School of Architecture and Planning

A warm welcome to new and returning students -- I'm looking forward to meeting you in the next week and to our discussions throughout the fall semester.

Given the wealth of original eighteenth-century material held in Boston and Cambridge-area collections, I've arranged to hold five of our meetings in local libraries -- two of our seminar meetings will take place in the Rotch Library, two at the Houghton Library (Harvard University), and one in the Print Room at the Museum of Fine Arts.

For our first meeting on Tuesday, September 11, please read the following texts. They will provide some of the intellectual foundations for approaching the material we will be discussing throughout the semester.

• E. P. Thompson, “Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture,” Journal of Social History 7, no. 4 (Summer, 1974), pp. 382-405.
• Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger & Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), chapters 1 & 2, pp. 1-56.
• Daniel Brewer, “Lights in Space,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 37, no. 2 (Winter, 2004), pp. 171-86.
• Antoine Lilti, “The Kingdom of Politesse: Salons and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 1, no. 1 (May 1, 2009): http://rofl.stanford.edu/node/38.
• Charles W. J. Withers, "Place and the 'Spatial Turn' in Georgraphy and in History," Journal of the History of Ideas 70, no. 4 (October 2009),
637-58.