My name is Sama Mammadova, and I was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, and moved to Brooklyn, NY in 2010. I am a junior at Harvard pursuing a joint concentration in History and History of Art and Architecture. I am interested in economic, intellectual, and art history of the High Middle Ages and the Italian Renaissance. During my time at Harvard, I have been involved in student publications as an editor-in-chief of a history magazine, as well as an editor in medieval studies, Germanic studies, and international relations magazines. Along with publishing, I have done research with the Harvard Center for History and Economics, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, and Villa I Tatti: The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.
Though I have had extensive experience with secondary sources, I have only had the opportunity to physically engage with a primary source in the last academic year. In the spring of 2014, I took Professor Daniel Smail’s sophomore tutorial on material history, which aimed at exploring aspects of material culture such as consumption habits, cultural meanings and economic values assigned to objects, and people’s increasing dependence on commodities. As a final assignment for that class, I wrote a biography of four scattered leaves of an early printed Bible, and getting to closely examine the leaves in Houghton Library was an incredibly enriching and rewarding experience. There was a drastic difference between reading a secondary source on the history of printing and being able to engage directly with a tangible fragment of that history to try discovering where, how, why, and through whose diligent efforts this object was created. It became so much easier for me to visualize historical events and to form personal connections to them since I started viewing history through material objects, and I hope that Medieval Objects Lessons will spark similar interests in other students as well.