McFarland, Benjamin J. “Making Light Work: A First-Year Writing Course on Art, Colors, and Chemistry.” In Contextualizing Chemistry in Art and Archaeology: Inspiration for Instructors, pp. 97-110. American Chemical Society, 2021.
Professor of Biochemistry
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
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This book chapter was supposed to be a talk in 2020 but was cancelled by COVID and turned into this. For my WRI1100 class, I developed a final project in which students found articles in the literature of chemistry analyzing the colors of artifacts. The students learn context for the artifacts from a historical overview of pigments, and for the instrumentation from demonstrations in class, finally synthesizing their own pigments in the lab and (literally) making paintings from those.