Monsters, Marvels and Museums

Catalog description

Freak shows, serial killers, medical oddities, and flesh-eating beetles are all part of the Chicago experience. This course is an interdisciplinary study of curiosity and wonder, incorporating philosophy, science, and history to investigate the threshold between shadow (the unfamiliar) and light (the known). Celebrating the marvelous and the macabre is part of a long history of collecting, reaching back to the wonder-cabinets of the late Renaissance. Chicago museums were leaders in the post-Darwinian transformation from sideshow to legitimate science. In this course we will explore three categories of strange Chicago (monsters, marvels, and museology) as case studies to understand the nature of curiosity. Themes will include the nature of knowledge (e.g., credulity, skepticism, collecting and constructing nature, etc.), the borders of human and inhuman (natural and moral monsters), and the hidden oddities of urban natural history. In addition to reporting on a few strange sites in Chicago, each student will make their own curiosity cabinet (a personal artistic/intellectual statement).For more information go to First Semester Experience: Big Chicago