2024-2025 Art History Courses

An introduction to the study of art, architecture, and material culture from a global perspective, including Asia, Europe, Latin America, and Africa. Organized around themes, parallels and connections will be drawn between artistic objects and buildings from across history and around the world. Case studies consider art and architecture’s relationship to religion, monarchy, colonialism, indigeneity, missionization, cultural appropriation, commodification, and self-representation. Others will consider medium, technique, perspective, composition, and art’s relationship to narrative and meditation. 

Looking into a painting’s genesis: Technical Art History looks closely at the materials and techniques used to create art -- from Early Italian panel paintings to Piet Mondrian's abstract canvases -- and better understand when, how, why and by whom these works were created.

We explore the pivotal period of European, North African, and Middle Eastern art history between c. 300-1400. This period not only brought forth our dominant systems of faith and their related artistic traditions (the mosques of Islam, the churches and chapels of Christianity), but also many of our institutions (monarchy, the earliest universities), and gave shape to many of our cities (Paris, London, Rome, Istanbul, etc). This course reframes the period through careful contextual analyses of major monuments and argues for the importance of the medieval world for shaping world art.

This course examines the histories, meanings, and sites of modern arts in a globalizing world. Students become familiar with key art works, transnational and global networks of art, shifts in critical conceptions, and art historical problems surrounding modernity, modernisms, and modern arts.

Explores the art and architecture of Latin America, from Argentina to the Caribbean and Southeastern United States, from ca. 1200 BCE to the present. The course will look at the great civilizations of pre-Hispanic America (Olmecs, Maya, Aztecs, Moche, Inca and others), colonial Latin America (Spanish America, from New Mexico to Patagonia, and Portuguese Brazil), and the arts from Independence in the early 19th century to the present, including a consideration of figures such as Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Wifredo Lam, and Tarsila do Amaral.

The period we now call "Gothic" was one of the most vibrant in the entire history of art. Covering all of Europe and the Mediterranean, parts of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia (via the Silk Roads), the Gothic might have been the first "international style" in art history. This course looks at the period anew through its art but also its literature.

How can it be that the mysterious works that Jheronimus Bosch created 500 years ago are still puzzling art historians today? Why was Pieter Bruegel the Elder so fascinated with Bosch that he set out to emulate him, 50 years after the death of his famous predecessor? This course surveys painting in the Low Countries between c. 1500 and c. 1570. Triggered by the Reformation and the advent of Humanism, this period is characterized by major political upheaval and military conflict, resulting in important changes in the patronage, production, marketing, and function of art. 

Focusing on a selection of thematic studies from across history, from the Indus Valley Civilization to the present day, this course examines a range of artistic and artisanal works across South Asia including painting, architecture, arts of the book, sculpture, textiles, metalwork, and ceramics, as well as theories of aesthetics and craftsmanship. 

Forgeries have an incredible allure.  As with a conjuring trick, we are bemused when we are fooled, especially when our own finances and reputations are not involved.  However, on a societal level, rarely do we investigate this phenomenon in more than a superficial manner resulting in little understanding of the depth of a fake’s impact.  This class will delve more fully into the world of art forgeries to provide a more detailed and comprehensive understanding of their history, production, identification, and reception.  In order to encapsulate the nuances of this phenomenon, this class will take an interdisciplinary approach, including guest lectures, to foster discussion about the impact of art forgeries on a wide range of disciplines including art history, finance, law, museology, and conservation.  Through interdisciplinary dialogue, students will attempt to form their own philosophical approach to forgeries based on their fields of study in combination with art history.

An investigation of how cultural heritage has been preserved in different parts of the world in the past and the present, focusing on methods used to ameliorate or prevent damage and destruction caused by the environment, war, looting and restoration. Case studies will be drawn from the UNESCO World Heritage list.

Each week, students will work on learning a craft while also reading theoretical and historical texts on knowledge, craft, and the body. Our goal will be to understand how theory and practice, the head and the hand, and making and knowing relate to each other, and how making might be used as a research process.  

What does The Matrix Trilogy have to do with critical theory? What does Harry Potter tell us about our fascination with the Middle Ages? What is “camp” and what does it have to do with queer culture and representation? As art is freed from the confines of the gallery where it is conventionally located in Western art history, it potentially becomes a “popular”, even democratising medium accessible to anyone with access to television, radio, urban space, and the internet.

Offers a critical assessment of the relationship between imperialism and architecture with a focus on the European empires in Asia, Africa, and Latin America from the 15th to 20th centuries. Using case studies organized chronologically and by empire, this course will look at the architecture of European colonies not just from the viewpoint of the colonizer but also from that of the colonized. It will consider how architecture functions as an image of power and nostalgia for the colonizers but how strategies used by colonized people preserved their own architectural traditions and iconography in the architecture and subverted imperial goals.

Why is it that Jan van Eyck’s astonishingly realistic paintings still stun us today? And what are the qualities of Rogier van der Weyden’s paintings that still move many museum visitors to tears today? This course surveys painting in the Low Countries between c. 1400 and c. 1500. This period is characterized by major changes in the patronage, production, marketing, and function of art works, triggered by the rapid growth of cities such as Bruges and Ghent. The religious, political, and socio-economical contexts for these changes will be discussed, and new scholarly approaches such as technical examinations will be introduced. 

This course explores new materials, new processes, and new meanings in craft and design in the early twentieth century with a focus on issues in ecology, colonialism, race, and gender.  

Most paintings are complex layered structures that were produced with a broad range of materials in distinct stages. This seminar will teach you how to use X-rays, UV, and infrared to study the genesis of these works. It will focus on the materials and techniques of Early Netherlandish painters such as Jheronimus Bosch (d. 1516), but these techniques can also be applied to examine paintings from other regions and time periods. 

From the Gothic novel of the eighteenth century to Scooby Doo in the twentieth century and Cabin in the Woods in the twenty first, the haunted house is a central construction of modern architecture and of modernity itself. Architecture was variously “haunted” by ghosts (as in the film The Ghost Goes West—see image) or by repressed trauma (as in Hitchcock’s Psycho), thus creating double lives for many of our most famous buildings. This course explores the haunted house in architecture, literature and cinema and of course considers aspects of modern psychology and the paranormal. 

Explores the art and architecture that resulted from the interaction between European and non-European civilizations from the 15th-20th centuries. This period involved an age of global encounter between the widest spectrum of peoples, representing different ethnicities and religions, as well as political, social, economic, and cultural systems. We will explore the reception of European art and architecture in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, with focuses on Mughal India, Goa, Ming & Qing China, Momoyama Japan, the Nahua (Aztecs), the Quechua (Incas), Paraguay, Ghana, Senegal, Haiti, and Madagascar, among others.

How do art historians put method and theory into practice? In this exploratory class, we read widely in iconography, formalism, biography, semiotics, post-structuralism, Marxism, social history of art, psychoanalysis, theories of gender and race, postcolonial and decolonial theory, seeking to experiment with the methods and theories most suited to the research questions that fuel our academic and creative interests