Spring 2020

Ewa Lajer-Burcharth Wednesday, 10:30am - 1:15pm A series of team-taught workshops designed to sharpen skills in the observation, analysis, and historical interpretation of works of art and architecture. Enrollment open only to incoming graduate students...

Thomas Cummins Monday, 3:00pm - 5:45pm “Something New, Something Old: A Marriage Made in Hell” This seminar will examine how the new is rendered as something known. This conundrum is, in and of itself, an unprecedented problem. As such, the seminar will...

Makeda Best and Mary Schneider Enriquez Wednesday 03:00 PM - 05:45 PM Practicing art history in today’s increasingly mobile art world—whether as a field curator, academic researcher, critic, or other professional specialism—requires museum literacy...

Graduate seminar exploring the intersection of the field of art history with the globalized art world. What is "contemporary art" - in theory, in practice, and in history?

Benjamin Buchloh Thursday, 12:00pm - 2:45pm This graduate seminar (qualified undergraduates will be admitted after interview), will investigate the complex relationships between painterly practices and mass cultural formations (photography, advertisement...

Philip Goad Tuesday, 3:00pm - 5:45pm This course, designed as a graduate level seminar, has as its focus the question of transnational exchanges in architecture and urbanism. Themes of reception, transaction, technology transfer, the flows of capital and...

Melissa M. McCormick Monday, 12:00pm - 2:45pm This is a seminar for advanced graduate students in East Asian art (and adjacent fields) focusing on reading secondary and primary sources in Japanese, as well as recent scholarship and theoretical texts in...

Gulru Necipoglu-Kafadar Thursday, 12:00pm 2:45pm Critically explores the historiography and interpretations of Islamic ornament. Themes include ornamentality and abstraction, theories of perception, orientalist discourses on the so-called "arabesque,"...

Yukio Lippit Wednesday, 3:00pm - 5:45pm This seminar explores the history of painting during Japan’s Edo period (1615-1868). Along with an introduction to major artists and schools, the course will examine themes such as the formats and materiality of...

Jinah Kim Monday, 12:00pm - 2:45pm The course explores the history of Indian painting based on the collections of Harvard Art Museums and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. We will investigate the theory of pictorial form in India and its relationship to...