Ever wonder: we are all born nude, but most of us wear clothes, at least when facing the public in our adult life. We are told nude is not the same as just “naked”: it is an art form. However, in grand museums, we see plenty of representation of nudes in, let’s say, the European wings. But if we turn the corner to other galleries dedicated to other traditions of art, we might see none. We gaze at a marble statue of a classical nude there, and when we go watch a film with nude scenes in a cinema with friends and strangers, we respond very differently in these two spaces. We quickly ask ourselves, is this pornographic? Is this art? Am I cool? Do I look prudish? In this First-Year Seminar, we will go to museums, watch movies, and take a global, historical, and multimedia perspective to approach nude as art in the world. How is nude defined? What are the philosophical and scientific ideas that find nude as an ideal vehicle? What are the historical and cultural particularities of classical nude that have been taken for centuries as universal? How do other art traditions approach the representation of an unclothed nude body? How are nudes gendered, sexualized, classed, and racialized? How do modern media transform nude? These are among the questions that this class explores. The Truth is naked, as the saying goes. Nude is therefore a mirror reflecting both the foundations and aspirations of humanity.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Liu, Mia Yinxing
• Room: Gilman 177
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12
• PosTag(s): HART-MODERN

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: Stager, Jennifer; Zchomelidse, Nino
• Room: Gilman 55
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 9/18
• 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: Stager, Jennifer; Zchomelidse, Nino
• Room: Gilman 55
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/18
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course explores seven centuries of fruitful collaboration between physicians and artists, uncovering the shared discourses and therapeutic agendas that united the art of picture-making with the art of healing. Topics include understandings of the gendered body in ancient natural philosophy and Christian theology; astrological medicine; physiognomics and the visual diagnosis of mental and physical disease; medieval medical diagrams; the anatomical investigations of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo; depictions of pain and suffering in the art of Matthias Grünewald, melancholy in the prints of Albrecht Dürer, and the cross-cultural history of the therapeutic artefact; the spectacularization of the body in Enlightenment science, and the ethics of medical specimen display today -- all bringing into view the dynamic intersections of the history of medicine and the history of art.

• Days/Times: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Merback, Mitchell
• Room: Gilman 119
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 1/24
• PosTag(s): HART-MED, HART-RENEM, MSCH-HUM

This course considers how people envision, construct, and negotiate place in cultures throughout the Ancient Americas. From the dark galleries of the Old Temple at Chavín de Huantar to the towering twin Templo Mayor in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, we will consider how Indigenous makers created powerful places, and how those places would have been experienced and understood by ancient communities. Considering art and architecture in a variety of media, we will study places where gods live; places where important things happened; places that ordered the world; and places where humans access and negotiate power.

• Days/Times: TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM
• Instructor: Staff
• Room: Gilman 119
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 6/19
• PosTag(s): HART-ANC

We will read a selection of Greek tragedies in translation and explore the visual arts that appear in, shaped, and respond to them.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Stager, Jennifer
• Room: Gilman 177
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/20
• PosTag(s): HART-ANC

The lavish feasts and dynamic jousts associated with medieval and Renaissance celebrations have long been subjects of fascination in popular culture and will be familiar to anyone who has watched House of the Dragon or attended a modern “Renaissance” fair. But what did these celebrations mean in their original context? This course aims to take “play” seriously by examining the wide-ranging material culture of courtly and civic festivities in Germany and the Netherlands from 1400 to 1600. The art created for festive events ranges from panel paintings and tapestries to table fountains and drinking vessels made of expensive and “exotic” materials. Artists were also responsible for the design and construction of ephemeral architecture for triumphal entries as well as the festival books that commemorated them. But these works did more than just facilitate fun; they were tools of communication that made arguments about issues such as social class, identity, and power. They also engaged with the geopolitical and intellectual developments of the period. There are drinking vessels, for instance, made of nautilus shells, Seychelles nuts, or bezoars, whose materials and construction offer insight into global exploration and European colonialism as well as medicinal practices. Automata, machines akin to premodern “robots,” frequently provided entertainment for guests at aristocratic banquets by showing off the latest technological developments. While the study of any historical event faces the daunting task of recuperating what has been lost to time, this rings especially true for the study of festivities. In this course, we turn to these celebrations’ artistic and material traces to illuminate the past. As object-based learning is an important component of this course, we will visit several local collections including the Walters Art Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the National Gallery in Washington, and Johns Hopkins’ Special Collections.

• Days/Times: TTh 3:00PM - 4:15PM
• Instructor: Slater, Alexis Diane
• Room: Gilman 119
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 14/18
• PosTag(s): HART-RENEM

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.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Zchomelidse, Nino
• Room: Gilman 177
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 1/15
• PosTag(s): HART-ANC, HART-MED

Painter and provocateur, quitter-of-art and player-of-chess, Marcel Duchamp aka Rrose Sélavy has long been recognized for redefining what counts as a work of art. His most prodigious legacy are the ready-mades of the 1910s, everyday objects – from bottle rack to urinal – that he nominated as art and signed. The influence of this gesture on pop art, conceptual art, minimalism, and happenings has since been called “the Duchamp effect.” But what happens for the history of art when the logic of cause and effect is undone? Duchamp too was interested in this question. His last work, Étant donnés (1946-1966), was made in complete secrecy in the very decades that inaugurated the clichés of his reception. Unveiled at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1969, the year after his death, Étant donnés seems to repudiate all that the ready-mades had come to stand for – and, at the same time, to register the effects of diverse postwar practices on Duchamp’s understanding of art. This seminar takes Étant donnés as point of departure for studying the long and multidirectional history of modernism. Artists under discussion include: Joseph Beuys, Scott Burton, Vaginal Davis, Richard Hamilton, Eva Hesse, Yayoi Kusama, Senga Nengudi, Dieter Roth, Alina Szapocznikow, Hannah Wilke. Readings span Duchamp’s writings and reception, the historiography of the avant-garde and modernism, aesthetics and affect theory, feminist and queer thought. The seminar will include at least one group excursion to visit the Arensberg Collection in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Undergraduates enrolling should be aware that this is an upper-level reading and writing intensive seminar and be prepared to read and discuss upwards of 100-pages per week. There are no exams. Assignments include regular written reflections based on the course readings and short critical essays.

• Days/Times: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Schopp, Caroline Lillian
• Room: Gilman 177
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/8
• PosTag(s): HART-MODERN

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.

• Days/Times: M 4:30PM - 7:00PM
• Instructor: Campbell, Stephen John
• Room: Gilman 177
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 6/12
• PosTag(s): HART-RENEM

From embellished silver pens and abolitionist secretary desks to contemporary artists manipulating historical postcards and making fax collages, this course will explore the materiality, technologies, and aesthetics of written communications from the 18th century to the present. This research-centered course will engage directly with objects in the Baltimore Museum of Art collection, in preparation for an upcoming exhibition. Topics include the development of specific decorative arts and designs in conjunction with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century postal and bureaucratic history, letter-writing as a mode of resistance, strategic illegibility and asemic writing as a form of critical artistic practice, and the importance of mail art as conceptual and institutional critique. Includes hands-on work in the museum and class visits with BMA curator Dr. Leslie Cozzi.

• Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Brown, Rebecca Mary
• Room: Gilman 177
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/5
• PosTag(s): HART-MODERN, MSCH-HUM

We live in a world of global consumption. This course introduces students to the birth of global consumer culture in the period from the 1600s through to the American, French and Haitian revolutions. These revolutions were themselves sold to consumers through “revolutionary things”, and this period witnessed the first major consumer boycotts against slave-produced goods. Students will examine the histories of many key commodities involved in the “consumer revolution”, including fashion items such as shoes, wigs, clothing and accessories. A significant portion of the course will examine addictive stimulants like sugar, coffee, tea and tobacco, globalized and imperial goods which became common for the first time in this period. We shall see how production of these goods involved new forms of racialized exploitation; simultaneously, we shall explore the diversity of people involved in the consumer revolution, studying the consumption of important new goods by people living in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. By the end of the class, students will understand how the emergence of mass consumption affected the global politics of race, gender and class, with especially important consequences for women and non-elite men. Students will examine objects lauded for their politeness, decorative appeal, and cultural importance such as porcelain tea sets, snuffboxes, and fans. Students will choose their own objects for a student presentation and research project.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Roberts, Anna May
• Room: Hodson 315
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 13/20
• PosTag(s): HIST-US, HIST-EUROPE, CES-FT, CES-GI, CES-PD, CES-RI, INST-GLOBAL

This hybrid seminar examines in depth a series of artistic case studies over a 3000 year period in the region of what is today Iraq, Syria, and southeastern Turkey, from c, 3500-500 BCE. Discussion will focus on processes of making and contexts of using myriad forms of art and architecture. Topics will include the invention of writing and complex imagery; portraiture and ritual practice; the symbolic value of materials; visual narration; and the uses of space for expressive purposes. We will approach these and other topics through critical engagement with existing scholarship, as well as by direct study of objects in nearby museum collections.

• Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Feldman, Marian
• Room: Gilman 130G
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 1/10
• PosTag(s): HART-ANC, MSCH-HUM

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.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Kingsley, Jennifer P
• Room: Gilman 17
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 22/25
• PosTag(s): HIST-EUROPE, ARCH-ARCH, PMUS-INTRO, MSCH-HUM, ARCH-RELATE, CDS-SSMC

This course critically examines the role of exhibitions in shaping cultural narratives and public understanding of people and places across the globe. Students will explore the history, theory, and practice of exhibiting cultures in museums, galleries, and digital platforms. Topics include curatorial ethics, representation and identity, postcolonial critiques, audience engagement, and the impact of emerging technologies on exhibition design. Through case studies and hands-on projects, students will analyze how cultural heritage is displayed and interpreted, considering issues of appropriation, authenticity, and inclusivity. The course culminates in a final project where students conceptualize and design their own cultural exhibition proposal.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Roome, Kristine
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/15
• PosTag(s): CDS-SSMC