Welcome to the WordPress site for our Fall 2025 class: ECL 596: BOOKS!!: Book as Medium, Object, Artform, Archive
This is new, experimental class, and you are lucky to be part of it! Truly, take a look at the course description below, and then look at the pages of the WordPress blog to get a sense of what we are planning to do, study, and make! Eager to meet you all soon.

COURSE DESCRIPTION

This class is an experimental one-time offering, introducing students to the primary medium of literary study– the book– through a collaborative teaching partnership between a scholar of literature and media studies (Jessica Pressman) and Head of Special Collections & University Archives at SDSU (Anna Culbertson). This is a merger of theory and practice, pairing readings in book history with hands-on engagement in Special Collections, “labs” that support experiential learning with the subject of book history and the actual objects contained in SDSU’s archives.  We will learn about the history of books and learn to see them differently– as medium, object, artform, and archive– all while considering how and why books continue to matter as material objects in our digital age.

-Professor Pressman