3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

This course, conducted as a humanities research lab, will focus on the literature, history and future of the Port of Baltimore and its relation to other world seaports. We’ll start by exploring some great literary works focused on Baltimore’s harbor, and we’ll compare and connect them to works set in other port cities from New York City to Havana, Cuba, and the Panama Canal Zone. Alongside this, we’ll study the function of modern ports—their “critical logistics,” environmental challenges, and roles in creating civic imagination. We’ll conduct field visits at dredge facilities, marine terminals, and or sites of postindustrial redevelopment, and we will visit archives that record the changing shape of the port of Baltimore. This is a literature class because our big questions are fundamentally about stories: how do Baltimore and those who live or travel here tell the story of the seaport? What stories are missing? What does it mean to find or recover these stories? Answering those questions will also require us to learn and integrate historical and archival methods and observational and interview techniques, so students should bring to the class a spirit of curiosity and openness to collaboration and experimentation. Undergraduates Only.