Global Arc

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Junior Seminar is an introduction to the myriad subjects, methods, and strategies of art history. The course examines the different kinds of evidence and methodological tools that have been used to identify, explain, and contextualize works of art as well as other kinds of objects, artifacts, and cultural phenomena. In other words, this seminar considers what art historians do, and how and why they do it. In addition, majors will learn how to use resources such as the library and the museum, and how to undertake substantive written research projects. Students begin their Junior Independent Work in this seminar. One three-hour seminar.

Introduces students to the methods and thinking of archaeologists and prehistorians. Topics include the concept of prehistory; ethnographic analogy and the interpretation of material remains; relating material culture to texts; schemes of cultural interpretation; and how to read an excavation report. This seminar is required for the Certificate in Archaeology. One three-hour seminar.

This seminar will explore ethical dilemmas in past and current study and practice of archaeology, cultural resource management, museum studies, and bioarchaeology. We will consider conflicts between living communities and archaeological research; the ethics involved in bioarchaeological research; the acquisition and display of items in museums or private collections; and the nature of archaeological inquiry itself. Twice-weekly meetings (once as a class, once in small groups) will be accompanied by written assignments and an in-class debate, as well as a student-directed final paper.

In this course we will explore, discuss and dispute key archaeological topics pertaining to various aspects of the material multicultures of Jerusalem, from the time of Alexander the Great until its surrender to the Muslem Caliph, 'Umar. During these centuries, Jerusalem grew from a small city into "by far the most famous city, not of Judæa only, but of the East." It became the central sacred locale of the Jewish people, and the cradle of Christianity. During these times, it was twice a pagan city -Antioch in Jerusalem and Aelia Capitolina.

Topics of Greek art and architecture that will normally deal with the Hellenistic period (323-31 B.C.). Depending on student interest, special subjects may also be treated in relation to the Hellenistic period, such as classicism, or the course may concentrate on thematic studies, such as architectural sculpture. Two 90-minute seminars. Prerequisite: a course in ancient art or instructor's permission. For department majors, this course satisfies the pre-400 historical distribution requirement. Offered in alternate years.