Islam vs. Image?: Visual Representations in Islamic Art
David Roxburgh
Wednesday – 3:00pm - 5:00pm
Is Islam against images? For reasons that are perplexing and hard to pinpoint, this notion appears to have been promoted by ideas about Islamic doctrine and an endemic hostility toward images which has only been magnified after recent years of religious extremism and terrorism. These include the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan in 2001, and the Charlie Hebdo mass shooting in Paris 2015 over the cartoons representing the Prophet Muhammad. And yet there is ample evidence of making and using images across the time and space of Islam. The stereotype of Islam’s antipathy toward paintings and drawings, etc., has fostered the understanding that calligraphy and geometry flourished because of figuration’s illicitness. These ideas and assertions are misleading and incomplete. The Seminar is an opportunity for personal reflection and to study the issues at stake in questions about the values, forms, and functions of images and examines a broad variety of images produced throughout the Islamic lands from 600–1900. Each week focuses on a selected case study that together span diverse subject matters, mediums, functions, and contexts, and invite thought about a spectrum of modes of representation. We will learn that the condition of images in Islam is as diverse and complex as the religion itself which cannot be reduced to a unified or monolithic expression, to a singular system of belief.
HAA 31M In Pursuit of the Ordinary: Genre Painting in Boston-Area Museums
Joseph Koerner
Monday - 1200pm - 2.45pm
This seminar looks at portrayals of everyday life in art, mostly from Europe and America, and mostly in the medium of painting. Examining original art objects in different Boston-area collections, we investigate this type of imagery as it develops into a distinct tradition. We observe its beginnings in medieval marginalia. We trace its evolution into a specialty product from the Renaissance and through its heyday in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when it came to be called “genre painting.” And we consider its rejection by and strange survivals in modern art. Studying individual artworks closely, we also explore the character and missions of the public collections that house them.
Permanent Impermanence: Why Buddhists Build Monuments
Jinah Kim, Yukio Lippit, Eugene Wang
Monday & Wednesday - 12.00pm - 1.15pm
Everything changes. This is, in its simplest and most fundamental formulation, one of the essential teachings of Buddhism. Buddhist communities throughout history have preached, practiced, and written about the ephemerality and illusoriness of our everyday lives and experiences. Ironically, however, many of these same communities have attempted to express these teachings in the form of monumental structures meant to stand the test of time. Some of the world’s greatest cultural heritage sites are a legacy of this seeming contradiction between the impermanence that is a central presupposition of Buddhist thought and the permanence to which these same monuments seem to aspire. If the world is characterized by emptiness and the Self is illusory, how does one account for the prodigious volume of art and architecture created by Buddhists throughout history? This Gen Ed course takes a multicultural and reflective engagement with the challenges presented by this conundrum through a study of Buddhist sites scattered throughout time and space. Pertinent topics such as cosmology, pilgrimage, materiality, relics, meditation, and world-making will be explored. Through these Buddhist monuments in South and Southeast Asia, the Himalayas, Central Asia, China, Korea, and Japan, students will learn about the rich, diverse world of Buddhist practice and experience.
HAA 12Y Introduction to Islamic Art: Visual and Portable Arts in Context
David Roxburgh
Tuesday & Thursday - 10.30am - 11.45am
Introduces key examples of the arts of the book, calligraphy, and portable arts between 650 and 1650 in the Islamic world, from the rise of Islam through to the pre-modern Gunpowder Empires.'' Objects are examined in light of their aesthetic, cultural, and political contexts. Themes include production and patronage; systems of object content and use; correspondences across media; and cross-cultural relationships of content and form. The selected materials are studied through a range of methodologies.
HAA 17K Introduction to Contemporary Art
Carrie Lambert-Beatty
Tuesday & Thursday - 1.30pm - 2.45pm
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.
17Z Black Rock, White City: Australian Architecture from earliest times to the present
Philip Goad
Tuesday - 3.00pm - 5.45pm
HAA 92R Design Speculations: Senior Design Tutorial
Megan Panzano, Lisa Haber-Thomson
Thursday - 9:45am - 11:45am
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 97R Sophomore Methods Tutorial
Yukio Lippit
TBA
Group tutorial, offers an introduction to the methods and research skills of art and architectural history.
Faculty Tutorial
Yukio Lippit
TBA
Junior Tutorial consisting of weekly meetings with designated faculty, where regular reading and writing assignments are focused on a topic of mutual interest.
Yukio Lippit
TBA
Group tutorial, offers concentrators the choice of several study groups investigating a particular field of art of architectural history.
Jinah Kim
Monday - 3:00pm - 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.
Gulru Necipoglu-Kafadar
Thursday - 12:00pm - 2:45pm
Course Description: Between the 16th and 18th centuries, three empires - the Mediterranean-based Ottomans, Safavids in Iran, and Mughals in the Indian subcontinent - developed interconnected yet distinctive architectural, material and visual cultures with individualized ornamental idioms by fusing their common transregional Timurid heritage with local traditions. The course explores connections between empire building, iconic monuments, and garden landscapes with respect to design, materiality, aesthetics, religion, imperial identity, and theories of dynastic legitimacy. Interactions with neighboring regions will be considered (Europe, Uzbek Central Asia, the Deccan and Gujarat Sultanates).
HAA 138M From Byzantium to the British Isles: The Materiality of Late Antiquity
Evridiki Georganteli
Monday - 12:00pm - 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 143M The Art of the Court of Constantinople
Ioli Kalavrezou
Wednesday - 12:00pm - 2:45pm
Concentrates on art and architecture created for the court of Constantinople from the 9th to the 12th century. Focuses on objects and monuments, exploring their role in political, religious, and personal events.
HAA 179X Tectonics Lab: Conference Course
Andrew Plumb
TBA
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).
Suzanne Blier
Monday - 12:00pm - 2:45pm
This seminar addresses questions of cultural display through the art and architecture of world fairs, mid-nineteenth century to present. Students are introduced to the seminal fair events beginning with the Crystal Palace in London, and extending to fairs in the U.S., France, Belgium, Spain, Japan and China. the history of fairs as artistic and social phenomenon is explored along with how these events shaped national identity, ethnicity, social class, race, imperialism, colonialism, and gender.
HAA 206 Science and the Practice of Art History
Narayan Khandekar
Wednesday - 3:00pm - 5:45pm
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 265 Topics in Northern Renaissance and Baroque Art
Joseph Koerner
Tuesday - 12:00pm - 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 267K Old Masters in a ‘New’ World
Shawon Kinew
Wednesday - 3:00pm - 5:45pm
As the territory of early modern European studies continues to expand, mimicking the colonization of the period under study, art historians inevitably become explorers of terra incognita claiming “marvelous possessions.” Now is an ideal moment to take stock of recent global-facing literature and methods in the art history of early modern Europe: where are we, and where are we going? The first half of this graduate seminar will do just that. At the same time, in this experiment, each seminar participant will be encouraged to choose an “old master” as their compass and test the limits of the canon.
HAA 282S Japanese Buddhist Sculpture
Yukio Lippit
Thursday - 3:00pm - 5:45pm
This course explores the golden age of Japanese Buddhist sculpture from the seventh through thirteenth century. Each week focuses on one famous work in terms of style, iconography, technique, materials, sculptor, patronage, and ritual. Special emphasis will be placed upon the relationship of the sculpture to its temple setting, inclusive of mural décor, other sculptures in the ensemble, the mandorla, dais, and canopy. Similarly, the recent discoveries of conservation science will be debated, as well as the significance of interred objects and an interregional purview. Insofar as possible, meaning will be explored in relation to sculptural process. All readings will be in English. Several sessions will take place at the Harvard Art Museums, and there will be at least one group excursion during the semester.
HAA 291R Topics in Pre-Columbian and Colonial Art
Thomas Cummins
Monday - 3:00pm - 5:45pm
Topics to be determined in consideration of interests of students.
310A Methods and Theory of Art History
Ewa Lajer-Burcharth
Wednesday - 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.