Northern Baroque Art and Knowledge

N. Baroque Art & Knowledg

This course will explore the intersections between visual and intellectual culture in Northern Europe during the long seventeenth century. Sessions will examine outstanding productions by such figures as Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Peter Paul Rubens, Maria Sibylla Merian, Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Charles le Brun, and others. In addition, we will study visual and material culture, from philosophical prints to anatomical models of eyes, produced by less well-known artists and artisans. The themes and topics we will discuss include the redefinition of the aims and nature of art and knowledge; collecting; competing theories of vision, attention and discernment; and the shifting interrelations of art, religion, philosophy, and science in this period in Northern Europe. We will consider a broad range of objects, including paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, architecture, gardens, shells, and flowers. The course is suitable for students from all disciplines and all years.

• Instructor: Susanna C Berger
  Info
• 3 points

Nineteenth-Century Art in Europe

19th-Century Art in Europ

How do you represent a revolution? What does it mean to picture the world as it “really” is? Who may be figured as a subject or citizen, and who not? Should art improve society, or critique it? Can it do both? These are some of the many questions that the artists of nineteenth-century Europe grappled with, and that we will explore together in this course. This was an era of rapid and dramatic political, economic, and cultural change, marked by wars at home and colonial expansion abroad; the rise of industrialization and urbanization; and the invention of myriad new technologies, from photography to the railway. The arts played an integral and complex role in all of these developments: they both shaped and were shaped by them. Lectures will address a variety media, from painting and sculpture to the graphic and decorative arts, across a range of geographic contexts, from Paris, London, Berlin, and Madrid to St. Petersburg, Cairo, Haiti, and New Zealand. Artists discussed will include Jacques-Louis David, Francisco Goya, Théodore Géricault, J.M.W. Turner, Adolph Menzel, Ilya Repin, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Mary Cassatt, James McNeill Whistler, C. F. Goldie, Victor Horta, and Paul Cézanne.

• Instructor: Meredith Gamer
  CULPA: 1 Info
• 3 points

HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY

• Instructor: Noam M Elcott
  CULPA: 6 h-index: 7 Info
• 3 points

History Painting and Its Afterlives

History Painting & Afterl

This course will study the problematic persistence of history painting as a cultural practice in nineteenth century Europe, well after its intellectual and aesthetic justifications had become obsolete. Nonetheless, academic prescriptions and expectations endured in diluted or fragmentary form. We will examine the transformations of this once privileged category and look at how the representation of exemplary deeds and action becomes increasingly problematic in the context of social modernization and the many global challenges to Eurocentrism. Selected topics explore how image making was shaped by new models of historical and geological time, by the invention of national traditions, and by the emergence of new publics and visual technologies. The relocation of historical imagery from earlier elite milieus into mass culture forms of early cinema and popular illustration will also be addressed.

• Instructor: Jonathan K Crary
  CULPA: 11 Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

ARTS OF CHINA, JAPAN AND KOREA

Introduces distinctive aesthetic traditions of China, Japan, and Korea--their similarities and differences--through an examination of the visual significance of selected works of painting, sculpture, architecture, and other arts in relation to the history, culture, and religions of East Asia.

• Instructor: Bryce Heatherly
  Info
• 3 points

Arts of Islam, 700-1000 CE

This lecture course offers a comprehensive and chronological overview of the major masterpieces of art and architecture of the Muslim world between circa 700-1000 AD. Topics concerning the rise of Arabic as the official language of the new Muslim Empire and the aesthetic transformation it went from script to calligraphy, the shaping of sacred spaces and liturgical objects, rulers’ iconographies and urban designs, as well as daily-life objects, will be discussed. Mecca, Madina, Jerusalem, Damascus, Fustat (old Cairo), Qayrawan, Cordoba, Baghdad, Samarra, Balkh, Bukhara and early Fatimid Cairo are the major playgrounds to illustrate particular moments of shifting powers and aesthetic paradigms in the early days of the Muslim empire, suggesting a more differentiate picture of the arts of Islam in the age of imagining a world-wide empire. The past narratives for these regions will be critically presented by both looking at the medieval sources and the modern historiographies for these regions and by highlighting the varied ideologies at play. Taking this critical vein of studying the arts of the early Muslim age, past narratives will be reconsidered, while enhancing our awareness to the complicated, if not sometimes manipulated, processes of giving works of arts meanings and values.

• Instructor: Avinoam Shalem
  CULPA: 4 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

INTRO LIT/METHODS OF ART HIST

Required course for department majors. Not open to Barnard or Continuing Education students. Students must receive instructors permission. Introduction to different methodological approaches to the study of art and visual culture. Majors are encouraged to take the colloquium during their junior year.

• Instructor: Meredith Gamer
  CULPA: 1 Info
• 4 points

SENIOR THESIS

Prerequisites: the departments permission. Required for all thesis writers.

• Instructor: Barry G Bergdoll
  CULPA: 1 Info
• 3 points

Images of the Apocalypse

What does the end of time look like? How have still and moving images made the Apocalypse available for intellectual exploration, explanation, and even play? Why is the End so important in Western European and American culture and what role does it play in our imaginations? In this seminar we will explore the fascination with the end of time as articulated in a broad range of artworks from medieval illuminated manuscripts to Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957) and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979). We will examine diverse proposals for the expected end of time, proposals often given urgency by the imminence of the Apocalypse (an anticipation sustained even in the face of constant deferrals).

• Instructor: Susanna C Berger
  Info
• 4 points

Renaissance Architecture on the Page

Renaiss. Arch on the Page

This seminar examines how architecture was conceived, represented, and disseminated through drawings, prints, and books in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe. Bringing together the study of manuscripts, architectural drawings, printed treatises, and reproductive media such as woodcuts, engravings, and etchings, the course investigates the central role of the page as a critical site of experimentation and the production of architectural knowledge in the Renaissance. By breaking down traditional divisions between media, it seeks to elucidate interconnected graphic and textual practices. It also aims to understand how the mediation of architecture on the page conditioned its reception across a range of contexts. The weekly seminar is structured thematically and roughly chronologically, and will consist of discussion of primary and secondary sources, an examination of visual material, and student presentations. We will also draw on a variety of critical theory while also being grounded in an object-based approach, utilizing especially the rich collections of Avery Library.

• Instructor: Michael J Waters
  CULPA: 5 h-index: 3 Info
• 4 points

APPROACHES TO CONTEMPORARY ART

This course examines the critical approaches to contemporary art from the 1970s to the present. It will address a range of historical and theoretical issues around the notion of the contemporary (e.g. globalization, participation, relational art, ambivalence, immaterial labor) as it has developed in the era after the postmodernism of the 1970s and 1980s.

• Instructor: Branden W Joseph
  CULPA: 9 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

NINETEENTH-CENTURY CRITICISM

This course examines a diverse selection of social and aesthetic responses to the impacts of modernization and industrialization in nineteenth-century Europe. Using works of art criticism, fiction, poetry, and social critique, the seminar will trace the emergence of new understandings of collective and individual experience and their relation to cultural and historical transformations. Readings are drawn from Friedrich Schiller's Letters On Aesthetic Education, Mary Shelley's The Last Man, Thomas Carlyle's "Signs of the Time," poetry and prose by Charles Baudelaire, John Ruskin's writings on art and political economy, Flora Tristan's travel journals, J.-K. Huysmans's Against Nature, essays of Walter Pater, Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy and other texts.

• Instructor: Jonathan K Crary
  CULPA: 11 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

The Modern Woman Genius in Paris & New Y

Mod.Woman Genius Paris/NY

How have women turned combinations of creatives roles into artistic success?  At once daughters, fashion icons, models, mothers, muses, painters, print-makers, sisters, sculptors, and wives, great women artists have brilliantly understood the conditions of creativity in their times. This seminar studies how Impressionist Paris launched the modern woman artist, then traces a history of women’s tactics through mid-twentieth century New York Abstract Expressionism.  The seminar takes advantage of: a major 2026 exhibition about Mary Cassatt at the Musée d’Orsay; a burst of 2025-26 scholarship about the women Impressionists; 2025 and 2026 exhibitions about Ruth Asawa and Frida Kahlo; a major 2026 exhibition about Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the creative ecologies of two cultural capitals: Paris and New York.

• Instructor: Anne Higonnet
  CULPA: 31 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

BEYOND EL DORADO

In this seminar, we will investigate ancient and indigenous art, materials, and aesthetics from areas of what is today Latin America. Taking advantage of New York’s unrivaled museum collections, we will research Pre-Columbian gold and silver work, as well as equally precious stone, shell, textile, and feather works created by artists of ancient Mexico, Central America, and Andean South America. We will also study latter-day histories of collecting, reception, display, appropriation, and activism that shape contemporary understandings of Pre-Columbian art.

• Instructor: Lisa Trever
  CULPA: 2 Info
• 4 points

Sumer: Art & Architecture

The fourth millennium BC was a time of tremendous innovation in monumental architecture, the organization of urban space and developments in the visual arts in southern Mesopotamia. As settlements grew into city-states, monumental architectural works transformed the landscape. New technologies of metallurgy, casting, the mechanical reproduction of images, stone sculpture and seal carvings emerged alongside the invention of writing, a technology first documented in the city of Uruk, the place of the setting of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Sculpted images and monuments began to be inscribed with texts that reveal a great deal about the ontological and agentive, the aesthetic and the order of the divine. The lecture introduces students to these extraordinary developments in early art and architecture of ancient Sumer (southern Iraq). Lectures will discuss votive statues, portraiture, image rituals, and the visual manifestation of the gods. The lectures also introduce the extraordinary developments in architecture and monuments.

• Instructor: Zainab Bahrani
  CULPA: 11 Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

Chinese Art: Center and Periphery

Chinese Art: Center& Peri

This course introduces you to the rich and diverse tradition of Chinese art by focusing on materials and techniques. We will discuss a wide array of artistic media situated in distinct cultural contexts, examining bronzes, jade, ceramics, paintings, sculptures, and textiles in the imperial, aristocratic, literary, religious, and commercial milieus in which they were produced. In addition to developing your skills in visual-material analysis, this course will also acquaint you with the diverse cultures that developed in China’s center and periphery during its five thousand (plus) years of history. Emphasis will be placed on understanding how native artistic traditions in China interacted with those in regions such as the Mongolian steppe, Tibetan plateau, and Central Asia.

• Instructor: Jin Xu
  Info
• 3 points

Latin American Artists from Independence

The course looks at works produced in the more than 20 countries that make up Latin America. Our investigations will take us from the Southern Cone nations of South America, up through Central American and the Caribbean, to Mexico to the north. We will cover styles from the colonial influences present in post-independence art of the early 19th century, to installation art found at the beginning of the 21st century. Along the way we will consider such topics as, the relationship of colonial style and academic training to forging an independent artistic identity; the emergence and establishment of a modern canon; experimentations in surrealism, neo-concretism, conceptual art, and performance. We will end the course with a consideration of Latinx artists working in the U.S.

• Instructor: Kellie Jones
  CULPA: 3 Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

The Roman Art of Engineering: Traditions

Interdisciplinary study of ancient Roman engineering and architecture in a course co-created between Arts & Sciences and Engineering. Construction principles, techniques, and materials: walls, columns, arches, vaults, domes. Iconic Roman buildings (Colosseum, Pantheon, Trajan’s Column) and infrastructure (roads, bridges, aqueducts, baths, harbors, city walls). Project organization. Roman engineering and society: machines and human labor; engineers, architects, and the army; environmental impact. Comparisons with current practice as well as cross-cultural comparisons with other pre-modern societies across the globe. A Columbia Cross-Disciplinary Course.

• 3 points

AI, Imaging, Art

This bridge seminar welcomes graduate and advanced undergraduate students with backgrounds in art history or computer science (and related fields). We will interrogate intersections in artificial intelligence, machine vision, neural networks, visual culture, imaging, and art. Students will gain a foundation in the histories and technologies underlying the recent rise of neural networks and machine vision, as well as the more recent rise of generative AI, especially image generation. With this foundation, we will investigate a range of artistic, technological, mass-media, and legal developments in visual culture and AI. In addition to readings and seminar meetings, we will take advantage of the ample public and private AI-related programming at Columbia and in New York: lectures, exhibitions, screenings, studio visits with artists, etc. Students will also have the opportunity to work with custom generative AI models.

Admission by application only. All students are expected to complete the readings and tutorials for the first class prior to the start of the semester.

• Instructor: Noam M Elcott
  CULPA: 6 h-index: 7 Info
• 4 points

Greek Myths in Italy: Images, Contexts,

This seminar addresses the unique role of ancient Italian cultures as both avid consumers and creative producers of Greek mythology. It analyzes and compares the uses of mythological images in a native context (Etruria) and a colonial one (Magna Graecia,) and posits the visual dimension, alongside the verbal and the theatrical, as a crucial channel for the intercultural circulation of myths. It focuses on the viewing contexts of the images—and the functions of the monuments and artifacts they decorated—as special keys for their interpretation.

• Instructor: Francesco de Angelis
  CULPA: 10 Info
• 4 points

Painted Reflections in Early Modern Euro

In the early 15th century, technical refinements in glazing allowed oil painting in the Netherlands to achieve its characteristic transparency and brilliance, while technical advances in glass tinning enhanced the reflectivity of convex mirrors in Northern Europe, and the new steel quenching technique, developed by Milanese armorers,made armor as reflective as a mirror. These reflective mirrors and pieces of armors became quintessential pictorial objects and contributed to the specular metaphor that underpins Renaissance painting. The seminar will explore how the “mise en abyme” operated by the reflection reveals the reverse side of painting, in terms of pictorial composition, mediality and artistic conception within a specific cultural context. Addressing materials from the early 15th to the early 17th century, the seminar will analyze how the detail of the reflection offers a specific lens through which to understand the challenges and transformations of painting in early modern Europe.

The course will be run as a seminar, with meetings devoted to discussions. Students will be responsible for introducing and commenng on the weekly readings. They will also be asked to carry out a research project, culminating in a class presentation and a final paper.

Prerequisites: The seminar is open to graduate students and upper-level art history major undergraduates.

• Instructor: Diane Bodart
  CULPA: 3 Info
• 4 points

Thinking New York: The Urban Conceptions

Mumford/Moses/Jacobs/Kool

“New York is the perfect model of a city,” stated Lewis Mumford, “not the model of a perfect city.” This seminar contrasts the ideas of four urban thinkers and actors who possessed radically different perspectives on the modern metropolis and brought them to bear in and on New York City. The protagonists are 
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990), Robert Moses (1888–1981), Jane Jacobs (1916–2006),
 
and
 
Rem Koolhaas (1944–)
. We discuss the urban and architectural issues that animated them—and frequently pitted them against each other—as they variously strove to imagine and affect New York’s built future. From Mumford’s prophetic environmentalism and “sidewalk criticism” to Moses’s “expressway world,” from Jacobs’s neighborhood activism and battles against urban renewal to Koolhaas’s celebration of Manhattan’s “delirious” architectural imaginary, the course reassesses the legacies of these figures, placing them into historical context and exploring the changing social, political, and cultural forces and landscapes that shaped their thinking. What “usable past,” to invoke Mumford again, do they offer to urbanism today? Concerned with both realities on the ground and big ideas about how to build and inhabit cities, class discussions revolve around key texts supplemented by slide lectures, film excerpts, and case-study presentations. Students are expected to make site visits and to carry out primary research utilizing archival and material resources available around New York City.

• Instructor: Joan Ockman
  Info
• 4 points

It is Time to Write about Time in Art:

'Islamic' Objects Paintin

Much has been written about the role of architecture and, to some extent, the significance of representing sculpture in painting. However, the function of the depicted artefacts in painting in general and that of the depicted Islamic Object in particular, has not been thoroughly explored. It is perhaps the derogative general terms of ‘applied arts’ and ‘minor arts’ which probably hint at the relatively underestimated status in which this category of artifacts was, and still is, classified and still held. And yet, one should admit that only few case studies have so far been devoted to the manifold meanings of objects in painting (European and non-European alike), mainly in moments in which objects took major part in the shaping of the capitalistic and consumerist societies in which they were used (and misused).

The aim of this seminar is to contribute to the large and still unexplored field of research, which involves the significance of the presence of objects in painting, namely the iconography of objects, or better say
objectology
. At the core of this seminar is the exhibition “Orientalism” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (to be opened in June 2026 and run during the Fall of 2026). Most of the meeting will be held at the Met Museum, in front of paintings. Students will be asked to read and discuss theoretical articles related to the role of objects in painting and to critically analyse the important roles of the depicted objects. This course explores the different sort of objects, from the biblical, sacred, historical and the mundane objects to the scientific and the imagined ones. The object’s role as signifier of geography, time, idea and even unconscious desires will be investigated by reading about and looking at objects.

• Instructor: Avinoam Shalem
  CULPA: 4 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

FOUCAULT AND THE ARTS

Michel Foucault was a great historian and critic who helped change the ways research and criticism are done today – a new ‘archivist’. At the same time, he was a philosopher. His research and criticism formed part of an attempt to work out a new picture of what it is to think, and think critically, in relation to Knowledge, Power, and Processes of Subjectivization. What was this picture of thought? How did the arts, in particular the visual arts, figure in it? How might they in turn give a new image of Foucault’s kind of critical thinking for us today? In this course, we explore these questions, in the company of Deleuze, Agamben, Rancière and others thinkers and in relation to questions of media, document and archive in the current ‘regime of information’. The Seminar is open to students in all disciplines concerned with these issues.

• Instructor: John Rajchman
  Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

Medieval Art, Craft, Science

This bridge seminar investigates the history of science through the study of artworks and monuments and the materials and techniques of their manufacture. Because the course’s method hinges on the marriage of theory and practice, in addition to discussions in the seminar room, several sessions will take the form of workshops with artisans and conservators (e.g. stonemasons, illuminators, gardeners), or “laboratory meetings” where students will conduct their own hands-on experiments with materials as part of Professor Pamela Smith’s
Making and Knowing
Project. Topics to be explored include but are not limited to: metallurgy and cosmogeny, paint pigments and pharmacology, microarchitecture and agriculture, masonry and geology, manuscripts and husbandry, and gynecology and Mariology. Discussion and lab experiments enhanced thanks to the service and experience of Naomi Rosenkranz, Associate Director, The Center for Science and Society, The Making and Knowing Project.

• Instructor: Gregory Bryda
  CULPA: 7 h-index: 1 Info
• 4 points

American Conceptualism

This seminar explores the history and evolution of conceptual art and conceptualism across four major cities in the Americas: New York, Buenos Aires, Rosario, and Santiago de Chile. Between 1966 and 1975, artists and curators working in distinct geographical and political landscapes simultaneously foregrounded the notion that the “work” of art was an “idea” rather than an act of object-making. Together, they expanded this concept, producing innovative dematerialized, ephemeral, installation, site-specific, and participatory artworks and exhibitions. Instead of viewing U.S. conceptual art as contemporaneous but ultimately distinct from Latin American conceptualism (as is often assumed), this seminar adopts a hemispheric approach.

Our focus will be on the alternative circuits formed by artists, curators, and critics, as well as the dynamic movement of ideas and the distinct local imperatives that have shaped these global connections. Our investigation will be limited to a critical decade, allowing us to develop a depth of context while underscoring the porosity of dematerialized art across borders. We will examine how translations and mistranslations of art terminology, such as “conceptual art”, “Conceptual Art,” and “conceptualism,” can expand or evade rigid institutional categorizations. We will engage with archival materials and listen to the voices of prominent and outlier artists and curators, including Oscar Masotta, Lucy Lippard, Seith Siegelaub, Nemesio Antúnez, Jorge Glusberg, Catalina Parra, Cecilia Vicuña, Juan Pablo Langlois, Art & Language, the Art Workers’ Coalition, and the Rosario Group, to trace the contours of post-1960s conceptualism anew.

• Instructor: Veronica Tello
  Info
• 4 points

Critical Methods Colloquium

Critical Methods Colloq.

The structure of the colloquium combines reading and analysis of texts by major theorists and critics. Each week discussions focus on key terms and analytical lenses in the history of art and art criticism. The course is designed to allow for guest presentations on particular issues by critics and writers, just as it draws on the expertise and participation of Columbia faculty. The aim is to develop students critical thinking and for them to learn directly from leading practitioners writing about modern and contemporary art. In addition to department faculty, writers for Artforum, Grey Room, Parkett, Texte zur Kunst, and October, among other venues, regularly participate in the colloquium.

• Instructor: Janet L Kraynak
  Info
• 4 points

MA METHODS: COLLOQUIUM

• Instructor: Frederique Baumgartner
  CULPA: 3 Info
• 4 points

Architecture of the Japanese Temple

Arch. of Japanese Temple

An introduction to timber-frame architecture, the primary method of construction prior to the 19th century, focusing on its use in Japanese Buddhist temples. While the course should serve as an introduction, it assumes a basic knowledge of the broad outlines of the history of Japan and its art. Weekly lectures will cover major monuments, beginning with Ise Shrine and the introduction of continental timber-frame architecture at Hōryūji, and extending to the early 19th century. Special attention will be devoted to defining the three major rubrics of the
wayō
(“Japanese” style), “Zen-style,” and “Great Buddha Hall” modes that were refined and standardized by the 13th century, along with their infinite variations and recombinations. Topics to be explored throughout the course will include: wood joinery techniques and bracket technology; the development of indigenous
shoin
architecture and its impact on residential architecture; the role of varied Buddhist doctrines in developments of liturgical space; builders’ responses to local environmental and seismic conditions; and the impact of sumptuary laws in the early modern period.

The course will be taught as a series of weekly lectures, and students will be expected to complete and respond to weekly reading assignments. The syllabus focuses primarily on readings available in English, but supplemental reading assignments will also be included for students with a reading knowledge of Japanese.

• Instructor: Matthew P McKelway
  CULPA: 6 Info
• 3 points

PROSEM-INTRO-STUDY OF ART HIST

Required course for first-year PhD Students in the Art History Department.

• Instructor: Julia Bryan-Wilson
  Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

Scales of History

Every student of history must eventually reckon with questions of scale: What temporal and geographical boundaries are epistemologically defensible in a study? How long or short is the historical arc? How wide or narrow is the geographical scope? Does one approach one’s object of study from above or from below? What are the epistemic implications of working with anecdotes or cases, with planetary time or world-systems, with series, multiples, and sequences? This seminar is structured thematically around the problems of scaling historiography. It brings key texts from the historical disciplines (with special attention to art history and architectural history) to bear on such problematics as: the case study, the period, microhistory, world-systems, the 
longue durée
, the anecdote, global and world history, seriality, and comparison. It is meant to be both a theoretical and a practical resource for those tackling the challenges of writing history. Weekly discussions will be driven by close readings of assigned texts.

• Instructor: Zeynep Celik Alexander
  Info
• 4 points

Antiquity in the Museum: Archaeology, Cu

The seminar introduces graduate students to works of ancient art and architecture held in museum collections. It explores the modern history of their study as antiquities, a category which required a detailed connoisseurship set within a framework of newly arising aesthetic and racial theories and classifications that accompanied imperial archaeological endeavour. The seminar’s focus is on Mesopotamian, Anatolian, Egyptian and Greek antiquities, as ancient works in their original context and as extracted objects that mark an imperial trail. Students will also be introduced to the development of archaeological field methods within the colonial context, and archaeology’s varied forms of visual documentation which became instrumental to imperial knowledge production: architectural and scientific illustrations, excavation images, and archaeological photography, and by the early twentieth century, the introduction of aerial photography as a way of visualizing sites and ruins. Taking ancient works and their display as a starting point, the seminar also explores the ways in which archaeology and the collecting of antiquities were inextricably linked to the technologies and economies of empire and colonialism. Reading and discussions include museum histories and theories of collecting, as well as the history and theories of archaeology and ancient art. Permission of the instructor is required before registration. Please submit a seminar application to the Department of Art History and Archaeology.

• Instructor: Zainab Bahrani
  CULPA: 11 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

Black British Art & Theory

This course considers visual culture in Britain in the context of Black European studies. The discipline of cultural studies, which evolved in postwar Birmingham, intersected with the rise of black consciousness throughout Britain in the 1980s. How did the interactions of intellectuals and artists at this moment in the late 20th century lead to the creation of strong postcolonial theory and practice? We will consider the role of medium (particularly film and video), feminism, issues of diaspora, migration, and globalization, and the emergence of Black European Studies. Readings include texts by Hazel Carby, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, and Kobena Mercer. We will look at visual production and film by artists such as Sonia Boyce, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Ingrid Pollard, Chris Ofili, Isaac Julien, and Khadija Saye among others.

• Instructor: Kellie Jones
  CULPA: 3 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

ITALIAN RENAISSANCE SCULPTURE

• Instructor: Michael Cole
  CULPA: 4 Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

Problems in Kano Painting

The graduate seminar “Problems in Kano Painting,” is a graduate seminar offered periodically to investigate the hereditary lineage of painters that dominated the field of painting in Japan’s late medieval and early modern eras. This semester we will begin with the work of Kano Motonobu and his grandson Eitoku, but will spend most of our time focused on their descendants at the turn of the seventeenth century, particularly Kano Sanraku and Kano Sansetsu. The seminar address the question of how this clan of painters managed to secure its position as official painters to Japan’s rulers for nearly three centuries—a phenomenon unique in the history of art. We will also explore such topics as the ways in which it expanded its painting repertoire beyond its origins in monochrome ink painting, what is meant by an “academic” painting tradition in the Japanese context, its systems of training, promotion, and the economics of their enterprise, and the institutionalization of the Kano project through the writing of art historical treatises.

• Instructor: Matthew P McKelway
  CULPA: 6 Info
• 4 points

Seventeenth-Century Chinese Painting

17th-C Chinese Painting

This seminar will examine Chinese paintings primarily in Japanese and American collections. The aim of the course is to become familiar with the major painters of the seventeen century from Dong Qichang, whose history of Chinese painting still influences how we view paintings today, to his followers and imitators, and further to the scholar-painters who found ways to express resistance to the Manchu conquest at the middle of the century, and finally to imperial court painters. We will look at a wide variety of painting genres and formats. Special attention will be given to the way paintings are presented, from the outside title slip to the inner title sheet to seals and colophons. We will also consider the artists’ intended audience.

• 4 points

M.A. THESIS

• Instructor: Alexander Alberro
  CULPA: 12 h-index: 17 Info
• Instructor: Zainab Bahrani
  CULPA: 11 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Frederique Baumgartner
  CULPA: 3 Info
• Instructor: Barry G Bergdoll
  CULPA: 1 Info
• Instructor: Diane Bodart
  CULPA: 3 Info
• Instructor: Julia Bryan-Wilson
  Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Gregory Bryda
  CULPA: 7 h-index: 1 Info
• Instructor: Zeynep Celik Alexander
  Info
• Instructor: Michael Cole
  CULPA: 4 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Jonathan K Crary
  CULPA: 11 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Francesco de Angelis
  CULPA: 10 Info
• Instructor: Susanna C Berger
  Info
• Instructor: Noam M Elcott
  CULPA: 6 h-index: 7 Info
• Instructor: Meredith Gamer
  CULPA: 1 Info
• Instructor: Anne Higonnet
  CULPA: 31 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Elizabeth Hutchinson
  CULPA: 9 Info
• Instructor: Kellie Jones
  CULPA: 3 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Branden W Joseph
  CULPA: 9 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Subhashini Kaligotla
  Info
• Instructor: Holger A Klein
  CULPA: 13 Info
• Instructor: Rosalind Krauss
  CULPA: 10 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Janet L Kraynak
  Info
• Instructor: Matthew P McKelway
  CULPA: 6 Info
• Instructor: Ioannis Mylonopoulos
  CULPA: 13 Info
• Instructor: Eleonora Pistis
  Info
• Instructor: John Rajchman
  Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Avinoam Shalem
  CULPA: 4 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Zoe S Strother
  CULPA: 10 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Lisa Trever
  CULPA: 2 Info
• Instructor: Michael J Waters
  CULPA: 5 h-index: 3 Info
• Instructor: Jin Xu
  Info
• 4 points

RESEARCH FOR ADVANCED STUDENTS

• Instructor: Alexander Alberro
  CULPA: 12 h-index: 17 Info
• Instructor: Zainab Bahrani
  CULPA: 11 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Barry G Bergdoll
  CULPA: 1 Info
• Instructor: Diane Bodart
  CULPA: 3 Info
• Instructor: Julia Bryan-Wilson
  Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Gregory Bryda
  CULPA: 7 h-index: 1 Info
• Instructor: Zeynep Celik Alexander
  Info
• Instructor: Michael Cole
  CULPA: 4 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Jonathan K Crary
  CULPA: 11 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Francesco de Angelis
  CULPA: 10 Info
• Instructor: Susanna C Berger
  Info
• Instructor: Noam M Elcott
  CULPA: 6 h-index: 7 Info
• Instructor: Meredith Gamer
  CULPA: 1 Info
• Instructor: Anne Higonnet
  CULPA: 31 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Elizabeth Hutchinson
  CULPA: 9 Info
• Instructor: Kellie Jones
  CULPA: 3 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Branden W Joseph
  CULPA: 9 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Subhashini Kaligotla
  Info
• Instructor: Holger A Klein
  CULPA: 13 Info
• Instructor: Rosalind Krauss
  CULPA: 10 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Janet L Kraynak
  Info
• Instructor: Matthew P McKelway
  CULPA: 6 Info
• Instructor: Ioannis Mylonopoulos
  CULPA: 13 Info
• Instructor: Eleonora Pistis
  Info
• Instructor: Avinoam Shalem
  CULPA: 4 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Zoe S Strother
  CULPA: 10 Wikipedia Info
• Instructor: Lisa Trever
  CULPA: 2 Info
• Instructor: Michael J Waters
  CULPA: 5 h-index: 3 Info
• Instructor: Jin Xu
  Info
• 3 points