Out of Date: Expired Patents and Their Unrealized Histories

Historians ask the why and the how, but they are rarely trained to visualize what a city, meal, or landscape might have looked like had a particular technology or living system been adopted. Rather than shy away from such counterfactuals, this course explores and seeks to visualize these historical what-ifs by taking a comparative, global perspective on the history of patents as visual and textual artifacts. Students collectively rewrite and remodel the past using a set of interrelated patents. They not only rethink how we narrate and visualize the past, but also question the conventions of historical research and representation.