This doctoral methods colloquium will explore approaches that combine the history of
technology, media, and architecture. An organizing theme will be that of the relation of
ideal and material processes. In recent years the humanities have witnessed a proliferation
of “materialisms” new and old, often accompanied by a return to empiricist methods
associated with the origins of the modern historical sciences. To test the limits of such
approaches, we will combine readings in the history of technology and the history of ideas
with readings in media history, alongside representative scholarship in the history of
architecture and of the visual arts. We will inquire into ways of specifying relations
between materiality and ideation, use and meaning, instrument and symbol; and we will
inquire into ways of writing the history of such relations that are accountable to the
critique of ideology on the one hand, and to the social construction of knowledge on the
other, without being reducible to either. In a mini-practicum embedded into the seminar,
we will test these questions and approaches against primary sources with reproductions of
selected materials from the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University.
ARCHA8904 T 11am-1pm