Worsnick creates classes that research the Vaughn home
The Vaughn home, an 1870s campus residence that inspired an extensive exhibit supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, was the subject of a number of classes created by Matthew Worsnick, assistant professor of history of art and architecture.
“This was a student-led venture over multiple semesters. In each seminar, students identified and divided up research tasks and shared findings with one another and future classes to make sense of the big story,” said Worsnick, instructor for several of the Vaughn home courses.
Students photographed and documented every inch of the house, even crawling into spaces that hadn’t been seen in decades. They drafted architectural drawings, analyzed paint chips, and researched scores of archival documents, newspapers, and more.
“The result was a rich picture of not just the life of a building as it evolved over 150 years, but also the lives of its occupants, visitors of the campus, even the city spanning from the beginning of Vanderbilt to the present,” Worsnick said.
Read more about the Vaughn home project.