Courses

Do you believe in magic? Historically, a lot of people have done. Some of the earliest objects and texts we have are about magic or divination; if you put those terms into Google, you get tens of millions of hits. Even if you don’t believe in magic, you know what it is, you could give a general description, you have read a book or watched a tv show or movie or listened to a song about magic. More importantly, when, and why people have believed or disbelieved in magic tells us much about their society and their priorities. We have records of attempts to divine who will win a battle, recipes for spells to make your boss like you more, and witchcraft accusations against the most disempowered and disliked people in a community. This course then takes us through the varied sources on magic to ask the question – why were people interested in magic? And what does that tell us about their lives that we can’t access through less bewitching documents? 

We can ask such questions because of the huge range of sources available to us on this topic. We will look at online catalogues and images of magic texts and objects from 13th century Chinese carved bones, to the early modern witch-hunts that stretched from Eastern Europe to North America, to magical themes in 19th century Russian Opera. We will make use of the rich IU collections to gain first-person experiences of magical objects of all kinds. We will appreciate magic-inspired art at the Eskenazi Art Museum, find magic books in the Wells library, learn how to classify magic objects in the Archaeology and Anthropology Museum, and look at spooky photographs and charming tools of stage magic in the Lilly library. In doing so, we will think about magic not only as words on a page or a screen, but tangible objects we can interact with, just as people have done for centuries.  

An atypical subject deserves an atypical set of assignments. As you will learn in your time at IU, here we like to have students learn new things and demonstrate their ideas in a range of ways. For this class you will do some writing, and some presenting, sometimes individually and sometimes in groups, like you probably have done so before. As you may not have done before, we will also look at how scholars study materials without writing a paper at all. We can recreate historical practices, watch and workshop plays, create podcasts and TikToks. It takes as much knowledge and time to accurately recreate a faked Victorian photograph of ectoplasm as it does to write a paper explaining how that was done. So, for this course you will take all the knowledge you acquire and express your expertise and insights in the “unessay” format where the idea is – anything but a paper. After all, if we are studying rule-breakers like witches and wizards then we should break some rules, too. 

This course is eligible for honors credit through Hutton Honors College. 

Catalog Information: COLL-S 103  FRESHMAN SEMINAR IN A&H

Instructor:

Clare Griffin

Email:

clgriff@iu.edu

Department:

Robert F. Byrnes Russian and East European Institute

I am a neuroatypical historian, fiction writer, and mental health advocate originally from the UK, but my work has taken me to Russia, Germany, and Kazakhstan. My academic research focuses on science, medicine, and expertise in the early modern Russian Empire, in particular how those processes intersected with colonialism and globalisation. I explore those topics in my first book, Mixing Medicines, appeared with McGill-Queens in Fall 2022, which demonstrates how the seventeenth-century Russian court utilised its deep pockets and global connections to bring medical ingredients from across the early modern world to Moscow, only to then edit imported medical practices to suit Muscovite tastes. Alongside my academic work, I also publish fiction and advocacy pieces focused on my experiences of neurodiversity and mental illness. That work has helped shape my second book project, on wounds and global conflict. When early modern Russian soldiers were injured in service to the Tsar they were examined as part of a medico-bureaucratic knowledge-gathering process that was always more about the functioning of the Empire than the suffering of the individual. This project combines early modern medical and military records with scholarship on disability and the history of pain to reconsider how Empires used bodies as a part of their global ambitions.   Learn more about me and my work here: http://www.claregriffin.org/ .

GenEd Information: Approved for the Arts & Humanities requirement of the IU Bloomington General Education program.