35 courses with the subject ARH, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
ARH 110Art and Its Histories4
This course explores how art and architecture have profoundly shaped visual experiences and shifting understandings of the past and present. Featuring different case studies, each section includes work with original objects, site visits and writings about art. Unifying themes include: (1) materials, techniques and the patterns deployed to create space; (2) the design, function and symbolism of images and monuments; (3) artistic production and its relation to individual and institutional patronage, religion, politics and aesthetics; (4) issues turning on artists’ fame versus anonymity and uniqueness versus reproducibility; and (5) cross-cultural exchanges. Enrollment limited to 25. {A}{H}
ARH 190Colloquium: Art History: Theories, Methods, Debates4
The meanings ascribed to art and architecture from any culture or period turn upon the interpreter’s preoccupations and methods. This course examines contemporary debates within the discipline, locating them within the field’s own history. The class asks: what kinds of knowledge do historians of art and architecture produce and legitimize? What kinds of questions do they ask, and what means do they use to answer them? Considering art and architectural history as a living field, the focus falls on recent scholarship, with an eye to the dynamic ways in which it builds on and/or departs from the history of the discipline. Prerequisites: ARH 110 or a first-year seminar taught by a member of the department. Enrollment limited to 18. {A}
What is antiquity in the Americas? To explore this question, this class focuses upon visual cultures and urban settings from across the Americas. Emphasis rests upon recent research especially about the Inka, the Aztec and their ancestors, but the course also studies the current debates in art history and archaeology. Discussions include: sacrifice and rulership, representations of human and deified beings, the symbolic and economic meanings of materials, and the ethics of excavation and museum display. Case studies include architectural complexes, textiles, ceramics and sculpted works from Peru, Mexico, the Caribbean and the U.S. Southwest. Counts for ARU. {A}{H}
This course explores many different aspects of life in the cities and sanctuaries of the ancient Near East, Egypt, Greece, Etruria and Rome. Recurrent themes include urbanism, landscapes and patterns of worship, including initiation, sacrifice and pilgrimage. The class probes how modern notions of the secular and the sacred influence interpretation and how sometimes the seemingly most anomalous features of the worship of Isis or of the juxtaposition of commercial and domestic space within a city can potentially prove to be the most revealing about life in another place and time. Counts for ARU. {A}{H}
ARH 216The Art and Architecture of the Ancient Roman World4
From North Africa to Gaul, from the Pillars of Hercules (Straits of Gibraltar) to Asia Minor, the interrelationships of art and power in the visual culture of the ethnically diverse Roman empire, from the first century B.C.E. through the fourth century C.E., are the subject of study. The class also examines works of art from later periods as well as literature and film that structure the perception of the Roman world. Counts for ARU. {A}{H}
Is this Architecture? To answer this question, this class considers both traditional forms of Architecture (capital A) and creations that stretch that very concept and definition. Among the issues discussed and debated: how people and communities create spaces to live; enshrine the sacred; build sites of pleasure; and re-work land, water, and civic space in the wake of imperial expansion wars, earthquakes, and floods. Working across cultures, with examples drawn from antiquity to the present, this class highlights global and local perspectives, attending to settings as diverse as 3rd century India, 16th century Peru, and 21st-century Maldives and Great Britain. Counts for ARU. Enrollment limited to 20. {A}{H}
To step inside a medieval cathedral is still a profound experience. Nowadays, their majestic heights and elegant forms are objects of quiet contemplation. Yet medieval buildings were seldom still or silent, and their audiences were rarely disinterested observers. This course surveys the architecture of Europe and the Mediterranean between the fourth and the fifteenth centuries. The course explores the development of the distinctive forms of medieval architecture in both the East and the West—from churches and monasteries to mosques, synagogues, cities, and palaces—and how these spaces were activated in contexts of ritual, liturgy, and performance. (E) {A}{H}
In what spaces are collections—of art and artifacts, plants and animals, papers and memories—held? What physical spaces have been created to house, preserve, sequester, and display such things? Upon what conceptual and infrastructural practices does collecting depend? To consider these questions, this class focuses on case studies from 1500-present, drawn from across the world: museums of ethnography and racial justice, private houses and public gardens, seed banks and aquaria. In addition, this class addresses the ethical implications of thinking about architecture and collecting—both literally and metaphorically—as joint, codependent endeavors. Counts for ARU. Enrollment limited to 30. {A}{H}{L}
ARH 247Colloquium: The Art and History of the Book4
Will books as material objects disappear in the near future? Or will the book, a remarkably long-lived piece of communication technology, continue to flourish and develop alongside its electronic counterparts? This course surveys the artistry and history of books from the ancient world through medieval manuscripts, hand press books and machine press books, to the digital media of today. Students discover how books were made, read, circulated, and used in different eras, and explore the role they have played over time in social, political, scientific, and cultural change. The course involves extensive hands-on work with books and manuscripts from across the centuries and sustained engagement with current debates about book, print, and media culture. Instructor permission required. Enrollment limited to 12. {A}{H}
European architectural, urban and landscape design from (precisely) 1537 to about 1750. Specific topics include Tuscany under the first three grand dukes; Rome in the 17th century; France under the first three Bourbon kings; the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire; the significant enlargement or establishment of capital cities (Turin, Amsterdam, Versailles, Stockholm, St. Petersburg, Dresden, Berlin, Vienna); the rise of the English country house; the English landscape garden; and palaces, pilgrimage churches and monastic complexes in Bavaria, Franconia and Austria. Focus throughout on the fundamental interdependence of architecture and society. Counts for ARU. {A}{H}
A study of painting, sculpture, architecture, urban and landscape design, printmaking and the luxury arts in France, from the last years of Louis XIV's reign to the French Revolution. Recurring themes include artists' training and careers; academies, aesthetics and art theory; art criticism and the viewing public; collecting and display; patronage; and the relationship of art to politics, literature and science. France's pacesetting role in contemporary art is explored by looking beyond its borders to other courts--among them Bourbon Naples, some German-speaking principalities, Great Britain, Russia, Spain and Sweden--and to the French Atlantic world. Counts for ARU. {A}{H}
ARH 272Revolution, Industry, Empire: The Art of the Nineteenth Century4
The Haitian revolution, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the rise of photography: the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of new ways of seeing, knowing, and being in the world. The course considers the ways art objects and the built environment revealed, constructed, and mediated nineteenth-century life. Students study key case studies, from painting and sculpture to advertising ephemera, to understand significant cultural nodes. Conversations center around the meaningful role objects play in shaping and constructing social experience and key concepts elaborated by nineteenth-century thinkers, such as modernism. The course primarily focuses on Europe and the US. Group B. Enrollment limited to 30. {A}{H}
ARH 278Race and Gender in the History of Photography4
This course introduces the history of photography, emphasizing the ways photographs represent, mediate, construct and communicate histories of race, gender, sex, sexuality, intimacy and desire. The class studies a variety of photographic images, from the daguerreotype to digital media, from fine arts photography to vernacular images. Students consider objects that have forged connections among loved ones, substantiated memories or served as evidence, considering critical questions about photography’s relationship to identity, affect, knowledge production and power. The course focuses on race and gender, and also attends closely to photography’s relationship to identity broadly speaking, including class, ability and religion. Enrollment limited to 35. {A}{H}
This course examines global artistic tendencies since 1945 in their art-historical and socio-historical contexts. The class considers such developments as American abstraction and the rise of New York, neo-dada, pop, minimalism, conceptual art, earthworks, the influence of feminism, postmodernism, the politics of identity, conceptions of the site and the institution, global publics and the global culture of art, and the theoretical issues and debates that help to frame these topics. {A}{H}
This course presents a global survey of architecture and urbanism since 1945, from post-World War II reconstruction and planning, through critiques of modernism, to postmodernism, deconstruction, critical regionalism and beyond. Major buildings, projects, movements and tendencies are examined in their historical, theoretical and rhetorical contexts. Counts for ARU. {A}{H}
A consideration of the ancient city: architecture, painting, sculpture and objects of everyday life. Women and freed people as patrons of the arts are emphasized. The impact of the rediscovery of Pompeii and its role as a source of inspiration in 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century art is discussed. No prerequisite. Restrictions: ARH 285 may be repeated once with a different topic. {A}{H}
Urban and architectural history of the Eternal City, comprising seven famous hills whose summits and slopes (and the valleys in between) are a cradle of Western civilization. Extensive readings in primary sources and the analysis of works of art of all types help students understand why Rome has constituted such an indispensable and inexhaustible point of emulative reference from the traditional date of its founding (21 April 753 BCE) to the fascist era and beyond. Considered as well is the relationship between city and country as expressed in the design of villas and gardens through the ages. Restrictions: ARH 285 may be repeated once with a different topic. {A}{H}
ARH 286History and Theory of Performance Art: Why Did the Performance Artist Cross the Road?4
This class addresses the history and theory of performance art since the 1960s, introducing artists whose work has shaped the field and the issues which have become important in the reception of performance art. {A}{H}
ARH 288Colloquium: Techniques in Digital Art History1
This course provides students with a robust set of skills for today’s art historian. With an emphasis on hands-on training using Imaging Center facilities, students complete multiple small projects in digital mapping, digital timelines and other data visualizations, scanning and photography of artworks, documenting artwork with international data standards, creating virtual galleries, 3D scanning and more. Short readings on the application of these methods in current art history scholarship is also assigned. Software includes Google MyMaps, Tableau, Timeline JS, Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, Artstor/JSTOR Forum, Wordpress, Unity and others. S/U only. Enrollment limited to 12. {A}{H}
ARH 289Art and Medicine, Late 18th Century to the Present4
This course examines intersections of art and medicine from the late 18th century to the present. Considering a variety of texts and objects, from wax medical models and public health posters to Mona Hatoum’s cell-like sculptures and photographic coverage of the 2014 Ebola epidemic, the course disentangles how medical understandings of the body filter into artistic production and popular thought and vice versa. While course material is primarily from Europe and the United States, the course attends to the ways medical imaginings of the body engage with imperialism and geopolitical boundaries, as well as race, gender, ability, class and sexuality. {A}{H}
ARH 290AMColloquium: Topics in Art History-Art and Money4
Art and money are inextricably intertwined. This course delves into the ramifications of this relationship in the ways art is valued in the contemporary art market and the consequences for museums, collectors, artists, and the general public. Discussions include artists’ self-fashioning for the market as well as the historical detective work it takes to reveal the practices which have fed this market of limited supply and infinite demand including looting and forgery. These are stories which need to be shared with an ever-wider audience especially in a time when the importance of art to humankind needs reevaluation. Restrictions: ARH 290 may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics. Enrollment limited to 20. Instructor permission required. {A}{H}
Subject
ARH
Credits (min)
4
Credits (max)
4
Credit unit
Credits
Type
course
Repeatable
may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics.
ARH 290CAColloquium: Topics in Art History-Contemporary Art4
This class examines current issues in contemporary art, suggested by critical debates and significant exhibitions. The class is particularly interested in practices and debates that offer the following: analyses of the global condition of art; demonstrations of the influence of new technologies; reflections on institutional frameworks; excavations of earlier art-historical moments; and accounts of the shifting status of art, artists and audiences in the contemporary public sphere. Prerequisite: One 200-level ARH course, or equivalent. Restrictions: ARH 290 may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics. Enrollment limited to 20. {A}{H}
Subject
ARH
Credits (min)
4
Credits (max)
4
Credit unit
Credits
Type
course
Repeatable
may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics.
ARH 290CEColloquium: Topics in Art History-China in Expansion: Early Chinese Art & Material Culture (20th century BCE-220 CE)4
During the formative periods when the local and global forces simultaneously took actions in shaping Chinese civilization, the functions of images and objects, the approaches to things and the discourses around art underwent significant shifts, not only responding to but also mapping out the "Chinese-ness" in visual and material culture. This course of early Chinese art investigates diverse media bronze vessels, sculptures, murals, textiles, architecture and other visual and material forms in relation to political and military conquest, cross-cultural exchange, the dissemination of ordinary practices and the formation of identities. Key terms and issues for the course include expansion, connection and materiality. Counts for ARU. Restrictions: ARH 290 may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics. Enrollment limited to 20. {A}{H}
Subject
ARH
Credits (min)
4
Credits (max)
4
Credit unit
Credits
Type
course
Repeatable
may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics.
ARH 290CVColloquium: Topics in Art History-Colonialisms and Their UnMaking: Land, Water, Bodies, Belongings4
How does conquest by foreigners change the ways land and water, bodies (human andotherwise) and human creations are valued, lived with, and passed to other generations? What kinds of loss do different forms of colonialism produce, what forms of resilience? Focusing on recent scholarship, this course addresses these questions, highlighting the 16th–19th centuries. Among the themes addressed: colonial architectures—built and conceptual, trans-oceanic travel and shipwrecks, nationalist museum and archival projects; and current debates about decolonization, repatriation, and reparation. Counts for ARU. Prerequisite: One course in AFR, ARH, ARS, ARU, ANT, ENV, HST, LAS, LSS, or equivalent. Restrictions: ARH 290 may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics. Enrollment limited to 20. {A}{H}
Subject
ARH
Credits (min)
4
Credits (max)
4
Credit unit
Credits
Type
course
Repeatable
may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics.
ARH 290FSColloquium: Topics in Art History-The Visual Culture of Freed Slaves in the Roman Empire4
Many ancient Roman houses and tombs belonged to freed slaves who had established themselves and their families in the world. Assessed through the lens of elite authors who disparaged freed people, these monuments have often been judged as lesser, imperfectly emulating lost aristocratic models. On the contrary, as a close reading of these houses and tombs themselves demonstrate, freedmen and freedwomen celebrated their transformation from being things to being persons of means by finding visual means to celebrate their industry, their wealth, their ambition and their identification with mythological figures who had once been enslaved. Restrictions: ARH 290 may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics. Enrollment limited to 20. {A}{H}
Subject
ARH
Credits (min)
4
Credits (max)
4
Credit unit
Credits
Type
course
Repeatable
may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics.
ARH 290IBColloquium: Topics in Art History-Playing with Ink and Brush4
How should ancient East Asian painting and calligraphy, created primarily with ink and brush, be read? What were the typical themes and styles? Who were the artists and their audiences? Why did they venerate certain works of art over others? To answer these questions, this course examines masterpieces of Chinese painting and calligraphy from the Six Dynasties (220-589) to the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368). This course includes a few studio sessions to give students basic hands-on experience with ink and brush. Restrictions: ARH 290 may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics. Enrollment limited to 20. {A}{H}
Subject
ARH
Credits (min)
4
Credits (max)
4
Credit unit
Credits
Type
course
Repeatable
may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics.
ARH 290LBColloquium: Topics in Art History-The Presence of the Past: Libraries as a Building Type in the Ancient Mediterranean World4
This course looks at the famed third-century BCE library at Alexandria, Egypt, precedents like the library of the Assyrian king Assurbanipal at Nineveh (with epics and omen texts on clay tablets) and later extant examples like the Library of Celsus at Ephesus to discuss the development of the library as a public building type. The class also compares later innovations like Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, Snøhetta’s award-winning 2002 Bibliotheca Alexandrina (on the site of the ancient library) and Maya Lin’s renovation of Neilson Library, analyzing how the buildings themselves make knowledge manifest. Restrictions: ARH 290 may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics. Enrollment limited to 20. Counts for ARU. {A}{H}
Subject
ARH
Credits (min)
4
Credits (max)
4
Credit unit
Credits
Type
course
Repeatable
may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics.
ARH 290LSColloquium: Topics in Art History-Age of Louis XIV4
Mounting the throne in 1643 and dying in 1715, Louis XIV is the longest-ruling monarch in European history. This course examines how the visual arts served to fashion an extraordinary image of rulership, one already much imitated during that monarch's lifetime. In this period, France rose to both political and cultural prominence throughout Europe, and the institutional structure of many intellectual and artistic endeavors formed an important part of the centralized bureaucracy that came to define the state. Materials for study are drawn from literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, landscape design, festivals, the decorative arts, printed books, and numismatics. Restrictions: ARH 290 may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics. Enrollment limited to 20. {A}{H}
Subject
ARH
Credits (min)
4
Credits (max)
4
Credit unit
Credits
Type
course
Repeatable
may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics.
ARH 290MCColloquium: Topics in Art History-Meditations in Caves4
The course is an introduction to Buddhist grottoes of East Asia. Students learn the historical trajectories of Buddhist grottoes, including the development of cave architecture, mural painting and sculpture. The course pays special attention to the site specificity of the visual imageries and their transmissions, commissions and functions. The case studies in this course range from the Kizil Caves and Mogao Caves in Northwestern China, to the Yungang Caves and Longmen Caves in the central plains and the Seokguram Caves in the Korean Peninsula. The course also considers the collecting, preserving and displaying of Buddhist grottoes in the contemporary world. Restrictions: ARH 290 may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics. Enrollment limited to 20. {A}{H}
Subject
ARH
Credits (min)
4
Credits (max)
4
Credit unit
Credits
Type
course
Repeatable
may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics.
ARH 290RAColloquium: Topics in Art History-Representing Animals4
This colloquium investigates the space between animal studies and art history. Examining case studies from the early modern period to the present, the class considers questions such as: What constitutes the animal, and how do images shape responses to this question? How and why have artists deployed animals as visual signs? How did the collection of animal specimens in the West both depend on and sustain networks of imperialism? Students' conversations center around the meaningful role images and objects play in shaping understandings of the human, the animal, nature, identity, and both human and animal culture. Prerequisite: ARH 110. Restrictions: ARH 290 may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics. Enrollment limited to 20. {A}{H}
Subject
ARH
Credits (min)
4
Credits (max)
4
Credit unit
Credits
Type
course
Repeatable
may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics.
ARH 290SSColloquium: Topics in Art History-Swords and Scandals4
Since the beginning of cinema, the decadence of the ancient Romans has been a subject of fascination. Starting with HBO's Rome (2005-2007) and Ridley Scott's Gladiator (2000), this course explores the multiple sources of the visual tropes used to construct this universe and seeks to analyze it in aesthetic, historical and ideological terms. Their twentieth-century counterparts from films of the silent era to Hollywood epics like Spartacus (1960) and Cleopatra (1963), as well as cult classics like Caligula (1979), are scrutinized in order to gain an understanding of how Romans function cinematically as cultural signs in varying historical contexts. Restrictions: ARH 290 may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics. Enrollment limited to 20. {A}{H}
Subject
ARH
Credits (min)
4
Credits (max)
4
Credit unit
Credits
Type
course
Repeatable
may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics.
ARH 352CESeminar: Topics in Art History-Imperial Matter: The Arts of China's Early Empires4
Why did the First Emperor of China build his grand mausoleum as a microcosm? What foreign motifs and luxury goods were brought to the Chinese proper and by whom? How did trade and war affect the making of the arts 2,000 years ago? These are some of the core questions embedded in this seminar, which investigates the power of things that made a difference in shaping the conditions of the Qin and the Han, Chinese first empires. Throughout the semester, students closely examine art objects and read leading scholars of early imperial Chinese art around the world. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required. Counts for ARU. {A}{H}
ARH 352RPSeminar: Topics in Art History- Uncollecting: Repatriations, Reparations and the Ethics of Return4
This course studies the ethics of return, focusing on collections of belongings made under colonial conditions. Across the 2000s, hundreds of artifacts, artworks, ancestral creations and animal (including human) bodies have been repatriated. But what does it mean to “return” belongings taken—indeed, often stolen—in the colonial past? What, really, can repatriation accomplish? Is reparation a better option, and what might it entail? Drawing examples from a wide range of geographies, and highlighting recent—especially decolonial—scholarship, the course debates these issues. Open to students in any discipline. Pre-req: one class in the visual arts, archaeology, anthropology, museum studies or equivalent. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required. {A}{H}
The capstone provides students with an opportunity to reflect on their path through the major and to develop projects that grow out of and synthesize their previous coursework. It enables students to have an overview of things achieved and to showcase their competence in an area of focus in planning for their futures. The class is designed to support the challenge of conceptualizing and developing individual projects. In the collaborative workshop space of the class, students share their projects in stages, which are discussed and edited by their peers. Prerequisites: ARH 110, ARH 190 and two 200-level ARH courses. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required. {A}{H}
