Newberry Library Undergraduate Seminar

Responding to the City: Imagined Pasts, Utopian Futures

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

In this course we will survey 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.

In the first six weeks of the course, we will meet together twice a week in seminar format, discussing assigned readings and exploring the Newberry’s resources and collections. In the second half of the course, each student will develop an original research project related to the seminar theme and based on materials held in the Newberry's collections.

This course will meet Tuesday/Thursday 2-5pm from January 19 to April 29.

Please reach out to the faculty advisors listed below to apply for the course.

Interested in taking an NLUS course?

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
• Loyola University Chicago
  D. Bradford Hunt, Department of History
  Email
• Roosevelt University
  Priscilla Archibald, Department of Literature and Languages
  Email
• University of Illinois at Chicago
  Ellen McClure, School of Literatures, Cultural Studies and Linguistics
  Email

“Taking a course where I was actually taught step by step how to take on a large-scale research project made me more confident to pursue other research opportunities in the future. I’d never had a class that was so supportive and collaborative!”
- Annie Lemieux, '21 NLUS

“This course offers a chance to step outside of the comfort of your home university and enter into a world of scholars you’ve never met. It’s such a unique chance to make friends who are also interested in intensive archival work and love, just as much as you, how your own unique questions take you through an archive.” - Rose Gallo, '21 NLUS

NLUS courses from the recent past include: 

• 2026: "The Culture of Paper: Investigating a World-Changing Medium", Nina Dubin (University of Illinois Chicago) and Nora Epstein (Newberry)

• 2025: "Chicago Memoir: From the Page to the Archive," Kara Johnson (Newberry) and Lisa Schoblasky (Newberry).

• 2024: "Medicines, Poisons, and Landscapes of Care in the Early Americas," Kat Lecky (Loyola) and Josefrayn Sánchez-Perry (Loyola).

• 2023: “Inventing Mexico: Maps, Manuscripts, and Materiality, 1521-1921,” Delia Cosentino (DePaul) and Emmanuel Ortega (UIC).

• 2022: “Writing Migration: Chicago, Haymarket to 1968,” Elliott Gorn (Loyola) and Mary Hale (Newberry Library)
  
  
• 2021: “Chicago: City of Industry, Art, and Labor,” Elizabeth Tandy Shermer and Melissa Bradshaw (Loyola)
  
  
• 2020: “Shakespeare’s Afterlives: Literature, Philosophy, Politics, and the Visual Arts, 1623-2020,” Meghan Heffernan (DePaul University) and James Knapp (Loyola University)
  
  
• 2019: “Modern Literature and Art in Chicago, 1900-1960,” Melissa Bradshaw (Loyola), Mark Pohlad (DePaul)
  
  
• 2018: “Censorship and Freedom of Expression in an Era of Religious Change: Western Europe, 1450-1789,” Valentina Tikoff (Depaul) and Glen Carman (DePaul)

Interested in teaching an NLUS course?

We welcome proposals for future NLUS courses. Seminars run from January - May at the Newberry Library. Seminars are team-taught by faculty from participating universities. Faculty receive Newberry short-term fellowship awards to prepare their syllabi. 

For more information, please email us.