Global Arc

In the turbulent interlude between the first and second world wars, an unprecedented number of female photographers became studio owners, documentarians, and artists in their own right. Using the 1920s as its starting point, this course considers the conditions that enabled these women to expand the field and explores how they variously responded to the political upheavals of their times. Alongside key theoretical texts on race, gender, colonialism, and exile we will consider a diverse range of work by female photographers.

The conquest of Asia from Anatolia to Afghanistan by Alexander the Great brought far-reaching changes in both the East and the West of the ancient world. Powerful new visual styles and techniques interacted with local ideas and visual cultures in complicated and unpredictable ways. The seminar aims to describe this vital period of ancient visual history and its complex, multi-stranded artistic cultures. It also aims to embody a method of investigating cultural history through material and visual evidence. The classes follow the material on the ground and its archaeological and historical contexts closely.

Before the suppression of non-Christians in Spain and Portugal after 1492, three vibrant medieval cultures inhabited the peninsula: Muslims based in Al-Andalus, Christians based in the northern Spanish kingdoms, and Sephardic Jews throughout both realms. Their coexistence transformed their visual culture in ways that resonated well beyond Iberian borders, from Atlantic colonialism to modern identity politics. This course asks how the contacts, conflicts and compromises provoked by "living with" each other shaped artistic traditions and cultural identity in a land both enriched and destabilized by its own diversity.

The study of techniques, functions, and connoisseurship of drawings, and their place in the interpretation of the history of art. Drawings ca. 1400-1800 will be the major objects considered. Extensive use of the resources of the art museum. For department majors, this course satisfies either the Group 2 or 3 distribution requirement. Prerequisite: a course in Renaissance or baroque art or instructor's permission. One three-hour seminar.

Siegecraft was an art more complex than painting, more powerful than sculpture, and more monumental than any building in the early modern world. This seminar confronts the discomfiting reality that the period long known as the Renaissance was defined as much, if not more, by brutal and collective warfare than it was by the rise of the individual. The class has no prerequisites and is open to all, including students of architecture, engineering, art, history, media, and literature. Seminar sessions will include hands-on study of original artworks in campus collections.

This seminar will focus in depth on a specific aspect of art, history, theory, and criticism in Europe between 1789 and 1914. Possible topics include French painting and its critics, portraiture and sociability, shifting conceptions of realism and naturalism, the onset of modernism, and representations of interior space. Prerequisites: a course in the art of this period or permission of the instructor. Visits to area museums. For department majors, this course satisfies the Group 3 distribution requirement. One three-hour seminar.

A survey of architectural history in the West, from ancient Egypt to 20th-century America, stressing a critical approach to architectural form through the analysis of context, expressive content, function, structure, style, and theory. Discussion will focus on key monuments and readings that have shaped the history of architecture. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

A broad study of European painting and sculpture from the French Revolution to 1900 with special attention to art's relationship to social and cultural changes. Lectures will explore a range of themes including art and revolution, the rise of landscape, shifting conceptions of realism, and the birth of "modernism" and the avant-garde. Emphasis on major figures including David, Canova, Goya, Ingres, Turner, Courbet, Manet, Monet, Degas, Rodin, Van Gogh, and Cézanne. For department majors, this course satisfies the Group 3 distribution requirement. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

Thematic introduction to the role of painting in Chinese cultural history, with attention to the interaction of stylistic standards, materials, and techniques; the impact of regional geographies on landscape painting; the influence of class, gender, and social behavior on figure painting; the engagement of art with traditional philosophies and 20th-century socialism; and the shape of time in art-historical development. For department majors, this course satisfies the Group 2 distribution requirement. Three lectures.

In twelve weeks this course will examine major art works from the twelve centuries (300-1500 CE) that encompass the European Middle Ages. Presenting works from Europe and the Middle East, the course will introduce students to the art of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, Judaism and Islam; the great courts of the Eastern- and Holy Roman Empires, and the roving Vikings, Celts and Visigoths. Students will not only be invited to consider how art can represent and shape notions of sacred and secular power, but will also come to understand how the work of 'art' in this period is itself powerful and, sometimes, dangerous.