My inpiration for this course came from reading Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes, a book that we will be studying in this class. The text is remarkable because it tells the story of a family not by psychoanalyzing personalities but through looking at objects–a collection of Japanese Netsuke (small handcrafted figurines) to be precise. We get an amazing view of who this person is and where he comes from because of the stories that these objects contain.

It is my hope that we can find out more about ourselves, our community, and our scholarship by looking to the stories held by the objects around us. We will be using our “reading” of things (some simple and everyday, some more elaborate) as an avenue to personal stories, collective histories, and new approaches to our scholarly work. I am very excited to see where these searches will take us over the course of the term!