The Book Lab is building a list of current and past Book Studies courses offered at Indiana University, Bloomington. Please reach out to share details of your own courses with us! By clicking below, you can also browse some past Book Lab offered courses, and learn about our new NEH-funded curricular development project, Creating an Indiana University Book Studies Minor (2024-2027).
Fall 2025 TAUGHT BY ELIZABETH HEBBARD
COLL-X 101 Experimental Topics
MW 12:45 PM–3:15 PM
First Eight Weeks - 8/25/2025–10/17/2025
Books are one of the most ordinary and familiar objects in our lives. We see them everywhere without ever really looking at them. We tend to think of books as simple containers of words and of works that can be accessed in a variety of formats: in print or in e-book, in disembodied PDF scans, or in fragmented GoogleBooks search results. Yet the book as object represents a realm of continual technological and artistic experimentation.
This course offers an introduction to the book as historical, cultural, and material object through immersive, hands-on making experiments (labs). Organizing our inquiry into thematic modules which might include commercial and artisanal book production, libraries and archives, performance, and books and the sacred, among others, we will situate the book or codex among other text formats and within a variety of cultural and historical contexts. Class time will be divided between discussion of readings that introduce theoretical concepts and hands-on labs that put knowledge into practice, which might include paper making, ink making, sewing book bindings, and other creative and research-intensive making experiences.
This course, developed collaboratively by a working group of IU faculty who are specialists in the history of the book, will be the pilot course for the new interdisciplinary undergradaute minor in Book Studies developed with the support of a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Humanities Initiatives Grant awarded in 2024.
FRIT-F 225 Spring 2026 TAUGHT BY ELIZABETH HEBBARD AN ASURE COURSE
The Bayeux Tapestry is a 70-meter-long textile depicting the background and events of the Battle of Hastings in 1066. It is thought to have been made for Odo of Bayeux shortly after the Norman Conquest of England and designed for display in Bayeux cathedral. Likely called a tapestry because of that display context, the Bayeux Tapestry is actually an embroidery featuring the work of many anonymous needlecraft artists. The Bayeux Tapestry itself is worthy of sustained attention, particularly given that so few textiles survive from the Middle Ages, but this course uses this object to dive deeper into networks of people and specialized knowledge of the premodern world. Where was flax cultivated and exported in the 11th century and how are the crops processed to gather fibers and weave them into linen cloth? How is wool spun into yarn, and what dye plants were available to color it? How long does it take to make a 70-meter embroidery? How were textiles used in the premodern world to engage in storytelling, and why was the Norman Conquest recounted in embroidery? Who made this object, and what can we learn from it today about art and sustainability, premodern craft as knowledge, gender and textile work, and the natural world?
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