What is it about?
This essay traces the development of the humanities curriculum and of its relation to the specialized technical curriculum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the first three decades after its founding in the 1860s.
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Why is it important?
Histories that treat the foundational decades of MIT have generally credited the idea that the institution provided a robust auxiliary humanities curriculum as a complement to the increasingly sophisticated and influential curriculum it developed in areas that we now designate STEM education. The essay shows how the institution came to neglect its original commitment to fostering knowledge of philosophy, history, language, the emerging social science disciplines, literature, and even the technology of writing.
Perspectives
This essay is related to a larger project in which I am studying the transformation of English literature into an academic subject. The project focuses on the period when what we consider the modern university was emerging. It involves archival research in the archives of more than twenty colleges and universities in the U.S. and in England.
Dayton Haskin
Boston College
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This page is a summary of: Shakespeare, Milton, and the Humanities at mit in Its Foundational Period, Explorations in Renaissance Culture, May 2017, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/23526963-04301001.
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