Art History and Archaeology

AHIS UN2405 TWENTIETH CENTURY ART. 4.00 points.

The course will examine a variety of figures, movements, and practices within the entire range of 20th-century art—from Expressionism to Abstract Expressionism, Constructivism to Pop Art, Surrealism to Minimalism, and beyond–situating them within the social, political, economic, and historical contexts in which they arose. The history of these artistic developments will be traced through the development and mutual interaction of two predominant strains of artistic culture: the modernist and the avant-garde, examining in particular their confrontation with and development of the particular vicissitudes of the century’s ongoing modernization. Discussion section complement class lectures. Course is a prerequisite for certain upper-level art history courses

AHIS UN2412 18TH CENTURY ART IN EUROPE. 3.00 points.

This course will examine the history of art in Europe from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. This was a period of dramatic cultural change, marked by, among other things, the challenging of traditional artistic hierarchies; increased opportunities for travel, trade, and exchange; and the emergence of “the public” as a critical new audience for art. Students will be introduced to major artists, works, and media, as well as to key themes in the art historical scholarship. Topics will include: the birth of art criticism; the development of the art market; domesticity and the cult of sensibility; the ascension of women artists and patrons; and the visual culture of empire, slavery, and revolution. The emphasis will be on France and Britain, with forays to Italy, Spain, Germany, India, America, and elsewhere

AHIS UN2415 History Painting and Its Afterlives. 3.00 points.

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

AHIS GU4021 MDVL ART I: LATE ANTIQUITY TO BYZANTIUM. 0 points.

AHIS GU4044 Neo-Dada and Pop Art. 3 points.

This course examines the avant-garde art of the fifties and sixties, including assemblage, happenings, pop art, Fluxus, and artists' forays into film. It will examine the historical precedents of artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Allan Kaprow, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Carolee Schneemann and others in relation to their historical precedents, development, critical and political aspects.

AHIS GU4062 Chinese Art: Center and Periphery. 3.00 points.

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

AHIS GU4093 Sacred Space in South Asia. 3.00 points.

“Sacred” space in the Indian subcontinent was at the epicenter of human experience. This course presents Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, and Jain spaces and the variety of ways in which people experienced them. Moving from the monumental stone pillars of the early centuries BCE to nineteenth century colonial India, we learn how the organization and imagery of these spaces supported devotional activity and piety. We discuss too how temples, monasteries, tombs, and shrines supported the pursuit of pleasure, amusement, sociability, and other worldly interests. We also explore the symbiotic relationship between Indic religions and kingship, and the complex ways in which politics and court culture shaped sacred environments. The course concludes with European representations of South Asia’s religions and religious places

AHIS UN3017 Architecture and Deception. 4.00 points.

Fittingly in the age of fake news, this seminar addresses how lying, deception, concealment, and forgery have shaped the history of architecture and its historiography. It deals not only with architects’ lies, but also with how their architecture can be deceptive in many different ways. It also analyses how architectural narratives—including biographies—and historical accounts have been shaped by falsehoods and distortions. While addressing philosophical issues that remain relevant to our present, the course will examine some of the most influential architects and key works of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth century—a pivotal time within intellectual history for the definition of the concept of ‘truth’ and also, therefore, of its opposite. Students will learn how to make use of the many lenses through which architecture can be investigated. The goal is not only to acquire a foundation in European architectural history, but also, more broadly, to develop the skills necessary to analyze architecture and to deal with original architectural objects and texts, as well as to cultivate a critical attitude towards architectural literature

AHIS UN3317 Shaping Renaissance Rome. 4.00 points.

This year the eyes of the Catholic world will once again turn to Rome as the city celebrates the Jubilee—a tradition that has occurred every twenty-five years since the fifteenth century. In this seminar, we will investigate the architectural and urban history of Rome, stressing projects (both realized and ideal) conceived during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The city will be analyzed as the product of successive interventions that have created a deeply layered topography. How Rome has continued to build upon its past, both literally through physical reuse and figuratively through symbolic appropriation, from the time of Pope Martin V to Pope Sixtus V, will thus serve as a key theme. Working within this overarching framework, each class session focuses on a thematic group of projects that will be studied in relationship to one another rather than as independent monuments. We will examine churches, palaces, villas, public amenities, streets, and piazzas through the functional demands that shaped them and the life that went on in and around them. Topics under discussion include architectural and urban palimpsest; the resurgence of interest in antiquity; building typologies; self-aggrandizement by means of architectural patronage; the reverberations of the Counter-Reformation in architecture; the role of urban rituals and spectacles; and the representation of the city and its buildings in drawings, maps, and prints

AHIS UN3413 NINETEENTH-CENTURY CRITICISM. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: junior or senior standing, and the instructor's permission.
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

AHIS UN3466 AIDS Is Contemporary. 4.00 points.

This seminar examines two intertwined propositions. One is the undisputable fact that the global HIV/AIDS pandemic is ongoing and that the disease continues to shape the way artists and activists grapple with public health, national policy, and medical injustice. The other is my own polemic-in-formation, which is that the eruption of AIDS in the 1980s was the threshold event that inaugurated what is now understood to be “the contemporary” within the art world. Rather than periodize the start of “the contemporary” with the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, as has become conventional, we will investigate how the AIDS crisis precipitated a sudden urgency that more decisively marks this transition, in particular around the promiscuous inclusion of non-fine art forms such as demonstration posters, zines, and handmade quilts. We will read foundational texts on HIV/AIDS organizing and look at interventions with graphic design, wheat-pasting, ashes action protests, body maps, embroidery, performance-based die-ins, voguing, film/video, and photography. We will consider: the inextricability of queer grief, anger, love, and loss; lesbian care; the trap of visibility; spirituality and death; activist exhaustion; the role played by artists of color within ACT-UP; and dis/affinities across the US, Latin America, and South Africa. Our investigations will be bookended by two critical exhibitions, Witness: Against Our Vanishing (Artists Space, 1989) and Exposé-es (Palais de Tokyo, 2023). Authors and artists/collectives include: Aziz Cuchar, Bambanani Women’s Group, Felicano Centurion, Douglas Crimp, Ben Cuevas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Darrel Ellis, fierce pussy, Elisabeth Lebovici, José Leonilson, Nicolas Moufarrege, Marlon Riggs, Matthew Wong, and the Visual AIDS archive. We will conclude with feminist, queer, and collaborative artistic work made during the (also ongoing) Covid-19 pandemic. In small groups, students will lead discussions of our texts and the final project will be a collectively curated virtual exhibition

AHIS UN3613 Temples of Kyoto. 4 points.

Perhaps no other single institution has played a more crucial role in the development and preservation of Japanese art and other forms of visual culture than the Buddhist temple, itself an entity that has undergone significant change, particularly in the modern period. This seminar will examine Buddhist temples in the city of Kyoto, Japan’s imperial capital from 794-1867 from their beginnings in the late eighth century into the early modern period. Although painting, sculpture, and architecture will be our primary focus, the course will provide students with multiple, interdisciplinary perspectives on the diverse forms of institutional organization, architecture, art, and liturgy that comprise Buddhist houses of worship, with particular attention to their development in the city of Kyoto. We will take a site-specific approach, attending to the following general issues: the legacy of continental practices in such early monasteries as Hōryūji and Tōdaiji in Nara; adaptations to Japanese urban space and landscape at Tōji and Enryakuji; physical changes in temples with the introduction of new sects such as Zen and Pure Land Buddhism; and the transformation of temples in the early modern period. Coinciding with the course will be a series of five guest lectures in February and March on the topic of medieval Japanese sculpture.

AHIS GU4546 GILLES DELEUZE:THINKING IN ART. 4.00 points.

The philosophy of Gilles Deleuze has emerged as one of the richest, most singular adventures in post-war European thought; Foucault considered it the most important in France, and more generally, in the 20th century. In all of Deleuze's work there is a search for a new 'image of thought.' But how did art figure in this search, and how did the search in turn appeal to artists, writers, filmmakers, architects, as well as curators or critics? In this seminar, we explore the complex theme of 'thinkin in art' in Deleuze, and its implications for art in the 21st century or for the global contemporary art of today

AHIS GU4722 Medieval Art, Craft, Science. 4.00 points.

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

AHIS GU4762 Art and Archaeology of Immigrants in Chinese History. 4.00 points.

This seminar examines the art and archaeology of immigrants and immigrant communities in pre-modern China. Since the beginning of China’s dynastic history around the first millennium BCE, people from surrounding regions and even further afield have consistently moved into the Chinese heartland. These groups include not only nomads from the Mongolian steppes and the Tibetan Plateau, but also merchants, missionaries, and Muslims arriving via the so-called “Silk Roads”—a network of land and sea routes connecting China to the rest of the Eurasian continent (India, Persia, Central Asia, etc.). In certain periods, descendants of the Chinese diaspora and refugees in frontier regions also played significant roles in Chinese history. This seminar focuses on the archaeological remains and artistic expressions of these immigrants, as well as their interactions with native Chinese art and culture. Topics covered range from painting, sculpture, and calligraphy to crafts and architecture

AHIS GU4949 Architecture in the Age of Progress. 4.00 points.

This course focuses on buildings and design theories from the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States that were responding to industrialization and rapid urbanization. Based on the premise that modernism in architecture has as much to with attitudes toward change as it does a particular set of formal traits, this class will examine those works that responded to significant technological and social upheaval in an effort to welcome, forestall, or otherwise guide change. We will look at broad themes of the period, including national character, rapid economic growth, the quickened pace of urban life, and shrinking distances due to emerging forms of transportation and communication, all in the light of new methods and materials of construction, new functional programs, and the growing metropolis

AHIS UN2129 Before Rome: The Art and Architecture of Italy’s Peoples in the First Millennium BCE. 3.00 points.

This course explores the rich artistic traditions of the peoples living in Italy—the Etruscans, Italics, Greeks, Celts—from their emergence in the early first millennium BCE to their eventual absorption within the system of “Roman” art. While the arts of Etruria will form the backbone of the course, its conceptual focus will be on the densely entangled web that connected the diverse visual landscapes and creative practices of the Italian peninsula both to each other and to external centers of artistic production, from Cyprus and Carthage to Syria and the cultures of northern Europe. In addition to intercultural connectivity— imports and exports, convergences and divergences, parallels and unique features—special attention will be paid to the socio-political and religious dimensions of art and architecture. Both iconic and non-canonical objects will be examined, ranging from furniture and weaponry to anatomical votives and mythological paintings. This lecture is the first in a three-year cycle that also includes “Roman Art and Architecture” and “Rome Beyond Rome.”

AHIS UN2309 EARLY MODERN ARCHITECTURE (1550-1799). 3.00 points.

This course examines the history of early modern architecture from a European perspective outward. It starts with the time of Michelangelo and Palladio and ends in the late eighteenth century.  It addresses a number of transhistorical principal issues and analytical approaches while focusing on to a series of roughly chronological thematic studies. Travelling across courts, academies, streets, and buildings devoted to new institutions, this course examines the cultural, material, urban, social, and political dimensions of architecture, as well as temporal and geographic migrations of architectural knowledge. Topics will also include: the resurgence of interest in antiquity; the longue durée history of monuments; changes in building typology; the patronage and politics of architecture; technological developments and building practice; architectural theory, books, and the culture of print; the growth of capital cities; the creation of urban space and landscape; the formalization of architectural education; and the changing status of the architect.

AHIS UN2311 Baroque Imperial Spain (17th Century). 3 points.

The course will survey Baroque art in Hapsburg Spain, considered in the wide geographical context of the extended and dispersed dominions of the different crowns of the Spanish monarchy, which connected the Iberian Peninsula with Italy, Flanders and the New World. It will concern visual art in its various media, mainly painting, sculpture and architecture, but also tapestries, prints, armor, goldsmithery and ephemeral decoration, among others. Works of the main artists of the period will be introduced and analyzed, giving attention to the historical and cultural context of their production and reception. The course will particularly focus on the movement of artists, works and models within the Spanish Hapsburg territories, in order to understand to what extent visual arts contributed to shaping the political identity of this culturally composite empire.

AHIS UN2409 Nineteenth-Century Architecture. 4.00 points.

This course revisits some of the key moments in the architecture of the nineteenth century with the goal of understanding the relationship between these developments and a global modernity shaped by old and new empires. In doing so, it assumes a particular methodological stance. Rather than attempting to be geographically comprehensive, it focusses on the interdependencies between Europe and its colonies; instead of being strictly chronological, it is arranged around a constellation of themes that are explored through a handful of projects and texts. Reading of primary sources from the period under examination is a crucial part of the course. Students will have the opportunity to hone their critical skills by reading, writing, and conducting research toward a final paper. Discussion section required

AHIS UN2425 Visual Activism. 4.00 points.

How has visual culture played a role within the social movements of the last several decades, such as #BlackLivesMatter and Extinction Rebellion? How, we might ask, is activism made visible; how does it erupt (or disappear) with collective fields of vision? Drawing upon Black South African queer photographer Zanele Muholi’s term “visual activism” as a flexible rubric that encompasses both formal practices and political strategies, this lecture class interrogates contemporary visual cultures of dissent, resistance, and protest as they span a range of ideological positions. We will examine recent developments in and around recent intersections of art and politics from around the world, looking closely at performances, photographs, feminist dances, graffiti, murals, street art, posters, pussy hats, and graphic interventions, with a special focus on tactics of illegibility and encodedness. Topics include visual responses to structural racisms, global climate change, indigenous land rights, state violence, gentrification, forced migration, and queer/trans issues

AHIS UN2600 THE ARTS OF CHINA. 3.00 points.

CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement

An introduction to the arts of China, from the Neolithic period to the present, stressing materials and processes of bronze casting, the development of representational art, principles of text illustration, calligraphy, landscape painting, imperial patronage, and the role of the visual arts in elite culture.

AHUM UN2604 ARTS OF CHINA, JAPAN AND KOREA. 3.00 points.

CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement

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

AHIS UN2702 PRE-COLUMBIAN ART AND ARCHITECTURE. 3.00 points.

The Western Hemisphere was a setting for outstanding accomplishments in the visual arts for millennia before Europeans set foot in the so-called “New World.” This course explores the early indigenous artistic traditions of what is now Latin America, from early monuments of the formative periods (e.g. Olmec and Chavín), through acclaimed eras of aesthetic and technological achievement (e.g. Maya and Moche), to the later Inca and Aztec imperial periods. Our subject will encompass diverse genre including painting and sculpture, textiles and metalwork, architecture and performance. Attention will focus on the two cultural areas that traditionally have received the most attention from researchers: Mesoamerica (including what is today Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, and Honduras) and the Central Andes (including Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia). We will also critically consider the drawing of those boundaries—both spatial and temporal—that have defined “Pre-Columbian” art history to date. More than a survey of periods, styles, and monuments, we will critically assess the varieties of evidence—archaeological, epigraphic, historical, ethnographic, and scientific—available for interpretations of ancient Latin American art and culture

AHIS UN2804 Mediterranean Artistic Interactions in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era. 4.00 points.

Transcultural studies are, today, part of any undergraduate curriculum in the field of humanities. In our contemporary mobile society, transculturality becomes a major phenomenon for understanding the driving power behind the creation of art, style, fashion and social behavior. The Medieval world was no less mobile, and the idea of the ‘Global’ has its roots in ancient times. In this course the medieval Mediterranean basin as space of interactions and the port/trade cities around it will serve as the exemplary arena, in which the constant interactions between Asia, Europe and Africa contributed to the mobility of aesthetic notions and novel ideas

AHIS GU4089 NATIVE AMERICAN ART. 4.00 points.

This course looks closely at objects and images produced by Native North Americans across history. Grounding our study in essays and guest lectures from Native scholars, we will investigate the significance of the works and how and to whom meaning is communicated. Beginning with an introduction that links aesthetics and worldview using the conventional organizing principle of the culture area, we quickly move on to case studies that take up key issues that persist for Native people living under settler colonialism today, including questions of sovereignty, self-expression, transformation and representation. Along the way, we will also tackle historiographic questions about how knowledge about Native art has been produced in universities and museums and how Indigenous people have worked to counter those discourses

AHIS UN3105 Sacred Spaces ＆ Divine Images Transformed. 4.00 points.

This seminar will explore the profound transformation of art and architecture connected to the religious practices of both polytheists and monotheists that occurred across the Middle East when much of the region was under Roman rule. Sacred spaces we will focus on include the Temples of Bel and Baalshamin at Palmyra (destroyed in 2015) and Jupiter Heliopolitanus at Baalbek, the recently discovered synagogues at Migdal (Magdala), and the temples, housechurch, and synagogue at Dura-Europos. We will delve into topics such as possible cult continuity between the Iron Age and the Hellenistic and Roman periods, the creation of new deities, the roles of priests, aniconism and figural sculpture, and the construction and adornment of buildings to meet the specific needs of the cults of various deities, Judaism, and Christianity. We will explore and challenge traditional categories such as “Roman” and “provincial” art/architecture. Key questions to consider include the following: how were individuals/communities’ personal, civic, and religious identities expressed in art/architecture that was influenced by interaction with Roman culture broadly, but also highly localized? The approach is interdisciplinary: we will study architecture, sculpture, mosaics, wall paintings, votive dedications, and inscriptions, and read Jane Lightfoot’s 2003 translation of Lucian’s De Dea Syria (On the Syrian Goddess). Discussion of current and future responses to the destruction of archaeological sites and monuments and looting, as well as the intertwining of cultural and humanitarian crises, will also form an important part of the course and prepare students to engage in contemporary debates. Our visit to the Yale University Art Gallery will provide students with the outstanding opportunity to examine sculptures and wall paintings from Dura-Europos first-hand and give presentations in the gallery

AHIS UN3318 Books and Architecture. 4 points.

This seminar investigates architectural books as both carriers of knowledge and objects. Through the analysis of books, prints and drawings, as well as of their production, circulation and reception, this course explores how different figures have thought, discussed and written about architecture in Europe from the mid-Sixteenth Century to the end of the Eighteenth Century. The objects of investigation include architectural treatises, but also prints and books of various natures that contain architectural information. By questioning the stability of these media, the seminar aims to explore their mutability over time and place. It explores how these objects' meanings were shaped by their makers, by the material manipulations of their owners, and by their physical proximity to other works on desks and library shelves. The seminar examines architectural theory’s relationships with practice and with contemporary debates on society, as well as fields of knowledge such as literature, music, philosophy and science. It aims to understand how media have shaped the migration of architectural knowledge, the construction of Western architectural canons, and the developments of the architect’s profession. At the same time, the object-based analysis of the rare books kept at the Avery Library will allow the class to address questions related to architectural representation, different architectural media, and printing technology. Students will learn how to deal with the complex relationships between texts and images, between drawings and prints, and between the ‘architecture’ of a book and its content. 

AHIS UN3402 Introduction to Design History. 4.00 points.

This course offers an introduction to the history of design from the eighteenth century through the twenty-first century, with emphasis placed on the twentieth century. Attention will be paid to a wide range of design specializations, including industrial design and product design, fashion and textile design, automotive design, and graphic design. Proceeding in roughly chronological order, it will explore key themes in the history of design, including matters of taste and etiquette, social reform, the production of value, design education, branding and marketing, and recent trends in sustainable, speculative, and digital design. The course also considers the relationship between design and other modes of material production, including architecture, fine art, and craft

AHIS UN3410 APPROACHES TO CONTEMPORARY ART. 4.00 points.

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

AHIS UN3429 American Architecture: Skyscrapers ＆ Urbanism. 4.00 points.

This course will examine the distinctly American invention of the building type the “skyscraper” and its evolution and impact from the 1870s to today. We will approach the subject through a range of lenses – historiographical, critical, and methodological – exploring tall buildings and their history as objects of design, products of technology, sites of construction, investments in real estate, and places of work and residence. Throughout, the urban dimension will be key in our critical analysis. Classroom sessions, for the most part, will be organized as lectures and discussions of assigned readings. There will also be sessions outside the classroom, including a visit to the drawing collection of Avery Architectural ＆ Fine Arts Library and to The Skyscraper Museum, as well as a walking tour of Midtown Manhattan

AHIS UN3438 Land and Landscape. 4.00 points.

How did land—a primary source of economic value—become separated from landscape—an object of aesthetic enjoyment—in Enlightenment Europe and its colonies? This course examines the moment between the mid eighteenth and the mid nineteenth centuries when the physical and conceptual demarcations of land from landscape coincided with the emergence of political economic discourses, on the one hand, and the formulation of aesthetics as a separate branch of philosophical inquiry, on the other. Re-examining well-known moments in landscape history, the course aims to ask: What does a global modernity fueled as much by agriculturalization as by industrialization look like? How can this theoretical recalibration help construct new historical ontologies of such key concepts as nature, culture, and environment? What might this examination reveal about the vexed relationship between politics and aesthetics? And what are the historical interdependencies between economic value and aesthetic value?

AHIS UN3791 Epic India: The Rama Story in Visual Art. 4.00 points.

The epic story of Rama (Ramayana) is one of the most influential tales of the Indian subcontinent. It has been told and experienced in a stunning range of media across time and space: from epic verse and lyric poetry to painting, narrative sculpture, film, graphic novels, and puppet theater. While Valmiki’s Sanskrit Ramayana of ca. 500 BCE is acknowledged as the first, writers have recounted the tale in the polyglot array of Indic languages, from Kashmiri to Telugu, and infused it with the values and interests of their own time and place. The story’s flexibility and capaciousness has encouraged social contestation and given voice to the concerns of disenfranchised social groups, including women and Dalits. This seminar will examine a generous array of South Asia’s visual Ramayana traditions from the ancient to the modern, encompassing temple relief sculpture, painted courtly manuscripts, and comic book and film Ramayanas. Reading a selection of primary texts alongside we consider this tale’s immense capacity to represent the gamut of human experience, both private and public, and its continued resonance for artists, writers, performers, and their publics

AHIS GU4518 Greek Sanctuaries. 4.00 points.

In every culture there exist highly specific features, which, in their interplay, create its quintessence. In terms of Greek antiquity, temples are generally considered one of these significant cultural parameters. One easily tends, however, to forget that temples are simply a small part – and not even an essential one – of so-called sacred or religious spaces. It is the sanctuary with its precinct wall, temples, sacred groves, divine images, offerings, and – above all – the altar or altars that constitutes the central and transcendent spatial element of ancient Greek religion. Nevertheless, despite their primarily religious function, Greek sanctuaries were never simply cultic spaces; every single one of them was to various degrees an integral part of its social, political, and economic context. The occasionally problematic interpretive model of the “polis religion” makes it absolutely clear that Greek sanctuaries cannot be studied and properly understood, if they are not examined beyond the constraints of religion. Aim of the seminar is to understand the forms and functions of architecture and dedicatory objects in Greek sanctuaries while analyzing these religious, social and political spaces as the centers in which Greek aesthetics, Greek identity, and ultimately Greek culture were shaped

AHIS GU4534 Pastel and the Enlightenment. 4.00 points.

This seminar takes as its hypothesis that pastel, an artistic medium whose rise to prominence in eighteenth-century Europe was as spectacular as it was short-lived, offers a particularly productive lens through which to consider some of the fundamental aesthetic, social, and cultural debates that helped shape Enlightenment thought. To test this hypothesis, we will study the work of celebrated pastel practitioners such as Rosalba Carriera, Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Jean-Étienne Liotard, and John Russell, in dialogue with primary sources authored by artists, art critics, art theoreticians, and philosophers, whose thought found provocative responses in the luminous, fragile, and ultimately modern surfaces of pastels. Topics of discussion will include: color in the discourse on art; craft in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie; pastel, cosmetics, and identity; the art market and the debate on luxury; and new understandings of the self. These discussions will be informed by recent scholarship on eighteenth-century art engaging with questions of materiality, identity, and consumption, among others

AHIS GU4741 Art and Theory in a Global Context. 4.00 points.

What is “globalization”? How does it change the way we think about or show art today? What role does film and media play in it? How has critical theory itself assumed new forms in this configuration moving outside post-war Europe and America? How have these processes helped change with the very idea of ‘contemporary art’? What then might a transnational critical theory in art and in thinking look like today or in the 21st century? In this course we will examine this cluster of questions from a number of different angles, starting with new questions about borders, displacements, translations and minorities, and the ways they have cut across and figured in different regions, in Europe or America, as elsewhere. In the course of our investigations, we will look in particular at two areas in which these questions are being raised today -- in Asia and in Africa and its diasporas. The course is thus inter-disciplinary in nature and is open to students in different fields and areas where these issues are now being discussed

AHIS GU4946 Historicism ＆ Restoration in European Arch.. 4.00 points.

The aim of this seminar is to explore the relationship between changing theories of historical change and the practice of architecture in the long nineteenth century from the ideas of progress that animated architectural theory and design in the European Enlightenment to the critiques of historicism and of revivalism in the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century. It is the hypothesis of this seminar that during the period one of the dominant themes of architectural form making was the notion that all understanding is historically conditioned, that an understanding of the past evolution of architectural form was necessary to defining current practices and preparing for the future, increasingly a subject of anxiety in this crucial period industrializing modernity. This relationship between theory and practice will not be considered uniquely in the realm of the history of ideas, however. Rather we will strive to “historicize historicism,” and to examine the political, social and economic stakes and settings of historicist architectural practices primarily in France, Britain, and Germany. Issues of nationalism, colonialism, the discourses of progress, of natural science, and of evolution must necessarily overlap with our joint research. A key theme that runs throughout the course is the relationship between ideas of defining an appropriate historically based style for modern practice and the rise of a culture of restoration (rather than repair) of the newly defined category of the historical monument. As a result the course will be punctuated by a series of pairs that look at a single practitioner’s practices between newly conceived construction and restoration