Graduate Courses

Fall 2022

Research Lab: The Dutch Americas
AS.010.614 (01)

The Dutch East India Company, or VOC, is historically and art historically well documented and firmly understood. But the Dutch also had significant holdings to the west via the Dutch West India Company, or WIC. They operated and held outposts in the present-day United States (New York/New Amsterdam), Caribbean (Surinam, Curaçao, Bonaire), Latin America (Brazil), and West Africa. Despite the abundance of materials associated with the WIC from this wide geography, these have been scarcely assessed by art historians, and a defined and comprehensive corpus has never been assembled. This class will act as a research lab in which to do so. In research teams, students will map artworks and objects created from that broad, transnational cultural ambit—categories that might include maps, landscape paintings, still life paintings featuring American flora and fauna, botanical illustrations, plantation architecture, luxury objects made from precious raw materials gathered in the Americas, the urban environment of slavery—and develop individual research questions around them. The class will run with a partner lab in the form of a course led by Professor Stephanie Porras at Tulane University. The course will feature speakers; and there is potential for funded travel to conduct research. We will start at the ground level; no previous knowledge about the field is required. Students from all disciplines are welcome.

Credits: 0.00
Level: Graduate
Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
Instructor: Hyman, Aaron M.
Room: Gilman 177
Status: Open
Seats Available: 2/5
PosTag(s): HART-RENBAR

Script, Character, Scribble: Writing and Pseudo-Writing in Modern and Contemporary Art
AS.010.662 (01)

Almost readable, but not quite: artists in the twentieth and twenty-first century played with script of all kinds, from ancient glyphs and Persian script to Roman typefaces and Korean Hangul. Artists also scribbled in ways that evoke writing without script or meaning. This course takes on the question of meaning-making in art through the form of script—flirting with that tantalizing feeling that we can almost read the work of art through the marks on its surface. We will engage with artists from around the world whose work grapples with knowledge, meaning, and script, and discuss the limits and possibilities of legibility, knowing, and language. In addition to painting and drawing, we will also discuss conceptual art, installation, video, architecture, tapestry, ceramics, graphic novel forms, book arts, and sculpture. We will have opportunities to situate these works within longer histories of script and pseudo-script and image-text relations. Our discussion-driven seminars will be guided by readings in art history and theory. The course carries no expectation that you are multi-lingual or have experience with multiple scripts. Central to our semester will be group trips to see art in person in DC and Baltimore. Assignments include an option for short, focused writing with feedback and opportunities to experiment with genre and to rewrite, or a longer seminar paper, chosen in consultation with the professor.

Credits: 0.00
Level: Graduate
Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
Instructor: Brown, Rebecca Mary
Room: Gilman 177
Status: Open
Seats Available: 7/8
PosTag(s): HART-MODERN

The illuminated charter: visual splendor, performance, and authenticity of medieval legal documents
AS.010.671 (01)

This course investigates the complexities of medieval legal documents, their specific visuality and materiality, as well as practices of copying and forgery. We will address the aesthetics of legal documents, their graphic signs, seals, and paleography and the authenticating strategies used to corroborate their legitimacy. Another emphasis is set on the performative aspects of the medieval charters in court and church rituals. Comparison with contemporary illuminated sacred books will reveal the tight connections of monastic scriptoria and royal/imperial chanceries. The geographic focus is set wide, ranging from medieval Spain, to Carolingian and Ottonian chanceries in France and Germany, to the papal court in Rome and the imperial and monastic scriptoria in Byzantium.

Credits: 0.00
Level: Graduate
Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
Instructor: Zchomelidse, Nino
Room: Gilman 177
Status: Open
Seats Available: 5/6
PosTag(s): HART-MED

Pictura/Scriptura: Visual and Literary Culture 1400-1600
AS.010.672 (01)

The seminar explores common ground between literary and art historical scholarship on Early Modern Europe and beyond; it seeks to further conversation between art historical and literary critical methodologies as well as media theory, and is designed to appeal to students of literature and of art history. Seeking to move beyond the mid-20th century discourses of iconology, it will re-consider the potential of Aby Warburg’s psychological and anthropological approach to the trans-cultural and trans-historical migration of symbols, and its implications for a “global Renaissance.” We will focus on antiquarian scholarship with its considerations of visual and material evidence, ekphrasis and the picturing functions of language, inscription and the legibility of images, the printed book as sylloge and “collection,” the dynamic interrelation of writing and drawing, Renaissance controversies about theater and epic and their implication in debates about art. In addition to Warburg and more recent writing on Warburg and the Renaissance, readings will be drawn from an array of interdisciplinary inquiry in Classics, Medieval and East Asian fields.

Credits: 0.00
Level: Graduate
Days/Times: M 10:00AM - 12:30PM
Instructor: Campbell, Stephen
Room: Gilman 177
Status: Open
Seats Available: 8/12
PosTag(s): HART-RENBAR

Topics in Late Medieval Art
AS.010.708 (01)

A critical interrogation of past and current interpretative approaches to the devotional arts of western Europe, c. 1300-1500.

Credits: 0.00
Level: Graduate
Days/Times: T 3:00PM - 5:30PM
Instructor: Merback, Mitchell
Room: Gilman 177
Status: Open
Seats Available: 12/12
PosTag(s): n/a

Special Rsrch & Problems
AS.010.801 (01)