My Approach to Cultural History, Teaching & Learning
“Nothing, I think, is more interesting, more poignant, and more difficult to seize than the intersection of self and history.” — Linda Nochlin, art historian
My approach to teaching and learning about literature, history, and the arts is informed by my experience and perspective as a cultural historian. Cultural history provides a kaleidoscopic lens into diverse human efforts to create beauty and new aesthetic experiences; to express emotions including joy, fear, wonder, rage, and sadness; and to refine and communicate a finely observed, carefully crafted, or hard-earned piece of wisdom to other human beings.
In my classes, author conversations, and other programs, participants are inspired to ponder and critically analyze how writers, filmmakers, artists, and other cultural producers create new meanings and ways of understanding the world. They learn to ask questions about how hierarchies of power and resources (based on race, class, gender, and other categories of identity) leave a mark upon these works.
What does it mean to cultivate a sociological imagination?
When analyzing a contemporary memoir, a classic novel, a documentary film, or a series of archival photographs, my aim is to activate what sociologist C. Wright Mills called the "sociological imagination." Mills coined the term “sociological imagination” in 1959 to highlight the connection between social structures and individual agency. Simply put, it suggests awareness of the relationship between one’s personal life and the wider society. To recognize this connection is to see that what we often experience as “personal troubles” (such not having enough money to pay bills, lacking access to medical care, or being bullied for not complying with normative gender roles) are also, in fact, “public issues”—the result of socially and politically constructed realities that affect the material and emotional lives of countless other people.
Sociological imagination is the capacity to mentally step back from one’s own situation and think about the world from another point of view. It enables a deeper understanding of how a person’s biography emerges from a broader set of historical processes that occur beyond the self. When people take action, make decisions, and exercise personal agency—often with great resourcefulness, courage, grit, or a host of other qualities that enable human flourishing—they do so while inhabiting a social realm that permits and empowers, or limits and constrains, those actions in ways they may not even be fully conscious of.
What is cultural history?
Cultural history brings to life a past time and place. Cultural historians critically study beliefs and ideas—patterns of thought and meaning—as they are expressed, debated, resisted, and altered through an enormously wide variety of forms. In addition to the writings of intellectual and social elites, they consider the ideas and creations of people from a range of socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic backgrounds. Cultural history is embodied in artistic and literary endeavors, as well as the objects and experiences of everyday life, such as clothing, advertisements, toys, and cuisine. “Culture” is also embedded within constellations of attitudes, values, assumptions, and prejudices, and the rituals and practices that express them.
Cultural history is also invaluable for rethinking our own historical moment. Like the air we breathe, the cultural context that shapes our perception of the world is often invisible for those who are surrounded by it. When we learn about how cultures and societies (including our own) have evolved over time, we can recognize that some of what appears to be “natural” or immutable is actually contingent and open to change—and we can ask what we might do as individuals to shape that process. (This statement is adapted from the Yale History Department website.)