Fall 2025

This seminar explores the art of Indian Esoteric Buddhism from various interpretive vantage points. After a brief historiographical introduction, we will examine scholarly discourses on Esoteric or Tantric Buddhism in relation to the artistic productions...

Photomontage—the assembly of photographic fragments—is as old as photography itself. Prompted by the Harvard Art Museums’ recent accession of over one hundred works by Gustavs Klucis and Valentina Kulagina--leading Soviet photomonteurs of the 1920s and...

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...

People change. They grow up and grow old, each differently but in ways divisible into stages. Different cultures and different eras understand and number these stages differently, but between birth and death bodies and minds develop and age. This...

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. Questions about...

What is left out of view and why? Many landmark works about the intersection of race, culture, and equity have been censored, excised, or unseen—viewed and then disregarded—or even erased from official narratives. This course will focus on key works from...

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...

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...

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...

Architecture of the eastern Mediterranean basin (at Italian, Ottoman, and Mamluk courts) with emphasis on cross-cultural encounters and transmission of the Romano-Byzantine heritage, science and technology, architectural practice, ornament, urban design...