This course explores world art and architecture before c. 1400 and introduces art historical concepts and approaches. Works of art from local collections, such as the Walters Art Museum and the Baltimore Museum of Art, as well as local monuments and architecture may be incorporated into the course. Lectures will be supported by weekly sections that will include museum visits, discussion of scholarly readings and primary sources, and exam reviews.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM, F 10:00AM - 10:50AM
• Instructor: Merback, Mitchell
• Room: Gilman 119
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course explores world art and architecture before c. 1400 and introduces art historical concepts and approaches. Works of art from local collections, such as the Walters Art Museum and the Baltimore Museum of Art, as well as local monuments and architecture may be incorporated into the course. Lectures will be supported by weekly sections that will include museum visits, discussion of scholarly readings and primary sources, and exam reviews.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM, F 12:00PM - 12:50PM
• Instructor: Merback, Mitchell
• Room: Gilman 119
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 6/18
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course surveys the art and architecture of Mesoamerica, from the ancestral Puebloans in what is today the Southwestern United States, through the homelands of the Mexica, Maya, and Zapotec in Central America, to the Taíno and Chiriquí in the Circum-Caribbean. After first discussing the concept of “Mesoamerica,” we will then explore the material and spatial productions of these Indigenous groups. Each week we will focus on a different urban setting, examining the works communities made and used there, which included sculpture, ceramics, murals, manuscripts, textiles, metalwork, and earthen architecture. Course themes will include—but are not limited to—the portrayal of humans, animals, and sacred figures; urban design, construction, and monumentality; as well as how materials and spaces were used for religious and political purposes.

• Days/Times: TTh 3:00PM - 4:15PM
• Instructor: Meyer, Anthony Joshua
• Room: Gilman 177
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/19
• PosTag(s): HART-ANC, ARCH-ARCH, ARCH-RELATE

This course investigates the confluence of archaeology as a discipline, collecting of cultural heritage, and their ongoing roles in the socio-politics of the Western world and Middle East. It focuses primarily on the Middle East, first tracing a narrative history of archaeology in the region during the 19th and early 20th centuries, with its explorers, diplomats, missionaries and gentlemen-scholars. It then examines the relationship of archaeology to the creation of the encyclopedic museum and collecting practices more generally, considering how these activities profoundly shaped the modern world, including the antiquities market and looting. A central theme is the production of knowledge through these activities and how this contributes to aspects of power and (self-)representation.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Feldman, Marian
• Room: Gilman 177
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 13/20
• PosTag(s): HART-ANC, ARCH-ARCH, ARCH-RELATE

This writing-intensive (W) seminar investigates the role of performance and ritual in the conceptualization, production, and reception of medieval European art and architecture (ca. 500-1500). Utilizing an achronological, interdisciplinary framework formed around thematic sessions, students will engage with primary texts and secondary scholarship from the fields of art history, architecture, sociology, and performance studies. Using these sources, as well as the art objects and architectural spaces themselves, students will evaluate a key concept for the study of medieval objects and sites: the relationship between art and function. Students will be required to apply readings and seminar discussions to artworks in museum and university collections located in Baltimore, working directly with manuscripts, paintings, liturgical furnishings, and sculptures in the Johns Hopkins University Rare Books Library and the Walters Art Museum. This will allow students to make claims and conclusions about the involvement of medieval cultural artifacts in rituals and performances, from official liturgical rites to daily personal prayer. Throughout this course, students will also be asked to critically evaluate the role of objects, spaces, and performances in their own life, serving to reduce the temporal gaps between the Middle Ages and the contemporary world. Using current, broad conceptualizations of ritual and performance, students will explore the powerful potential of art objects and sites in shaping, framing, and recontextualizing communal and individual identities.

• Days/Times: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: Sova, Matthew A
• Room: Gilman 177
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 14/18
• PosTag(s): HART-MED

The era identified as the “High Renaissance” in Florence was one of the most dystopian in the history of the city, a period of terror and explosive political crisis beginning with the expulsion of the Medici, followed by the theocratic Savonarolan regime in 1494, the repressive Medici restoration of 1513 and concluding with the fall of the “Last Republic” in 1530. Much of the most distinctive cultural production associated with this period - the sermons of Savonarola, the writings of Machiavelli, and major works of art by Michelangelo and others, is concerned with the relocation of Florentine identity following an experience of rupture with history and tradition, leading to a fundamental revaluation of the past and of the significance of history and memory. We will examine cultural transformation under a succession of Republican and autocratic regimes, with a particular attention to the process of “image-making” on the part of the state, of factions within it, of writers and ideologues, and - not least - of artists.

• Days/Times: TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM
• Instructor: Campbell, Stephen John
• Room: Gilman 177
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/12
• PosTag(s): HART-RENEM

As a central practice of the Muslim faith, pilgrimage has long animated the arts of the Islamic world, not only by generating countless monuments and objects, but also by facilitating the movement of artists, artifacts, and ideas across vast distances. This course explores the rich visual and material products of the Islamic pilgrimage tradition during the early modern and modern periods, including the architecture of the sacred sites themselves, the processions and ceremonies enacted by those who journeyed to these destinations, and proxy monuments and artworks created for those unable to perform the pilgrimage in person. Although our focus will be on the Hajj—the main annual pilgrimage to Islam’s holiest city, Mecca—we will also consider the arts associated with other pilgrimage sites, in particular the Shi‘i shrines of Iraq and Iran, as well as the pilgrimage practices of non-Muslim communities in the Middle East. We will bridge the gap between these geographies and our own vantage point in Baltimore through locally housed artworks, among them a seventeenth-century Ottoman tile at the Walters Art Museum that shows the Great Mosque of Mecca and a printed Hajj certificate—probably designed by an Indian artist but published in Istanbul in 1895—recently acquired for Hopkins’ own Special Collections. Through close engagement with these objects and other materials, the course will address such themes as sacred spectacle and ritual, pilgrimage as a locus of female patronage, and the impact of modernity on the Hajj and its traditions.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Rustem, Unver
• Room: BLC 2043
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/8
• PosTag(s): HART-RENEM, HART-MODERN

This course is dedicated to the study of the art and material culture of ancient Egypt, spanning from the 5th millennium BCE to the Roman period. The objective of the course is to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of Egyptian art, with a focus on materiality, effective methods of description and analysis, and a command of bibliography. It will also enable students to practice two fundamental aspects of their future professional life: presenting a paper at a conference and submitting an article to an academic journal. In the initial sessions, we will examine the fundamental principles and conventions that define Egyptian art. We will then investigate the natural resources available to Egyptian craftsmen and artists, including nature, origin, networks, and uses. We will analyze the production of works of art through several case studies, focusing on materiality. Finally, we will reflect on the presence of Egyptian works of art in museums around the world. Moreover, the course will provide an opportunity for discourse on professional matters pertaining to engagement with Egyptian antiquities and works of art. The course will be structured around: lectures by the professor or by guest researchers, with the students participating in a dialogue with the lecturers; sessions dedicated to discussions of articles to be read (with two/three articles per session); oral presentations by the students, with the aim of reproducing the conditions of a colloquium or conference. These will include formal presentations and question-and-answer sessions, with all students taking part. At the conclusion of the semester, students will be required to submit a paper in connection with the oral presentation they have prepared. This paper will be presented as a scientific article, and the instructor will evaluate it in the same manner as an anonymous referee.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Arnette, Marie-Lys
• Room: Gilman 130G
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/10
• PosTag(s): NEAS-HISCUL, ARCH-ARCH, ARCH-RELATE

This course surveys museums, from their origins to their most contemporary forms, in the context of broader historical, intellectual, and cultural trends including the social movements of the 20th century. Anthropology, art, history, and science museums are considered. Crosslisted with Archaeology, History, History of Art, International Studies and Medicine, Science & Humanities.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Kingsley, Jennifer P
• Room: Gilman 400
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/25
• PosTag(s): HIST-EUROPE, ARCH-ARCH, PMUS-INTRO, MSCH-HUM, ARCH-RELATE

Examines the history of African art in the Euro-American world, focusing on the ways that Western institutions have used African artworks to construct narratives about Africa and its billion residents.

• Days/Times: M 6:00PM - 8:30PM
• Instructor: Tervala, Kevin
• Room: Gilman 10
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/12
• PosTag(s): ARCH-RELATE

This course will explore the American art museum as a distinctive cultural and political idea. Tracing its origins to the ancient world, the American art museum was descended more immediately from institutions created during the European Enlightenment, but differing with regard to overall mission and civic purpose. This course will explore the various roles played by museums in American society, focusing on programmatic content, organizational design, funding and operating practices, and the particular issues that have arisen in recent years in the areas of cultural property restitution, collection development, special exhibitions, governance and funding, and the larger question of civic purpose.

• Days/Times: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Weiss, Daniel H
• Room: Gilman 177
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/15
• PosTag(s): HART-MODERN, ARCH-RELATE

Modern Palestinian art took shape in the bourgeois salons of nineteenth-century Cairo, the Ottoman-era workshops of Jerusalem’s icon painters, the militant presses of revolutionary Beirut, and the sewing circles of Amman’s refugee camps. It emerged from the state-sponsored art schools of the Communist Bloc, in conversation with the Black Panther Party, through crowds of curious exhibition-goers in Tokyo and Oslo and Tehran and, of course, in defiance of the ongoing Israeli occupation. This class introduces students to art made in and around Palestine between 1880 and today, focusing on its engagement with the myriad worlds in which it has always participated. How can visual culture mediate relationships to local heritage across space and time, or negotiate nationalism in the absence of a nation? What tensions arise around the circulation of artwork inexorably linked to a liberation struggle? How have artists navigated questions of the “postcolonial” as the subjects of a contemporary colonial regime? This class will explore modern Palestinian visual art from a transnational perspective, paying particular attention to the roles of women and gender in its creation, content, and display.

• Days/Times: MW 3:00PM - 4:15PM
• Instructor: Amin, Alessandra
• Room: Gilman 177
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/15
• PosTag(s): HART-MODERN

From the 2008 Swiss referendum banning minarets and the opposition of the 2010 proposed construction of a mosque near the site of the September 11 attacks in New York City to the more recent reconversion of the Hagia Sophia in 2020, the mosque in modern times has incited significant controversy and sentiments of hostility among various political and religious groups. The mosque as a political battleground, however, has a much longer history, and the coopting of religious buildings and architectural elements as visual symbols deserves a more comprehensive historical analysis. With a focus on the Ottoman context, this seminar will explore the political dimensions of mosque architecture since the fifteenth century and will examine its transformations both visually and symbolically across spatiotemporal contexts. The historical investigation into the symbolic significance of the mosque and Islamic architecture in the first half of this course will lead to a broader discussion in the second half about the role of architectures of nationalism in politics and diplomacy starting from the nineteenth century until today. By focusing on the mosque itself as a symbol, this course aims to spark dialogue and reflection on the role of religious monuments in contemporary political encounters across different geographic contexts. This course encourages a multi- and inter-disciplinary approach to Islamic art and architecture by incorporating readings and topics from a variety of fields, such as cultural theory, political history, anthropology, and heritage studies. Case studies covered by this course include the Persianate and Byzantine influences in early Ottoman mosques, the establishment and continuation of the classical Ottoman architectural style of the sixteenth century, neo-Mamluk mosques in Egypt and the creation of architectural identities in Ottoman Arab lands, architectural afterlives of Ottoman heritage in modern Greece, and the use of neo-Ottoman architecture by

• Days/Times: MW 4:30PM - 5:45PM
• Instructor: Kim, Christine
• Room: Gilman 177
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/18
• PosTag(s): HART-MODERN, HART-RENEM, ARCH-RELATE

The American continent and its islands are home to a diverse and delicate ecosystem, and for millennia, Indigenous communities have tended to and shaped these rich landscapes. This seminar journeys across the Americas to understand how Indigenous makers cultivated materials from these ecologies and transformed them into impressive arrays of art and architecture. Each week, students will explore a different medium—bark, shell, rubber, feathers, reed, stone, clay, etc.—that makers shaped into visual and spatial forms. Although this course focuses on the ancestral and early modern periods, it will also explore continued and shifting practices with these materials among contemporary artists. Readings will include material analyses, art historical and archaeological interpretations, as well as early colonial writings by Indigenous authors. There will also be opportunities for students to engage with materials in class. Course material will cover issues of technical skill and ecological knowledge; ephemerality and (im)permanence; animacy and relationality as it pertains to the relationships formed between makers and their works; and the role of Indigenous materialities in reconfiguring canons and categories that continue to scaffold the field of art history. For their final assignment, students will select a multimedia work from the Indigenous Americas and unpack its materiality in both presentation and essay format.

• Days/Times: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Meyer, Anthony Joshua
• Room: Gilman 177
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/12
• PosTag(s): HART-RENEM, HART-ANC, HART-MED, ARCH-ARCH, MSCH-HUM

This course follows twentieth and twenty-first century artistic projects that imagine, propose, or navigate Afro Asian pasts and futures. We will follow artists of African and Asian descent, several of them diasporic, in considering imaginaries of the world that precede our present. We will also engage, collaboratively, in a speculative exercise: what happens when we are given the material grounds to think the world differently? Covering significant epistemic passages in world history—the Afro Asian conference in Bandung, the origins of modernism, Négritude, comparative studies in caste, and the art history of race—and a variety of parallel primary sources (maps, music, cinema, and archival journals), we will think Afro Asia to speculate art history and think art history to speculate Afro Asia. Our work together draws heavily on local collections and specifically the Baltimore Museum of Art.

• Days/Times: MW 1:30PM - 2:45PM
• Instructor: Ballakrishnen, Meghaa Parvathy
• Room: Gilman 177
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 6/12
• PosTag(s): HART-MODERN

How did artists define their identity in the era before fixed “nationalities” and setgeographies? This course investigates the art and personalities of the many Netherlandishpainters, sculptors, printmakers, and craftsmen who moved and migrated across early modern Europe, finding work and fortune in cities from Rome to London, and Madrid to Stockholm. Their mobility, as the Florentine merchant Lodovico Guicciardini remarked in1567, was “something no less wonderful than honorable.” But the reasons behind the unprecedented migrations of Dutch and Flemish artists from the Low Countries from c.1550 to 1700 were complex and varied. Many artists were driven by the political andreligious turmoil of the Eighty Years’ War with Spain, while others sought economic and professional opportunities abroad. While some artists undertook short-term migrations, others left their native soil permanently. How did artists adjust to new cultures, languages,and religious traditions? What strategies did they use to succeed in their new homes? And how did their mobility ultimately affect their artistic practice? Taking a wide and critical view, the course provides a framework for examining the full range of motivations, how artists navigated new artistic, cultural, social, and religious contexts, and how artistic identity itself emerges from a relationship to place beyond one’s own.

• Days/Times: Th 5:00PM - 7:30PM
• Instructor: Yeager-Crasselt, Lara
• Room: Gilman 177
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/8
• PosTag(s): HART-RENEM

How did ancient civilizations around the Mediterranean basin (Greece, Rome, Egypt, Persia, Carthage) understand and represent their own and others’ identities and ethnic differences? How did notions and practices around race, citizenship, and immigration evolve from antiquity to the present? How have culture and politics informed artistic, literary, and museum representations of ethnic ‘others’ over time, along with the historical development of ethnography, biological science, and pseudo-sciences of race? What role did “Classics” (the study of Greco-Roman cultures) play in modern colonialism, racecraft, and inequality? And what role can it play in unmaking their legacies, through the ongoing Black Classicism movement, the practice of Critical Race Theory, and the development of more global and interconnective approaches to premodern cultures? RAP provides an opportunity for Hopkins undergraduates and graduate students from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds to engage in project-based research toward building an open-access, grant-winning educational resource (OER) on “Race in Antiquity.” Participants learn, share, and practice advanced research methods; examine and discuss the history and modern implications of the teaching and study of their fields; test-drive and collaboratively edit OER pilot materials; and create new content based on their own research, for eventual digital publication.

• Days/Times: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Pandey, Nandini
• Room: Greenhouse 000
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/15
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM, ARCH-RELATE

This course analyzes the role of artists and the visual arts in shaping ancient Greek medicine and the afterlife of these ideas. Grounded in the visual arts, we will explore class, gender, race, ethnicity, disability, and sexuality as they intersect with developments in ancient medicine and later interpretations of this history. Includes excursions to local museums.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Stager, Jennifer
• Room: Gilman 177
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/18
• PosTag(s): HART-ANC, ARCH-ARCH, MSCH-HUM

This course explores world art and architecture from c. 1400 to the present and introduces art historical concepts and approaches. Works of art from local collections, such as the Walters Art Museum and the Baltimore Museum of Art, as well as local monuments and architecture may be incorporated into the course. Lectures will be supported by weekly sections that will include museum visits, discussion of scholarly readings and primary sources, and exam reviews.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM, F 10:00AM - 10:50AM
• Instructor: Campbell, Stephen John
• Room: Gilman 119
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

From dancing skeletons and Mickey Mouse to nuclear-powered robots and Fritz the Cat, modernist visual culture is replete with iconic images of animated existence. This course surveys these diverse forms of "animatedness” emerging within the interconnected histories of special effects film and animated media, focusing on their entanglement with broader modernist practices, movements, and styles between the 1920s and the 1970s. Students will explore the shared origins of animation and special effects in the frame-by-frame manipulations of early trick film, the hopes and fears attached to machine aesthetics in German expressionism, French surrealism, and Soviet avant-garde cinema of the 1920s, and the ambivalent agency expressed by animated bodies in American and Japanese cartoons of the 1920s-40s. They will then assess the continuities and ruptures in the aesthetic and political commitments of interwar and postwar modernisms through case studies from North American, Central and Eastern European, and Japanese animation. By engaging with the diverse forms of “animatedness” and animated media presented in this course, students will develop critical theoretical, historical, and comparative frameworks for navigating the complex entanglements of organic life, emotional states, and machine technologies that increasingly define contemporary existence.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Taylor, Chris Ross
• Room: The Centre 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 11/15
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

This course explores world art and architecture from c. 1400 to the present and introduces art historical concepts and approaches. Works of art from local collections, such as the Walters Art Museum and the Baltimore Museum of Art, as well as local monuments and architecture may be incorporated into the course. Lectures will be supported by weekly sections that will include museum visits, discussion of scholarly readings and primary sources, and exam reviews.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM, F 12:00PM - 12:50PM
• Instructor: Campbell, Stephen John
• Room: Gilman 119
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/15
• PosTag(s): n/a