Spring 2022

Sarah Lewis, Joseph Koerner This graduate seminar is designed to consider: Why have monuments, particularly in the United States, become such points of controversy in recent years? What does the fixation on monuments in this historic moment have to teach...

Makeda Best, Mary Schneider Enriquez 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, intellectual empathy, and the ability...

Maria Gough What is the role of the artist in society? We will discuss this crucial and perennial question through the lens of the work of Russian and Soviet avant-garde painters, photographers, designers, and architects--many of them women--who...

Shawon Kinew “Ogni dipintore dipinge se”—every painter paints himself—is a Renaissance proverb that posited every artist would inevitably replicate himself in his artwork, try as he might to avoid this. In short, no artist can escape himself. Are art...

Felipe Pereda, Jeffrey Hamburger The course looks at the ways in which artists pushed the boundaries of representation to capture ineffable experiences evoked in accounts of mystical experience. Drawing on the writings of famous mystics from the 6th...

David Roxburgh The seminar examines the medium of drawing in the Islamic lands, focusing on the post-Mongol through early modern periods throughout the Middle East, Iran, India, and Central Asia. Topics include the medium, materiality and practice of...

Gulru Necipoglu Three empires from the Balkans to Bengal developed distinctive architectural, urban, material, and ornamental cultures rooted in their Timurid-Turkman pasts and transformed by cosmopolitan regional traditions. An inter-imperial dialogical...

Suzanne Blier

Jinah Kim Understood as a divine abode in Indic mythology and envisioned as the immortal realm of "Shangri-la" by later western interpreters, the Himalayas abound with Hindu and Buddhist holy sites. This course explores the vibrant visual culture of the...

Maria Gough The objectives of this workshop-style graduate seminar are two-fold: 1) To foreground the pioneering role of textiles and other artisanal media produced by women in the development of modernist art, especially abstraction, Dada, constructivism...