Professor Seth Bruggeman’s Studies in American Material Culture course this spring took students out of the classroom and into The Clay Studio.  Students learned to throw pots from the studio’s Daniel Ricardo Teran.

“The value of working intimately with objects is that it provides a new way of understanding history.” Bruggeman explains that historians are often “good at sitting in the archives and sifting through old books and papers, but we’re usually not trained to use things—artifacts, images, buildings, landscapes, and so on—in our research. One goal of my material culture seminar is to familiarize our graduate students with basic methods for finding clues about the past in the things that surround us.”

Check out a full article on the class here.