This November, students from the fall ECS / EPS course “Problems in Rethinking European Culture in the Present” visited the Tenement Museum, a nonprofit cultural center in the heart of the Lower East Side of Manhattan that welcomes visitors into “historically recreated homes of immigrants, migrants and refugees.” The trip was part of the annual ECS excursion, a requirement for completion of the new minor in European Studies.
Before visiting the museum, the 12 students and two faculty stopped for lunch at Café Katja for Austrian food, where they sampled bratwurst, pretzels, eggs, and coffee. Students then walked over to the museum, where they took tours of three distinct apartments, each highlighting different facets of the immigrant experience in the 19th century. Themes included community organizing, gender politics, and inter-community tensions and cooperation.
The museum “offers more than ten tours, each led by an educator who guides visitors through the apartments while weaving together anecdotes, archival details, and broader cultural and societal threads,” Wendy Wang ’28 described. “This narrative form made the experience singularly vivid and intimate, preserving and animating culture in a way that let the textures of time gently settle into our hands with unexpected clarity.”
Aidan Gouley ’27, who is majoring in politics and minoring in European studies, reflected on the opportunity to explore and re-examine the lives and experiences of immigrants in New York City.
“The Tenement Museum’s remarkable preservation work, including its close collaboration with the descendants of those who lived in its Orchard Street apartments, vivified and personalized encounters with material, decorative, and print cultures,” Gouley said. “Ultimately, the visit was a fantastic opportunity to engage with European culture—and, perhaps to a lesser extent, politics—in a distinctly American setting, while also visualizing the sites of digression and discontinuity brought about by the experience of immigration.” “The visit stood out from every other museum or gallery experience I have had, not only because it placed us directly inside the rooms where everyday histories unfolded, but also because of its distinctive mode of storytelling,” said Wang.
Past ECS excursions have taken students to the Metropolitan Opera, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Learn more about the minor in European Studies, which is offered jointly by the Program in European Cultural Studies and the Program in Contemporary European Politics and Society.
