Scribner Seminar Program
Course Description
Wonder
Instructor(s): Maggie Greaves, English
Wonder is the pleasurable experience of being captivated by something we do not yet understand––and perhaps can never fully understand. Contemporary culture inundates us with wonder-on-demand: immersive art installations, viral James Webb images, algorithmically delivered astonishment on TikTok, and AI systems that simulate human speech with eerie fluency. Yet amid such relentless novelty, wonder is often elusive. In this seminar, we will slow down to treat wonder as a practice of attention and inquiry, tracing its long intellectual lineage as both an object of study and a method of knowing. We will examine how wonder takes shape across cultural forms and academic disciplines—from poetry to the sciences—and how it is curated and engineered in places like museums and planetariums. We will also consider wonder’s entanglement with histories of power, spectacle, collection, and conquest. By reading closely and observing carefully, we will ask how wonder is made, who has access to it, and what kinds of knowledge and possibilities it summons.
Course Offered: 2026