Vermont Collaborations Public Humanities Lab
In collaboration with local archives, museums, and community organizations, we will work closely with primary sources, learning skills of transcription, analysis, and interpretation; in the spirit of Public Humanities, we will share this scholarship with the broader community, whether in the form of an exhibition, a publication, a website, podcasts, or other digital media. The focus will change annually or by sections, but this project-based course will emphasize place-based experiential learning and community partnerships in its critical engagement with histories of collections and archives. This course is part of the Public Humanities Labs Initiative administered by the Axinn Center for the Humanities.

2021 marked the bicentennial of the birth of Henry Luther Sheldon, founder of Middlebury’s Sheldon Museum of Vermont History (founded 1881) and 2022 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Research Center. In this course we will mine the Archives of the Sheldon Museum for information about the early years of the museum’s establishment, exploring institutional history, histories of collecting, and local history, alongside a critical investigation of how archives and collections are formed, developed, and made legible (or illegible) to broader publics. 3 hrs. Sem.