Class Act: Volcanoes and Victorian Media

Last fall, Caltech undergraduates had the opportunity to take two new courses offered by Anne Sullivan, the Weisman Postdoctoral Instructor in Visual Culture. 

The new classes, Volcanoes and Consuming Victorian Media, are part of the new Caltech-Huntington Program in Visual Culture, which was established in 2018 with a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The program is designed to expand Caltech students’ exposure to different forms of artistic media through coursework, guest lectures, field trips, and artists-in-residence.

Collaborative classrooms

Sullivan says her classes are based on her own academic interests in 19th-century British literature and culture as well as previous experiences as a writing instructor at UC Riverside.

“When I’m designing classes, I find what I am really excited about but then make it relevant to everybody,” she says. “What’s great about working at Caltech and close to The Huntington is that I can enrich my own work in scientific literature and culture. These are collaborative classrooms where students learn from one another and the instructor, and the instructor learns from the students as well.”

“Too scintillating”

The course on Victorian media looks at historical concerns around the consumption of media, which at that time included books, art, and live entertainment. The students read Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen, in which the main character becomes obsessed with Gothic novels. “Similar to the way we are concerned with screen time now and how we consume media, 19th-century people had concerns about media consumption, such as of Gothic novels, which were thought to be overly stimulating and too scintillating,” she says. The students also read Dracula by Bram Stoker, which includes mentions of typewritten notes, telegrams, and phonograph recordings, items that, according to Sullivan, would have been considered new forms of media technology at the time.

Lava, bonfires, and fireworks 

The volcanoes class focused on various forms of media that depict famous disasters brought on by the eruption of volcanoes, including Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, which destroyed the Italian city of Pompeii; Indonesia’s Mount Tambora in 1815, one of the largest eruptions in recorded human history; and Mount Krakatoa, also in Indonesia, whose 1883 eruption changed the color of sunsets worldwide for some time afterward. Students studied “pyrodramas” of the 1880s and 1890s, big outdoor shows that dramatized the Vesuvius eruption for crowds of thousands of people; the shows used bonfires and fireworks along with water-pump systems to create the effects of lava. The course also included a field trip to the Getty Villa in Malibu to see the exhibit Buried by Vesuvius: Treasures from the Villa dei Papiri.

“I remember learning about these disasters as a kid and being horrified, but now I am fascinated,” says Sullivan. “By examining literary and visual representations of disasters, students engaged with larger questions about how we perceive the past and how we conceptualize our relationship with nature.”