Graduate Courses

Spring 2023

Visualizing Travel, Movement, and Interaction in the Ancient Americas
AS.010.658 (01)

In photographs and museum displays, the visual culture of the ancient Americas is made static. Pyramids stand vacant, sculptures appear frozen, and once portable objects remain stationary. But ancient American small-scale objects were designed to be set in motion for ritual and pilgrimage, free-standing stelae and altars were meant to be circumambulated and engaged with directly, and architecture (and spaces bound by architecture) influenced the shape of bodily movement. Notably absent from a twenty-first century vantage point are the ways that these spaces, and the spaces around art, were interacted with and how objects such as polychromed ceramics and carved pieces of precious stone were moved from place to place by the region’s ancient Indigenous residents. Exploring a rich visual and material record and considering the movement of both people and objects, this course asks how works of art influenced the ways ancient peoples physically interacted with and moved throughout the three-dimensional world. By considering a series of case studies from the ancient Americas, this course seeks to better understand the full aesthetic dimensions of this visual culture in the context of its rich social use. Additionally, we will also engage with issues related to contemporary travel, tourism, and migration that crosses through these places and materials. No prior knowledge of the field is required.

Credits: 3.00
Level: Graduate
Days/Times: M 4:30PM - 7:00PM
Instructor: Popovici, Catherine H
Room: Gilman 119
Status: Open
Seats Available: 7/7
PosTag(s): n/a

Renew, Reuse, Recycle: Afterlives of Architecture in the Ottoman Empire
AS.010.665 (01)

Designed from the outset to be inhabited and used, works of architecture are inherently susceptible to changes in purpose, appearance, and meaning over time. This was particularly so in the Ottoman Empire (c. 1299–1922), a multiethnic and multireligious transcontinental polity whose territories were already marked by long and eventful architectural histories. Through such case studies as the Parthenon in Athens, the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople/Istanbul, the Citadel of Cairo, and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, this course investigates the ways in which buildings and sites have been appropriated, repurposed, transformed, and/or reconceptualized in response to changing sociopolitical and artistic conditions. Topics to be addressed include the conversion of places of worship, (re)decoration as a vehicle of ideology, and the phenomenon of spoliation—the recycling, whether for practical or symbolic reasons, of existing building materials. In addition to the monuments themselves, we will address the objects that filled them and the human activities they hosted. While our focus will be on the Ottoman context and its relationship to the past, the course will also consider comparable examples in other geographies as well as developments in the post-Ottoman era, including the current debate over the Parthenon marbles and the recent reconversion of the Hagia Sophia into a mosque.

Credits: 3.00
Level: Graduate
Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
Instructor: Rustem, Unver
Room: Latrobe 120
Status: Open
Seats Available: 5/8
PosTag(s): n/a

Rethinking Artistic Geography – The Renaissance in its Global Dimensions 1450-1650
AS.010.667 (01)

A seminar focusing on recent scholarship that seeks to conceptualize a “global Renaissance,” beginning with Italy and the Mediterranean and then addressing exchanges between Europe and Southern/Eastern Asia. Case studies of the mobility of artists and artifacts, artistic adaptation and translation, materials as commodities and bearers of meaning.

Credits: 3.00
Level: Graduate
Days/Times: M 4:30PM - 7:00PM
Instructor: Campbell, Stephen
Room: Gilman 177
Status: Open
Seats Available: 2/7
PosTag(s): n/a

Picturing Performance
AS.010.674 (01)

Picturing Performance takes up the material traces of ancient Greek performance—the remains of theaters, paintings, masks, and musical instruments, as well as epigraphic, papyrological, and other textual transmissions of these works—alongside contemporary receptions of these performances, which have been such a rich site of reworking. Examples include: the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and Anäis Mitchell’s Hadestown, Euripides’ The Bacchae and Hope Mohr Dance’s Before Bacchae, and Sophocles’ Antigone and Theater of War’s Antigone in Ferguson. These ancient performances engage questions of gender and sexuality, constructions of race, migration, citizenship, and belonging, power, governance, and resistance, disease and collective healing, among the subjects that have also inspired contemporary interpretations. All texts will be read in translation. We will visit museum collections in the region and, where possible, see live performances of these works.

Credits: 3.00
Level: Graduate
Days/Times: F 1:30PM - 4:00PM
Instructor: Stager, Jennifer M S
Room: Gilman 177
Status: Open
Seats Available: 1/9
PosTag(s): n/a

Figuration after Formlessness
AS.010.681 (01)

What would an art history of modernism look like that sought not to overcome or eliminate painterly figuration, but to attend to displaced and disparaged figures in it? At least since Benjamin Buchloh’s important 1981 warning about a “return to figuration” in European painting, figuration has been linked with questionable, if not highly suspect, aesthetic and political values – from nostalgia to repression. Buchloh inherits this this view from the historical avantgardes, which sought to counter conventions of figuration by developing disparate strategies of abstraction. And it is this view of figuration that guides both formalist and social art histories: For both share an anxiety about the authoritative figure of the human form. This seminar invites an alternative perspective on the artistic project of figuration. We look at modern and contemporary practices of figuration that cannot so easily be dismissed as retrogressive or authoritarian. These practices suggest ways of thinking the figure without an appeal to its coherent visibility or sovereign standing. We will read broadly in the contemporary critical theory, feminist and queer theory, Black thought, and critical disability studies that share this investment (e.g. Butler, Cavarero, Garland-Thomson, Halberstam, Hartman, Honig, Sharpe, Wynter). We will critically reconsider Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois’ project Formless: A User’s Guide, along with the turn of the twenty-first century debates about abjection, feminism, and “body art” it engaged. Artists under discussion include Maria Lassnig, Ana Mendieta, Alina Szapocznikow, Kara Walker, and Hannah Wilke, amongst others. For the final research paper, graduate students are encouraged to bring their own archives to the questions addressed in the seminar.

Credits: 3.00
Level: Graduate
Days/Times: W 4:30PM - 7:00PM
Instructor: Schopp, Caroline Lillian
Room: Gilman 177
Status: Open
Seats Available: 1/5
PosTag(s): n/a

The Double in Premodern Art
AS.010.706 (01)

Inspired by the recent (2022) exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington, "The Double: Identity and Difference in Art Since 1900," this experimental seminar extends the conversation to selected manifestations of the double in European medieval and Renaissance culture: ancient archteypes such as Medusa and Narcissus, and their reinterpretation as philosophical images; post-mortem Doppelgängers glimpsed in the diverse genres of the macabre (memento mori, transi tombs, legendary encounters with the living dead); doublings of personhood in the identification portrait, mask imagery, portrait effigies, and allegorical personification. We will also examine a range of contexts and motifs that enabled double-vision and seeing-double: mirror-gazing, the Eucharist, double-sided panels and diptychs, anthropomophic landscapes, and more. Throughout we will keep up the dialogue with modern and modernist paradigms of the double.

Credits: 3.00
Level: Graduate
Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
Instructor: Merback, Mitchell
Room: Gilman 177
Status: Open
Seats Available: 8/10
PosTag(s): n/a

Special Research/Problems
AS.010.802 (01)

This course is for students who wish or need special instruction in areas of art history not included in the currently offered course

Credits: 3.00 - 9.00
Level: Graduate Independent Academic Work
Days/Times:
Instructor: Campbell, Stephen
Room:
Status: Open
Seats Available: 3/5
PosTag(s): n/a

Special Research/Problems
AS.010.802 (02)

This course is for students who wish or need special instruction in areas of art history not included in the currently offered course

Credits: 3.00 - 9.00
Level: Graduate Independent Academic Work
Days/Times:
Instructor: Feldman, Marian
Room:
Status: Open
Seats Available: 5/5
PosTag(s): n/a

Special Research/Problems
AS.010.802 (03)

This course is for students who wish or need special instruction in areas of art history not included in the currently offered course

Credits: 3.00 - 9.00
Level: Graduate Independent Academic Work
Days/Times:
Instructor: Merback, Mitchell
Room:
Status: Open
Seats Available: 4/5
PosTag(s): n/a

Special Research/Problems
AS.010.802 (04)

This course is for students who wish or need special instruction in areas of art history not included in the currently offered course

Credits: 3.00 - 9.00
Level: Graduate Independent Academic Work
Days/Times:
Instructor: Schopp, Caroline Lillian
Room:
Status: Open
Seats Available: 4/5
PosTag(s): n/a

Special Research/Problems
AS.010.802 (05)

This course is for students who wish or need special instruction in areas of art history not included in the currently offered course

Credits: 3.00 - 9.00
Level: Graduate Independent Academic Work
Days/Times:
Instructor: Stager, Jennifer M S
Room:
Status: Open
Seats Available: 4/5
PosTag(s): n/a

Special Research/Problems
AS.010.802 (07)

This course is for students who wish or need special instruction in areas of art history not included in the currently offered course

Credits: 3.00 - 9.00
Level: Graduate Independent Academic Work
Days/Times:
Instructor: Liu, Yinxing
Room:
Status: Open
Seats Available: 5/5
PosTag(s): n/a

Special Research/Problems
AS.010.802 (08)

This course is for students who wish or need special instruction in areas of art history not included in the currently offered course

Credits: 3.00 - 9.00
Level: Graduate Independent Academic Work
Days/Times:
Instructor: Zchomelidse, Nino
Room:
Status: Open
Seats Available: 5/5
PosTag(s): n/a

Special Research/Problems
AS.010.802 (09)

This course is for students who wish or need special instruction in areas of art history not included in the currently offered course

Credits: 3.00 - 9.00
Level: Graduate Independent Academic Work
Days/Times:
Instructor: Hyman, Aaron M.
Room:
Status: Open
Seats Available: 4/5
PosTag(s): n/a

Special Research/Problems
AS.010.802 (10)

This course is for students who wish or need special instruction in areas of art history not included in the currently offered course

Credits: 3.00 - 9.00
Level: Graduate Independent Academic Work
Days/Times:
Instructor: Brown, Rebecca Mary
Room:
Status: Open
Seats Available: 5/5
PosTag(s): n/a

Special Research/Problems
AS.010.802 (11)

This course is for students who wish or need special instruction in areas of art history not included in the currently offered course

Credits: 3.00 - 9.00
Level: Graduate Independent Academic Work
Days/Times:
Instructor: Rustem, Unver
Room:
Status: Open
Seats Available: 5/5
PosTag(s): n/a

Individual Work
AS.010.804 (01)