Money and the Muse: An Introduction to the History of Culture
20.10.2021
Welcome to listen to the online course by Dr. Mayhil Fowler, implemented within the project "Handy Tools of Culture: an Interdisciplinary Educational Program About the City and Art." The video lectures are available on the Center’s Youtube channel to be later accompanied by the materials and recommended literature on the Center’s Educational Platform.
Culture is one of the most difficult concepts, and yet we use this word all the time. This course tells how to think about culture and introduces an area such as cultural history. Through this study of cultural history, you will learn to formulate and analyze how people attach importance to different ideas, objects, and practices. We will focus here on two meanings of culture: first, on a worldview definition about how you analyze how people build meaning? Second, we will focus on art. The main idea of this course is that cultural objects tell how people perceive the world around them, especially in places like Eastern Europe, where art has acquired a political and social significance that is not found elsewhere. Culture helps us to analyze ... culture.
Dr. Mayhil Fowler
A historian and associate professor in the Department of History at Stetson University, where she also directs the Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. She holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University (2011). Her first book, Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge: State and Stage in Soviet Ukraine (Toronto, 2017), tells the story of the making of theater both Soviet and Ukrainian through a collective biography of young artists and officials in the 1920s and 1930s.
The course is part of the project "Handy Tools of Culture: an Interdisciplinary Educational Program About the City and Art" supported by the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation.
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Theatrical performance of an athlete with a partner in an unknown travelling circus, 1930s. Collection of Oleksandr Korobov / Urban Media Archive at the Center for Urban History