Instructor Sarah Schellinger  

Class # 35582 | IN-PERSON | Full Semester | LECTURE Mon & Wed 9:10-10:05 + FRI RECITATION 

Course Designer - Professor Karl Whittington, Instructor – Professor Kristen Adams  

Class #35581 | ONLINE | 7 Weeks, Session 2 | ASYCHRONOUS 

Professor Jody Patterson 

Class #35585 | HYBRID | Full Semester |ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS LECTURE + IN-PERSON RECITATION FRI 

Course Designer – Jody Patterson, Instructor – TBD 

Class #35743 | ONLINE | 7 Weeks, Session 2 | ASYNCHRONOUS  

Professor Benjamin Jones 

Class # 35589 | IN PERSON | MON AND WED 9:35-10:55

This undergraduate lecture course traces a history from the emergence of racial blackness to formations Black futurity and from the plantation to artificial intelligence, in order to better understand how Black artistic production has been a site of aesthetic innovation and political resistance. Our interdisciplinary survey will primarily focus on the artistic production of African American artists, but we’ll also examine art of the broader African Diaspora. 

HA2301 is concerned with the study of the Classical past through its material remains. The term Classical here refers to the Greek and Roman cultures of the Mediterranean world beginning with the palace civilizations of the Aegean Bronze Age and extending through the third century of the Roman Empire (c.2000 BCE-300 CE).  The objective of the course is to familiarize the student with the history of the discipline, the techniques of archaeological fieldwork, and the major archaeological discoveries and controversies of the past two centuries.    

Additionally, as a History of Art course, HA 2301 places a strong emphasis on the study of the major arts of antiquity, especially architecture, sculpture, and painting.  Indeed, the study of ancient Greek and Roman art has for centuries been embedded within the field of Classical Archaeology, for reasons that we will closely consider. The selection of sites and monuments is not comprehensive but is intended to showcase important developments within the field, especially in cases where archaeology has provided evidence that challenges preconceived notions of Greek and Roman culture.

 Professor Kris Paulsen 

This course will introduce students to the history of film as an artistic medium and a global art form. We will track technological, aesthetic, and formal developments in its evolution from photographic and proto-cinematic technologies to digital cinema by studying particular masterpieces, and focusing on the role of the director or auteur. We will pay close attention to the medium’s complex relationship to time, its changing materiality, and its fraught relationship to truth and reality. Students will engage in a historical and formal study of international cinema through a chronological survey of its major forms, techniques, and its relationship to the broader history of art, as well as social and political history. We will sample its major and “minor” forms, from Hollywood productions to art gallery experiments and cinema from the developing world. Students will be introduced to the grammar of film through a historical account of its formal evolution and the stylistic analysis of the visual and narrative structures of individual films.

Instructor Tony Del Aversano  

Class #27399 | IN PERSON | TUE & THUR 5:30-6:50  

Course Designer - Professor Karl Whittington, Instructor TBD

Class #36100 | ONLINE | 7 Weeks, Session 2 | ASYNCHRONOUS 

History of Art 3020 – History of Textiles  

Professor Kristen Adams  

Class # 34924 | IN PERSON | MON & WED 2:20-3:40 

To tell the history of textiles is to tell the history of humankind and its cultures and traditions. Textiles through the ages have adorned bodies, decorated churches, propelled trade routes, driven language, and served as tactile forms of protest. By critically examining textiles rooted in cultural traditions from around the world, students will come to understand how textiles dating from pre-history to the present are artifacts deeply woven into the material culture of society. In addition to providing physical protection from the environments in which we live, textiles also serve as symbols of status and power, and their production and use have propelled systems that have had profound implications on humankind and its history. Our study begins with textiles produced from plant fibers - linen and cotton - and then shifts to textiles produced from animal fibers - wool and silk. We will examine technologies utilized across the Bronze Age, the Industrial Revolution, and the digital age to inform our understanding of textiles and their histories.

GE Theme: Tradition, Culture, and Transformation  

Instructor TBA 

Class # 35686 | IN PERSON | TUE & THUR 5:30-6:50

History of Art 3901 - World Cinema Today 

Course Designer - Erica Levin, Instructor TBD

Class #28558 | ONLINE | ASYNCHRONOUS

History of Art 4010 - An Introduction to the Methods and Theories of Art History  

Professor Ujaan Ghosh  

Class # 18314 | IN PERSON | MON & WED 3:55-5:15  

This course is intended for Art History Majors and other interested students to get acquainted with the fundamental theories and methods of art historical writing. Throughout the course, we will closely read some of the foundational texts that have influenced art historical writing over the past few centuries. We will look at how global movements— aesthetic, political, and sociological have shaped the ways in which historians have approached writings on art. At the same time, the course will attempt to decenter the overabundant theoretical gaze on European thought that dominates art historical methodology. At the end of this course, students should be able to engage with the multiple modalities of art historical thought and become more aware of the kind of art historian they want to become in the future. 

History of Art 4030 - Art and Conservation- History, Ethics, and Materials  

Professor Christina Wei-Szu Burke Mathison  

Class # TBD | IN PERSON | TUES & THURS 2:20-3:40 

This course is designed as an introduction to art conservation through the lens of art history.  In this class, we will work through various topics and areas of conservation through an exploration of historical and theoretical readings on art conservation and in hearing from specialists in the field. Considering the ethics behind art conservation, course topics will include the conservation of: architecture, variable media art, East Asian scrolls, oil on canvas, textiles, works on paper, photography, and books and manuscripts. We will also consider concepts of preventive conservation in the context of the care of archaeological materials, archiving, and digitization. The course will involve class visits to conservation studios, engagement with specialists in the field, working on an art conservation project, and learning about art conservation programs and conservation fieldwork.

GEN Foundations: Literary, Visual, and Performing Arts (LVPA) 

History of Art 4240 - Arts of the Black Atlantic

Professor Sam Aranke  

Class # 29175 | IN PERSON | WED & FRI 11:10-12:30 

Where is the Black Atlantic? What does it look, smell, taste, and feel like? How does it color our world? This class explores the visual and cultural history of the Black Atlantic—a phrase used to define the relationship between dissonant geographical locations that were forged into relationship with each other through the Transatlantic Slave Trade. We will forge an understanding of how vision, texture, touch, sound, and color owe their meanings through the Middle Passage and its production of arts of the Black Atlantic. Questions of justice and freedom are central to this course, and we will consider how artists envision their work as acts of civic service. We will work with concepts like “modern” visual forms, social-cultural movements, the afterlives of slavery, “the aesthetics of cool”, and the anticolonial imagination. Of particular focus will be how and why migration and mobility come to be contested terms for Black artists, critics, and activists. 

History of Art 4541 – Art of Italy and Spain 

Professor Kristen Adams  

Class # 35592 | IN PERSON | MON & WED 9:35-10:55 

The seventeenth century marks an era of heightened artistic experimentation and experience, a phenomenon loosely labeled “the Baroque” by art historians. Baroque art is emotional, visceral, seductive, and even manipulative. This course will help students learn how to interpret and critique this vast, complex, often contradictory, and even fun period of art from primarily two geographical areas, Italy and Spain (ca. 1580-1700). Students will explore topics such as the demands placed on religious imagery following the Counter-Reformation, the relationship between art theory and art-making, artistic self-fashioning, the rise of new genres of painting and specialized art markets, and the transmission and translation of iconography and ideas across the European continent and beyond. The art and architecture covered in this course will provide unique avenues to approach a period in history marked by political and religious upheaval, scientific discovery, and intellectual developments that shaped the modern world. 

Image: Caravaggio, The Cardsharps, c. 1596-97, Oil on canvas, Kimbell Art Museum

History of Art 4605 – Aspects of Modernity  

This undergraduate lecture course introduces one of the most contested terms of art-historical inquiry today: modernism. For some, the terms modernity and modernism simply denote Western art of the last two hundred-odd years. For others, modernism refers to forms of “progress” and “advanced” visual art. For still others, the modernism singles out modes of artistic opposition to the structures of modernity: patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, industrialization, and war, that continue to define our world. Over the course of the semester, we will keep these competing definitions in play as we examine signal episodes of European and U.S. modernism from the mid-nineteenth through today, as well as their counterparts in Brazil, China, Haiti, India, Japan, Mexico, and Nigeria. At the same time, we will engage major concepts that have spurred and inspired the movements of modern art, including, capitalism, communism, fascism, racism, sexism, orientalism, and psychology, whose proponents come to define the modern era and our approaches to its understanding within humanistic discourse. This course examines a history of ideas, (art) objects, and events that have shaped the “modern.”

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History of Art 4620 - 20^th Century European Art

Instructor Asia Adomanis

ONLINE | SYNCHRONOUS

This course explores the relationship between some of the formal changes that appeared across 20th-century European art movements and the shifting social, political, and philosophical frameworks that shaped the century. We will analyze concepts of modernity and modern ways of looking at the world in the European context, as well as the discontinuities introduced by postmodernism, identifying connections and distinctions between the visual languages utilized by different art movements and the theoretical or political underpinnings that motivated them. We will examine how the art world of 20th-century Europe was transformed by new technologies of labor, leisure, and war that reshaped national borders and birthed new ideologies. Throughout the course, students will consider how an artwork’s formal and stylistic qualities—not only its content—can be interpreted to give viewers an understanding of the artist’s outlook on their historical moment. Key topics include Dadaist form and the social and political rupture of World War I; Constructivist design and Marxist theory; tensions between Expressionism and Realism as modes of representation in the interwar period; the politicization of aesthetics during World War II and the Cold War; Pop Art, mass media, and the persona of the modern artist; the European neo-avant-garde, post-modernism, and new perspectives on gender, sexuality, and the ‘canon’ of art history; and decolonial art movements and the unevenly balanced history of transcultural exchange between Europe and Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

Through comparative visual analysis of artworks and discussions of historical texts, artists’ writings, and art criticism, we will consider the ways in which artists broke from tradition in their responses to modernization and industrialization, revolutions and world wars, developing technology, and a rapidly interconnected cultural landscape. Course activities will include lectures and in-class discussions, close reading and critical analysis of texts, and writing assignments and a final presentation focused on building analytical research skills.

History of Art 4630 – American Art: Inventing the Americans- The Art of Nationhood, Citizenship, and Democracy, 1776-1900 

Professor Jody Patterson  

Class # 28149 | IN PERSON | TUE AND THURS 9:35-10:55 

This course is concerned with how citizenship, nationhood, and democracy were constituted in and through works of art from the founding of the United States in the late 18^th century, through the nation’s rise to global dominance by the turn of the 20^th century. We will look at a range of artworks— including painting, sculpture, print, and photography—with a view to understanding how the nation, its citizens, and its approaches to democracy were made visible (or rendered invisible) in culture.   

The course will explore what artworks say about national identity and historical memory. Do images convey a common set of ideals and values that create an overarching sense of unity in American society? Conversely, how and why do different social groups contest certain artworks or visual representations? Unifying themes in this course include the implications of geographical and political redefinition of the United States through Westward expansion; processes of economic and social modernization; shifting definitions of what it meant to be an “American;” who counted as a “citizen;” and how democracy has been pictured for different audiences.  

History of Art 5001 - Special Topics in Western Art: Ancient Art and the Museum  

Instructor Sarah Schellinger   

Class # 35643 | IN PERSON | MON & WED 12:45-2:05 

Museums have become public institutions that collect, preserve, document, exhibit, and interpret cultural materials for the benefit of the public. This course will examine museum collections from functional, historical, material, and aesthetic perspectives. Students will be expected to critically engage with these perspectives throughout the semester and in their research projects. Case studies, guest lectures, and museum visits will be used to demonstrate evolving theories, practices, laws, and ethical implications of collecting archaeological materials. An important component of the course will be devoted to examining the role of museums in defining cultural identity, legitimacy of ownership for materials collected during colonial eras, and repatriation of materials to original countries and/or communities. We will also consider how museums are redefining themselves today as educational, social, and cultural institutions. 

History of Art 5060 - Alternative Histories –Earthworks, Land Art, Land Back  

History of Art 5711 – Art of India I  

Professor Ujaan Ghosh  

Class #35600- UG, # 35601 -G | IN PERSON | TUE & THUR 12:45 - 2:05

History of Art 5901- Silent Cinema  

Class #35742-UG # 35739-G | IN PERSON | MON & WED 5:30-6:50 

Instructor Mark Svede  

HistArt5901 traces the evolution of silent film from proto-cinematic technologies and popular visual entertainments, through the invention of various motion picture devices by competing interests, on towards the standardization of early film language and conventions. At the same time, this course surveys the global proliferation of the medium, with its increasingly diverse styles, delineations of genre, exhibition practices, and ideological programs. We will look at canonical works as well as outlier examples and consider theoretical texts of the time that attempted to both make sense of this new art form and push it in even newer, more radical directions.

Professor Erica Levin  

Class # 29172 UG or #29171 G | IN PERSON | TUE & THUR 2:20-3:40

History of Art 7190- Curatorial Practicum   

Professor Kris Paulsen  

Class #34932 | IN PERSON | THURS: 2:15-6:20 

This class introduces graduate students to the operations, practices, and missions of the various departments that comprise an art institution. We will learn how each relates to the final exhibition that a public encounters in the gallery. Though field trips, expert guest visits, and structured, scaffolded assignments toward a large final project, students will produce all the components of a museum exhibition and understand the role each department of the institution plays in producing and supporting exhibitions. The goal of this course is to not only train students to curate exhibitions, but to also understand and respect the labor and workflows of the institution as a whole. To be an effective curator, one must be aware of the production process beyond concept and artist selection, and the internal deadlines and protocols in place to make sure exhibitions open on time, on budget, and with the timely collaboration of colleagues. By the end of the semester, students will have drafted materials representing the outputs of each department of the museum, producing a complete dossier of an executable exhibition for one of our cam­pus or local spaces. This practical knowledge will be paired with theoretical and critical writing about the ethics of exhibition making and philosophies of curating. 

History of Art 8001- Studies in Art Theory and Criticism - Ecocritical Art History 

Professor Aaron Katzeman 

Class # 34930 | IN PERSON | MON 2:15 - 5:00

History of Art 8821 – Studies in Japanese Art: Global Art History and its Discontents  

Professor Namiko Kunimoto 

Class # 34928 | IN PERSON | TUE 2:15-5:00  

What is the Global Turn and how has it reshaped art history? Why are universities and museums hiring Global Art Historians and how might they resolve the center-periphery model of scholarship? This seminar examines the possibilities and contradictions of Global Art History, asking not only how the field might expand geographically, but how its categories, methods, and structures of knowledge production might be transformed. We will consider writings by Atreyee Gupta, Partha Mitter, Rey Chow, Lisa Lowe, Steven Nelson, Okui Enwezor, Monica Juneja, and others. Particular attention will be given to debates around global, transnational, regional, and decolonial approaches, and to how these frameworks reshape the study of art in Japan, China, and beyond.