Welcome!

Most of the visitors to this blog, very likely you reading this now, are enrolled in the seminar., The Victorian Avant-Garde at the Corcoran College of Art + Design. I welcome others to follow along, but the blog is primarily a means of conveying information from professor (me) to student (you). I'd also like the site to facilitate online student-to-student communication. Bookmark this site and visit it frequently. If you happen to be clever with blog design, you can already see that I could use your help.

Students are required to purchase two books: Inventing the Victorians by Matthew Sweet, and Inside the Victorian Home by Judith Flanders. These books are easily available on Amazon and ecampus. Any edition is fine for our purposes(new or used, early or later, US or UK), so if yours doesn't look like the cover images below it's not a problem. Please buy these books at your earliest convenience. I wouldn't recommend sharing the books or relying on library copies. Send me an email message if you have questions.

For the first half of the course, you can expect on between 100 and 150 pages of required reading per week. This might seem like a lot, but it's really not considering that we meet just once a week for fifteen weeks. During the second half of the class, there will be far less required reading because you'll be busy with your research project (which should clock in around the same amount of reading time per week). More on all of this later. Here are the cover images of the two required books:

 

Two other books are recommended but not required: Victorian London by Liza Picard, and the catalogue accompanying the exhibition coming to the National Gallery of Art in February, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (Eds. Barringer, Rosenfeld and Smith).

Spend some time with the growing list of resources I've linked to on the right column of the blog. Send me recommendations for other sites to add. I'm looking forward to a fascinating and productive semester. 

-- Casey  (csmith@corcoran.org)