Newberry Library Undergraduate Seminar

Responding to the City: Imagined Pasts, Utopian Futures

January 19 through April 29, 2027 / Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2-5pm

The course meets at the Newberry Library, 60 West Walton Street, Chicago, IL

Instructors: Brandiann Molby (Loyola University) and Ben Weil (The Medieval Academy of America)

This course surveys the responses of artists, architects, archaeologists, and urban planners to
increasing urbanization, from the rise of cities in the European Middle Ages to contemporary
Chicago. Faced with industrialization, disease, and extreme wealth disparities, artists and thinkers
responded by imagining utopian civic plans, reviving past relationships to urban space and the
natural world, and embracing the frenetic chaos of urban life. Through an examination of the Arts
and Crafts Movement’s reimagining of the Middle Ages and the Chicago World’s Fair’s return to
neoclassical style, we will discuss contrasting visions of idealized pasts and the ways they were
recombined to inspire urban futures. Moving between Europe and the Americas will also prompt
discussions of colonization and Indigenous urbanism. We’ll conclude with an exploration of
modernism in Chicago and consider how those imagined pasts could be jettisoned altogether to
create something new. We will engage with the Newberry Library’s strengths in early cartography,
the Arts and Crafts movement, and the history of Chicago, and students will work directly with
manuscripts, prints, and ephemera.

If you’re a student at one of the participating institutions and would like to apply for the upcoming NLUS course, contact the advisor at your home campus.

• DePaul University
  Megan Heffernan, Department of English
  Email

Applications are due October 15th