Fall 2025

Limited to juniors and seniors. Students wishing to enroll must petition the Head Tutor for approval, stating the proposed project, and must have the permission of the proposed instructor.

This course focuses on fashion and clothing in Japan and Korea from pre-1900 to the present day. It aims to build a knowledge base of historically contextualized case studies through readings, lectures, and discussion. It examines clothing as a site of...

A seminar focusing on primary sources in classical languages, as well as recent scholarship and theoretical texts. This semester, the course centers on medieval Japanese manuscripts in the collections of the Harvard Art Museums and Harvard University...

This class invites you to practice a new kind of plant-consciousness. Our guides will be contemporary artists and thinkers who are encouraging new relationships between human and vegetal life, or recalling very old ones. Suddenly, we have plant...

Objects are essential primary sources for the study of the past. They are imbued with tales of their makers, of societies in which they took shape, of customs and beliefs that lent them meaning, and of routes that facilitated their dissemination. In this...

How can one small, remote country change the way we think about the culture of the world? Being wedged between superpowers might seem like a recipe for ethnic assimilation and cultural conformity. Yet what if it made you stronger? In the case of Armenia...

An introduction to major works of art and architecture from around the world, co-taught by a team of six HAA professors, two of whom will co-lead the course. Each week consists of one 75-minute lecture by a faculty member, 60-minute looking labs in the...

How was a particular work of art made, and why does it look the way it does? To what extent do the availability of materials and development of material technology influence artistic choice and innovation? How can science help us understand the making and...

Critically explores the historiography and interpretations of Islamic ornament. Themes include ornamentality and abstraction, theories of perception, orientalist discourses on the so-called "arabesque," resonances of non-figural abstraction with modernism...

What is known as the Renaissance was a period of intense cultural transformation, and it is a history whose legacy we have inherited. From the construction of the liberal arts to the Doctrine of Discovery (only rejected by the Vatican in 2023), we live...