Please consult the online course catalog for cross-listed courses and full course information.
Fall 2021 UNDERGRADUATE CourSES
This entry-level course in the History of Photography will introduce students to ways of reading, writing and thinking about photographs through the theme of the body, and in turn to
consider the ways our attitudes toward the human body have been shaped by photographs, particularly as the emergence of postcolonial, feminist and gendered critiques in the late 20th century has forced a reappraisal of representations of the body in visual culture, reframing apparently innocent images as key articulations of power relations. Photography, as the most widespread means of visual communication of the past century, has necessarily been at the center of these debates. Our goal will be close analysis of a limited number of examples, rather than a broad historical survey, with emphasis on developing a critical approach to images in and out of the art historical context.
CRN#: 32343
Meetings: Monday and Wednesday, 9:30AM – 10:50AM
Place: In Person, Watkins 1000
This entry-level course in the History of Photography will introduce students to ways of reading, writing and thinking about photographs through the theme of the body, and in turn to
consider the ways our attitudes toward the human body have been shaped by photographs, particularly as the emergence of postcolonial, feminist and gendered critiques in the late 20th century has forced a reappraisal of representations of the body in visual culture, reframing apparently innocent images as key articulations of power relations. Photography, as the most widespread means of visual communication of the past century, has necessarily been at the center of these debates. Our goal will be close analysis of a limited number of examples, rather than a broad historical survey, with emphasis on developing a critical approach to images in and out of the art historical context.
CRN#: 32347
Meetings: Monday and Wednesday, 11:00AM – 12:20PM
Place: In Person, Watkins 1000
FALL 2021 GRADUATE LEVEL COURSES
This seminar interrogates the history of art history through readings of texts that were foundational to it. It engages, among others, with theological, philosophical, historical, psychoanalytical, iconographical, stylistic, and poststructuralist accounts of artistic objects, from Plato and the Middle Ages, to the Enlightenment and the institutionalization of the field in the 19th and early 20th-century, all the way to Benjamin, Warburg and Foucault, as well as with their role in the discursive formations of the subject of art history. The seminar thus provides students with an understanding of the “deep time” of the discipline and prepares them for the study of 20th and 21st-century methodological approaches discussed in AHS 251B.
CRN#: 10044
Meetings: Thursday, 3:00PM – 5:50PM
Place: In Person, ARTS Screening Room 335
WINTER 2022 UNDERGRADUATE COURSES
Surveys the visual arts of Europe in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. As the political, economic, and religious foundations of modern European urban centers are laid down, artists vie to increase their own status with a newly revived emphasis on the individual’s value in society. Demanding patrons and creative craftspeople work together to produce buildings, statues, paintings, books, and prints of engineered practicality, imposing propaganda, carefully-observed science, and graceful beauty.
3 hours of lecture, 1 hour of discussion. Prerequisite(s): none.
Credit is awarded for only one of AHS 017B or AHS 17HB.
CRN#: 30012
Meetings: Tuesday and Thursday, 9:30AM – 10:50AM
Place: Watkins 1000
In 1808, Dom João, King of Portugal, fled the Iberian Peninsula as Napoleon’s armies advanced. He sailed for Rio de Janeiro and declared the colonial city the new capital of the Portuguese empire. This historic event initiates this course, which examines the history of art and architecture from Brazil over the last two centuries. Drawing on a range of media – including painting, sculpture, photography, murals, architecture, urbanism, landscape design – we will study artworks and buildings through a social historical framework, taking into consideration such topics as colonialism, tourism, modernization, underdevelopment, race, gender, nationalism, internationalism and globalism. Dominant tropes of Brazilian studies – including tropicalism or cannibalism – will reappear throughout the quarter and in relationship to a range of contexts and objects.
CRN#: 49692
Meetings: Monday and Wednesday, 2:00PM – 3:20PM
Place: ARTS 335
PRIMITIVISM. ABSTRACTION. COLLAGE. THE READYMADE.
These are only a few of the innovations that rocked the art establishment in the first decades of the 20th century. Modern Art 1870-1945 is a critical study of the major movements and paradigms of modern art in Europe from Post-Impressionism to Surrealism. We will track the formal austerity of modern art as well as the anti-modern impulses of the avant-gardes, placing all within a context of rapid urbanization, industrial development, and the rise of mass media and technological utopianism.
CRN#: 52125
Meetings: Monday and Wednesday, 12:30PM – 1:50PM
Place: ARTS 335
WINTER 2022 GRADUATE LEVEL COURSES
ART/PLAY considers art practices from mid-to-late twentieth century in light of an international and cross-disciplinary explosion of texts on and about play, beginning with translations of Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938), Roger Caillois’ Man, Play and Games (1958) and Jacques Derrida’s Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences (1968). This same period saw the rise of art practices emphasizing process, collaboration, indeterminacy, chance, the unforeseeable and the interactive – all hallmarks of the ephemeral and contingent ludic. The range of artists addressed will be broad and Euro-American-focused, although final projects may address other geographic contexts, so long as play in some form is the theme. Artist/groups to be considered will include: Oyvind Fahlström, Sophie Calle, Nikki de Saint Phalle, Fluxus, Lygia Clark, the Situationist International.
CRN#: 52126
Meetings: Wednesday, 3:00PM – 5:50PM
Place: ARTS 333