Graduate Courses

Summer 2019
Fall 2019

Individual Work
AS.010.803 (07)

Credits: 0.00
Level: Graduate
Status: Open
Seats Available: 50/50
PosTag(s): n/a

Summer Practicum-History of Art
AS.010.890 (01)

Credits: 0.00 - 3.00
Level: Graduate
Status: Open
Seats Available: 5/5
PosTag(s): n/a

Course # (Section)	Title	Day/Times	Instructor	Room	PosTag(s)	Info
AS.010.803 (07)	Individual Work		Pereda, Felipe
AS.010.890 (01)	Summer Practicum-History of Art		Campbell, Stephen

Obsessed with the Past: the Art and Architecture of Medieval Rome
AS.010.639 (01)

In antiquity, Rome became the capital of an empire, its growing status reflected in its sophisticated urban planning, its architecture, and the arts. While an abundance of studies explores the revival of this glorious past in the Renaissance, this seminar discusses various ways of the reception of antiquity during the medieval period. We address the practice of using spolia in medieval architecture, the appropriation of ancient pagan buildings for the performance of Christian cult practices, the continuation of making (cult)images and their veneration, the meaning and specific visuality of Latin script (paleography and epigraphy) in later medieval art. We discuss the revival and systematic study of ancient knowledge (f. ex. medicine, astronomy, and the liberal arts), in complex allegorical murals. As we aim to reconstruct the art and architecture of medieval Rome, this course discusses ideas and concepts behind different forms of re-building and picturing the past, as they intersect with the self-referential character of a city that is obsessed with its own history.

Credits: 0.00
Level: Graduate
Status: Open
Seats Available: 3/5
PosTag(s): HART-MED

Art and Colonialism: Nineteenth-century India
AS.010.624 (01)

This seminar explores the technologies of colonial power, from small ephemeral watercolor images of religious processions to massive multi-volume photographic projects documenting the “people of India,” and extending to the establishment of new urban and architectural spaces, archaeological museums, and art schools, the circulation of diplomatic art collections, and the commissioning of survey data. We will engage with the anti-colonial movements of resistance and uprising that took place across this century, examining the central participation of modern artists with these political movements, and explore the way this period fundamentally shaped the foundations for the study of South Asian art and archaeology. Readings will include colonial and postcolonial theory, Orientalism, historiography; we will be actively working with materials in the library’s special collections.

Credits: 0.00
Level: Graduate
Status: Open
Seats Available: 4/5
PosTag(s): HART-NW, HART-MODERN

Beyond Word & Image
AS.010.603 (01)

The relationship of “word” and “image” has been a central concern of both the history of art and other humanistic disciplines; and semiotics, (post-)structuralism, narrative studies, media studies, and theories of ekphrasis and representation have been marshalled to probe how visual and verbal systems work in conjunction, overlap, and conflict. Much less art historical attention has been paid to the visuality of writing itself. Against the backdrop of robust work on the relationship between text and image, this course focuses on text as image: the visuality of text, the imagistic dimensions of writing, Schriftbildlichkeit. The seminar takes as guiding premise that art historical method might be robustly brought to bear on the visual and material features of texts, both those that appear as part of traditional art historical media (paintings, sculptures, and architectural monuments) and those that have primarily remained within the purview of other humanistic subfields: books, archival documents, writers’ manuscripts, epistolary communication, and inscriptions (both analog and digital). In this course, we will survey a broad range of textual objects, from ancient inscriptions to moveable type to digital texts to “writing” in twenty-first century artists’ books; and we will work together towards assembling an art historical toolkit for excavating the full valences of texts, accounting for the ways they make meaning in linguistic, semiotic, formal, material, visual, and media-specific registers. Though art historical in focus, this course will be essentially interdisciplinary, and students from other subfields are warmly welcomed. There will be ample opportunity for discussing and studying objects in local collections.

Credits: 0.00
Level: Graduate
Status: Open
Seats Available: 7/10
PosTag(s): HART-RENBAR

Approaches to Ancient Art
AS.010.606 (01)

The discipline of art history has passed through a number of major methodological and theoretical shifts since its inception (and in particular, over the last thirty years). Foundational disciplinary methods derive principally from the arts of Classical Greece, the Renaissance and contemporary periods. As the discipline embraces an enlarged field of inquiry, particularly drawing upon developments in anthropology, material culture studies, feminism, queer theory, and political theory, additional avenues for understanding the arts of the ancient world are emerging. The seminar focuses on how art historical method and theory – both foundational and emergent – might be profitably applied to the subfields of the ancient Near East and eastern Mediterranean (understood in the broadest sense).

Credits: 0.00
Level: Graduate
Status: Open
Seats Available: 6/12
PosTag(s): HART-NW, HART-ANC

Performing Power: Ceremonial, Diplomacy, and Gift-Giving in and beyond the Ottoman Empire
AS.010.631 (01)

As a major global power straddling three continents, the Ottoman Empire developed a rich and diversified ceremonial culture aimed at impressing local and international audiences alike. This seminar will explore the ways in which works of art and architecture provided settings and apparatus for, and were themselves shaped and enlivened by, the ceremonial acts in which they featured. Covering the period between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, we will address a range of case studies—including mosque inaugurations, royal processions, the reception of foreign ambassadors, and the exchange of diplomatic gifts—with regard to their sociopolitical, visual, material, and spatial contexts. A major concern of the seminar will be the question of how Ottoman ceremonies, together with their staging and attendant art forms, were adapted in response to changing conditions and audiences, particularly with the shift from the early modern to the modern period. While our focus will be on the Ottoman Empire, the course will also consider the ceremonial cultures of the various Asian and European polities with which the Ottomans interacted, investigating the points of comparison and contrast that defined these multifarious but connected interregional approaches.

Credits: 0.00
Level: Graduate
Status: Open
Seats Available: 9/10
PosTag(s): HART-NW, ISLM-ISLMST

Challenge to Painting: Collage, Montage, Assemblage
AS.010.640 (01)

The invention of Cubist collage is generally regarded as a watershed in twentieth-century art. This seminar will examine key junctures in the rapid proliferation and redefinition of collage strategies primarily in Europe and the United States, including but not limited to Futurist “words in liberty”; Dada and Constructivist photomontage; the Surrealist exploration of desire; Situationist détournement; and selected varieties of postwar assemblage. Frequent meetings in Special Collections.

Credits: 0.00
Level: Graduate
Status: Open
Seats Available: 2/5
PosTag(s): HART-MODERN

Before and After Trent
AS.010.650 (01)

The seminar will investigate the question of art and reform in three major centers of the Italian peninsula (Rome, Naples, Spain), with attention to parallel phenomena in other centers of Catholic Europe (Spain and the Spanish Netherlands). We will examine transformations in the practice of pilgrimage and the organization of sacred shrines, tensions between centralization and the persistence of the local, and the initiative of artists and architects in responding to the call for a “reform” of sacred art.

Credits: 0.00
Level: Graduate
Status: Open
Seats Available: 12/12
PosTag(s): n/a

Patterns of Attention in the Visual Arts
AS.010.703 (01)

This seminar aims to excavate six distinct modalities of attention and attentiveness in the visual arts from Middle Ages to Modernity (cultic, narrational, speculative, ethical, sexual, and artistic). While emphasizing European developments, close consideration will be given to the role of visual attention in Hindu and Islamic visual cultures, providing the opportunity for cross-cultural comparison. Each case study will consider the historically shifting roles given to vision, cognition, imagination, affect, desire and power-knowledge in the culturally prevalent patterns of attention we study, and explore how specific kinds of pictorial schema or spatial environments served to structure and guide, or deflect and disrupt, the attention of their beholders. Finally, we will ask whether the historical study of attention can suggest analytical models or ethical lessons for the (re)mobilization of attentiveness in our own art-historical methods.

Credits: 0.00
Level: Graduate
Status: Open
Seats Available: 15/15
PosTag(s): HART-RENBAR

Special Rsrch & Problems
AS.010.801 (01)