Global Arc

An introduction to African art and architecture from prehistory to the 20th century. Beginning with Paleolithic rock art of northern and southern Africa, we will cover ancient Nubia and Meroe; Neolithic cultures such as Nok, Djenne and Ife; African kingdoms, including Benin, Asante, Bamun, Kongo, Kuba, Great Zimbabwe, and the Zulu; Christian Ethiopia and the Islamic Swahili coast; and other societies, such as the Sherbro, Igbo, and the Maasai. By combining Africa's cultural history and developments in artistic forms we establish a long historical view of the stunning diversity of the continent's indigenous arts and architecture.

This course acquaints students with the art, architecture, and archaeology of ancient Mexico and Central America. The course considers a wide range of cultures spanning from the first arrival of humans at the end of the Upper Paleolithic period through the 16th century Spanish invasion. Major culture groups to be considered include Olmec, Teotihuacan, Maya, Zapotec, and Aztec. Precepts will include theoretically-focused discussions, debate regarding contested scholarly interpretations, and hands-on work with objects at the Princeton University Art Museum. For department majors, this course satisfies the Group 1 distribution requirement.

Celebrating Rembrandt Year, this class surveys painting, sculpture, architecture and the graphic arts of the Low Countries (Belgium and the Netherlands) from 1580-1750 in relation to art elsewhere in Europe and the world. Dutch art is seen in relation to its historical circumstances, including cross-cultural developments in Europe, Asia and Americas. Extensive use of the Princeton University Art Museum with visits to New York.

With a highly developed system of aesthetics, Chinese art is not what meets the eye. In China, artworks have represented and also shaped sociocultural values, religious practices and political authority throughout the ages. With an emphasis on the persuasive, and even subversive, power of art related to imperial and modern Chinese politics, this course reflects upon how art has worked in changing historical contexts and for serving political, religious and social agents in Chinese history. It covers a wide range of artifacts and artworks.

Monsters, imagined as occupying the margins of reality and patrolling its borders, teach us about the cultures that engendered them. This seminar investigates the kinds of monsters represented in premodern art and literature and asks what these texts and objects do, how they work, and what relationships they generate with their readers and beholder. It considers how different societies aligned monstrosity with excessive creatures, unwanted persons, and aberrant behaviors to establish order: natural, social, religious and political. By examining the historical formation of cultural categories, it probes the mechanisms that define otherness.

Just as the Internet does today, the picture press of the last century defined global visual knowledge of the world. The pictures gracing the pages of magazines and newspapers were often heavily edited, presented in carefully devised sequences, and printed alongside text. The picture press was as expansive as it was appealing, as informative as it was propagandistic, regularly delivered to newsstands and doorsteps for the everyday consumer of news, goods, celebrity, and politics. Through firsthand visual analysis of the picture presses of both the U.S. and Russia, this course will consider the ongoing meaning and power of images.

This course surveys the art and architecture of the Islamic world from the 7th to the 16th centuries. It examines the form and function of architecture and works of art as well as the social, historical and cultural contexts, patterns of use, and evolving meanings attributed to art by the users. Themes include the creation of a distinctive visual culture in the emerging Islamic polity; urban contexts; archaeological sites; key architectural types such as the mosque, madrasa, caravanserai, and mausoleum; portable objects and the arts of the book; self-representation; cultural exchange along trade and pilgrimage routes.

In this course we will examine ancient Egyptian art and architecture (primarily from the pharaonic period, c. 3000 BCE to c. 1000 BCE) using the body as a visual and conceptual theme. Utilizing art historical and archaeological methods, we will analyze sculpture, relief, painting, drawing, and architecture, as well as objects used to adorn and encase bodies both living and dead, emphasizing the context and interrelationships of these materials as they relate to the body and the corporeality of Egyptian society and culture.

Seminar explores wide-ranging ways in which artists working in Western Europe since the 1960s have confronted questions about how works of art emerge from and shape historical circumstances. Reckoning with history and responding to the present, artworks engage viewers to address ethical and political issues of responsibility and guilt in the wake of fascism, colonialism, and the Holocaust; the dynamics of late capitalism, the Cold War, and political shifts since 1989; existential threats of nuclear warfare and ecological disaster; and transformations effected in culture and everyday life by new media, biopolitics, surveillance.

Tomb monuments built for the highest status members of ancient Egyptian society comprise one of the most important sources of information on ancient Egyptian civilization. In this course, we will examine many aspects of elite funerary culture, centering the built stone tombs filled with images and texts, while incorporating as well other forms of religious texts, stelae, statuary, and coffins. We will consider questions of ancient Egyptian religious beliefs and conceptions of the afterlife, the role of ritual practices, the changing relationship between high elite officials and the king, and multiple aspects of ancient social identities.