Fall 2024

Yukio Lippit This course examines the history of East Asian portraiture. Limited to graduate students, and knowledge of Chinese or Japanese is required.

Ewa Lajer-Burcharth This seminar seeks to reassess the role of drawing in modern artistic culture. We will follow the trope of line, the most basic drawing mark, not to construct a linear history of the medium, but to provide a selective account of its...

Jeffrey Hamburger Issues of interpretation in medieval book illumination, especially in the context of glossed books and commentaries, but also in emergent vernacular literatures, with a focus on pictorial constructions of authorship and the image of the...

Seth Estrin Whether naked or clothed, male or female, mortal or divine, the body takes pride of place in the visual worlds constructed by ancient Greek artists. Yet this proliferation of representations of the body begs the question: What is a body that...

Narayan Khandekar This course leads students through the examination of a work of art from the collection of Harvard Art Museums using the perspectives of a curator, conservator and a conservation scientist. Students will examine and interrogate a work...

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...

Brenda Croft Australian First Nations cultural practices, cosmological beliefs and creativity span 65,000+ years, deeply grounded in the collective cultural knowledge that we have been on the continent now known as Australia since time immemorial, from...

Eric Huntington What is a sacred image? Does it embody a presence or merely serve as a visual reminder? Does it need to look like its subject? How is it manufactured, used, repaired, and discarded? How do sacred images differ from tourist art or works in...

Sarah Lewis, Suzanne Blier What would be lost without an understanding of Art of the Black world? This course will introduce students to visual art from the African continent and African diaspora (with an accent on the United States) by examining the...

Jonathan Grinham, Leonard Palmer Present assumptions indicate that the management of our material world accounts for more than half of all global greenhouse gas emissions. Nearly fifty percent of these emissions are attributed directly to building...