Teaching
Thomas Dale (Art History) obtained a Digitization Grant from the Memorial Library in 2006-2007 to catalogue and scan photographs from the Casselman Archive of Mudejar and Islamic Architecture. This material is now available as a teaching resource as part of the Digital Library, and Dale was able to have his students use the photographs as part of a new course on Cultural Exchange and Alterity in Medieval Art. To sample this collection go to http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/Arts.CasselmanImage
Scott Mellor (Scandinavian Studies) taught the cornerstone course this fall for an interdisciplinary First Year Interest Group (FIG) called "World of the Vikings." Each FIG serves a group of incoming freshmen, helping them get oriented both academically and soc
ially because the students live near each other on campus and all take the three related courses in their FIG. Besides his own literature course, World of the Sagas, Mellor's FIG included a folklore course and an archeology course. Much of what we know of Old Scandinavian culture comes either from archeology or from the texts that were written after the conversion to Christianity and the introduction of Latin writing to the region. By using techniques and practices from both of these disciplines, the students thus gain an understanding of how our information on mediaeval Scandinavia has been obtained, as well as an introduction to theoretical techniques from both the social sciences and the humanities.