Spring 2025 Religion UN3232 section 001

Museums and Sacred Things

Call Number 13963
Day & Time
Location
TR 4:10pm-5:25pm
To be announced
Points 4
Grading Mode Standard
Approvals Required None
Instructor Courtney Bender
Type LECTURE
Method of Instruction In-Person
Course Description

This course invites students to consider how museums create, curate, collect, and engage with sacred things, including things that are recognizably religious, things that become “sacred” through the processes of museum collection and display, visitors to museums, and even museum spaces themselves. This course focuses on the American context, and American museums. We will first consider the particular social and political contexts in which museums and museum practices developed and responded to sacred things, and the contexts in which “religion” serves as a valuable if often implicit classification structure.  We will then focus on the ways in which things deemed sacred are engaged by museums and encountered by museumgoers, with particular attention to the ways that museumgoers, museum architecture, and religious communities all interact in relation so object. In this class, students will learn to thoughtfully ask question and evaluate the role that museums as public institutions play in shaping public and private understandings and experiences of religion, the sacred, and spirituality.

Web Site Vergil
Department Religion
Enrollment 30 students (30 max) as of 5:05PM Sunday, December 8, 2024
Status Full
Subject Religion
Number UN3232
Section 001
Division Interfaculty
Note Must join waiting list for discussion section
Section key 20251RELI3232W001