HAA 399 - Doctoral Dissertation
Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2024
Note: May not be counted toward course requirements for the PhD degree.
Undergraduate Courses
A summary of HAA courses for AY24-25 (with provisional schedule) is available here.
Visual summaries: Fall | Spring
Please note that links to the my.harvard course catalog will not work until this goes live on March 27.
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HAA 310B - Works of Art: Materials, Forms, Histories
Semester:
Spring
Offered:
2025
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
Link:
HAA 399 - Doctoral Dissertation
Semester:
Spring
Offered:
2025
Note: May not be counted toward course requirements for the PhD degree.
Link:
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Previous Academic Years
Spring 2024
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Fall 2023
HUMAN 20 - A Colloquium in the Visual Arts
Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2023
Yukio Lippit, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Jennifer Roberts, Vishal Khandelwal, Felipe Pereda
HUMAN 20 is an introduction to the study of the humanities through major works of art and architecture from around the world, taught by five members of the Harvard faculty. The course was specially created for students focusing on the humanities or interested in a wide-ranging introduction to works of art and architecture and the many issues they embody.
Each week immerses students in the cultural and imaginary world of an artwork, whether it be a Japanese woodblock print by Katsushika Hokusai, Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the portrait sculptures of the Ife Empire, the scientific illustrations of Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s Self-Portrait, or the animal locomotion photography of Eadweard Muybridge. Each week, an artwork is introduced during a 75-minute lecture. Then, students attend a weekly looking lab, where they develop skills of visual observation, analysis, and description. The looking lab is followed by a discussion section where ideas from the lecture, looking lab, and selected readings will be explored further.
Humanities 20 teaches students what it means to engage deeply with an artwork, and how to think through that artwork about large questions. The course will consider: the relationship between race, visuality, and social justice; modernism; monuments and cultural memory; encounters between cultures; the relationship between art and science and time; artworks and the expression of religious beliefs; and how different cultures have thought about life, death, and the beginning of the world. The readings emphasize engagement with primary source texts which include artists’ statements, manifestoes, art criticism, religious narratives, and history.
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GENED 1185 - The Power and Beauty of Being In-Between: The Story of Armenia
Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2023
Christina Maranci
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, being “in-between” led to a vibrant, diverse, and resilient culture, a distinctive religious and national identity, and a dynamic diaspora. Travelling from antiquity to modernity, we will explore how Armenia and Armenians survived and thrived despite invasion, oppression, statelessness, and planned annihilation. We will explore the connections between Armenian culture and diverse traditions, including classical antiquity, the Ancient Near East, Sasanian and Islamic Iran, and the Byzantine empire, East Asia, and Europe, and the relations between Armenia and neighboring cultures of the Caucasus. We will follow the Armenian experience into the early modern period, when Armenians established a trade network reaching from the Indian subcontinent to Amsterdam, absorbing and informing a kaleidoscope of cultures along the way. We will wrap up with the survival of Armenian traditions in contemporary culture, the role of the Armenian genocide in shaping Armenian identity, including in neighboring Watertown. Finally, we will discuss the meaning of cultural heritage for Armenians today, and explore its role at the intersection of politics, diplomacy, law, scholarship, human rights, and activism.
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FYSEMR 65M - Reading Buildings
Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2023
Patricio del Real
Architecture is the backdrop of our lives. Although we routinely encounter buildings — we live in them, use them, visit them — we often ignore them. This Freshman Seminar brings buildings to the foreground of your lives and asks: How does architecture live among us? We begin from the premise that, fundamentally, to be able to "read" architecture and the built environment, is to be equipped with the skills to better understand the world we live in. In this seminar, we will visit select case studies in the Boston area. We will examine architectural works from different periods and in different mediums. We will visit built works and analyze unbuilt projects; read manifestos and historical descriptions; look at archival drawings and period photos, all to reveal the disciplinary, cultural, and social forces embodied in architecture. This class will help you understand how architecture lives among us.
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FYSEMR 65I - The Modern City and its People: South Asia and Beyond
Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2023
Vishal Khandelwal
A city is a strange organism in which many kinds of realities exist alongside each other. In addition to containing the buildings and infrastructures of everyday life, a city suggests numerous meanings to the people who comprise and navigate it. This seminar will consider some of these meanings by analyzing architecture and urban development; artworks that represent everyday life; and films that showcase the modern city. How do people build cities in relation to their needs? How and why do specific urban spaces cater to entertainment and excitement? Where do emotions such as love, longing, or fear make themselves apparent within the textures of cities? How does urban life give rise to inclusions and exclusions? In what ways do artworks and everyday objects register urban and rural realities, fantasies, and memories? And how do we study and talk about the built and unbuilt infrastructures that shape and enable cities and subjectivities? Our core examples will draw from South Asian cities and diasporic South Asian lives, and our readings will come from disciplines including architectural history, art history, urban studies, and anthropology. At stake will be a variety of terms and concepts that we will use to think, write, and reflect about cities, the kinds of activities that take place within them, and the types of transactions that structure our urban experiences as well as the experiences of those we study. We will strive to move beyond conceptions of urban life that privilege the ideals and aspirations of only a few, and will question what has historically constituted the urban itself in relation to the non-urban. A mandatory field trip to the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University (Waltham, MA) is included as part of this seminar.
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HAA 17K - Introduction to Contemporary Art
Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2023
Carrie Lambert-Beatty
This class is about encountering the art of your time.
In HAA 17K, you will learn why visual artists today have such a different range of choices than counterparts in other periods have had. You'll get answers to some big questions (what’s the difference between modern and contemporary?) and have debates about others (can it be good art if it’s not hard to make?). You’ll understand why you won't find an orderly series of movements and styles in contemporary art history, and you'll come to recognize an alternate structure: emergent constellations around issues that matter socially and artistically at once; productive conversations in visual, tactile, experiential form about problems like truth and misinformation; historical memory; race and racism; craft, relationships, and money.
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HAA 81 - Art of Monsoon Asia
Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2023
Jinah Kim
Monsoon Asia refers to the area of the globe where climates are determined or profoundly affected by the monsoon, from the Himalayas, to the islands of Indian Ocean, all the way to the Japanese archipelago. Focusing on the impact of monsoons in South and Southeast Asia, the course explores the common patterns and traits of the art of Monsoon Asia. How was the monsoon and its impact conceptualized in art?
The main learning goal of the course is to understand how artistic means were harnessed to conceptualize, cope with, and tame environmental challenges posed by monsoons and long-distance travels, often facilitated by the monsoon winds, in pre-modern times. From water management to water symbolism, from impressive temples that mark auspicious arrivals to itinerant objects like ivories and amulets that moved with travelers across Monsoon Asia, we will look at diverse sites and objects that date between the fifth through the sixteenth centuries and attempt to connect the dots between ports and uncover hidden narratives of long-distance travels and travails of dealing with environmental challenges in pre-modern times. The course challenges the diffusionist model of influence in understanding trans-regional interactions and introduces ways to discuss interconnected histories using digital tools. The course will introduce basic tools of digital art history and students will be asked to contribute to a course exhibition site with annotated maps and research pages as part of their final projects.
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HAA 144M - Hagia Sophia: Space and Ceremony
Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2023
Ioli Kalavrezou
The seminar will investigate an architectural masterpiece, the famous 6th c. Church of Hagia Sophia of Constantinople, now Istanbul.The monument stands at the forefront of the supreme architectural achievements not only of the emperor Justinian but of all Medieval and Byzantine domed architecture. It is best known for its unique design, its dome of unprecedented scale, and its splendid mosaics, now very much in the lime light. The seminar will analyse issues of design and materials, structure, symbolism and ritual performances.
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HAA 162V - Imagining Witchcraft: Women, Satire, and Enmity in Early Modern Visual Culture (from Dürer to Goya)
Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2023
Felipe Pereda, Joseph Koerner
Witchcraft as a magical practice is documented across many cultures since ancient times, while the “witch” of popular imaginings is a more recent local phenomenon. Young or old, alluring or monstrous—but usually female—the image of the witch developed in the West at the start of the early modern era, mobilizing the fantasies of major artists from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and beyond. This course explores the witch from three entangled perspectives: that of painters fascinated with nefarious illusions, that of witch-hunters and their largely fictive accusations, and that of modern historians seeking to make sense of this difficult material. Artists studied include Albrecht Dürer, Salvatore Rosa, José de Ribera, Henry Fuseli and Francisco de Goya. The course consists of lectures, debate seminars, and studio classes on the printing techniques (etching and acquatint) used by artists discussed.
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HAA 170G - Harvard Square: Social-History of Cambridge, MA
Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2023
Suzanne Blier
Harvard Square has a rich history; under its earlier name of Newtowne (founded in 1630), it was once the site of the Massachusetts capital. Much has changed. This class looks back on the many changes Harvard Square has undergone, recent challenges it has faced, and asks class members to think forward about how it might be re-envisioned. This class will combine work in local archives on issues related to history and policy, meetings on local Cambridge political issues, and an array of local design and drawing assignments. Learn how Harvard fits in; Be part of the change.
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HAA 171M - Architecture + Utopia in the 20th Century
Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2023
Patricio del Real
Can architecture bring about a utopian space, a different space from the one we normally inhabit? This proseminar explores architectural utopias in the 20th Century by examining ideas, forms, and case studies across the world that sought to challenge the hegemonic production of architecture.
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HAA 177X - Nano, Micro, Macro: Adaptive Material Laboratory
Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2023
Jonathan Grinham, Joanna Aizenberg
Leonard Palmer (TF)
In recent years, a wealth of cross-disciplinary research has produced unprecedented growth in the study of "architectured-materials." At the heart of this growth is a desire to design extraordinary functionality by manipulating matter at the smallest length scale possible—think nano or even atomic. The science's new approach to material design is radical.
This course asks what these new material technologies mean to design, energy, and our everyday occupancy of this planet. This course brings together scientists, engineers, and designers to think across scales, learn about each other's' working methods, and address real-world challenges by designing new materials and applying them to new applications, or atmospheres.
Class Notes: This course is open exclusively to HAA architecture track concentrators. Because of the limited number of spaces available, seniority will factor into the determination as to who gets a seat on the course.
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HAA 179G - Indigenous Diplomacy in the Great Lakes & Northeast
Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2023
Alan Corbiere
The collections housed at the Peabody Museum of Ethnology and Archaeology, Harvard University, offer a stellar opportunity to investigate Indigenous diplomacy carried on throughout the Great Lakes and Northeast region during the colonial period (1600 – 1900). In this seminar, students will complete readings that address theoretical aspects of museology, such as materiality, orality, literacy, knowledge transfer, meaning-making, collecting, repatriating, and cultural revitalization. Each week readings will be assigned that thematically focus on various diplomatic items, delving into how those items were used historically, how they continue to be used, or in some cases, how they are being reincorporated into Indigenous lives. The readings will cover item descriptions, material composition, techniques, historic use, as well as object journeys. These readings have been selected because typological samples of such diplomatic items are housed at the PMEA-H collections. The seminar will offer tactile museological sessions at the museum, allowing students to work directly with various items from the collections. Throughout the seminar, students will explore how items such as pipes, wampum strings and belts, came to symbolize the treaty and the treaty relationship. Indigenous peoples regard and treat these items as records and documents – thus this seminar is designed to provide the students opportunity to increase their appreciation and understanding of that ontological and epistemological status.
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HAA 181M - Art of Qi
Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2023
Eugene Wang
What is it that makes both the cosmos and us? Qi, loosely glossed as “vital energy,” is the Chinese answer. Commonly evoked in medicine, therapeutic care of mind and body, as well as martial arts, it actually underpins a wider spectrum of cultural spheres, not least among them, pictorial and plastic arts. This course introduces students to key concepts of the qi-engendered system and its manifestations in Chinese art throughout history. Case studies of qi-related artworks and their contexts are keyed to close inspection of art objects in Harvard Art Museums.
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HAA/AFRAMER 192M/192 - The History of African Art
Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2023
Suzanne Blier
This course explores key art historical and architectural traditions in Africa from earliest man to the eighteenth century.
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HAA 197P - Intro to Pre-Columbian Art
Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2023
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. Questions about the materials, urban planning,meaning and aesthetics will be addressed. The course will also take advantage of the great collections at the Peabody Museum as well as the MFA. There are no prerequisites.
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AAAS 112 - Black Art and the Refounding of America: Art, Race, and U.S. Law
Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2023
Sarah Lewis
In 2023, it is hard to look anywhere and not see the force of black culture in media, entertainment, and the visual arts, now more heavily represented in the exhibitions and displays in museums around the country. It is hard to read the political landscape in American life and not engage with the work of black culture from film to sculptures, public installations to paintings. This course focuses on the visual work of racial politics as a critical technology for contestation, redress, and rights-based advocacy in the United States.
This course method represents a change in how we can study the arts and humanities today. It was once possible to produce scholarship on vision and visuality in the United States as if it was somehow sealed off from the discursive force of racial formation. It is not any longer. In the 1990s, a methodological shift occurred as scholars including but not limited to Martin Berger, Maurice Berger, Kirsten Pai Buick, Eddie Chambers, Hal Foster, Édouard Glissant, Kellie Jones, Nicholas Mirzoeff, W. J. T. Mitchell, Toni Morrison, Steven Nelson, Michele Wallace, and Deborah Willis began to focus on the polemics, process, and construction of vision, absence, and opacity in the history of racial formation and social power.
The dual aim of this course is to give students—undergraduate and graduate—of all backgrounds and concentrations an understanding of core topics in Black Art, and a critical understanding of the imbrication of visuality, race, and politics in the United States through a series of case studies.
The final project will be a presentation of an exhibition concept to the class that can be developed into larger research projects including theses and dissertations.
Enrollment is capped. This seminar will include trips to the King Embrace Memorial in Boston and Hartford, Connecticut.
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HAA 226V - Visual, Material, Architectural Cultures btw East and West (Early Modern Ottoman Empire, 15-17th C)
Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2023
Gulru Necipoglu
Examines multimedia arts, monuments, gardens, and cities of the Ottoman Empire straddling Asia, Europe and Africa. The selective fusion of Ottoman-Islamic, Byzantine, and Italian Renaissance artistic traditions, and the earliest pictorial representations of the Islamic East by European artists working in the "Orientalist" mode are considered.
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HAA 236 - The Living Image in Premodern Art
Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2023
Seth Estrin
This course focuses on the living image—a concept central to many artistic traditions both globally and historically. Such an image can possess qualities normally only found in human beings or other living creatures: movement, speech, social agency, and even emotion and cognition. In some discourses, animation depends on practices of representation and artistic styles—realism or naturalism—that bring an image's depictive content to life. In others, animation occurs as a product of specific kinds of social engagement or religious practice. Yet others hold that images or imaged objects are capable of becoming animate of their own accord—that they are not ontologically distinct from living beings. At the same time, the affective turn in the humanities has suggested the importance of emotional and sensorial intimacy in animating images. As we investigate these and other accounts of the living image, our focus will be on the methodological challenge of recovering animated qualities of images that originate in distant and especially premodern cultural contexts. Theoretical readings will be balanced with case studies from a variety of subfields and museum visits.
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HAA / ARMENST 236V/201 - Threads of Survival
Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2023
Christina Maranci
This course studies Armenian liturgical and domestic textiles from local collections, putting them into their social, historical, ritual, and art-historical context.
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HAA 262G - Ego Documents in Early Modern Art and Literature
Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2023
Joseph Koerner, Stephen Greenblatt
Jacob Burckhardt’s thesis that literary and artistic representations of “self” became more common and expansive during the Renaissance has been vigorously challenged, but it gets at something that happened in the registration of personal identity in the Italy in the 14th century and then throughout the rest of Europe. This course revisits the prime textual and visual instances of Renaissance self-presentation—autobiography and portraiture—but expands the archive to “ego-documents” more generally: i.e., to written and material disclosures (and concealments) of the “I” of individuals, including letters, inquisitorial records, makers’ signs, coats-of-arms, ex-votos, collectors’ marks, iconoclastic defacements, and more. This interdisciplinary seminar will be conducted together with a course in the English Department taught by Professor Stephen Greenblatt. Enrollment Limited.
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HAA 276P - Photomontage & the Power of Assembly
Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2023
Maria Gough
Photomontage—the assembly of photographic fragments—is as old as photography itself. This seminar offers an episodic history of the medium, examining its use in not only the fine arts but also aristocratic photocollage albums, radical scrapbooks, revolutionary political posters distributed en masse, and monumental displays at exhibitions and trade fairs. Of particular interest is the use of photomontage for the expression of political dissent (Berlin Dada) and the affirmative representation of public assemblies and collectivities.
Facilitated by the Harvard Art Museum’s major acquisition of works by Gustavs Klucis, a Latvian photomonteur active in Moscow in the 1920s and 1930s, and the Houghton Library’s growing collection of photomontaged books and magazines, the seminar will study the wide-ranging deployment of the medium first-hand. Other photomonteurs to be discussed include, inter alia, Hannah Höch, John Heartfield, Valentina Kulagina, Marianne Brandt, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, El Lissitzky, Claude Cahun, Charlotte Perriand, Mieczysław Berman, Romare Bearden, Martha Rosler, and Wangechi Mutu.
A darkroom session on campus will introduce students to analogue processes for the making of photomontage, while a Department-funded field trip will enable us to visit New York museums and meet with one of the world’s most important collectors of photomontage. In consultation with the instructor, students may write on the work of any practitioner of the medium. Open to graduate students and advanced undergraduates; limit 10.
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HAA 281K - Embodied Architecture: Art in Stupa-Towers
Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2023
Eugene Wang
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.
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HAA 288P - Medieval Japanese Ink Painting
Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2023
Yukio Lippit
This seminar examines the history of medieval Japanese ink painting from the thirteenth through sixteenth century. Subjects to be addressed include the emergence of a Zen figural pantheon, Zen master portraiture (chinsō), poem-picture scrolls, landscape styles and inscriptions, the Ashikaga shogunal collection of Chinese painting, the relationship between architecture and painting, modal painting, the status of the monk-painter, and the emergence of the Kano school. Participants are required to have knowledge of either Chinese or Japanese.
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HAA 91R - Directed Study in HAA
Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2023
Limited to juniors and seniors. Students wishing to enroll must petition the DUS for approval, stating the proposed project, and must have the permission of the proposed instructor.
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HAA 92R - Design Speculations
Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2023
Lisa Haber-Thompson, Rachel Skof
This seminar will serve as a design platform for inquiry, documentation and analysis in relation either to the thesis topic or capstone project of interest to each student. Thesis students will be responsible for selecting a Thesis Advisor (or Advisors) with whom they will meet regularly to develop specific intention, substance and methodology of the thesis research and paper. This seminar is a support of independent thesis and/or independent project research, extending methodological inquiry of the project topic to design where students may convene to collectively discuss and experiment with design speculations – design tests that explore research through the visual and spatial language of architecture. The course will cover topics general to design research with discussions, assignments, and readings focused on three main themes in relation to architectural design: Discourse, the development of a proposition for the role and significance of architecture relative to the project topic of interest; Method, the design steps/process of working through a design application/inquiry of those ideas; and Context, the relationship of the project topic of study to broader surroundings which include but are not limited to the discipline of architecture, cultural contexts, technical developments and/or typologies. The seminar will emphasize and support the translation of ideas emerging from independent research into visual forms of representation including, but not limited to, drawings, diagrams, images, study models, and short animations. The techniques of representation reviewed will be catered to the project topics of individual students, but will also form a part of the general discussion of the course.
HAA 96A Transformations or HAA 96B Connections design studios is a pre-requisite to the Design Speculations course. HAA 92R is open exclusively to HAA architecture-track concentrators.
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HAA 96 - Special Seminar
Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2023
Seminar offered under special arrangements consisting of weekly meetings with designated faculty, where regular reading and writing assignments are focused on a topic of mutual interest.
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HAA 97R - The Sophomore Seminar
Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2023
Required of all History of Art and Architecture concentrators in their sophomore year. An introduction to the practice of art and architectural history through object-based teaching led by faculty members in HAA.
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HAA 98AR - Junior Tutorial ["Museums and Collections"]
Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2023
Required of juniors concentrating in History of Art and Architecture. A group tutorial consisting of weekly meetings with a graduate student, with regular reading and writing assignments. HAA 98ar offers concentrators the choice of several study groups investigating a particular field or topic in art history, including each year: museums and collections; race and aesthetics; the art of looking and writing, and; architectural methods. Concentrators select two of the group tutorial topics.
For AY 23-24, the following topics will be offered:
HAA 98AR - "Museums and Collections" (Fall)
HAA 98BR - "Architectural Methods" (Fall)
HAA 98CR - "Race and Aesthetics" (Spring)
HAA 98DR - "Writing Art History" (Spring)
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HAA 98BR - Junior Tutorial ["Architectural Methods"]
Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2023
Required of juniors concentrating in History of Art and Architecture. A group tutorial consisting of weekly meetings with a graduate student, with regular reading and writing assignments. HAA 98ar offers concentrators the choice of several study groups investigating a particular field or topic in art history, including each year: museums and collections; race and aesthetics; the art of looking and writing, and; architectural methods. Concentrators select two of the group tutorial topics.
For AY 23-24, the following topics will be offered:
HAA 98AR - "Museums and Collections" (Fall)
HAA 98BR - "Architectural Methods" (Fall)
HAA 98CR - "Race and Aesthetics" (Spring)
HAA 98DR - "Writing Art History" (Spring)
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HAA 99A - Senior Thesis Seminar
Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2023
Carrie Lambert-Beatty
In the fall term, HAA 99 includes several group tutorial meetings with the senior honors adviser, where assignments are aimed at facilitating the writing of a senior honors thesis; spring term consists of independent writing, under the direction of the individual thesis adviser. Part one of a two part series. Required of honors candidates in History of Art and Architecture. Permission of the DUS required.
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Spring 2019
Freshman Seminar 62m
Can Art Inspire Social Justice?
Sarah Lewis
Tuesday 12-2:45pm
How do images—photographs, films, and videos—create narratives that shape our definition of national belonging? Social media has changed how we ingest images. Protests, social injustice, and collective moments of triumph are all played out in photos and videos in real time unlike anything we thought possible just a few decades ago. What skills of visual literacy and critical consciousness are required to understand of the opportunities and challenges that technology is presenting to civic life? The seminar will explore the connection between images and justice in America, focusing on case studies that deal with historic and contemporary topics from emancipation, indigenous conflict, desegregation, Japanese internment, borderland conflicts, the long Civil Rights movement, and more. It will wrestle with the question of how the foundational right to representation in a democracy, the right to be recognized justly, is indelibly tied to the work of images in the public realm. What constitutes a figurative emblem of protest? What does effective resistance look like in art and in the digital realm? By the end of the course, students should be able to consider how images have had persuasive efficacy in the context of social and racial justice movements, critically engage with and contextualize the narratives surrounding images posted online, and understand how democratic rights are connected to visual representation in the United States.
HAA 11
Landmarks of World Architecture
Joseph Connors
Tuesday/Thursday 12-1:15pm
Examines major works of world architecture and the unique aesthetic, cultural, and historical issues that frame them. Faculty members will each lecture on an outstanding example in their area of expertise, drawing from various periods and such diverse cultures as modern and contemporary Europe and America, early modern Japan, Mughal India, Renaissance and medieval Europe, and ancient Rome. Sections will develop thematically and focus on significant issues in the analysis and interpretation of architecture.
HAA 14k
The Roman World in Transition: 4th to 8th centuries
Ioli Kalavrezou
Tuesday/Thursday 1:30-2:45pm
The course will focus on major moments in the history and politics from the Conversion of Constantine I the Great to the Fall of Constantinople.
HAA 17k
Introduction to Contemporary Art
Carrie Lambert-Beatty
Tuesday/Thursday 10:30-11:45am
This class is about encountering the art of your time. You will learn why artists today have such a different range of choices than their counterparts in other periods, and how to make sense of the experiences they create, in order to take up the opportunities contemporary art provides: to retune your senses, reassess your assumptions, and reencounter matters that concern you as one of the globally interconnected, differently positioned constituents of the contemporary period.
HAA 17p
Introduction to Contemporary Photography: War and Conflict
Makeda Best
Monday/Wednesday 10:30-11:45am
HAA 19z
Introduction to the Arts of Pre-Columbian America
Thomas Cummins
Tuesday/Thursday 10:30-11:45am
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 the materials, urban planning, meaning and aesthetics will be addressed. The course will also take advantage of the great collections at the Peabody Museum as well as the MFA. There are no prerequisites.
HAA 56g
Spanish Golden Age Painting: Truth and Deceit
Felipe Pereda
Monday/Wednesday 9-10:15am
The art of the Spanish Golden Age is well known for its radical naturalism, on the one hand, and its intense religious imagery, on the other. This course will be an introduction to the major artists of this period –Murillo, Velázquez, Zurbarán and others— from the point of view of painting’s power to produce visual illusions and deceive their spectators. Consequently, the course will consider artistic tropes of illusion and disillusionment in relation to early modern debates on belief and skepticism.
HAA 83
Buddhist Monuments
Jinah Kim, Yukio Lippit, Eugene Wang
Monday/Wednesday 12-1:15pm
This introductory lecture course examines architectural monuments of the Buddhist world, including sites in South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Himalayas, Central Asia, China, Korea, and Japan. Roughly following the history and development of Buddhism in chronological sequence, the course explores pertinent topics in the study of Buddhist monuments, such as cosmology, pilgrimage, ritual, materiality, relics, meditation, world-making, and the relationship between Buddhism and local religions. Through Buddhist sites scattered throughout time and space, students will learn about the rich, diverse world of Buddhist practice and experience.
HAA 96a
Architecture Studio I: Transformations
Elle Gerdeman
Wednesday/Friday 1:30-4:15pm
Architecture assembles multiple models, surfaces, and materials; it is not a single monolithic thing, rather it is comprised of disparate parts and organizational systems operating at different scales. Design, the bringing together of these elements, requires sensitivity, registers scale, and renders perceptual effect. This course is an introductory architectural design studio focused on building foundational architectural concepts and design methodologies studied through a process of making. A series of physical modeling/fabrication assignments explore spatial and organizational transformations as a consequence of the changing interactions among material, fabrication technique, and form. Resultant expressions of space, scale, and perceptual effects are discussed and evaluated in relation to a series of course readings that frame the intentions of each assignment within architectural theory and history discourse.
Both studios in the Architecture Studies Track (Transformations HAA 96A and Connections HAA 96B) explore architectural means and methods of design. Each begins from a different scale of inquiry, but converges at a similar end. This studio originates at the scale of material - focusing on specific capacities and effects thereof as well as the details of assembly - and expands from this to an investigation of an occupiable architectural scale in relation to a dynamic site.
The course emphasizes fluency in the visual and spatial communication of ideas through instruction in 2D drawing and 3D modeling techniques. Technical workshops are provided in choreography with serial assignments encompassing drafting and 3D modeling (AutoCAD + Rhino), techniques of fabrication (Rhino to various outputs), 3D printing, and representational processing (Adobe Creative Suite). The studio exposes students to critical architectural thinking and design methods for more broad disciplinary application following. No particular skill set, technical or otherwise, is a required prerequisite for this course; students from all backgrounds are welcome.
HAA 96b
Architecture Studio II: Connections
Lisa Haber-Thomson
Tuesday/Thursday 1:30-4:15pm
The practice of architecture fundamentally asks us to continuously engage with, and re-conceptualize, the world for which we are designing. As such, architecture as a discipline is not only about designing buildings, but also about challenging us to imagine new ways of seeing the world. This studio takes on the challenge through a series of design exercises focused on understanding, engaging with, and reimaging the urban condition. Throughout the course, we will approach architectural design as both a method of producing urban environments, and also as an avenue through which to understand our cities. We will be directly confronting the social, political, and environmental contexts that are necessarily implicated in any design process.
Both studios in the Architecture Studies Track (Transformations HAA 96A and Connections HAA 96B) explore architectural means and methods of design. Each begins from a different scale of inquiry, but converges towards a similar end. This studio originates at the scale of the urban site, and begins with a set of design research assignments that ask students to imagine the city from the perspective of a non-human agent. Extrapolating abstract principles from these agents, we will be mobilizing the possibilities of architectural representation to reimagine the city through mapping, diagraming, and collage.
The studio culminates in a design proposal for a site in Harvard Square. Students will be given an architectural brief, and will produce projects that address existing site conditions, programmatic space requirements, and projected users of the site. Technical workshops will provide all the necessary skills required for the course, and will allow students to develop aptitude in architectural drawing, mapping, rendering, and simple animation. No existing expertise or technical proficiency is necessary for this course. Students from all backgrounds are welcome; we will be encouraging interdisciplinary thinking throughout the design research process.
HAA 100r
Sophomore Excursion Seminar: Camino de Santiago
Felipe Pereda, Jeffrey Hamburger
Tuesday 12-2:45pm
This course introduces sophomore concentrators to on-site study of art and architecture through the case study of a particular geographic and cultural area. This year: Camino de Santiago
HAA 122x
Architecture in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: A Cross-Cultural Perspective
Gulru Necipoglu
Thursday 3-5:45pm
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, military, religious, and domestic architecture.
HAA 127m
Medieval Architecture in Greater Iran and Central Asia
David Roxburgh
Monday 3-5:45pm
The seminar examines cities and monuments built in Greater Iran and Central Asia from the 11th through 15th centuries spanning three principal dynastic periods (Seljuqs, Mongols, and Timurids). Various functional types—mosques, madrasas, minarets, tombs—, urban systems, and spatial organization are studied including the cities of Baghdad, Bukhara, Herat, Isfahan, Mashhad, Nishapur, Rayy, and Samarqand. We will examine the materials, construction and design processes of buildings, their typologies and morphologies, as well as their relationships to law, religion, climate, social and political life. A variety of primary sources are also considered ranging from geographies to histories and travel narratives.
HAA 155V
Making Art in Amsterdam, c.1645-1675; from Rembrandt and his Competitors to the Lower Tiers of the Art Market
Eric Jan Sluijter
Monday/Wednesday 12-1:15pm
This lecture course will focus on the production of paintings in Amsterdam between c. 1645 and 1675, a market which surged to its summit in the 1650s and early 1660s – both in quantity, and, propelled by artistic and economic rivalry, in quality ̶ and quickly contracted within a matter of years. Central will be the later career and work of Rembrandt (from c. 1645 until his death in1669) and of his most distinguished pupils and competitors, up to the highly successful Gerard de Lairesse, who arrived in 1665. The main thread of the lectures will be the question how painters positioned themselves in relation to each other within this competitive and continually changing art market. What choices did they make with respect to style, subject matter, techniques, and targeting audiences? How did they distinguish their works from, or follow the examples of, other artists, and how did they find buyers for their products or patrons for commissions? How did they acquire a reputation, and how was the monetary value of their works related to this? With these questions in mind, we will examine primarily the successful artists who made expensive high-quality paintings for wealthy patrons and knowledgeable connoisseurs, but we will also consider those making cheap, mass-produced work for the lower end of the art market.
HAA 164n
The Motif in Renaissance and Baroque Art of the Italian Peninsula
Shawon Kinew
Monday 3-5:45pm
This course studies the invention, permutations and transformations of visual motifs in the art of Renaissance and Baroque Italy, 1400-1700. The mirror, the shadow, the nymph, a person who can fly—what can the specific study of these motifs tell us of origins and identities, of love and violence, in early modern Italy? By taking this non-chronological approach, this course thinks critically and diachronically through the artworks of Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Caravaggio, Bernini and others, artists often in conversation with one another across space and even across time.
HAA 168v
The Vatican
Joseph Connors
Wednesday 3-5:45pm
The evolution of St. Peter’s basilica from Constantine to Bernini. Growth of the Vatican Palace, Library and Museums from the fifteenth through twentieth centuries. Artists covered will include Giotto, Fra Angelico, Pollaiuolo, Bramante, Raphael, Giulio Romano, Michelangelo, Ligorio, Domenico and Carlo Fontana, Maderno and Bernini. Students should keep spring break free. Permission of the instructor is need to enroll.
HAA 176w
Bauhaus and Harvard: The Making of an Exhibition
Maria Gough, Benjamin Buchloh, Laura Muir
Thursday 12-2:45pm
In conjunction with a major exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums, this seminar introduces students to the utopian politics, experimental pedagogy, and wide-ranging aesthetic production of the Bauhaus, the most influential school of art, architecture, and design of the 20thC. Founded in Germany in 1919, in the wake of the devastation wrought by the first world war, the Bauhaus sought to reunify art and architecture—and thus remake the cultural production of everyday life—through a return to manual craft. In the mid-1920s, however, it abandoned craft in favor of a new alliance with industry in a bid to bring its design prototypes into mass production. In the final weeks of the course we will turn to the “red Bauhaus” of Hannes Meyer in Soviet Moscow in the early 1930s, and the migration of other key figures to the United States after 1933, among them the school’s founding director, the architect Walter Gropius (who joined the Harvard faculty in 1937), Lázsló Moholy-Nagy (founder of the New Bauhaus in Chicago), Mies van der Rohe (head of architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology), and Anni Albers and Josef Albers (faculty at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and subsequently Yale). / Key issues to be discussed include: the contribution of textile design to the development of modernist abstraction; the ways in which the culture and organization of the school was marked by gendered norms and assumptions; the workshop model; craft object vs. design prototype; the design of domestic vs. public space; the role and variety of lens-based technologies (photogram, photo-collage, new-vision photograph, and photo document); print media, from lithography to advertising; utopia vs. technocracy; the cosmopolitan nature of both the faculty and student body; the vagaries of financial support from the state; the school’s relation to its sole foreign counterpart, the Vkhutemas in Moscow; and the constitutive role of exile in the transfer of Bauhaus principles to foreign institutions. / Comprising some 200 objects drawn almost entirely from the collection of the Busch-Reisinger Museum, the Harvard exhibition will serve as our chief laboratory, enabling first-hand study of original textiles, furniture, homewares, architecture, typography, and photography, as well as student exercises and works of fine art. Co-taught by its curator, Laura Muir, along with HAA faculty Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and Maria Gough, the seminar will also familiarize students with the curatorial principles and practices that informed the making of the exhibition itself. / Requirements include: preparation of weekly readings; class attendance and participation; and a paper based on original research in the museum’s rich and voluminous Bauhaus collection. We are particularly interested in research papers that focus on artists in the collection whose work has been underserved by the secondary literature, especially if not exclusively women. Open to undergraduates and graduate students. Attendance at the first session is mandatory. Limited to 12.
HAA 183k
Himalayan Art
Jinah Kim
Tuesday 12-2:45pm
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 Himalayan region. Two learning goals are: 1) Understanding the historical development of distinctive artistic forms in paintings and sculptures of Nepal and Tibet during major moments of artistic innovations in the region, including the artistic responses to the current political situation; 2) Locating this knowledge in the context of the history of reception and collecting of Himalayan art in the west.
HAA 193n
Global Art History
Suzanne Blier
Monday 3-5:45pm
Global Art History is a relatively new field taken up partially a response to the challenge posed by global and the challenge to rewrite Art History. Often framed by hermetic and geographically-defined vantages – including nationalist ones, such approaches have often left out insights into the cultural dynamics and entanglements cross between places and peoples. This course focuses both on the core issues in play in creating a more global approach to Art History, and, in a pragmatic sense, on constructing a new course around this subject. Reframing the disciplinary model of art history around related discussions and exercises encourage us to explore often marginalized broader world artistic practices and experiences as well as related contexts of cross-engagement and entanglement.
HAA 240r
Topics in Byzantine Art: Images of Devotion
Ioli Kalavrezou
Wednesdayday 3-5:45pm
The seminar will study the cult of relics and icons housed in churches and palaces of medieval Constantinople. Topics include the development of image and relic veneration, the roles attached to the power and protection of the Virgin Mary, civic rituals and public processions, the political and diplomatic use of icons and reliquaries, and their place in the public and private lives of the citizens of the imperial metropolis.
MEDVLSTD 250
At Cross Purposes: The Crusades in Material Culture
Evridiki Georganteli
Tuesday 12-2:45pm
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 dispersed across Western Europe, coins, sculptures, frescoes, and manuscripts from the East and the West.
HAA 262k
Bernini: Roman Baroque Sculpture and Spirit
Shawon Kinew
Thursday 3:00 – 5:45pm
This graduate seminar investigates Gian Lorenzo Bernini and his sculpture within the context of Seicento art theory, aesthetics and his own spiritual practice. We will study Bernini alongside his contemporaries and their aims, while also critically examining the sometimes-parochial study of Bernini. What can Bernini teach us in 2019?
HAA 265r
Topics in Northern Renaissance and Baroque Art
Joseph Koerner
Tuesday 12-2:45pm
Considers the history of prints in Germany and the Netherlands from its beginnings in the fifteenth century through to Rembrandt, with special reference to the difference that history makes to larger narratives of artistic development in the historical culture. Classes held in the Harvard Art Museums and focused on holdings of the collection.
HAA 278k
On Line: Drawing
Ewa Lajer-Burcharth
Wednesday 12-2:45pm
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 uses, purposes, and functions as an instrument of modernity--or, as the case may be, of anti-modernity. Focusing on the period spanning the eighteenth century to the present, we will approach drawing not as a monolithic entity, but as a heterogeneous phenomenon. We will consider it as a medium, a practice, an object, and a concept, and explore its interaction with, and cross-pollination by, other mediums and practices, (e.g., prints, photography; dance). We will discuss diverse approaches to draftsmanship–e.g., chronometric, kinetic, embodied, sculptural, automatic, blinded, black–and different modes of practice, (studio vs. urban drawing), and acquaint ourselves with procedures, techniques and materials by using them ourselves. We will also participate in a life drawing class in order to get a better sense of what the practice entails and what it makes possible.
Convened in the Harvard Art Museums study room, the seminars will offer students a hands-on experience of the works of art combined with the discussion of the assigned readings. In an effort to assess as well as reimagine the role of drawing, students will be encouraged to experiment with the format of their final project: aside from the classic research paper, annotated drawing series, an exhibition project, a film, a podcast and other inventive modes of presenting an argument will be welcome. (Enrollment limited.)
HAA 278w
Photography in Weimar Germany, and in Exile, 1919-1959
Benjamin Buchloh
Tuesday 9:00 - 11:45am
The seminar, offered to graduate students and advanced qualified undergraduate art history majors, will study the development of photographic practices in Weimar Germany, from 1918-1933, and trace a number of selected case studies of photographers in exile in the US, Latin American countries and France after 1933.
Focusing on the opposition between the key movements of New Objectivity and New Vision, the seminar will study the theoretical and artistic and cultural implications of this opposition, with August Sander and Laszlo Moholy Nagy serving as the key opponents.
Particular emphasis will be given to the large number of female photographers working both as artists and producers for the milieu of advertisement and fashion. In particular figures like Lotte Jacobi, Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach, Gisele Freund, Anne Biermann and Ilse Bing, will be at the center of our studies tracing the differentiations in their oeuvres between Weimar and their production in Exile.
The seminar will read the major theoretical and critical literature on photography to emerge from the Weimar debates as much as it will carefully study the increasingly detailed monographic accounts that have been published over the past ten years on the work of these photographers.
HAA 279p
The Object in the Art Museum
Ethan Lasser and Rachel Saunders
Tuesday 3:00-5:45pm
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 living artists and presenting works of art to non-expert audiences. Through practical and written assignments accompanied by key readings, as well as site visits and behind-the-scenes introductions, students will gain an understanding of how the practice of art history in the gallery both differs from and relates to its practice on the page. The course will consider the key issues, debates, and interpretative strategies driving museum practice, and tackle existential questions about the role and responsibility of the 21st-century museum. Throughout the semester, students will work towards public-facing outcomes. They will identify potential acquisitions, and produce and present a temporary installation at the end of the semester. The course will meet at the Harvard Art Museums, a uniquely rich university museum environment endowed with deep collections and state of the art curatorial and conservation facilities.
HAA 286s
The Shoso-in Treasury
Yukio Lippit, Eugene Wang, David Roxburgh
Thursday 3-5:45pm
This graduate seminar examines the remarkable array of objects preserved in the eighth-century Shōsō-in Imperial Treasury in Nara, Japan. Each session will be centered around in-depth analysis of case studies drawn from different categories of objects (painting, calligraphy, textiles, lacquerware, ceramics, glass, and metalwork among others) created in different cultural regions along the Silk Road, spanning Persia and Japan, from the sixth through eighth century. The goal will be to work outwards from specific objects to larger themes including the interregional transmission of artistic techniques and cultural knowledge along the Silk Road; transposition of modalities of making from one material or process into another; the role of artifacts in diplomatic exchange; vernacular iconographies; pseudomorphology; the role of treasuries in the construction of kingship; the relationship between art and environment in Central and East Asia; the contribution of conservation science to discursive forms of art historical analysis; and the merits and demerits of various digital humanities approaches to the study of the Silk Road and its cultural history.
HAA 298p
Displaying Latin America
Patricio del Real
Wednesday 3-5:45pm
Exhibitions have been integral to the promotion of modern architecture. They helped imagine, construct and order a modern world under the hegemony of modernism. This graduate seminar explores the theory and practice of exhibiting architecture. It focuses on ‘Latin America’ as a historical category imagined through national and international magazines, pavilions and museum exhibitions in the 20th Century. Our aim is to study how the ‘exhibitionary complex’—to use Tony Bennett’s characterization—engaged modern architecture to help render visible a place called ‘Latin America.’
HAA 310b
Works of Art: Materials, Forms, Histories
Jeffrey Hamburger
Friday 12-2:45pm
A series of team-taught workshops designed to sharpen skills in the observation, analysis, and historical interpretation of works of art and architecture.
Fall 2018
Freshman Seminar 31m
In Pursuit of the Ordinary: Genre Painting in Boston-Area Museums
Joseph Koerner
Tuesday 12-2:45pm
This course focuses chiefly on “genre” pictures: that is, depictions, mostly painted on canvas or panel, of everyday life. Examining closely key examples in different Boston-area collections, we investigate the changing nature and context of this type of image from its rise as a specialty product in early modern Europe through its complex development in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, to its rejection in Modernist art practice. Renewed fascination with the ‘ordinary’ in contemporary art and in recent museology (that is, museum history, theory and practice) features in this course, as well. Today’s icons of the everyday (for example, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain of 1917, Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box of 1964 boxes) obey a modern imperative that artists represent everyday life in suitably banal ways. Eschewing figural anecdote, artists dismantle art’s traditional claims of occupying some special “higher” sphere; they confront viewers with estrangements of the things of the world we unthinkingly inhabit. Such works illuminate our pursuit within this course: We study how artists of the past pictured everyday life; but we also consider what people do with art in their everyday lives. And we explore what the discipline of art history, in its practices of scholarship, criticism, collection, preservation, and display, imagines the ‘ordinary’ to be. This focus—our own image of the ordinary—takes us to museum spaces that intend to simulate everyday life. The gallery becomes itself a genre picture to stroll through. Although the course is structured around broad themes and historical developments, the emphasis of the classes will be on close visual analysis of objects and critical evaluation of key art historical texts.
Freshman Seminar 36x
Money Matters
Evridiki Georganteli
Wednesday, 12-2:45pm
Money Matters aims to engage first-year students with the economics, politics and aesthetics of one of the most fascinating and enduring aspects in human history. The seminar is a study of money in all its manifestations from the early agrarian societies to the first financial crisis of the 21st-century global market. How have individuals and societies reacted to and used money in business, politics and religion? What are the factors that shaped the metallic content and iconography of coins from the 7th century BC to the end of the Gold Standard in the 20th century? Why are early modern American and European banknotes so important for the study of social history? What are the links between art, literature, theatre, cinema and money? Seminar meetings will take place at the Harvard College, the Harvard Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and the Harvard Art Museums, introducing students to the world-class Harvard Coin Collection and offering them the opportunity to handle research and discuss priceless artifacts. Money Matters is intended for students with an interest in history, art history, archaeology, political science, economics and the study of world religions. Handling sessions, group discussions and a short essay on a choice coin from the Harvard Coin Collections will offer students a sense of immediacy and accessibility of Harvard?s splendid numismatic holdings and the opportunity to understand why money makes indeed the world go round.
Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding 40
Monuments of Islamic Architecture
Gulru Necipoglu-Kafadar and David J. Roxburgh
Tuesday/Thursday 9-10:15am
An introduction to ten iconic monuments of the Islamic world from the beginning of Islam to the early modern period. The course introduces various types of building-mosques, palaces, multifunctional complexes-and city types and the factors that shaped them, artistic, patronal, socio-political, religio-cultural, and economic. Each case study is divided into two lectures. The first presents the monument or city by "walking" through it. The second is devoted to themes elicited from the example, developed in light of comparative monuments, sites, and/or written sources, and to problems of patronage, production, audience and meaning as they pertain to architectural history.
Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding 58
Modern Art and Modernity
Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Maria Gough and Benjamin Buchloh
Tuesday/Thursday 10:30-11:45am
The course examines the defining moments in the development of modern European and American art from the eighteenth- through to the twentieth-century. Anchored by a significant date, each lecture focuses on the relationship between a major artistic event and the social, political, cultural, and technological conditions of its emergence. A wide range of media, from painting, sculpture, and print-making to photography, photomontage, video, installation, and performance art, will be considered. Situating the key aesthetic transformations that defined art's modernity in a broader historical context, the course explores the fundamental role of advanced forms of artistic practice in the formation of modern culture and society.
Ethical Reasoning 37
Adam & Eve
Joseph Koerner and Stephen Greenblatt
Monday/Wednesday 1:30-2:45pm
What is the power of a story? For several thousand years Adam and Eve were the protagonists in the central origin myth of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim worlds. That myth was the arena for ethical reasoning about transgression and innocence, sexuality, gender roles, labor, suffering, and death. Jointly taught by History of Art and Architecture and English, our course focuses on this enigmatic story and its spectacular elaborations in theology, philosophy, literature and art. Above all, looking closely at some of the greatest achievements of European art and literature--from Durer, Michelangelo and Rembrandt to Milton's Paradise Lost--we will compare the possibilities of the verbal and visual arts in portraying human being.
African & African American Studies 199z
Majesty and Mythology in African Art
Suzanne Blier
Monday 12-2:45pm
This course serves as an introduction to key themes in Africa art framed around both questions of rulership and the array of mythological forms that define these and other arts. The course also examines what these arts reveal about the nature of power, society, and religion in Africa more generally. The diverse ways that Africans have employed art and architecture to define individual and group identity will also be examined. Among the topics that will be discussed are palace and community architecture, regalia, women, divine kingship, cosmology, enthronement ceremonies, history, and the importance of art in diplomacy and war. The importance of broader art and architectural connections between Africa and other world areas will be engaged as well, bringing into play issues of colonialism, the global economy, questions of display, and current concerns with art appropriation and return.
HAA 17v
Introduction to Modern Architectures
Patricio del Real
Tuesday/Thursday 1:30-2:45pm
This undergraduate survey course traces developments in architecture from the late nineteenth-century to the twentieth and beyond. We will focus on the consolidation of modernism as a global phenomenon in the 20th Century, engaging projects and architects who had a direct hand in its shaping and those who opposed it. We will look at key works of architecture and urban planning as laboratories of modernity fraught with tensions between tradition and innovation, form and function, art and technology, creative genius and teamwork, nationalism and internationalism. As modern architecture developed throughout the world, architects, planners and designers refashioned the built environment to serve the needs of growing populations, emerging nations, political ideologies, international markets and industrial modernization. The course will present how architects aimed to fulfill the promises of industrial modernity and need to be 'modern.' We will focus on case studies in the Americas and the Europes that launched global debates and international actors. The course highlights a simultaneous modernity and a dynamic international architecture culture that prepared the grounds for contemporary globalization.
HAA 18j
Introduction to Japanese Architecture
Yukio Lippit
Monday/Wednesday 10:30-11:45am
A survey of the diverse architectural traditions of the Japanese archipelago from the prehistoric era through the twentieth century. Various building types-including the Shinto shrine, Buddhist temple, castle, teahouse, palace and farmhouse-will be studied through representative surviving examples. Issues to be explored include the basic principles of timber-frame engineering, the artisanal culture of master carpenters, and the mixed legacy of the functionalist interpretation of Japanese architecture.
HAA 18x
Introduction to the History of Chinese Art
Eugene Wang
Tuesday/Thursday 12-1:15pm
This course surveys Chinese art from antiquity to the recent avant-garde. Though the introduction follows a chronological order, it is also thematically motivated. We will see how visual artifacts_paintings, sculptures, architectural monuments_both consciously encode different pragmatic agendas and circumstantial exigencies and unconsciously betray cultural anxieties and tensions. The purpose is to enable students to look at Chinese history in visual terms and to view visual objects in historical terms, with a critique of the perception of Oriental art as static aesthetical objects suspended in a timeless vacuum.
HAA 92r
Design Speculations: Senior Design Tutorial
Megan Panzano
TBA
This seminar will serve as a design platform for inquiry, documentation and analysis in relation either to the thesis
topic or capstone project of interest to each student. Thesis students will be responsible for selecting a Thesis Advisor (or Advisors) with whom they will meet regularly to develop specific intention, substance and methodology of the thesis research and paper. This seminar is a support of independent thesis and/or independent project research, extending methodological inquiry of the project topic to design where students may convene to collectively discuss and experiment with design speculations – design tests that explore research through the visual and spatial language of architecture. The course will cover topics general to design research with discussions, assignments, and readings focused on three main themes in relation to architectural design: Discourse, the development of a proposition for the role
and significance of architecture relative to the project topic of interest; Method, the design steps/process of working through a design application/inquiry of those ideas; and Context, the relationship of the project topic of study to broader surroundings which include but are not limited to the discipline of architecture, cultural contexts,
technical developments and/or typologies. The seminar will emphasize and support the translation of ideas emerging from independent research into visual forms of representation including, but not limited to, drawings, diagrams, images, study models, and short
animations. The techniques of representation reviewed will be catered to the project topics of individual students, but will also form a part of the general discussion of the course.
HAA 96A Transformations or HAA 96B Connections design studios is a pre‐requisite to the Design Speculations course.
HAA 99
Senior Thesis Seminar
Jinah Kim
Monday 3-5:45pm
In the fall term, HAA 99 includes several group tutorial meetings with the senior honors adviser, where assignments are aimed at facilitating the writing of a senior honors thesis; spring term consists of independent writing, under the direction of the individual thesis adviser. Part one of a two part series.
HAA 101
The Making of Art and Artifacts: History, Material and Technique
Francesca Bewer
TBA
To what extent do the availabilty of materials and development of material technology influence artistic choice and innovation? How was a particular work of art made, and why does it look the way it does? The course will explore these and other questions of materiality through a combination of close looking at objects in the Harvard Art Museums' collections, hands-on experimentation with a range of artist's materials and techniques, and discussions of related readings. Among the goals of the course are for students to gain a better understanding of the dynamic relationship between makers and the materials and techniques they use; to be able to better recognize traces of artistic processes in works of art; and consider the implications of alterations that can occur in objects over time. The course will be taught by the Harvard Art Museums' research curator for conservation and technical studies in collaboration with staff of the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies - professionals who routinely consider questions of materiality and how they effect the way we understand, interpret, preserve and present works of art.
Japanese Literature 124
The Tale of Genji in Word and Image
Melissa M. McCormick
Monday 3-5:45pm
Introduces students to The Tale of Genji, often called the world's first novel, authored by the court lady Murasaki Shikibu around the year 1000 CE. In addition to a close reading of the tale, topics for examination include Japanese court culture, women's writing, and the tale's afterlife in painting, prints, drama, manga, and film.
HAA 138m
From Byzantium to the British Isles: The Materiality of Late Antiquity
Evridiki Georganteli
Monday 12-2:45pm
This course explores the extraordinary cultural transformation Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East underwent from Diocletian's reorganization of the Roman Empire in the late third century to the Islamic conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in the eighth century. Monuments and sites, sculpture, mosaics, frescoes and ceramics, icons and relics, textiles, coins and seals chart the movement of people, commodities and ideas along routes of warfare, pilgrimage, trade and diplomacy. Was the world of late antiquity still bearing the hallmarks of Roman connectivity, administration and culture? Were Ireland and Anglo-Saxon Englans really the edge of the known world? What was the extent of the Eastern Roman Empire's cultural power in late antique Europe, Africa and the Middle East? How did religious changes influence urban topographies, geographies of power and artistic choices?Close-up inspection of works of art in the Harvard Art Museums, the Harvard Business School and the Boston Fine Arts Museum; art making in the Harvard Art Museum Materials Lab and the Harvard Ceramics Studios; and study of archaeological records of the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis offer participants a rare insight into one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of art and architecture.
HAA 144m
Hagia Sophia: Architecture, Space and Ceremony
Ioli Kalavrezou
Wednesday 3-5:45pm
This course will look into the history of construction and embellishment of Hagia Sophia, built by Justinian in the 6th century. This extraordinary building, with its dome and open spatial interior stood as a marvel of architecture throughout the middle ages. In this great space, many rituals and ceremonies took place, which will also be studied during the semester.
HAA 161g
Francisco de Goya : Art as Testimony, the Artist as Witness
Felipe Pereda
Thursday 3-5:45pm
Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) signals the beginning of a new understanding of the power of art as a historical testimony. Sometimes considered the “patriarch of war photographers” Goya gave a new image of war in which anonymous victims take over the protagonism traditionally held by national heroes. This course will be a general introduction to Goya’s art, from the popular imagery of his early years to his late Black Paintings, but it will also look into Goya’s “modernity” from the standpoint of art´s reflection of contemporary history.
HAA 172g
Romanticism Revisited: Gericault
Ewa Lajer-Burcharth
Wednesday 12-2:45pm
Held in conjunction with an exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums, Mutiny: Works by Géricault, this seminar explores the social and political role of art in the Romantic period. Focused on the most influential Romantic artist, Théodore Géricault (1791–1824), the exhibition tells a new story of this socially and politically engaged artist across a range of media. Including approximately 40 drawings, watercolors, lithographs, and paintings from the Harvard Art Museums collections augmented by loans from three Boston-area collectors, the exhibition will offer students an opportunity to work closely with the objects and present on them in the exhibition space. Students will also be encouraged to address at least one object in the exhibition as part of their final paper. Examples of other works by Géricault in the collection, and works by his contemporaries, will also be examined during the course in the Harvard Art Museums Art Study Center. A visit to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a class excursion to New York to see an exhibition about Géricault’s contemporary, Eugène Delacroix, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, are also planned. (Enrollment limited)
HAA 179x
Tectonics Lab: Material and Form
Andrew Plumb
TBA
HAA 194m
The Museum
Suzanne Blier
Monday 3-5:45pm
This course explores a vital cluster of themes around museums and the relation between objects, knowledge, culture and society. The focus is at once contemporary practice, historical, and theoretical. A key aim is to move beyond Euro- American geographies to think about constructions of the universal and the global, and the relationship between works of art, museum displays, and the construction of meaning. Since the early twentieth century, scholars, artists, and activists have closely questioned the movements of objects and the role of museums, particularly in relation to socio-political developments. Why do individuals and societies collect, conserve, and display objects? How has this practice changed over time and space? What role do culture and taste play? These are some of the questions we will be addressing alongside practical experience designing programs for an exhibition of African art at Harvard Art Museums.
HAA 222n
Early Ottoman Architecture
Gulru Necipoglu-Kafadar
Tuesday 12-2:45pm
Examines architectural cosmopolitanism in the early Ottoman polity straddling Asia and Europe, by focusing on artistic interactions with neighbors (Byzantium, Latin West, Anatolian principalities, Mamluks in Syria-Egypt, Timurid-Turkmen Iran). Ottoman urban centers (including Iznik, Bursa, Edirne, Amasya, Konya), monuments, and architectural ornament considered from a connective transregional perspective.
HAA 229p
Word and Image in Persian Painting
David J. Roxburgh
Monday 3-5:45pm
Texts of the Persian literary tradition that were illustrated constitute our focus, including Firdawsi's Shahnama and Nizami's Khamsa. Study of word and image is staged through key examples to open new lines of inquiry.
HAA 241p
Diagram Paradigm
Jeffrey Hamburger
Tuesday 12-2:45pm
In a networked age, diagrams are everywhere. From philosophy, semiotics and computer science to the burgeoning field of graphics, diagrams visualize knowledge in critical ways. This seminar will look at diagrams and the diagrammatic mode in medieval art — and beyond — as tools for thinking and for creating knowledge.
HAA 270w
Historiography of Modern Architecture: In Search for a Global History
Patricio del Real
Wednesday 12-2:45pm
This graduate seminar traces the development of architectural modernism as a discursive practice. It explores the construction of a cohesive narrative that enabled modernism to become the hegemonic embodiment of modernity in the mid-20th Century and led to its critique in the 1960s and beyond. We will interrogate foundational texts by architectural historians—such as Hitchcock, Giedion, Benevolo and Tafuri and Dal Co—and address the challenges to these histories with the development of modernism beyond Europe and the United States. We will focus on 'other' modernisms as sites of enunciations, both formal and discursive, that will challenge these foundational histories. The aim is to gain a greater understanding of modern architecture as a global endeavor, as well as to examine architecture history as an operative and critical practice. In examining the historiography of modernism, the course aims to address contemporary historiographic critiques and explore the present need of a global history of architecture.
HAA 272v
Cubism and its Others: Art in Paris, 1907-1937
Maria Gough
Monday 12-2:45
Emergence, development, reception, and legacy of Cubism in Paris between 1907 and 1937, focusing on Picasso, Braque, Léger, and Gris, the four major artists of the pioneering Galerie Kahnweiler. Having analyzed the fundamental role of primitivism, tradition, mass culture, and the commodity form in Cubism's genesis, our major endeavor is to unpack its ever-shifting relation to its aesthetic Others, namely, abstraction, decoration, the ready-made, realism, and monumentalism. Crucial to this endeavor is a thorough examination of the problem of medium in Cubism, considering not only drawing, easel painting, collage, and constructed sculpture, but also mural painting, architecture, photography, and film.
HAA 277y
From Posada to Isotype: International Progressive Political Print Culture, 1900-1945
Benjamin Buchloh
Wednesday 3-5:45pm
This seminar, open to Graduates and qualified undergraduates will trace the developments and exchanges between presumably regressive and anti-technological media such as the woodcut and the linocuts in the first half of the twentieth century, in its various geo-political contexts from Mexico and Germany to the Soviet Union and China. Key figures to be studied will be Käthe Kollwitz and some of the German Expressionists, José Posada, Leopoldo Mendez, Elizabeth Catlett and the Taller de Grafica Popular, Frans Masereel, Gerd Arntz and Otto Neurath. The debates around and against photography and technological media will be one of the theoretical challenges of the seminar, and the internationalization and interactions through major critics and historians travelling to the Soviet Union and subsequently in exile in Mexico, such as Hannes Meyer , Paul Westheim and Anna Seghers will form its historical horizons.
HAA 282k
Indian Esoteric Buddhism
Jinah Kim
Wednesday 12-2:45pm
This seminar explores the art of Indian Esoteric Buddhism from various interpretive vantage points. After a brief historiographical introduction, the discussion will focus on unpacking recent scholarly discourses on Esoteric or Tantric Buddhism in relation to the artistic productions in medieval South Asia (ca. 800-1200CE). The two main topics for this semester will be 1) Saiva-Buddhist interactions as manifested in iconographic (and artistic) articulations, and 2) trans-regional connections across Asia. Students will engage in case studies exploring a historical relationship between ritual practices and artistic outputs in various Esoteric Buddhist contexts, which include comparative examples from outside the Indian sub-continent.
HAA 291r
Topics in Pre-Columbian and Colonial Art
Thomas Cummins
Thursday 12-2:45pm
Topics to be determined in consideration of interests of students.
HAA 310a
Methods and Theory of Art History
Jeffrey Hamburger
Friday 10:30am-1:15pm
A team-taught course led by the DGS based on exemplary readings designed to introduce students to a wide range of art-historical methods.
Spring 2018
Freshman Seminar 61v
Dada and Bauhaus: 100 years
Benjamin Buchloh
Tuesday, 1-3pm
This seminar takes its departure from the fact that Dada and Bauhaus, two of the most important artistic movements of the twentieth century, have been recently celebrated and rediscovered, and newly researched by a number of scholars and curators, partially in response to their respective centennial. Dada was founded in Zürich in 1916, the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919, and both formations were intensely international from the very beginning, unifying artists from many different European countries (Austria, France , Germany Hungary, Rumania, Russia, , Switzerland), to engender two astonishingly complex group formations. All the more amazing is the fact that these two groups were pursuing utterly opposite goals in their practices, in fact one could consider them the extreme poles of the twentieth century. Dada’s goals were primarily anarchist and anti-aesthetic, yet politically often radical and progressive, and Dada was not accidentally the first avant-garde movement to include a large number of female artists in its midst. The Bauhaus, by contrast, while having its own political perspectives ranging from Social Democratic and Socialist positions to a more affirmative production- oriented liberal democratic orientation, aimed for the improvement of everyday life for the social collective as a result of design and production of consumer goods and transformed architectural conditions. The course will focus on individual practices as much as it will develop a critical comparative reading of the various features of the group identities. Throughout the semester, we will be reading original documents and manifestoes, as much as the writings of the artists, complemented obviously with key critical essays that make up the most important recent art historical literature on both subjects. The final two meetings of the course will also address the tremendous impact that both formations had on American art of the 1950s and 1960s, ranging from the foundation of the Chicago Bauhaus / Institute of Design, and Black Mountain College both institutions which explicitly modelled themselves on the Bauhaus and brought former faculty members from the Bauhaus to the United States, as much as we will trace the enormously important influence that the rediscovery of the Dada legacies had on the development of artistic practices after Abstract Expressionism such as Pop Art and Fluxus in the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Humanities 10b
Joyce to Homer
Melissa McCormick
Tuesday, 10-11:30am
2,500 years of essential works, taught by six professors. Humanities 10b is open only to students who completed Humanities 10a in Fall 2017. Humanities 10b includes works by Joyce, Nietzsche, Shelley, Rousseau, More, Machiavelli, Murasaki, Bai Juyi, Augustine, Plato, Sophocles, and Homer. One 90-minute lecture plus a 90-minute discussion seminar led by the professors every week. Students continue to receive instruction in critical writing one hour a week, in writing labs and individual conferences. Students also have opportunities to visit cultural venues and attend musical and theatrical events in Cambridge or Boston.
HAA 11
Landmarks of World Architecture
Joseph Connors
Tuesday/Thursday, 1-2pm
Examines major works of world architecture and the unique aesthetic, cultural, and historical issues that frame them. Faculty members will each lecture on an outstanding example in their area of expertise, drawing from various periods and such diverse cultures as modern and contemporary Europe and America, early modern Japan, Mughal India, Renaissance and medieval Europe, and ancient Rome. Sections will develop thematically and focus on significant issues in the analysis and interpretation of architecture.
HAA 53p
Looking Back: The Western Tradition
Jeffrey Hamburger, Joseph Koerner
Tuesday/Thursday, 10-11:30am
The history of western art, like any story, has a plot (Antiquity, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Baroque, etc.), protagonists (Michelangelo, Picasso, Pollock), and a climax (Modern Art). By looking backward instead of forward, beginning with contemporary works and ending in the Middle Ages, this introduction to western art considers how the past continuously informs an ever-changing present. Combining the canonical with the critical, this course introduces both the western tradition and the practice of art history itself.
HAA 56g
Truth and Deceit in Spanish Golden Age Painting
Felipe Pereda
Monday/Wednesday, 12-1pm
Description TBD
HAA 58m
Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael
Cammy Brothers (Northeastern)
Monday/Wednesday, 10-11am
A painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci recently fetched the highest price on record for a work of art, a staggering 450 million dollars. The price speaks to the tremendous fascination certain Italian Renaissance figures still hold, 500 years after the fact. The Renaissance had many protagonists, but few loom as large as the three contemporaries and rivals who will form the focus of the course. In many regards, they shaped the notion of “genius” that we have inherited around themselves. The course builds out from these specific figures to a broader understanding of the Renaissance as an artistic and cultural phenomenon.
HAA 96a
Architecture Studio I: Transformations
Megan Panzano
Wednesday/Friday, 1-4pm
This course introduces basic architectural concepts and techniques used to address issues of form, function, ornament and material. This course provides instruction in project analysis, visualization, communication, and fabrication using both physical and digital modeling. Students proceed through a series of progressively complex investigations of transformational processes, context, program and material assemblage. As an introduction to architectural design, we will explore comprehensive and foundational design principles, skill sets and critical thinking and making. The course material will be presented through a series of presentations, exercises, workshops, reviews and discussions. This course fosters the development of a design methodology founded on thoughtful, creative and rigorous work practices in service of exploring meaningful expressions of the constructed environment.
HAA 96b
Architecture Studio II: Connections
Lisa Haber-Thompson
Tuesday/Thursday1-4pm
Architecture, as an act of design, is about placing objects the world. But architecture also fundamentally asks us to continuously engage with, and re-conceptualize, the world for which we are designing. As such, architecture as a discipline requires us to challenge our own positionality with regards to the world we all occupy.
This studio takes on the challenge through a series of design exercises focused on understanding, engaging with, and reimaging the urban condition. In this course, we will be mobilizing the autonomous architectural transformations mastered in HAA 96A to intervene with a programed architectural project designed for a specific site in Harvard Square. Students will produce projects that address existing site conditions, and will develop designs in response to a determined program. Students will be expected to take into account projected occupants and other users of the site. Throughout the course, we will approach architectural design as both a method of producing urban environments, and also as an avenue through which to understand our cities. We will be directly confronting the social, environmental, and cultural contexts that are necessarily implicated in any design process.
The studio centers on three progressive design assignments, culminating in an architectural project for a site in Harvard Square. Design exercises will be supplemented with a series of short readings. Technical workshops will allow students to further develop skills in mapping, rendering, and simple animation.
HAA 100R
Sophomore Excursion Seminar: Berlin
Benjamin Buchloh, Patricio del Real
Monday, 3-5pm
This course introduces sophomore concentrators to on-site study of art and architecture through the case study of a particular geographic and cultural area. This year: Germany.
HAA 153m
The Art of Death: Funerary Monuments in the Mediterranean
Felipe Pereda
Tuesday, 1-3pm
Funerary art is a type of monumental sculpture that was systematically produced around the Mediterranean since Antiquity, through the Middle Ages and into the Early Modern –Renaissance and Baroque—period. From medieval royal tombs to the Escorial, this is a story about some of its most spectacular creations. This seminar will look into the continuities and discontinuities of this “long story” within the geographical frame of the Mediterranean, but focusing on some particular examples, mostly from the Iberian Peninsula. The seminar will explore the relation of art history to memory, and the ways the artistic imagination both reflected and also articulated ideas of the afterlife.
HAA 161v
Rome Eternal City
Joseph Connors
Wednesday, 3-5pm
An architectural history of Rome from the empire through the early Christian and medieval city, the Renaissance revival of antiquity, Baroque planning, and early archeology to Fascism and modernism, including the imperial fora, aqueducts, fountains, medieval basilicas, the piazza, villas, gardens, St. Peter's and the Vatican complex.
HAA 171x
Architecture and Authoritarianism in the 20th C.
Patricio del Real
Wednesday, 1-3pmIn this pro-seminar, we will explore architecture in totalitarian regimes, paying particular attention to fascism as a political ideology and historical frame. The course will examine how architecture in its expanded field produced the ideological apparatus of fascist and totalitarian dictatorships, and shaped its systems of thought and forms of social organization in Europe, Africa and the Americas. We will focus on architectural case studies to examine contexts where dictatorships have toppled democratic forms of government. We will explore material, spatial and intellectual connections between political power and architecture; examine material techniques, aesthetic sources and organizational strategies through which architecture has established its authority in totalitarian regimes; uncover the ways architects have engaged the sphere of politics, government and national sovereignty in the 20th Century. Our aim is to go beyond the notion of an architecture in the service of the state, and to understand it as a tool of power and a technique of authoritarian rule.
HAA 182k
Japanese Woodblock Prints
Yukio Lippit
Thursday, 3-5pm
A thorough introduction to the history of the Japanese woodblock print, based upon first-hand study of the Sackler and MFA collections. Technical and stylistic change will be studied within the context of the evolving conditions of the publishing industry, theater world, and urban prostitution during Japan's Edo period (1600-1868). Developments in the modern era and various aspects of the Euro-American reception will also be considered.
HAA 184x
Painting of India
Jinah Kim
Monday, 1-3pm
The course explores the history of Indian painting based on the collections of Harvard Art Museums and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. We will investigate the theory of pictorial form in India and its relationship to the society at large against the historical currents by probing the development and changes in artistic styles and material culture of painting production. We will pay particular attention to the role of media, such as palm-leaf, birch bark, paper, and pigments, along with consideration of changing symbolic and material meanings of color. Regular visits (sections) to the museums and conservations labs to examine the paintings in person are to be scheduled throughout the semester.
African and African-American Studies 185x
What is Black Art? African American Cultural Production from the Early Republic to Civil Rights
Sarah Lewis
Tuesday, 1-3pm
This course surveys the history of African American Art from the colonial period to the long Civil Rights movement in the context of larger aesthetic and social movements. Taught in the Harvard Art Museums’ study center, this undergraduate seminar (also open to graduates) culminates by students curating their own online exhibition as the final project, presenting it to the class for discussion. Each week, the course will incorporate object study to examine the full range of African American cultural expression and strategies: craft, painting, printmaking, photography, film, and art political collectives. Seminar discussions will focus on works and their key thematics in artistic production—survival, retention, creolization, the politics of “black art” aesthetics and exhibitions, and the question of genre, such as the freedom and costs of abstraction, and politics of racial representation. The dual aim of this course is to give students of all backgrounds and concentrations an understanding of core topics in African American Art and a critical analysis of a work of art that can be developed into larger research projects.
HAA 193s
Cuzco, 1650-1700
Thomas Cummins
Monday, 1-3pm
Cuzco, once the center of the Inca Empire, became a major colonial Peruvian city unlike any other in which the royal descendants of the Inca lived and ruled along with Spaniards. In 1650 an earthquake destroyed most of the city’s buildings. Between 1650 and 1700 most of the city and the surrounding pueblos were re-built. This is in part due to the remarkable efforts of the bishop of Cuzco Mollinedo. At the same time, conflicts between the bishop and the cabildo of the cathedral, and between the bishop and the Jesuits focused upon power and authority as the re-building took place. Still more surprising, perhaps, most of the architects and painters for this renewal were Indians. This pro-seminar will examine both the architectural campaigns and the various genres of paintings that came to fruition within the complex political and cultural struggles over power and its representation. Cuzco will be the focus of this course, but we will put its painting, sculpture and architecture into comparison with other 17th century cities such as Lima, Quito, and Mexico City.
HAA 198m
Books and Things in Spanish America
Thomas Cummins
Wednesday, 3-5pmMovable type and the discovery of the New World occur almost simultaneously. It is perhaps no surprise that one of the first international businesses was the printing press in Mexico. This course will therefore study the impact of the book, and the various relationships between the printed book and the manuscripts and their critical place in the creation of a colonial culture and the European knowledge of that culture. At the same time we shall study how the book/manuscript is both an object of desire and commerce and of fear and loathing. How are book and manuscript illustrations a critical element in the development of colonial visual culture?
Visual and Environmental Studies 215
Critical Printing
Jennifer Roberts, Matt Saunders
Tuesday/Thursday, 10-1pm
Incorporating both studio and seminar instruction, this intensive course will explore printmaking’s history, trace its particular forms of intelligence, and test its future potential. The class will meet for three hours of studio and two hours of seminar/discussion per week. Assignments will include weekly readings, a short scholarly paper, and two studio projects. For the first half of the semester, students will pursue a rigorous grounding in a particular historical technique (etching/intaglio); in the second half students will translate what they have learned to another medium, thus exploring printmaking as an expanded field of practice.
HAA 225p
Early Print Culture: Representations of the Islamic East
Joseph Koerner, Gulru Necipoglu
Thursday, 3-5pm
Explores depictions of the Islamic East by European printmakers circa 1450 - 1600 and reciprocal construction of “Europe” through these and other depictions. Focusses on original objects in Harvard’s collections; classes taught in Art Study Center, Harvard Art Museums
HAA 244w
Illustrating the Word: Images from the Byzantine World
Ioli Kalavrezou
Wednesday, 1-3pm
The seminar will study illustrated manuscripts that were produced in the Byzantine world from the 9th to the 15th century. Most of them are books, which contain religious texts: Old Testament, Gospels, Psalters etc. Several are treatises on a variety of subjects as well as of a historical nature. Some were produced at the imperial court workshops, many at monastic foundations and others in artists’ ateliers. Many were however for personal use. The type or choice of illustration varied according to period, function and patron. All these questions will be addressed during the course of the semester.
Medieval Studies 250
At Cross Purposes: The Crusades in Material Culture
Eurydice Georganteli
Monday, 1-3pm
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 dispersed across Western Europe, coins, sculptures, frescoes, and manuscripts from the East and the West.
HAA 256g
Antiquity in Ruins: The Renaissance Imaginary
Cammy Brothers (Northeastern)
Monday, 1-3pm
Why and when did broken things come to be valued as objects of aesthetic appreciation? The seminar begins with Petrarch and his idea of fragments, and follows the trail through the fifteenth and sixteenth century, when artists, sculptors, architects and humanists took a passionate interest in fragments and ruins of all kinds. They fix them, they draw them, they depict them, they reuse them, and they learn from them. The course considers and interrogates each of these manifestations of interest. While the idea of the classicism we have inherited from the 18th century suggests a static and authoritative past, in the Renaissance the interpretation of antiquity was a topic of great contention. As we delve into these debates, we explore what counted as ancient, how artists imitated and competed with the past, and how they remade it.
HAA 271k
Picturing America: Photography, Race, and Citizenship
Sarah Lewis
Monday, 3-5pm
What images have had agency and persuasive efficacy in the contestation of racial inequality and social justice in the United States? This course, open to graduate students as well as undergraduates, examines the way that photography has both solidified and challenged the construction of racial categories and contributed to the work in the long civil rights movement in America. The course will focus have a heavy emphasis on both film photography, closely examining the work of artists including Edward Curtis, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Lewis Hine, Deana Lawson, Charles Moore, Gordon Parks, Bradford Young, Carrie Mae Weems, and Joseph T. Zealy.
Classes will include a trip to the Gordon Parks archive and the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture. The course will also have guest visits from cinematographer Bradford Young and photographer Deana Lawson.
HAA 274m
Minding Making: Art History and Artisinal Intelligence
Jennifer Roberts, Ethan Lasser
Tuesday, 1-3pm
If the artisanal and technical skills behind artmaking are forms of knowledge, how can (or should) that knowledge be integrated into the analytical methods of art history? This seminar will provide a wide-ranging exploration of this question, examining theories of craftsmanship, fabrication, and material reciprocity, debates over the concept of "tacit intelligence" and the value of making or remaking as historical method, issues of skill and deskilling on the part of both artists and art historians, and the challenge of exhibiting making in an art museum context. We will explore the transformative possibilities of rigorous attention to making, such as its potential to create forms of interpretation that cut across the fine, decorative, and industrial arts. The course will include close looking sessions in the Harvard Art Museums, hands-on making exercises, and visits from guest artisans.
HAA 277k
The Contemporary
Carrie Lambert-Beatty
Thursday, 3-5pm
Graduate seminar exploring the intersection of the field of art history with the globalized art world. What is "contemporary art" - in theory, in practice, and in history?
HAA 282e
Buddhist Cave Visualization
Eugene Wang
Thursday, 1-3pm
The caves at Dunhuang are among the largest Buddhist cave complexes in the world, spanning the fourth to the fourteenth century. With 492 caves decorated with murals and sculptures, Dunhuang is the largest art gallery in situ in the world. The course explores the visual programs of Dunhuang caves. The disparate textual sources on which the murals are based do not explain their convergence in the same cave. A deep logic of world-making binds them together. Using available digital reconstructions that proffer spatial experience of the Dunhuang caves, we address some key questions: how do disparate murals add up? How does the cave visualize and stage the Buddhist mental cosmos?
HAA 289s
Buddhist Monuments of the World
Yukio Lippit, Jinah Kim, Eugene Wang
Tuesday, 1-3pm
This graduate seminar examines architectural monuments of the Buddhist world, including sites in South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Himalayas, Central Asia, China, Korea, and Japan. It is intended to develop an introductory lecture course that will be taught the following academic year. Themes for exploration include cosmology, pilgrimage, ritual, materiality, relics, meditation, world-making, and the relationship between Buddhism and local religions.
HAA 310b
Works of Art: Materials, Forms, Histories
Maria Gough
Wednesday, 11-1pm
A series of team-taught workshops designed to sharpen skills in the observation, analysis, and historical interpretation of works of art and architecture.
Fall 2017
Freshman Seminar 30x
The Life Project
Carrie Lambert-Beatty
Wednesday, 2-4pm
What happens when contemporary artists treat their everyday lives as artistic material, "sculpting" their eating, sleeping, or living habits and reporting on the process? What kind of art is this? In the era of reality TV, personal informatics, and "challenge literature" have such projects gone mainstream? How do they relate to the "life projects" of ascetics, experimental subjects, or the mentally ill?
Freshman Seminar 36x
Money Matters
Evridiki Georganteli
Thursday, 1-3:30pm
Money matters aims to engage first-year students with the economics, politics and aesthetics of one of the most fascinating and enduring aspects in human history. The seminar is a study of money in all its manifestations from the early agrarian societies to the first financial crisis of the 21st-century global market. How have individuals and societies reacted to and used money in business, politics and religion? What are the factors that shaped the metallic content and iconography of coins from the 7th-century BC to the end of the Gold Standard in the 20th century? Why are early modern American and European banknotes so important for the study of social history? What are the links between art, literature, theatre, cinema and money? Seminars will take place at the Harvard College, the Harvard Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and the Harvard Art Museums, introducing students to the world-class Harvard Coin Collection and offering them the opportunity to handle, research and discuss priceless artefacts. Money matters is intended for students with an interest in history, art history, archaeology, political science, economics and the study of world religions. Handling sessions, group discussions and a short essay on a choice coin from the Harvard Coin Collections will offer students a sense of immediacy and accessibility of Harvard’s splendid numismatic holdings and the opportunity to understand why money makes indeed the world go round.
Freshman Seminar 61L
“Get Out of My Space!” Making Sense of Our Built Environment
Patricio Del Real
Wednesday, 3-5pm
Today space is at a premium. We all want space, but what sort of space do we want? We have social space, virtual space, personal space, safe space, collective space. How much space is there? Can we run out of it? How much do you need when you tell me: “Get out of my space!” What makes it “yours?” How do we make space? Who controls it? Architecture helps us define space. We live, study, work and play in buildings and cities that have become the stages for our everyday lives, helping us do what we do and live our present. But architecture has another much more important function: It helps us imagine other possible ways of living. Architecture helps us envision the spaces we want to live in. In this seminar, we will explore the different ways in which we have created, claimed, fought over, shared and continue to imagine space. Our discussions will put a premium on the way architects, artists and social actors have produced space, and how their ideas and projects guide the way we understand our constructions of space. We will make space through hands-on projects such as mapping social networks and transforming your space through the technique of collage. These projects will challenge and help you record, transform and produce space. This seminar is designed to enrich your knowledge of space so that you may take a position on contemporary social questions, debate the nature of our built environment, and claim space for yourself.
Freshman Seminar 61x
Soft Power: The 21st Century Art Museum
Ethan Lasser, Rachel Saunders
Tuesday, 1-3pm
What are museums good for in the twenty-first century? Should they be temples of scholarship or purveyors of popular entertainment? Are they places in which we seek contemplative refuge in the experience of “beauty,” or are they viable sites in which to work for social justice? Should we be investing public funds in museums, or are they a luxury best supported by private sources? To whom do museum collections “belong?” Art museums today are thriving, yet they have never faced so many contentious questions about their role and responsibilities. Co-led by two curators at the Harvard Art Museums, this seminar will consider the big issues facing art museums across the globe today. The course is intended for both long-time museum goers, as well as those who have never set foot in an art gallery. We begin with a primer on museum basics—the work of collecting, conservation, display, and research—and an introduction to the many resources of the Harvard Art Museums. In the second half of the seminar, we consider the challenges that face both august, traditional institutions—like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York—as well as younger, start-up museums like the private/ public collections being established across Asia.
Humanities 11a
Frameworks: The Art of Looking
Jennifer Roberts
Tuesday, 11:30-1pm
Visual information today is superabundant thanks to our smartphones, tablets, and other screen-based gadgets. But few of us recognize how thoroughly our habits and experiences of looking have been conditioned by interfaces with long and complex histories. Participants in this course, developed as part of the Humanities Project at Harvard, will approach looking through a consideration of key technologies from its history, such as the telescope, the cinema, and the easel painting. Students will learn about the hidden intricacies of looking and hone skills of visual, material, and spatial analysis through encounters with aesthetic objects from Harvard's collections.
Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding 43
Visual Culture of the Ottoman Empire Between East and West, 15th-17th C.
Gulru Necipoglu-Kafadar
Tuesday/Thursday, 11-12pm
Examines the visual culture of the Ottoman Empire straddling three continents (Asia, Europe, Africa), together with cross-cultural artistic interactions with Western and Asian Islamic courts (Safavid Iran, Mughal India). Ottoman urbanism, architecture, miniature painting and decorative arts studied in their socio-political contexts that informed their production and reception. The selective fusion of Ottoman-Islamic, Byzantine and Italian Renaissance elements in the codification of a distinctive visual tradition that helped processes of multicultural empire building and identity formation is analyzed. Earliest representations of the East by European artists working in the "Orientalist" mode are also considered.
HAA 18k
Introduction to Japanese Art
Melissa McCormick
Monday/Wednesday, 11-12pm
Surveys the arts of Japan from the prehistoric period to the nineteenth century. Includes Japanese painting, sculpture, and architecture, as well as calligraphy, garden design, ceramics, and prints. Essential themes include the relationship between artistic production and Japanese sociopolitical development, Sino-Japanese cultural exchange, and the impact of religion, region, gender, and class on Japanese artistic practice.
HAA 88
China in Twelve Artworks
Eugene Wang
Monday/Wednesday, 11-12pm
China is grasped through twelve artworks, spanning three millennia from the Bronze Age to the twentieth century. These artworks form both a timeline and a jigsaw puzzle with recurrent themes, e.g., the correlation between cosmos, body, and mind. The course consists of case studies, revealing both larger intellectual trends and the nuanced way artworks engage established formal conventions. Students learn about China through art and acquire visual literacy that takes art on its own terms.
HAA 99
Senior Thesis Seminar
Jennifer Roberts
Monday, 3-5pm
In the fall term, HAA 99 includes several group tutorial meetings with the senior honors adviser, where assignments are aimed at facilitating the writing of a senior honors thesis; spring term consists of independent writing, under the direction of the individual thesis adviser. Part one of a two part series.
HAA 124e
Architecture and the Construction of Early Modern Islamic Empire
Gulru Necipoglu-Kafadar
Tuesday, 1-3pm
Between the 16th and 18th centuries, three empires - the Mediterranean-based Ottomans, Safavids in Iran, and Mughals in India - developed interconnected yet distinctive architectural cultures with individualized ornamental idioms by fusing their common Timurid heritage with cosmopolitan regional traditions. Explores connections between empire building and architecture, with respect to aesthetics, religion, imperial ideology, and theories of dynastic legitimacy.
HAA 138m
From Byzantium to the British Isles: The Materiality of Late Antiquity
Evridiki Georganteli
Monday, 1-3pm
This course explores the extraordinary cultural transformation Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East underwent from Diocletian's reorganization of the Roman Empire in the late third century to the Islamic conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in the eighth century. Monuments and sites, sculpture, mosaics, frescoes and ceramics, icons and relics, textiles, coins and seals chart the movement of people, commodities and ideas along routes of warfare, pilgrimage, trade and diplomacy. Was the world of late antiquity still bearing the hallmarks of Roman connectivity, administration and culture? Were Ireland and Anglo-Saxon Englans really the edge of the known world? What was the extent of the Eastern Roman Empire's cultural power in late antique Europe, Africa and the Middle East? How did religious changes influence urban topographies, geographies of power and artistic choices?
Close-up inspection of works of art in the Harvard Art Museums, the Harvard Business School and the Boston Fine Arts Museum; art making in the Harvard Art Museum Materials Lab and the Harvard Ceramics Studios; and study of archaeological records of the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis offer participants a rare insight into one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of art and architecture.
Japanese Literature 133
Gender and Japanese Art
Melissa McCormick
Thursday, 1-3pm
Examines the role of gender in the production, reception, and interpretation of visual images in Japan from the twelfth through the twenty-first centuries. Topics include Buddhist conceptions of the feminine and Buddhist painting; sexual identity and illustrated narratives of gender reversals; the dynamics of voyeurism in Ukiyo-e woodblock prints; modernization of images of "modern girls" in the 1920s; and the gender dynamics of girl culture in manga and anime.
HAA 143m
The Art of the Court of Constantinople
Ioli Kalavrezou
Wednesday, 1-3pm
This course will study monuments of the Byzantine Empire from the end of Iconoclasm in 843 to 1204 when Constantinople, the capital city fell to the armies of the Crusaders. It will focus on objects and monuments, which can be linked to individual patrons or institutions. These are primarily the imperial court and the high officials of the government and the church, which together make up only a small but important class of Byzantine society. The material will be studied in relation to historical events, and to court ceremonial and religious feast days. The course will be run in part as a lecture course with ample discussion periods in the form of a seminar.
HAA 171g
Modern Art in Revolution: Paris Commune to October 1917
Maria Gough
Wednesday, 1-3pm
This seminar examines the relationship between art and activism during two major popular uprisings against the state: the Paris Commune of 1871 and the October Revolution of 1917. What was the role of modern and avant-garde artists in these revolutionary events? What new forms of production and distribution did they invent, and how did their work engender, rather than simply reflect, processes of emancipation and social transformation? How, in other words, was the utopian imagination made into spatial and pictorial form? The first half of the course addresses Courbet’s activism, the use and abuse of photography for partisan purposes, Manet’s depiction of state violence, and the flowering of Impressionism in the wake of the Commune’s suppression. We then analyze the participation of Russian and Soviet avant-garde artists in the building of the first socialist society in the 1920s, considering the politics of abstraction, the turn to experimental and factographic models of photography, the fine artist’s transformation into media-worker, and the radicalization of exhibition practices. Weekly meetings will be organized around first-hand study of original works of art in the Harvard Art Museums, and photographic albums and artists’ books in Houghton and the Fine Arts Library. Note seminar location: Study Center of the Harvard Art Museums (show your ID at the desk on the 4th-floor). Requirements: seminar attendance and participation, weekly readings, and the preparation of a research paper based on original works and/or historical materials in Harvard collections. Open to undergraduates. Limit: 12.
HAA 176e
Vision and Justice: The Art of Citizenship
Sarah Lewis
Tuesday/Thursday, 1-2pm
This course is organized around a guiding question: How has visual representation both limited and liberated our definition of American citizenship and belonging? Today, as we are awash with images, and as social media has allowed us to witness racially motivated injustices with a speed unimaginable until recently, we have had to call upon skills of visual literacy to remain engaged global citizens. This course will allow us to understand the understudied historic roots and contemporary outgrowth of this crucial function of visual literacy for justice in American civic life.
Sequenced chronologically, the lectures are organized into three parts, examining the role of visual representation as Civic Evidence, as Civic Critique, and as Civic Engagement (i.e. movement building and solidarity). Exploring these three categories in turn, topics include: the role of aesthetics for the invention of race, narratives supporting and critiquing Native American “removal,” the abolition of transatlantic slavery, immigration, the creation of and destabilization of U.S. segregation, the New Negro Movement, Japanese Internment, and the long Civil Rights movement. Each lecture centers on case studies to show the historic roots of the contemporary interplay between visual representation and justice at these inflection points in the contestation for citizenship in America.
We are fortunate to have invaluable holdings at the Harvard Art Museums and at the Peabody Museum and via Cooper Gallery exhibitions that vividly showcase this contested relationship between art, justice, race, and culture over the course of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Lectures will incorporate material from these holdings and sections will meet at these locations to facilitate object-based study. This course will also include guest lectures from architect Michael Murphy and artist Theaster Gates. Students will leave the course having developed rigorous skills of visual literacy and critical analysis foundational to be engaged global citizens regardless of their concentration or future field of study.
HAA 179x
Tectonics Lab: Materials and Form
Mark Mulligan
Monday, 9-10am; Friday, 2-5pm
Tectonics Lab introduces students to material properties, structural behavior, and fabrication-and-assembly issues in architecture through a combination of lectures, workshops, and design-build projects. The course emphasizes two modes of architectural experimentation: analytical and intuitive. Abstract and architectonic exercises involving these modes of experimentation will take place in a workshop format, with students working in teams of varying sizes. Weekly lectures provide a theoretical basis for the design-build projects, with topics including fundamental, non-quantitative statics (e.g., free-body diagrams, types of forces and reactions) and generic structural approaches; material properties and fabrication; joinery and assembly; scalar transformation; modular construction; kinetic structures; and more. Design-build projects challenge students to engage lecture material in a hands-on manner; these projects focus on the construction of full-scale artifacts that may be tested against a range of performance criteria. In each project, students will explore the role of material expression, figuration, and formal gesture in communicating their ideas. Project documentation through drawing, photography, and video is an essential component of coursework, and a comprehensive course portfolio will be due at the end of term.
The principal objective of Tectonics Lab is to extend our shared knowledge of material properties, structural behavior, and construction techniques by testing new ideas. Our research model is a hybrid: equal parts scientific laboratory (where narrowly defined hypotheses are tested and evaluated) and artist’s atelier (where expression of ideas, both articulated and ineffable, is the goal).
HAA 183w
Women in South Asian Art
Jinah Kim
Monday, 1-3pm
This course aims to provide a historical perspective for understanding the contemporary politics of body and gender representation by exploring historical examples of female patronage of art and by attending to the development of goddess cults through archaeological and art historical evidence. By scrutinizing visual representations of female body in South Asia and by locating them in the context of aesthetic theories and erotic science, we will also problematize exoticizing views of “erotica Indica”, including the prevalent use of erotic imagery from medieval temples for illustrating the Kamasutra in the West. The readings for this course are interdisciplinary, and we will cover a broad range of materials from medieval sculptures, to miniature paintings, and to an interpretive animated cartoon of the Hindu epic, Rāmāyana
HAA 206
Science and the Practice of Art History
Narayan Khandekar
Wednesday, 1-3pm
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 using these different perspectives to understand how and from what the object is made and how it has changed since its creation using visual and instrumental techniques. The course will conclude with a presentation of a forgery/attribution/authentication case by individuals. The course will be taught by curators, conservators and conservation scientists from the Harvard Art Museums.
HAA 240
Family and Daily Life in the Byzantine World
Ioli Kalavrezou
Thursday, 1-3pm
The course will focus on the private and public life and world of everyday Byzantine society. Although most of the surviving material evidence originates from court and religious environments, the course will attempt to study Byzantine society as a whole. Course topics will examine the private as well as public life of the individual from childhood to adult life through artifacts from the household, work and other social environments. Emphasis will be on the early and middle Byzantine periods (5th – 12th c.).
HAA 247p
The Art of religious Experience: Devotional Images Before and After the Reformation
Jeffrey Hamburger, Felipe Pereda
Tuesday, 1-3pm
The Reformation, in 2017 500 years old, marks a caesura in the history of European religious art. Between the late Middle Ages and the Counter-Reformation, however, there are also important continuities. The course will pay special attention to the construction of religious experience through a series of comparative case studies.
HAA 274k
The Russian and Soviet Avant-Gardes
Maria Gough
Thursday, 1-3pm
On the centenary of the 1917 Revolutions, this seminar offers a major test case for assessing the relationship between aesthetics and politics by returning to the pioneering example of Russian and Soviet avant-garde artists, photographers, designers, and architects who participated in, or otherwise responded to, the building of the first socialist society. The key issue on the table is the avant-garde’s problematization and ultimate rejection of the modernist principle of the autonomy of the work of art. The significant role of women in this major shift within the history of modernism, as well as the work of non-architects in the field of architecture, is discussed.
We begin with the pre-revolutionary embrace of the autonomy principle in the differentiation of poetic vs. everyday language, Suprematist nonobjectivity, and the understanding of faktura (facture, texture) as materiological determination. We then turn to the troubling of that principle in the wake of 1917, in both Lissitzky’s art of the proun, which ranged across media from painting to architecture, and also laboratory Constructivism, which, following Picasso’s example, advanced constructed sculpture as a major new procedure. The rejection of autonomy altogether is found in the Productivists’ subsequent call for artists to enter into industrial production and the design of every day life. Major examples for discussion include: the reinvention of textile and clothing design; the advent of new typologies for interior and urban space; the recourse to experimental and factographic modes of photographic practice; and the radicalization of graphic design and exhibition design.
The seminar is supported by a dedicated exhibition in the Harvard Art Museums, “What about Revolution? Aesthetic Practices after 1917,” and a weekend study trip to the centennial exhibition, “Revoliutsiia! Demonstratsiia! Soviet Art Put to the Test,” at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Requirements: seminar attendance and participation, weekly readings, and the preparation of a research paper based on original works of art. Open to graduate students. Limit: 12.
HAA 284m
Medieval Japanese Ink Painting
Yukio Lippit
Monday, 3-5pm
This seminar explores the golden age of Japanese Zen monk-painters (ca. 1200-1600). Issues to be explored include ritual and portraiture, techniques of accidentalism, inscriptions and Zen discourse, the status of the monk-painter, the Ashikaga collection, and the relationship to Chinese literati painting. Knowledge of Japanese or Chinese is required
HAA 290m
Constructing Latin America
Patricio Del Real
Thursday, 1-3pm
In the 20th Century, architects, designers and urban planners in Latin America realized and projected visions of modernity through buildings and ideas that established the canonic works of modern architecture in the region. How do these buildings, forms and ideas engage the intellectual milieu produced by artists, writers and intellectuals in Latin America? What is the relationship between the notion of mestizaje debated by José Vasconcelos and Manuel Gámio, and Mexico’s University City? How did the idea of acomodação advanced by Gilberto Freyre impact the forms of Brazilian modernism? In this seminar, we will explore how architecture in Mexico and Brazil was mobilized to imagine and construct modern nations. We will engage in a close analysis of key works of architecture and examine the interactions between ideas and forms, texts and buildings, writers and architects. Our aim is to examine architecture in its expanded field and to study the multiple sites and strategies of constructing and imagining Latin America.
HAA 292
Colonial Art of Mexico and the Andes
Thomas Cummins
Wednesday, 1-3pm
“Something New, Something Old: A Marriage Made in Hell”
This seminar will examine how the new is rendered as something known. This conundrum is, in and of itself, an unprecedented problem. As such, the seminar will examine the relationship between differing theoretical approaches to urban spaces, architecture, pictorial production and consumption, and the historical investigation of colonial Latin American art and architecture in the 16th and 17th centuries. Some questions to be explored through specific readings and works are:
What is the intersection between formal studies of colonial objects and images with the questions formed to interpret them? Is it the same as in the study of European studies, or are there differences? Is pictorial perspective a visual imperative once it is introduced? What is the nature of hybridity/syncretism, emulation, copying and materiality? How does one study synthetics in the colonial period? Do the differences between European and American languages affect space, vision and object? How do text and image operate in the various publics of Mexico and Peru?
HAA 310a
Theories and Methodologies in the History of Art and Architecture
Maria Gough
Wednesday, 11-1pm
A team-taught course led by the DGS based on exemplary readings designed to introduce students to a wide range of art-historical methods.