Global Arc

Who were the Vikings, at home or abroad? How did their raiding and settlement change the history of the British Isles and western Europe? This course will study the political, cultural, and economic impact that Norse expansion and raiding had on early medieval Europe. It will also look at the changes in Scandinavia that inspired and resulted from this expansion. Sources will include contemporary texts, sagas and epic poetry, material culture, and archaeological excavations.

This course examines the relationship of art and medicine in the construction and production of race in the British Empire from the early modern period until the beginning of the twentieth century. We will analyze how image-making has been used in the development of medical knowledge and how scientific concepts of vision and natural history have been incorporated into art making. We will then examine how these intersections were deployed to visualize and, sometimes, challenge continually changing meanings about human and geographical difference across Britain and its colonies.

Rembrandt is an artist we feel we know, perhaps because he painted, etched and drew so many self-portraits. His art is characterized by an intense intimacy and humanity. Even in his own day, he was lauded for his ability to depict emotions in his narrative scenes, which elicit our empathy. His portraits are not mere likenesses but manage to imply the sitters' inner life. His technical virtuosity, whether it be with paint, pen and ink, or etching needle, is peerless. In this seminar, we will study all aspects of Rembrandt's art and examine his works held by the PUAM and museums in NYC in order to understand his universal appeal.

The museum traces its origins to the cabinet of curiosities and to princely collecting, and took form during the European Enlightenment as a way of ordering knowledge, often advancing nationalistic purposes. Today's museums draw deeply on these traditions while facing essential challenges: How must it respond to the digital age and to a world of increasingly porous borders? What must it do to assure its continuing relevance and survival? Through a series of case studies, this course will grapple with the ways in which museums look to the past and posit new, more "activist" ways of being.

The 19th century in Europe and America saw the rise and fall of empires and unprecedented innovation in industry, technology, science, and the arts. Through a series of topics, including history, science, medicine, perception, and time, this course considers how intellectual revolutions in diverse disciplines, such as biology and philosophy, and the invention of new fields of knowledge, such as ethnography and psychology, shaped art-making. The work of David, Cole, Church, Eakins, Manet, Courbet, Tanner, Inness, Van Gogh, and Cézanne will offer unique perspectives onto the modes of seeing and knowing that defined 19th-century culture.

This class explores the relationship between visual and verbal media. How is poetic vision not only given shape in words, but also in painting? Conversely, how is the beauty of women, a staple of portraiture, captured in words? How can a still picture express narrative in a medium that develops over time, and conversely how can words capture the spectacle of a martial arts action scene? We will answer these questions by investigating some of the most famous novels, paintings, poems, and prints, beginning with didactic paintings preaching Confucian values and ending with the birth of modern media such as animation and computer graphics.

Modern art is coeval with the modern market. This seminar examines key moments in this complicated relationship. Under what conditions does an artistic avant-garde emerge? In what ways does it advance the interests of capital? In what ways does it challenge them? How do artistic forms change vis-à-vis transformations in economic modes of production and consumption? These and other questions will be probed with test cases drawn from Impressionist painting, modern architecture, mass culture, Dada, Pop, Minimalism, and postmodernist art.

How do we know what we know in Black studies? How does what we know translate into action? How can informed action transform the world? In this course, students will examine the relationship between thought and practice, ways of knowing the world, and ways of remaking it by engaging a range of texts, media, art, and movements that diagnose the present-past while prefiguring a world in which many worlds fit. AAS Subfield: RPP

This course introduces students to the field of African American Studies through an examination of the complex experiences, both past and present, of Americans of African descent. Through a multidisciplinary perspective, it reveals the complicated ways we come to know and live race in the United States. Students engage classic texts in the field. All of which are framed by a concern with epistemologies of resistance and of ignorance that offer insight into African American thought and practice. AAS Subfield: AACL

This topics course explores the complex interplay between political, economic, and cultural forces that shape our understanding of the historic achievements and struggles of African-descended people in the United States and their relation to others around the world.