Fall 2023

Yukio Lippit This seminar examines the history of medieval Japanese ink painting from the thirteenth through sixteenth century. Subjects to be addressed include the emergence of a Zen figural pantheon, Zen master portraiture (chinsō), poem-picture scrolls...

Eugene Wang The Chinese stupa-tower is a distinct architectural medium. It stages and choreographs disparate images either through its external or internal decorative programs or the deposits interred inside. More importantly, it is keyed to the...

Maria Gough Photomontage—the assembly of photographic fragments—is as old as photography itself. This seminar offers an episodic history of the medium, examining its use in not only the fine arts but also aristocratic photocollage albums, radical...

Joseph Koerner, Stephen Greenblatt Jacob Burckhardt’s thesis that literary and artistic representations of “self” became more common and expansive during the Renaissance has been vigorously challenged, but it gets at something that happened in the...

Christina Maranci This course studies Armenian liturgical and domestic textiles from local collections, putting them into their social, historical, ritual, and art-historical context.

Seth Estrin This course focuses on the living image—a concept central to many artistic traditions both globally and historically. Such an image can possess qualities normally only found in human beings or other living creatures: movement, speech, social...

Gulru Necipoglu Examines multimedia arts, monuments, gardens, and cities of the Ottoman Empire straddling Asia, Europe and Africa. The selective fusion of Ottoman-Islamic, Byzantine, and Italian Renaissance artistic traditions, and the earliest pictorial...

Sarah Lewis In 2023, it is hard to look anywhere and not see the force of black culture in media, entertainment, and the visual arts, now more heavily represented in the exhibitions and displays in museums around the country. It is hard to read the...

Thomas Cummins This is a general introduction to and survey of the arts of Ancient America. We will look at both Mesoamerica and the Andean art and architecture beginning with some of the earliest cultures and ending with Aztec, Maya, Muisca and Inca...

Suzanne Blier This course explores key art historical and architectural traditions in Africa from earliest man to the eighteenth century.