A team-taught course led by the DGS based on exemplary readings designed to introduce students to a wide range of art-historical methods. Course is required of HAA G1s and open solely to HAA G1s
Individual work in preparation for the General Examination for the PhD degree or, by arrangement, on special topics not included in the announced course offerings.
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 conceptual core of a biological extinction and imaginary postmortem scenography. The course follows the development from early memorial towers in Buddhist caves to stupa-towers in the Forbidden City.
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 to work in multiple voices and mediums, in addition to art historical expertise. This object- centered seminar will introduce students to the central competencies required of art historians working in or with museums today, ranging from skills for assessing the quality and authenticity of objects on the market, to tools for working with...
Without starting from pre-determined categories (e.g. eco-art), how might we map artists' multiple, conflicting, and changing engagements with the more-than-human world? By thinking through a range of critical approaches, could we reframe art as a natural-cultural process? And, by researching specific practices of art-making, institution-building, or exhibition-creation, past, present, or even future, can we make tangible what it would mean to reframe art this way? The syllabus will focus on the period from the 1960s to the present, but students'...
This course explores art history through the idea of refuge, with particular emphasis on imaginative or contemplative means of freeing oneself temporarily from unhappy circumstances. Two related doubts inform the course: that the refuge today is an endangered resource, and that our electronic devices are more refuge-seeming than refuge-serving. The course will aim at developing a stronger theorization of the refuge than presently exists and putting that theorization into dialogue with the history of art. Cognate concepts such as sanctuary, retreat, haven, escape,...
How are artists, and how are disciplines in the arts and humanities, responding to the hyper-visuality of racial injustices on American ground? This course explores how visual artists including Mark Bradford, Theaster Gates, Amy Sherald, Xaviera Simmons, Hank Willis Thomas, and Kehinde Wiley, and new landmarks—such as the Equal Justice Initiative's National Memorial to Peace and Justice and the creation of Black Lives Matter Plaza—have initiated a new set of "groundwork" tactics in the Stand Your Ground Era in the United States. Stand Your Ground laws, first...
Taking an approach that is simultaneously material and theoretical, focusing on American art from the colonial period onward, this course will explore the breakdown and repair of objects, the cultures they sustain, and the critical approaches they demand. We will cover theories of making, repair, and maintenance. We will take a deep dive into conservation science and practice. We will think about the possibilities and precarities of reparative approaches to scholarship.
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 English. The topic will change each semester to accommodate the research projects, general exam fields, and interests of the participants. In addition to examining the state of the...
Crusading expeditions in the Holy Land, Spain and Eastern Europe from 1096 until the end of the Middle Ages shaped the political, socio-economic and cultural map of Europe and the Middle East. This course explores the multifaceted encounters between crusaders, Byzantines, Jews, Armenians and Muslims through the material traces they left behind: architecture, Byzantine objects...
A team-taught course led by the DGS based on exemplary readings designed to introduce students to a wide range of art-historical methods. Course is required of HAA G1s and open solely to HAA G1s
Individual work in preparation for the General Examination for the PhD degree or, by arrangement, on special topics not included in the announced course offerings.
