ARH 110 Art and Its Histories (4 Credits)

This course explores how art and architecture have profoundly shaped visual experiences and shifting understandings of the past and present. Featuring different case studies, each section includes work with original objects, site visits and writings about art. Unifying themes include: (1) materials, techniques and the patterns deployed to create space; (2) the design, function and symbolism of images and monuments; (3) artistic production and its relation to individual and institutional patronage, religion, politics and aesthetics; (4) issues turning on artists’ fame versus anonymity and uniqueness versus reproducibility; and (5) cross-cultural exchanges. Enrollment limited to 25. {A}{H}

Fall, Spring

ARH 190 Colloquium: Art History: Theories, Methods, Debates (4 Credits)

The meanings ascribed to art and architecture from any culture or period turn upon the interpreter’s preoccupations and methods. This course examines contemporary debates within the discipline, locating them within the field’s own history. The class asks: what kinds of knowledge do historians of art and architecture produce and legitimize? What kinds of questions do they ask, and what means do they use to answer them? Considering art and architectural history as a living field, the focus falls on recent scholarship, with an eye to the dynamic ways in which it builds on and/or departs from the history of the discipline. Prerequisites: ARH 110 or a first-year seminar taught by a member of the department. Enrollment limited to 18. {A}

Fall, Annually

ARH 201/ POR 201 Brazilian Art Inside and Out (4 Credits)

Offered as POR 201 and ARH 201. This course serves as an introduction in English to contemporary and modern Brazilian art. Course materials and class discussions address such topics as public vs. private art spaces, national vs. global identities, the role of art as agency for social change and as site of memory, activism, resistance and transformation. {A}

Fall, Variable

ARH 204 Inkas, Aztecs and Their Ancestors (4 Credits)

What is antiquity in the Americas? To explore this question, this class focuses upon visual cultures and urban settings from across the Americas. Emphasis rests upon recent research especially about the Inka, the Aztec and their ancestors, but the course also studies the current debates in art history and archaeology. Discussions include: sacrifice and rulership, representations of human and deified beings, the symbolic and economic meanings of materials, and the ethics of excavation and museum display. Case studies include architectural complexes, textiles, ceramics and sculpted works from Peru, Mexico, the Caribbean and the U.S. Southwest. Counts for ARU. {A}{H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ARH 207 Translating New Worlds (4 Credits)

This course asks how travel to and through the New World was imagined, described and lived by Indigenous residents as well as those who came to the Americas from across the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. The focus rests upon the ways in which geographies, anthropologies, material objects, and pictorial and written records shaped colonial ambitions and experiences. Among the objects the class considers: books and painted images, dyes and metals, feathers and urban buildings. Case studies are drawn from across the Americas, including Canada, Mexico, Ecuador, Haiti and the United States. The class also discusses contemporary cultural practices that seek to explain, interpret and redress colonial encounters and settlements in the Americas. Group A, Counts for ARU. {A}{H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ARH 212 Ancient Cities and Sanctuaries (4 Credits)

This course explores many different aspects of life in the cities and sanctuaries of the ancient Near East, Egypt, Greece, Etruria and Rome. Recurrent themes include urbanism, landscapes and patterns of worship, including initiation, sacrifice and pilgrimage. The class probes how modern notions of the secular and the sacred influence interpretation and how sometimes the seemingly most anomalous features of the worship of Isis or of the juxtaposition of commercial and domestic space within a city can potentially prove to be the most revealing about life in another place and time. Counts for ARU. {A}{H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ARH 216 The Art and Architecture of the Ancient Roman World (4 Credits)

From North Africa to Gaul, from the Pillars of Hercules (Straits of Gibraltar) to Asia Minor, the interrelationships of art and power in the visual culture of the ethnically diverse Roman empire, from the first century B.C.E. through the fourth century C.E., are the subject of study. The class also examines works of art from later periods as well as literature and film that structure the perception of the Roman world. Counts for ARU. {A}{H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ARH 217/ CLS 217 Greek Art and Archaeology (4 Credits)

Offered as CLS 217 and ARH 217. This course is a contextual examination of the art and architecture of Ancient Greece, from the end of the Bronze Age through the domination of Greece by Rome (ca. 1100-168 BCE) and handles an array of settlements, cemeteries and ritual sites. It tracks the development of the Greek city-state and the increasing power of the Greeks in the Mediterranean, culminating in the major diaspora of Greek culture accompanying the campaigns of Alexander the Great and his followers. The course takes a broadly chronological approach, and the question of a unified Greek culture is stressed. Continuing archaeological work is considered. {A}{H}

Fall, Spring, Alternate Years

ARH 236 Architectures of Collecting (4 Credits)

In what spaces are collections—of art and artifacts, plants and animals, papers and memories—held? What physical spaces have been created to house, preserve, sequester, and display such things? Upon what conceptual and infrastructural practices does collecting depend? To consider these questions, this class focuses on case studies from 1500-present, drawn from across the world: museums of ethnography and racial justice, private houses and public gardens, seed banks and aquaria. In addition, this class addresses the ethical implications of thinking about architecture and collecting—both literally and metaphorically—as joint, codependent endeavors. Counts for ARU. Enrollment limited to 30. {A}{H}{L}

Fall, Spring, Alternate Years

ARH 247 Colloquium: The Art and History of the Book (4 Credits)

Will books as material objects disappear in the near future? Or will the book, a remarkably long-lived piece of communication technology, continue to flourish and develop alongside its electronic counterparts? This course surveys the artistry and history of books from the ancient world through medieval manuscripts, hand press books and machine press books, to the digital media of today. Students discover how books were made, read, circulated and used in different eras, and explore the role they have played over time in social, political, scientific and cultural change. The course involves extensive hands-on work with books and manuscripts from across the centuries and sustained engagement with current debates about book, print and media culture. Instructor permission required. Enrollment limited to 12. {A}{H}

Spring

ARH 250 Building Baroque Europe (4 Credits)

European architectural, urban and landscape design from (precisely) 1537 to about 1750. Specific topics include Tuscany under the first three grand dukes; Rome in the 17th century; France under the first three Bourbon kings; the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire; the significant enlargement or establishment of capital cities (Turin, Amsterdam, Versailles, Stockholm, St. Petersburg, Dresden, Berlin, Vienna); the rise of the English country house; the English landscape garden; and palaces, pilgrimage churches and monastic complexes in Bavaria, Franconia and Austria. Focus throughout on the fundamental interdependence of architecture and society. Counts for ARU. {A}{H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ARH 258 The Arts in Eighteenth-Century France (4 Credits)

A study of painting, sculpture, architecture, urban and landscape design, printmaking and the luxury arts in France, from the last years of Louis XIV's reign to the French Revolution. Recurring themes include artists' training and careers; academies, aesthetics and art theory; art criticism and the viewing public; collecting and display; patronage; and the relationship of art to politics, literature and science. France's pacesetting role in contemporary art is explored by looking beyond its borders to other courts--among them Bourbon Naples, some German-speaking principalities, Great Britain, Russia, Spain and Sweden--and to the French Atlantic world. Counts for ARU. {A}{H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ARH 272 Revolution, Industry, Empire: The Art of the Nineteenth Century (4 Credits)

The Haitian revolution, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the rise of photography: the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of new ways of seeing, knowing, and being in the world. We will consider the ways art objects and the built environment revealed, constructed, and mediated nineteenth-century life. We will study key case studies, from painting and sculpture to advertising ephemera, to understand significant cultural nodes. Our conversations will center around the meaningful role objects play in shaping and constructing social experience, and key concepts elaborated by nineteenth-century thinkers, such as modernism. The course will primarily focus on Europe and the US. Enrollment limited to 30. Group B. {A}{H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ARH 278 Race and Gender in the History of Photography (4 Credits)

This course introduces the history of photography, emphasizing the ways photographs represent, mediate, construct and communicate histories of race, gender, sex, sexuality, intimacy and desire. The class studies a variety of photographic images, from the daguerreotype to digital media, from fine arts photography to vernacular images. Students consider objects that have forged connections among loved ones, substantiated memories or served as evidence, considering critical questions about photography’s relationship to identity, affect, knowledge production and power. The course focuses on race and gender, and also attends closely to photography’s relationship to identity broadly speaking, including class, ability and religion. Enrollment limited to 35. {A}{H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ARH 281 Modern, Postmodern, Contemporary (4 Credits)

This course examines global artistic tendencies since 1945 in their art-historical and socio-historical contexts. The class considers such developments as American abstraction and the rise of New York, neo-dada, pop, minimalism, conceptual art, earthworks, the influence of feminism, postmodernism, the politics of identity, conceptions of the site and the institution, global publics and the global culture of art, and the theoretical issues and debates that help to frame these topics. {A}{H}

Fall, Spring, Alternate Years

ARH 283 Architecture Since 1945 (4 Credits)

This course presents a global survey of architecture and urbanism since 1945, from post-World War II reconstruction and planning, through critiques of modernism, to postmodernism, deconstruction, critical regionalism and beyond. Major buildings, projects, movements and tendencies are examined in their historical, theoretical and rhetorical contexts. Counts for ARU. {A}{H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ARH 285pm Topics: Great Cities-Pompeii (4 Credits)

A consideration of the ancient city: architecture, painting, sculpture and objects of everyday life. Women and freed people as patrons of the arts are emphasized. The impact of the rediscovery of Pompeii and its role as a source of inspiration in 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century art is discussed. No prerequisite. {A}{H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ARH 286 History and Theory of Performance Art: Why Did the Performance Artist Cross the Road? (4 Credits)

This class addresses the history and theory of performance art since the 1960s, introducing artists whose work has shaped the field and the issues which have become important in the reception of performance art. {A}{H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ARH 288 Colloquium: Techniques in Digital Art History (1 Credit)

This course provides students with a robust set of skills for today’s art historian. With an emphasis on hands-on training using Imaging Center facilities, students complete multiple small projects in digital mapping, digital timelines and other data visualizations, scanning and photography of artworks, documenting artwork with international data standards, creating virtual galleries, 3D scanning and more. Short readings on the application of these methods in current art history scholarship is also assigned. Software includes Google MyMaps, Tableau, Timeline JS, Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, Artstor/JSTOR Forum, Wordpress, Unity and others. S/U only. Enrollment limited to 12. {A}{H}

Interterm

ARH 289 Art and Medicine, Late 18th Century to the Present (4 Credits)

This course examines intersections of art and medicine from the late 18th century to the present. Considering a variety of texts and objects, from wax medical models and public health posters to Mona Hatoum’s cell-like sculptures and photographic coverage of the 2014 Ebola epidemic, the course disentangles how medical understandings of the body filter into artistic production and popular thought and vice versa. While course material is primarily from Europe and the United States, the course attends to the ways medical imaginings of the body engage with imperialism and geopolitical boundaries, as well as race, gender, ability, class and sexuality. (E) {A}{H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ARH 290ca Colloquium: Topics in Art History-Contemporary Art (4 Credits)

This class examines current issues in contemporary art, suggested by critical debates and significant exhibitions. The class is particularly interested in practices and debates that offer the following: analyses of the global condition of art; demonstrations of the influence of new technologies; reflections on institutional frameworks; excavations of earlier art-historical moments; and accounts of the shifting status of art, artists and audiences in the contemporary public sphere. Prerequisite: One 200-level art history course, or equivalent. Restrictions: ARH 290 may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics. Enrollment limited to 20. {A}{H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ARH 290ce Colloquium: Topics in Art History-China in Expansion: Early Chinese Art & Material Culture (20th century BCE-220 CE) (4 Credits)

During the formative periods when the local and global forces simultaneously took actions in shaping Chinese civilization, the functions of images and objects, the approaches to things and the discourses around art underwent significant shifts, not only responding to but also mapping out the "Chinese-ness" in visual and material culture. This course of early Chinese art investigates diverse media bronze vessels, sculptures, murals, textiles, architecture and other visual and material forms in relation to political and military conquest, cross-cultural exchange, the dissemination of ordinary practices and the formation of identities. Key terms and issues for the course include expansion, connection and materiality. Counts for ARU. Restrictions: ARH 290 may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics. Enrollment limited to 20. {A}{H}

Fall, Spring, Alternate Years

ARH 290cv Colloquium: Topics in Art History-Colonialisms and Their UnMaking: Land, Water, Bodies, Belongings (4 Credits)

How does conquest by foreigners change the ways that images, objects, and environments (built and otherwise) are created and used? How do different forms of colonialism—settler, extractivist, etc.—remake values and thus objects, civic spaces, humans, and other living beings? What kinds of loss does colonization produce, what kinds of resilience? Focusing on recent scholarship, this class addresses these questions, highlighting the 16th–19th centuries. Discussion include: the production of colonial spaces and buildings; exchanges that brought people and objects into contact (and conflict); nationalist museum and archival projects; and current debates about decolonization, repatriation, and reparation. Counts for ARU. Restrictions: ARH 290 may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics. Enrollment limited to 20. {A}{H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ARH 290fs Colloquium: Topics in Art History-The Visual Culture of Freed Slaves in the Roman Empire (4 Credits)

Many ancient Roman houses and tombs belonged to freed slaves who had established themselves and their families in the world. Assessed through the lens of elite authors who disparaged freed people, these monuments have often been judged as lesser, imperfectly emulating lost aristocratic models. On the contrary, as a close reading of these houses and tombs themselves demonstrate, freedmen and freedwomen celebrated their transformation from being things to being persons of means by finding visual means to celebrate their industry, their wealth, their ambition and their identification with mythological figures who had once been enslaved. Restrictions: ARH 290 may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics. Enrollment limited to 20. {A}{H}

Spring, Alternate Years

ARH 290hw Colloquium: Topics in Art History-Home as a Work of Art (4 Credits)

This course examines dwellings, some with adjacent gardens, constructed for monarchs, aristocrats, upper- and middle-class individuals, workers, and the indigent, with an eye, first, toward identifying criteria that governed design, and second, toward understanding how articulated and decorated space shaped behavior and expressed meaning in specific social and cultural contexts. In addition to mining a rich trove of printed images and books related to domestic architecture, students study objects intended for the home, among them furniture, wall hangings, ceramics, commissioned ensembles of paintings and sculptures, and decorations executed in wood, stucco, and metal. Restrictions: ARH 290 may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics. Enrollment limited to 20. (E) {A}{H}

Fall, Spring, Alternate Years

ARH 290ib Colloquium: Topics in Art History-Playing with Ink and Brush (4 Credits)

How should ancient East Asian painting and calligraphy, created primarily with ink and brush, be read? What were the typical themes and styles? Who were the artists and their audiences? Why did they venerate certain works of art over others? To answer these questions, this course examines masterpieces of Chinese painting and calligraphy from the Six Dynasties (220-589) to the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368). This course includes a few studio sessions to give students basic hands-on experience with ink and brush. Restrictions: ARH 290 may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics. Enrollment limited to 20. {A}{H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ARH 290id Colloquium: Topics in Art History-Imperial Design (4 Credits)

Everyday objects have often been marginalized in art history. Until fairly recently, when these objects were under consideration—especially in histories of Europe and the United States in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries—they were framed as frivolous indicators of bourgeois taste. This course posits that histories of design, decorative arts, and material culture in the west reveal critical histories of imperialism, spotlighting topics such as migration, violation, appropriation, and indigenous agency. Far from benign indicators of status, then, this course asks students to position objects from the history of design, decorative arts, and material culture as critical historical texts. Restrictions: ARH 290 may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics. Enrollment limited to 20. (E) {A}{H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ARH 290lb Colloquium: Topics in Art History-The Presence of the Past: Libraries as a Building Type in the Ancient Mediterranean World (4 Credits)

This course looks at the famed third-century BCE library at Alexandria, Egypt, precedents like the library of the Assyrian king Assurbanipal at Nineveh (with epics and omen texts on clay tablets) and later extant examples like the Library of Celsus at Ephesus to discuss the development of the library as a public building type. The class also compares later innovations like Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, Snøhetta’s award-winning 2002 Bibliotheca Alexandrina (on the site of the ancient library) and Maya Lin’s renovation of Neilson Library, analyzing how the buildings themselves make knowledge manifest. Restrictions: ARH 290 may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics. Enrollment limited to 20. Counts for ARU. {A}{H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ARH 290mc Colloquium: Topics in Art History-Meditations in Caves (4 Credits)

The course is an introduction to Buddhist grottoes of East Asia. Students learn the historical trajectories of Buddhist grottoes, including the development of cave architecture, mural painting and sculpture. The course pays special attention to the site specificity of the visual imageries and their transmissions, commissions and functions. The case studies in this course range from the Kizil Caves and Mogao Caves in Northwestern China, to the Yungang Caves and Longmen Caves in the central plains and the Seokguram Caves in the Korean Peninsula. The course also considers the collecting, preserving and displaying of Buddhist grottoes in the contemporary world. Restrictions: ARH 290 may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics. Enrollment limited to 20. {A}{H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ARH 290mm Colloquium: Topics in Art History- Monuments and (Mis)remembering (4 Credits)

This course looks at the shifting role of monuments in Western culture, from public representation of the values of dominant culture to those that challenge what Kara Walker calls the “monumental misrememberings” central to most historical monuments. The class investigates the role that monuments play in forming—and disrupting—the stories told about history. The course attends to narratives of both domination and minoritization, foregrounding work by Black, Indigenous, and queer artists, across continents and centuries. Prerequisite: ARH 110. Restrictions: ARH 290 may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics. Enrollment limited to 20. (E) {A}{H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ARH 290ra Colloquium: Topics in Art History-Representing Animals (4 Credits)

This colloquium investigates the space between animal studies and art history. Examining case studies from the early modern period to the present, the class considers questions such as: What constitutes the animal, and how do images shape responses to this question? How and why have artists deployed animals as visual signs? How did the collection of animal specimens in the West both depend on and sustain networks of imperialism? Students' conversations center around the meaningful role images and objects play in shaping understandings of the human, the animal, nature, identity, and both human and animal culture. Prerequisite: ARH 110. Restrictions: ARH 290 may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics. Enrollment limited to 20. (E) {A}{H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ARH 290ss Colloquium: Topics in Art History-Swords and Scandals (4 Credits)

Since the beginning of cinema, the decadence of the ancient Romans has been a subject of fascination. Starting with HBO's Rome (2005-2007) and Ridley Scott's Gladiator (2000), this course explores the multiple sources of the visual tropes used to construct this universe and seeks to analyze it in aesthetic, historical and ideological terms. Their twentieth-century counterparts from films of the silent era to Hollywood epics like Spartacus (1960) and Cleopatra (1963), as well as cult classics like Caligula (1979), are scrutinized in order to gain an understanding of how Romans function cinematically as cultural signs in varying historical contexts. Restrictions: ARH 290 may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics. Enrollment limited to 20. {A}{H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ARH 320 Art & Money: A Calderwood Seminar on Public Writing (4 Credits)

Art and money are inextricably intertwined. We’ll delve into the ramifications of this relationship in the ways art is valued in the contemporary art market and the consequences for museums, collectors, artists, and for the general public. Topics include artists’ self-fashioning for the market as well as the historical detective work it takes to reveal the practices which have fed this market of limited supply and infinite demand including looting and forgery. These are stories which need to be shared with an ever-wider audience especially in a time when the importance of art to humankind needs reevaluation. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required. {A}{H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ARH 350 Seminar: The Arts in England, 1485-1714 (4 Credits)

Constitutional limits on monarchical power, the embrace of Protestantism, religious intolerance and fanaticism, revolution and regicide, and a much vaunted (when not exaggerated and misleading) insularity set the stage in England for patterns of patronage and a relationship to the visual arts both similar to and significantly different from modes established in Continental absolutist courts. While critically examining the perennial notion of "the Englishness of English art," students study the careers of the painters, printmakers, sculptors, architects and landscape designers whose collective efforts made English art, at long last, one to be reckoned with. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required. {A}{H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ARH 352ce Seminar: Topics in Art History-Imperial Matter: The Arts of China's Early Empires (4 Credits)

Why did the First Emperor of China build his grand mausoleum as a microcosm? What foreign motifs and luxury goods were brought to the Chinese proper and by whom? How did trade and war affect the making of the arts 2,000 years ago? These are some of the core questions embedded in this seminar, which investigates the power of things that made a difference in shaping the conditions of the Qin and the Han, Chinese first empires. Throughout the semester, students closely examine art objects and read leading scholars of early imperial Chinese art around the world. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required. Counts for ARU. {A}{H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ARH 352rp Seminar: Topics in Art History- Uncollecting: Repatriations, Reparations and the Ethics of Return (4 Credits)

This course studies the ethics of return, focusing on collections of belongings made under colonial conditions. Across the 2000s, hundreds of artifacts, artworks, ancestral creations and animal (including human) bodies have been repatriated. But what does it mean to “return” belongings taken—indeed, often stolen—in the colonial past? What, really, can repatriation accomplish? Is reparation a better option, and what might it entail? Drawing examples from a wide range of geographies, and highlighting recent—especially decolonial—scholarship, the course debates these issues. Open to students in any discipline. Pre-req: one class in the visual arts, archaeology, anthropology, museum studies or equivalent. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required. {A}{H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ARH 390 Seminar: Art History Capstone (4 Credits)

The capstone provides students with an opportunity to reflect on their path through the major and to develop projects that grow out of and synthesize their previous coursework. It enables students to have an overview of things achieved and to showcase their competence in an area of focus in planning for their futures. The class is designed to support the challenge of conceptualizing and developing individual projects. In the collaborative workshop space of the class, students share their projects in stages, which are discussed and edited by their peers. Prerequisites: ARH 110, ARH 190 and at least two 200-level ARH courses. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required. {A}{H}

Spring

ARH 400 Special Studies (2-4 Credits)

Instructor permission required.

Fall, Spring