navAcademic Programs
The American Antiquarian Society undertakes a variety of academic programs for constituencies including college undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral scholars.
All of these programs derive their focus and their strength from the collections in the Society's library and from the community of scholars, fellows, and staff that is centered around the institution.
American Studies Seminar
Each fall since 1978, AAS has sponsored an American Studies Seminar for a select group of undergraduates from the five four-year colleges and universities in Worcester: Assumption University, Clark University, the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and Worcester State University. Over the course of the semester, students produce a significant research paper on a topic related to the seminar theme and based on research using primary sources such as lithographs, city views, photographs, maps, portraits, newspapers, and letters held in the AAS collections.
Established in 2005, The Center for Historic American Visual Culture (CHAViC) at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) seeks to provide opportunities for educators to learn about American visual culture and resources, promote the awareness of AAS collections, and stimulate research and intellectual inquiry into American visual materials. CHAViC will accomplish these goals by offering fellowships, exhibitions, workshops and seminars, conferences, and improved access to AAS collections.
The most comprehensive is the Society's Program in the History of the Book in American Culture, which sponsors seminars, summer seminars, workshops, lectures, conferences, and publications, including a five volume work of collaborative scholarship, A History of the Book in America, in association with Cambridge University Press. The Program was formally established in 1983 in order to focus the Society's collections and its long-standing history of involvement in fostering and publishing scholarship in American bibliography and printing history on the development of an emerging interdisciplinary field of humanistic scholarship. The Program seeks to promote research, publication, and teaching about the impact that the printed word has had on the development of American society and culture. The Program's activities have helped the history-of-the-book field achieve its current, more mature state.
