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.

This course focuses on the networks, imaginaries, and lives inhabited by Black artists, makers, and subjects from the 18th through 19th centuries, revolving around the Caribbean (particularly the Anglophone Caribbean), North America, and Europe. We will reflect on how pre-20th-century Black artists are written into history or written out of it. We will explore the aesthetic innovation of these artists and the visionary worlds they created and examine their travels, their writings, along with the social worlds and communities they formed. The course incorporates lectures and readings and, if possible, museum visits. AAS Subfield: AACL, GRE

This seminar uses the prevailing analytical tools and critical perspectives of African American Studies to consider comparative approaches to groups, broadly defined. Students will examine the intellectual traditions, socio-political contexts, expressive forms, and modes of belonging of people who are understood to share common boundaries/experiences as either (1) Africans and the African Diaspora outside of the United States; and/or (2) non-African-descended people of color within the United States.

This course will explore the major issues that have shaped the Caribbean since 1791, including: colonialism and revolution, slavery and abolition, migration and diaspora, economic inequality, and racial hierarchy. We will examine the Caribbean through a comparative approach--thinking across national and linguistic boundaries--with a focus on Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. While our readings and discussions will foreground the islands of the Greater Antilles, we will also consider relevant examples from the circum-Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora as points of comparison. AAS Subfield: GRE

This seminar investigates the historical experiences of women in the Caribbean from the era of European conquest to the late twentieth century. We will examine how shifting conceptions of gender, sexuality, race, class, and the body have shaped understandings of womanhood and women's rights. We will engage a variety of sources - including archival documents, films, newspaper accounts, feminist blogs, music, and literary works - in addition to historical scholarship and theoretical texts. The course will include readings on the Spanish-, English-, and French-speaking Caribbean as well as the Caribbean diaspora. AAS Subfield: GRE