What is the seminar?

Fall semester seminar & topic in fall 2008

Winter/spring short-term seminars

Quotes from program alumni

The Library and its collection

Chicago -- a great city

Academic info: eligibility & credit

Costs, housing & how to apply

Contact: campus program advisors, ACM office

Opportunities for faculty

Fall 2007 Seminar

"Words and Deeds: Speech and Action in Western Culture"

Dates: August 27 - December 7, 2007

Faculty

Description of the seminar

The 2007 Newberry Seminar in the Humanities is built around a set of fundamental questions. How does social change happen? Who is more important -- the theorist or the activist? Is the pen or the sword more powerful? These questions stretch across time and cultures, touching on history, literature, philosophy, and religion. The seminar participants will look at the impact of writers, thinkers, and doers on important events, from the French Revolution to the civil rights movement, assessing the power of words to affect change. As with every Newberry seminar, participants will read and discuss crucial primary documents and pursue independent research on related topics.

During the first five weeks of the semester, the class will meet regularly to discuss common readings that will provide a shared context and language for the seminar’s work. Many of these readings will be specifically related to racial and ethnic encounters, including Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. Curators will visit the class to introduce students to the Library’s eclectic and fascinating collections, including novels, histories, philosophical treatises, plays, and maps. As they begin their own explorations of the Library’s collections, students will present their discoveries in class.

The heart of the seminar, however, will be students’ individual research, supported by the seminar faculty and the library staff. Throughout the second half of the semester students will spend most of their time working independently, allowing them to dig deeply into their own interests and the Library’s wealth of materials to produce a substantial research paper. Students will present their works-in-progress to their colleagues and critique each other’s work. During the last week they will make formal presentations of their research to the Newberry community.

This seminar’s broad topic lends itself to research in a variety of disciplines. A classics or ancient philosophy major could study the figure of Achilles, the arguments employed by Plato’s Socrates in the Apology, or Augustine’s Confessions. Students with literary interests might look at Shakespeare’s King Lear, or Melville’s Billy Budd. Students interested in history might explore the French Revolution or the Declaration of Independence.

The Newberry Library’s collections, which embrace the history and literature of the civilizations of Western Europe and the Americas from the Middle Ages through World War I, are tremendous resources for research related to this topic. For example, someone might work with the development of American laws on treason by studying the Burr and Wilkinson trials using materials in the Graff Collection. Someone else might examine the legal perception of reports given to coroners concerning the deaths of slaves on plantations by using documents from the African American collections. Using that same collection another student might look at sheet music from black popular culture to evaluate the status of words and deeds as a political discourse in that medium. Yet another student might use documents in the Edward E. Ayer collection to explore the nature of the first contact Jesuit missionaries had with Native Americans and the consequences following from that encounter. A student with a reading knowledge of French might work on the French political pamphlets from before 1648.