seminar is for graduate students engaged in traditional research projects as well as those interested in public humanities and museum work. Each student will design an individual project tailored to their scholarly interests and career goals, as well as contribute to a collaborative digital humanities project in African diasporic history.
ARTH613 – Studies in Renaissance Art & Architecture: European Art & Science
Professor Nelson
The turn in early modern studies toward connecting artisanal/making and scientific/knowing practices on a global scale has crucial repercussions for the entire field of art history. After collectively processing canonical case studies in, e.g., alchemy and the occult, anatomy and medicine, military technology and automata, astronomy and astrology, cartography and geography, and the afterlife of medieval encyclopedias like bestiaries and herbaria, participants will contribute new scholarship on themes related to visual knowledge during the (often globally extractive) “birth” of science in Europe.
ARTH6120 – Seminar in African Art: Sacrifice, Enchantment & Power
Professor Okoye
The seminar will on one hand explore African art, its forms, its material, its ritual or performative insertion or activation, as procedures of knowledge production. On the other hand, it will explore the collection and exhibition histories of its diverse arts from the 17th century onwards, pointing to the challenges and difficulties presented by the historical invention of the exhibition and the museum via an epistemological lineage we increasingly understand as particular–culturally laden attempts at understanding that sought after the ways that modern publics (later, including those in Africa) could understand the relevance this art has to things like an emerging anthropocenic imagination–about which it cautioned or forewarned. We will do so while occasionally viewing selected objects in UD Museum’s African art collection, and perhaps those nearby.
ARTH635 – American Art to 1900: Disability and American Art Histories
Professor Van Horn
This seminar investigates the intersections of disability studies with “American” art, architecture, design, material and visual cultures. How do histories of US art change when ableism is challenged? Where does disability surface and where do absences persist? What new ways of making or experiencing art are included when we consider disability? How can art history, museums, and public digital history contribute to anti-ableist future practices? We will approach disability intersectionally and with attention to the histories of understudied peoples. Our seminar will meet often at Winterthur Museum. Students will have a chance to interact with Winterthur’s collections and to share research through a public-facing format.
HIST603 – Historiography of Technology
Professor Mohun
Introduces major historiographic issues and examines the development of this subfield of history.