Fall 2019
ARTH 600 (CRN 3400) (3 credits)
Advanced Professional Seminar
Prof. Cecily Hilsdale
Monday, 2:35 PM-5:25 PM
Arts W-220
Approaching art history as a set of interrelated practices, this seminar is designed to build and refine the primary critical skills of the discipline—both practical and theoretical. In first half of the term we will devote particular attention to the art of compelling visual analysis, strategies for framing arguments, as well as grant writing (drafting, revising, and assessing grant applications). The second half of the semester turns to a series of interdisciplinary dialogues that cut across
periods, geographies, and specializations. These sessions will combine the incoming Art History and Communication Studies cohorts and will be led by professors from both streams of the department. At its core this seminar is intended to prepare students for a productive and engaged graduate career by examining a capacious set of intellectual debates.
ARTH 630 (CRN 5256) (3 credits)
Directed Reading 1
Supervisor approval required.
ARTH 653 (CRN 27652) (3 credits)
Topics: Early Modern Visual Culture 1: The Moving Image
Prof. Angela Vanhaelen
Tuesday, 8:35 AM-11:25 AM
Arts W-220
Early modern art criticism conveys a fascination with the moving image—an artwork so strikingly lifelike that it appears to come alive. The force of the moving image is physical, immediate, and emotive. Such works consume their beholders, deploying stunning visual effects that move and even change their human interlocutors. In this seminar, we will seek to redress art historical neglect of the moving image and explore its multifaceted potentialities. If the power of such works was to transform viewers, how was the rhetorical force of the moving image mobilized to inspire or manipulate political, religious, colonial, and social actions? Focusing on case studies, student research can take up any aspect of the moving image in the early modern period (1500-1700).
Keywords: emotions, senses, vision and visuality, idolatry, fetishism, animated art, the living image, automata, waxworks, death, early modern period.
ARTH 678 (CRN 27653) (3 credits)
19th Century Art & Architecture 2: Women in the Art and Visual Culture of Transatlantic Slavery
Prof. Charmaine Nelson
Thursday, 8:35 AM-11:25 AM,
Arts W-5
The field of Slavery Studies is dominated by historians, sociologists, anthropologists and others and even boasts stellar contributions from the human sciences. Despite the plethora of art and visual culture that was produced within the 400-year period of Transatlantic Slavery, art historians have arguably been one of the last groups of scholars to contribute to this important field. Slavery Studies is also historically guilty of a dismissive approach to the lives of free and enslaved black women, as well as white women of various classes. This course couples the focus on the art and visual culture of slavery with a study of the representation and material production of a diverse populations of black, white, and mixed-race women within the transatlantic world. While paying close attention to the lives of enslaved women of African descent, the course will also explore the systematic exploitation of enslaved women by white men and women, their resistance to such oppression, and the various dimensions of their complex lives.
ARTH 698 (CRN 19380) (12 credits)
Thesis Research 1
For the completion of thesis research.
ARTH 699 (CRN 20087) (12 credits)
Thesis Research 2
Advisor approval required
Supervised independent research work on an approved topic relating to thesis preparation.
ARTH 701 (CRN 3402) (0 credits)
Ph.D. Comprehensive Exam
Compulsory examination for all doctoral candidates.
ARTH 714 (CRN 27249) (3 credits)
Directed Reading 2
Supervisor approval required.
ARTH 725 (CRN 27654) (3 credits)
Methods in Art History 1: Ancient and Living Archives: Indigenous Materials, Eternal Sovereigns, and Cultural Belongings
Prof. Gloria Bell
Monday, 11:35 AM-2:25 PM
Arts W-220
Drawing inspiration from Seneca historian Arthur Parker who described First Nations wampum as an “ancient archive” for Indigenous peoples in 1916, this seminar investigates wampum, beadwork, and other arts practices as archives both ancient and living. Throughout this course we will engage with scholarship on materiality, sovereignty, art institutions, and the embodied practice of historical and contemporary Indigenous artists. Our readings include a mixture of art history, materiality studies, and archival theories. We will make site visits to art institutions to think about the competing sovereignties of Indigenous cultural belongings and artworks within colonial art institutions and to encourage sustained respectful engagement with material things being ancestors, travelers and teachers for Indigenous and Settler communities.
Keywords: Indigenous art, settler-Indigenous relations, materiality studies, museums, archival methods, wampum, tufting, beadwork
ARTH 731 (CRN 27658) / COMS 675 (3 credits)
Current Problems in Art History 2: Media and Urban Life
Prof. Will Straw
Wednesday, 11:35 AM-2:25 PM
SH688 465
This course deals with a variety of ways in which we might think about the relationship of cities to media. Cities “contain” media, of course, but the relationship between the two goes beyond this. Cities are themselves media-like in the ways in which they process information, structure cultural expression and give material form to social history and memory. This course will examine a variety of relationships between cities, media and cultural expression.
Keywords: media, cities, culture
Winter 2020
ARTH 630 (CRN 7429) (3 credits)
Directed Reading 1
Supervisor approval required.
ARTH 646 (CRN 19516) / EAST 503 (CRN 17277) (3 credits)
Topics: Chinese Visual Culture: Borders and Boundaries in Traditional Chinese Art
Prof. Jeehee Hong
Tuesday, 08:35 AM-11:25 AM
Arts W-5
Boundary-making is one of the most fundamental ways in which humans engage with their environs. While the core workings of the boundary-making are universal in a philosophical sense, its manifestation—at both conceptual and physical levels—is configured through specific historical and cultural conditions. In the field of visual art in which the image-maker encounters her/his surroundings as a multifaceted “self” (e.g., the self as a being in the phenomenal world; the self as a creator of art; the self as an occupier of social and political orders; the self as a member of certain religious communities, etc.), the visible world is dynamically represented in response to that complexity of the artist as a boundary-maker of the world. This seminar explores various modes in which the visual art in pre-modern China reveal conceptions of the boundary in philosophical, social, and religious terms as negotiated through the artist’s eyes and hands. While including the mimetic aspect of the images representing borders/boundaries of the cognizable world in the familiar dualistic scheme (e.g., self vs. the other, inside vs. outside, elite vs. non-elite, mundane vs. sacred, etc.), the central theme in our inquiry will revolve around how the two sides divided by a border were visualized (as well as whether the binary scheme was always the case), and how our recognition of such modes can help to better understand the intersections between diverse “selves” of society in classical China.
Keywords: Boundaries, world-making, modes of representation, pre-modern China
ARTH 647 (CRN 19512) (3 credits)
Topics: Renaissance Art & Architecture 1: Cities, Monuments, Memory
Prof. Chriscinda Henry
Tuesday, 2:35 PM-5:25 PM
ARTS W-5
Cities, Monuments, and Memory examines the relationship between geography, the built environment of cities, their visual dissemination in circulated media such as prints, maps, and postcards, and cultural constructions of memory. Topics will include, but not be limited to, the mythography of ancient and medieval cities across the longue durée, the destruction, neglect, or desecration of memorials, changes in civic memorial conventions, the recent rise in interest in memorials and commemorative activity, the reconstruction of place at sites such as Dubai and the World Trade Center, and theories of place and memory. Readings will include Frances Yates’s The Art of Memory, Pierre Nora’s Lieux de mémoire, Alois Riegel on the cult of monuments, Serguisz Michalski on the politics of European memorials, Françoise Choay on the idea of the monument, Kirk Savage, Edward Said, and a range of other essays and books. The course will give students the opportunity to write an original seminar paper about cultural memory and the built environment in a time and place of their own choosing.
Keywords: cultural memory; memorialization; built environment
ARTH 660 (CRN 16872) (3 credits)
Contemporary Art & Criticism 1: Coexistence in Contemporary Art II
Prof. Christine Ross
Monday, 2:35 PM-5:25 PM
Arts W-220
This seminar considers how forms of coexistence have become integral to artistic practices in the past decade in response to the migrant crisis. It examines media artworks which have been pivotal in that response, including: Ai Weiwei’s 2017 documentary Human Flow, which charts the global movement of refugees alongside the proliferation of borders and walls; Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Carne y Arena (2017), a virtual reality environment inviting viewers to share the space of migrants attempting to cross the US-Mexican border; Angela Melitopoulos’s four-channel video and sixteen-channel sound installation Crossings (2017)—a meditation on the affectivity of migration in Greece considered within the longer history of capitalism and resource extraction, whose video and sound projections appear and disappear, requiring that viewers circulate in space and constantly shift their perspective (a chaosmosis reception for a chaosmosis crisis); and Isuma Production’s online 2019 Venice Biennale video-and-webcast projection—a public sphere which reflects upon the impact of forced migration on Inuit communities in the 1950s and 1960s. These works show the migrant crisis to result both from the planetary increase of displaced people since 2011—migrants displaced by conflict, economic or any other precarious condition such as global warming and the overexploitation of land, or out of fear of persecution—and the implementation of national xenophobic immigration policies and border systems that preselect some migrants over others to block as much as possible the movement of the undesired. It is a condition that turns exodus into a process of elimination of a certain segment of humanity (Trilling, 2018; Balibar, 2018; Mbembe, 2019). Contesting that process, and this is the seminar’s main claim, they uphold the requirement to think coexistence—the state, awareness and practice of existing interdependently; the production of environments in which images, sounds, living organisms, objects, actions, performers and/or spectators coevolve. Coexistence evolves not so much as a living-together than an inexorable relation between humans, as well as between humans and nonhumans, in urgent need of repair, regeneration and looping. Coexistence is also a modality by which art reinvents itself. Focusing on 21st-century artistic practices based in the West and attentive to their cultural diversity, the seminar asks: “How is art performing migration as a ‘crisis’—what is a crisis/whose crisis is it?”; “How is art performing coexistence(s) in response to that condition?”; and “What are the possibilities of this aesthetics, i.e., how does it generate new modes of perceiving, knowing and relating?”
ARTH 675 (CRN 21435) (3 credits)
Topics: 19th Century Art and Architecture: Time in the Age of Impressionism: Body, Identity and Power
Prof. Mary Hunter
Tuesday, 11:35 AM-2:25 PM
Ferrier 230
Nineteenth-century France is often characterized as an era of rapid change and speed. Historians have focused on the hurried pace of modern life, the quick succession of technological advances, the hustle of capitalist economies, and the ‘sketchy’ look of modern paintings. This seminar will explore modern speed but will also reads against the grain of these histories by examining the co-existence of slow temporal modes, such as waiting. While waiting’s sluggish temporality may seem antithetical to the speed that has come to typify late nineteenth-century French culture – and art in particular –, this class will explore how slowness and deceleration were also key components of modern life: modernity’s speed was felt, rationalized and understood through its relationship with slow time.
ARTH 699 (CRN 14533) (12 credits)
Thesis Research 2
Supervised independent research work on an approved topic relating to thesis preparation.
ARTH 701 (CRN 2935) (0 credits)
Ph.D. Comprehensive Exam
Instructor’s approval required
Compulsory examination for all doctoral candidates.
ARTH 714 (CRN 14814) (3 credits)
Directed Reading 2
Supervisor approval required.