The Tabb Center sponsors opportunities for mentored research as well as student-initiated learning inside and outside the classroom. Semester-long and intersession courses delve into a wide array of topics through the analysis of rare books, manuscripts, and archival documents. Initiatives like the Edible Book Festival, Trans Histories Lab, and vintage game nights offer unique opportunities for creative exploration, blending research with playful and community-based engagement.
Vintage Game Night
At these annual events students are invited to play a variety of historic games dating back to the 19th century, drawing on our collection of fortune-telling games, women’s suffrage tabletop and card games, and 20th century party games related to fashion, dating, and celebrity.
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Download & Engage
Online engagements with our rare book, manuscript, and archival collections, including a pro-women’s suffrage board game, instructional toymaker cards, and more.
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Selection of Recent Courses
Votes and Petticoats
Students enrolled in this course explored artifacts and works on paper that were created by fans and foes of women’s suffrage and discovered how “votes for women” triumphed over fears of “petticoat government.”
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Queer & Trans Public History
This course drew on studies of queer affect, queer temporality, trans embodiment, and performance studies to explore how queer people shape collective memory through public history, broadly defined to include digital archives, documentary film, performance, walking tours, and site-specific installations.
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Romancing the Comic Book
Students enrolled in Romancing the Comic Book learned how these publications transformed from a much-mocked genre to an essential artifact that reveals much about mid-century American life and culture.
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Cooks & Their Books
By examining the historic cookbooks held in Special Collections, students will uncover forgotten histories, learn how to analyze and interpret cookbooks as historic objects, identify signs of use and ownership, trace the development of recipes from the manuscript era to the mid-twentieth century, and discuss authorship versus authenticity in the popularization of recipes.
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Queer Oral History
Engaging critically with queer and oral history theory, students broke into groups and coordinated interviews with 15+ queer Baltimore residents with the aim of archiving a queer reimagining of the city.
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A Century of Trans Cultural Production
This discussion oriented seminar offered an intensive survey of cultural production by trans, non-binary, gender-nonconforming, and intersex artists, writers, poets, and musicians.
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First Year Seminar: Queer Archives
This First-Year Seminar offers an in-depth exploration of Baltimore’s queer and trans archives, expansively defined, engaging with interdisciplinary scholarship on "the archive" within queer and trans studies.
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