I Made This For You: Reflections on Responding Materially, or Grading as Making

Since 2021, in my “Book History in Practice” class at the University of Toronto, I have given an assignment I call “material experiments.” The most basic articulation of the assignment (included below in full) is that students are asked to choose a material feature of books, manuscripts, or printed artifacts, and conduct an at-home experiment of their choice in making something using that material practice.

Revamping Hobson-Jobson

The Dictionary Project Assignment is from my upper-division class “Novel in India.” One of the university’s few offerings on South Asia, the class attracts English, History, and Anthropology, and Political Science majors, and occasionally Indian-heritage students.

A framing question of the class is: “can a language – English—and a genre –the novel – that were imported to India by British colonialists be ‘indigenized’?