New Course, Fall 2016 – Modern Cultures of Display: Archaeology, Museums and Nationalism in Italy, Greece, Egypt, and Turkey
Professors Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr. (Hellenic Studies Center, GSU) and Roxani Margariti (Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies Program, Emory University) are jointly offering a new course for the Fall 2016 Semester:
Modern Cultures of Display: Archaeology, Museums and Nationalism in Italy, Greece, Egypt, and Turkey
The Early Modern period was a time of unusual revolutionary activity in many areas, and especially in the Mediterranean basin. Whereas a great deal of attention has been paid to the Renaissance and Reformation roots of the rights revolutions and modern political change, less attention has been paid to equally revolutionary developments in art, art history and archaeology. In this course, we will examine an emerging culture of encyclopedic display as it developed in modern archaeology and the public art museums created to house treasures newly excavated and/or looted. What we see is, first, that the gunpowder empires rapidly took their rivalry in a new aesthetic direction, vying with one another for the best art collections, and second, that national and imperial museums created a new way of seeing such art objects, as common heritage and public treasure. Both archaeology and museums were put in the service of displaying the nation, and in the case of the last great empire of Islam, the empire itself. I each case, museums tell a politically and culturally meaningful story, often through a profound re-creation of the past.
The course will meet on Wednesday afternoons, 4:30-7:00pm, and alternate weeks on the Emory and Georgia State University campuses.
All students will meet once a week for the general lectures; additional meetings will be arranged for graduate students.