Department of Art History

ARTH 30712. The Auspicious Image. 100 Units.

Focusing on roughly 1200-1900 CE in East Asia, this course considers the social functions of East Asian paintings and craft objects in conjunction with their subject matter, materiality, and style. Art historian Timon Screech has observed that the function of most paintings in early modern Japan was to radiate positivity and auspiciousness --a fact also connected to Wu Hung's observations about the absence of 'ruins' in traditional Chinese art. How can we put a finer point on a painting's auspicious qualities, and what were some other functions that paintings were fulfilling during this time period, either in tandem with auspiciousness or in place of it?

Instructor(s): C. Foxwell     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): At least 1 prior course in Art History or East Asian Culture, Literature, or History. Open to undergraduate majors/minors. Fulfills the following categories in the ARTH major and minor: Asian, modern (post-1800), Asian, premodern (pre-1800), European and American, pre-modern (pre-1800)
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 20712

ARTH 30908. Media Revolutions Then and Now. 100 Units.

This seminar explores how the Protestant Reformation and innovations in printing technology coincided to catalyze a sweeping revolution that paved the way for today's media culture. The class will center around the eponymous exhibition curated by the instructors at the Hannah Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center in Winter 2026, which upends traditional narratives that center on printing technology as the driving force of the Reformation, and instead shows how essential religious thought and practice were for the emergence and success of modern media. We will highlight how Reformers like Martin Luther both provided content and theological legitimacy that sustained the print industry, transforming print from a nascent technology into a powerful tool for religious and cultural change. Crucial to the class is the notion of the Reformation as the first modern media event that laid the foundation for our modern media landscape. However, the aim is not to chart a straightforward linear narrative of progress from the woodcut to the meme; instead, we will focus on the commonalities as much as on the differences of the two eras. The class will touch upon a variety of themes (e.g., the page layout of printed Bibles, propaganda wars, hate speech, conspiracy theories, and witchcraft), illuminating what the early modern reformation of media can teach us about today's media culture and its potential future.

Instructor(s): T. Golan and C. Wild     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Fulfills the following categories in the ARTH major and minor: European and American, pre-modern (pre-1800)
Equivalent Course(s): GRMN 35908, ARTH 20908, GRMN 25908

ARTH 31014. Medieval Indian Cities. 100 Units.

TBA

Instructor(s): M. Manohar     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): This course fulfills the following requirements in the ARTH major and minor: Asian pre-1800
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 21014

ARTH 31333. (Re)Branding the Balkan City: Comtemp. Belgrade/Sarajevo/Zagreb. 100 Units.

The freedom to make and remake our cities (and ourselves) is one of the most precious yet most neglected of the human rights," argues David Harvey. In this course, we use an urban studies lens to explore the complex history, social fabric, architecture, infrastructure, and cultural transformation of the former Yugoslav capitals. Since their inception, these cities have relied on multifaceted exchanges of peoples and political projects, forms of knowledge, financial and cultural capital, means of production, and innovative ideas. Among others, these exchanges produced two phenomena, Yugoslav architecture, embodying one of the great political experiments of the modern era, and the Non-Aligned Movement, as explored in recent documentary films (Turajlić 2023), museum exhibits (MoMA 2018, "Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia 1948-1980"), and monographs (Tito in Africa: Picturing Solidarity). Drawing on anthropological theory and ethnography of the city, we consider processes of urban destruction and renewal, practices of branding spaces and identities, metropolitan citizenship, arts and design, architectural histories and styles, and the broader politics of space. The course is complemented by cultural and historical media, guest speakers, and virtual tours. Classes are conducted in English.

Instructor(s): Nada Petkovic     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GLST 21301, BCSN 21300, BCSN 31303, HIST 24008, REES 31303, ARCH 21300, ARTH 21333, REES 21300

ARTH 32115. Iconoclasm. 100 Units.

The recent removal of Confederate statues in the US and ISIL's destruction of ancient sites in Iraq and Syria, while motivated by different aims, find a common solution in dealing with images deemed inappropriate. Context is crucial to understanding what is at stake in these different iconoclastic acts: What is being destroyed? Who is destroying it and why? Although the term "iconoclasm" initially was used to describe the violent clashes between rival Christian ideologies over the status of images in a religious context in the 8th century, scholars now use it more capaciously and it refers to any movement dedicated to the destruction of images, be it in ancient Mesopotamia, Reformist Europe, or Talibanist Afghanistan. While the term offers syntactical clarity, it simultaneously obscures the various processes that go into practicing iconoclasm; for example, what motivated Byzantine destruction of icons is distinct from why European colonizers destroyed Native American heritage. This seminar proposes a broad and historically contingent study of iconoclasm. By looking at a range of examples from different periods and geographical contexts, we will examine the ways in which images have been perceived as threats, aberrations, seductions, or inconveniences best removed. We will also explore the various ways in which removed images continue to resonate with new meanings. The seminar spends a week defining the key terms before delving into particular case studies of iconoclasm.

Instructor(s): M. Manohar     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Consent Required
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 28312, NEHC 22115, SALC 32115, ARTH 22115, SALC 22115, PARR 22115

ARTH 32120. Ecocritical Art History: Perspectives from South Asia. 100 Units.

How can art history contribute to the ongoing discourse about environmentalism? What can the study of art tell us about the interrelatedness of human creativity and the environment? In this seminar, we will wrestle with these questions through an ecocritical study of South Asian art. Ecocriticism has its origins in literary studies, although it is now an interdisciplinary field of study that explores how the natural world is portrayed in the arts, broadly conceived. Art history has long been interested in analyzing how artists depicted the natural world. However, such explorations have usually been framed by a narrow set of discreet concerns that have their origins in Enlightenment-era discourse; for example, landscape studies, animal studies (zoology), plant studies (botany), etc. Ecocriticism does not have any such limiting framework. An ecocritical study attempts to move beyond the irreducibly anthropocentric approach in the humanities to understand the natural environments in which humans made art. South Asian art is fundamentally marked by an interest in nature. The towers of Indian temples were conceived of as physical manifestations of the Himalayas. The door guardians that stand on either side of temple entrances are anthropomorphic depictions of the rivers Ganga and Yamuna.

Instructor(s): M. Manohar     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 22120

ARTH 32305. Spiritual and Protective Lives of African Textiles. 100 Units.

This seminar explores visual culture and historical arts of Africa primarily from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with a focus on traditional textiles. We will cover a broad geographical range with case studies that center on production, practices, and uses for textiles and related objects of devotion in everyday life. Investigations will highlight textiles' tangible and intangible elements to examine their spiritual and protective dimensions through various lenses: organized religions, including the three Abrahamic faiths, local belief systems and ritual practices, social or political organizations, and other cultural distinctions. Such contextualization will contribute to students' recognition of the diversity and historical depth of the continent's arts and cultures. We will visit objects in local museums and exhibitions for in-person, close looking and to fuel discussions surrounding the role of museums and museum display and interpretation. At least two class sessions will take place at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Instructor(s): J. Purdy     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Consent only. This course fulfills the following requirements in the ARTH major and minor: African Art
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 22305

ARTH 32425. City of the Century: Vienna 1900 and the Making of the 20th Century. 100 Units.

In 1910, Vienna, with a population of 2 million was the 6th largest city in the world; it was the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a multiethnic and multilingual state. As the "cradle of modernism and fascism, liberalism and totalitarianism" (to use a phrase from The Economist), Vienna around 1900 has fundamentally altered the way we understand ourselves in the West. In this course, we will examine the cultural currents that came together in the city and have since determined our self-image as psychological, sexual, gendered, and political beings. We will explore these and other revolutions in our sense of identity through the lens of literature and art in conjunction with other historical materials. Readings and discussions in English. Undergraduate and MAPH students welcome.

Instructor(s): Margareta Ingrid Christian     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): GRMN 32425

ARTH 32526. Aby Warburg and the Memory of Images. 100 Units.

Trained as an art historian with an expertise in Renaissance art, Warburg morphed into a historian of images (i.e., Bildwissenschaft) and - more broadly - into a historian of culture. We will trace Warburg's cultural historical method as it develops primarily from philology, but also art history, anthropology, the comparative study of religions, and evolutionary biology. How does Warburg read culture? What is his methodological approach for examining a wide variety of cultural artifacts ranging from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Poliziano's poetry, and Dürer's etchings to postal stamps and news photographs? How can these artifacts be vehicles for cultural memory? And how does the transmission of cultural memory in artworks manifest itself in different media such as literary texts, religious processions, astrological treatises, photography, and painting? Moreover, how does Warburg's work help us contextualize and historicize "interdisciplinarity" today? This course explores Aby Warburg in the context of other thinkers of the time including Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Alois Riegl, and others. Readings and discussions in English. Undergraduates and MAPH students welcome.

Instructor(s): Margareta Ingrid Christian     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 32526, MAPH 32526, GRMN 32526

ARTH 32816. Narrative Frescos in Early Modern Italy. 100 Units.

In this course we will observe different ways to tell a story through painting, and we will analyze strategies used by artists in early modern Italy to describe space and time in visual terms. Students will engage with different artists, from Giotto to Raphael and Pellegrino Tibaldi, and different cultural and geographic contexts, from Padua and Bologna to Florence, Venice, and Rome, over the span of about three centuries.Students will explore a wide range of visual examples and textual sources on various subject matters, from poetry to history, from the Bible to vernacular accounts about saints, from mythology to contemporary chronicles, in order to investigate what kind of stories were told on the walls of halls and courts of honor, private rooms, or public spaces, aiming at understanding why each of them was chosen. Complex projects such as narrative mural and ceiling paintings usually involved a tight collaboration among artists, patrons, and iconographic consultants, all figures with whom students will become familiar. We will also analyse the theory behind the comparison of poetry and painting ("ut pictura poesis", "as is painting so is poetry") by investigating the meaning and the reception of this ancient concept in early modern times, and its implications on the social role of the artist. Students will investigate the significance of narrative frescos in early modern times, while also asking questions about their value and impact today.

Instructor(s): F. Caneparo     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): This course fulfills the following requirements in the ARTH major and minor: European and American pre-1800
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 22816, ITAL 22888, ITAL 32888

ARTH 33325. Touch and Tactility in East Asian Art. 100 Units.

This course considers East Asian art through the dimensions of touch and tactility. What happens when we think of art not just as something to be seen, but felt? How do material, tactile, and haptic qualities shape creative processes, as well as our understanding of art across China, Japan, Korean, and beyond? How have modern museum practices, with their "do not touch" signs, transformed our relationship with these works? Through various case studies-from the sensuous surfaces of Chinese decorative objects and the ritualized grinding of ink on stone, the hand-formed and deliberately textured Japanese tea bowls meant to be cradled in hands, to the illusionistic tactility in Korean chaekgeori still-life paintings-we will explore the significance of touch and materiality in artistic expressions and aesthetic experiences in East Asian art history. We will engage with art objects hands-on when possible, develop methodologies for analyzing tactile dimensions of art, and critically examine how touch intersects with cultural values, social hierarchies, and aesthetics across East Asian traditions

Instructor(s): S. Yi     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): This course fulfills the following requirements in the ARTH major and minor: Asian pre-1800
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 23325

ARTH 34002. Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Writing About the Arts. 100 Units.

Thinking about practices is a way of focusing a conversation between creative writers, art historians, curators, and working visual artists, all of whom are encouraged to join this workshop. We ourselves will be practicing and studying a wide variety of approaches to visual art. We'll read critics like John Yau and Lori Waxman, memoirists like Aisha Sabbatini Sloan, inventive historians like Zbigniew Herbert, and poets like Gwendolyn Brooks and Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, as well as curatorial and museum writings, catalogue essays, artists' statements, and other experimental and practical forms. The course hopes to support students both in developing useful practices and experimenting boldly. Classes will be shaped around current exhibitions and installations. Sessions will generally begin with student-led observation at the Smart Museum, and we will spend one session on close looking in the study room at the Smart. Students will also visit five collections, exhibitions and/or galleries and, importantly, keep a looking notebook. Students will write a number of exercises in different forms (immersive meditation, researched portrait, mosaic fragment), and will also write and revise a longer essay (on any subject and in any mode) to be workshopped in class.

Instructor(s): Rachel Cohen     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Advanced Workshop: During pre-registration, this course is open only to declared Creative Writing Majors and declared Minors in English and Creative Writing, as well as graduate students. During add/drop the course will be instructor consent and open to all students in the College. Please contact the instructor to be added to the waitlist for the option to enroll during add/drop. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 44002, CRWR 24002, ARTH 24002

ARTH 34030. Sexuality Studies in American Art. 100 Units.

TBD

Equivalent Course(s): AMER 24030, AMER 34030, GNSE 26102, ARTH 24030

ARTH 34091. Environmental Art History. 100 Units.

This course explores the historical and contemporary relationships between art and the environment in a global context. Two central questions will guide our inquiry. First, what constitutes "environmental art" as a field that is both theoretically and historically grounded yet open to redefinition, methodological innovation, and interdisciplinary experimentation? Second, what are the stakes of historicizing this field in a global framework? For instance, in parts of Asia, the term "environmental art" often refers to the environment in spatial and technological terms detached from environmentalist thought. Similarly, Land Art, a key milestone in the field, creates a productive tension with land-based or ecological perspectives. Considering the term's porosity and evolving definitions, the course adopts a broad purview, encompassing landscape painting, still life paintings, and plantation architecture, as well as recent debates on the Anthropocene, Indigenous land-based thought, environmental justice, and new materialisms. In addition to examining the objects and theories that constitute environmental art, the course will also consider cases of environmentally-informed art historical practice.

Instructor(s): S. Ryu     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 24091

ARTH 34092. Public and Political Locations of South Asian Art History. 100 Units.

This seminar will be addressing some of the new directions in South Asian art history over the turn of the 21st century, foregrounding the public and political inhabitations of the field. The background is set by two broad shifts in disciplinary focus and approach - from the ancient and medieval artistic pasts of the subcontinent to the modern and contemporary era; from the canonical genres of architecture, sculpture and painting to different visual media, image complexes, and spheres of popular production and consumption. The geo-political map of South Asia that frames the course is that of the dismantled empire and the dismembered subcontinent, born out of the twin occurrences of Independence and Partition, the making of multiple nation-states, and the ceaseless eruption of linguistic, ethnic and religious divisions. Placed within this historical context, South Asian history can be seen as an unquiet discipline: one that keeps interrogating the categories of art, nation and modernity, and recalibrating the registers of the secular and the religious, the national and the regional, the global and local in this sphere.

Instructor(s): T. Guha-Thakurta     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): This course is intended for advanced undergraduates in their final year as well as graduate students.
Equivalent Course(s): SALC 24092, ARTH 24092, SALC 34092

ARTH 34651. Latest Experiments in Architectural History. 100 Units.

This seminar invites students to examine recent scholarly experiments in architectural history. Participants will read and discuss a corpus of books published in the last five years. Each week, we will take a deep dive into a single publication by synthesizing its argument, unpacking its structure, and demonstrating its potential limits. In-class activities will catalyze dialogue and debate on the readings as well as highlight resonances across assigned books. By the end of the quarter, students will have developed transversal views of contemporary practices in architectural history and heightened their senses of methodological self-awareness.

Instructor(s): J. Huet     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Fulfills the following requirements in the ARTH major and minor: Theory and Historiography
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 24651, CEGU 24651, CEGU 34561, ARCH 24651

ARTH 34712. Envisioning Tokyo: City, Capital, Metropolis (Traveling Seminar) 100 Units.

One of the world's largest and most populous cities, Tokyo has long captivated the imaginations of Japanese artists, especially ukiyo-e (woodblock print) designers, who returned repeatedly to the tradition of the "100 Views" (hyakkei) of the city in an effort to capture its mystery, majesty, and constant transformations. This course is related to the planning phase of a special exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. It posits a periodization of Tokyo based around four major ukiyo-e series of "100 Views" from Hiroshige in the 1850s, to Kobayashi Kiyochika's 1876-1882 series in the Meiji period, and continuing on to the "100 Pictures of Great Tokyo in the Showa Era" (Showa dai Tokyo hyakuzue) by Koizumi Kishio (1893-1945), issued from 1927-1940. These prints will allow investigation of the creeping nationalism and rise in imperialism that would characterize the newly expanded "Great Tokyo" (Dai Tokyo) during the 1930s. The course concludes with an examination of a collaborative work entitled "100 Views of Tokyo: Message to the 21st Century" made from 1989-1999, which will allow investigation of new printing techniques, such as lithography and linocuts, as well as the culture and economy of "The Metropolis of Tokyo" (Tokyo-tou) in the post-Bubble era, concluding with Takashi Murakami's famed commissions for the real estate development Roppongi Hills.

Instructor(s): C. Foxwell     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Consent only via application. Students must have taken one prior course on East Asian (preferably Japanese) art
Note(s): Fulfills the following categories in the ARTH major and minor: Asian, modern (post-1800). Weekly sessions on campus will be supplemented by a mandatory 4-day field trip to Houston, Texas in January.
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 24712

ARTH 34815. Collecting the Ancient World: Museum Practice and Politics. 100 Units.

Where is this artifact from? Who does it belong to? How did it get here? Who's telling its story? Critical inquiry into the practice and politics of museums has reached a new zenith in contemporary discourse. From discussions of acquisition and repatriation to provenience (archaeological findspot) and provenance (an object's ownership history) and the ethics of curation and modes of display, museum and art professionals-and the general public alike-are deliberating on the concept of museums and the responsibilities of such institutions towards the collections in their care. This course will explore the early history of museums and collecting practices and their impact on the field today, with a focus on cultural heritage collections from West Asia and North Africa. We will first spend time on such topics as archaeological exploration of "the Orient," colonial collecting practices, and the antiquities trade, as well as the politics of representation and reception in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Next, we will look at critical issues presently facing museums, including ethical collection stewardship, provenance research, repatriation, community engagement, and public education. The course will be structured in a seminar format, with lectures devoted to the presentation of key themes by the instructor and critical discussion as a group. Meetings will include visits to the ISAC Museum at UChicago.

Instructor(s): K. Neumann     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): This course fulfills the following requirements in the ARTH major and minor: Theory and Historiography, Asian, premodern (pre-1800), and African
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 30509, ARTH 24815, HIST 20509, NEHC 34815, NEHC 24815

ARTH 35001. Theatricality in Modern Art from 1700 to the Present. 100 Units.

We examine the dramatic dimension of art in the modern era broadly speaking, paying attention to recurring themes like the Aristotelian theory of acton, the Diderotian theory of acting, and the linguistic theory of speech acts, as well as to momentous historical events like the French Revolution, the rediscovery of antiquity, and the advent of photography and motion pictures. Paradigms that have been influential in one or another discipline like Michael Fried's theory of theatricality (in art history), Heinrich Kleist's theory of puppets (In German literature and theatre theory) and Friedrich Nietzsche's theory of tragedy (in music and philosophy) and will also be scrutinized.

Instructor(s): Andrei Pop
Equivalent Course(s): SCTH 35001, TAPS 35001

ARTH 35009. Platonic Aesthetics. 100 Units.

The anachronism of the course title constitutes our program: to what extent can Plato's thinking about artworks, images, poets in the polis, beauty, the visual world, the senses, subjectivity and criticism be viewed coherently as an aesthetic theory? Does his style and dramatic mode of writing interact significantly with these views? How have they been received, and to what extent are they right?

Instructor(s): Andrei Pop     Terms Offered: Autumn. Autumn 2024
Equivalent Course(s): SCTH 35009, CLAS 38020, SCTH 25009, FNDL 29005

ARTH 35012. Caricature. 100 Units.

Though usually traced to Renaissance experiments with drawing deformed heads, caricature as a mode of parody, humor and invective has various roots, in ancient comedy, ancient modern physiognomy and psychology, the literature and (pseudo)science of social types, and above all in the rise of a public sphere of newspaper readers and broadsheet buyers avid for the ridiculing of public figures, beloved or otherwise. We approach caricature broadly, considering its inverse relation with a neoclassical aesthetics of the ideal body, its theorization around historically significant moments like 1848 and 1939, its relation to technological developments like the newspaper comic and the animated cartoon, and most recently, the viral meme.

Instructor(s): Andrei Pop     Terms Offered: TBD. Will not be offered 21-22 or 22-23
Equivalent Course(s): SCTH 35012, MADD 13012

ARTH 35115. Winckelmann: Enlightenment Art Historian and Philosopher. 100 Units.

We approach the first great modern art historian through reading his classic early and mature writings and through the art and criticism of his time (and at the end, our own). Reading-intensive, with a field trip to the Art Institute.Please help - many questions.

Instructor(s): Andrei Pop
Equivalent Course(s): SCTH 35000, CLAS 35014, KNOW 35000, GRMN 25015, ARTH 25115, GRMN 35015

ARTH 35119. Architecture and Colonialism in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. 100 Units.

This seminar invites students to examine the intersections of colonialism with architecture in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Throughout the semester, we will discuss the designs of architects working in the region (Le Corbusier, Fernand Pouillon, Shadrach Woods, etc.) and concepts defining colonialism as a design project (segregation, repression, primitivism, etc.). We will also pay particular attention to modes of opposition pursued by residents and their historical impact toward the region's decolonization. Moments of heightened historical consequence, such as the strategic use of selected architectural spaces by independentist guerrillas, will be thoroughly discussed. The class will progress through a chronological scope, from Orientalism as a 19th century phenomenon to the enmeshment of modernism with colonialism in the 20th century. We will conclude with the emergence of postcolonial modernities.

Instructor(s): Jacobé Huet      Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 25119, RDIN 35119, RDIN 25119, ARCH 25119

ARTH 35140. Aesthetic Ecologies. 100 Units.

What would an intellectual history of the environment look like when told from the perspective of art history writing? The geographer Friedrich Ratzel, who first began using the term "Umwelt" ("environment") in a systematic way, claimed that, up to the end of the 19th century, the idea of environment had been primarily discussed not in scientific contexts but rather in aesthetic ones, by "artistically predisposed thinkers." In this course, we will take Ratzel's claim seriously and aim to recuperate the aesthetic side of theories of environment across diverse areas such as: notions of landscape ("the picturesque"); aesthetic and biological theories of milieu (Haeckel's "ecology," Taine's "milieu," Uexküll's "Umweltlehre"); Warburg's cultural history; the "sculpture of environment" (Rodin and Rilke); the "space-body" in modern dance (Laban). This course is about artworks that continue beyond their material confines into the space environing them. It focuses on evocations of air as the material space surrounding an artwork in texts that thematize the continuity between artwork as image and material object. Materials include: Aby Warburg, Rudolf Laban, Siegfried Ebeling, Camillo Sitte, Otto Wagner, Alois Riegl, R.M. Rilke, Wassily Kandinsky, Martin Heidegger, and others. MAPH and undergraduate students welcome.

Instructor(s): Margareta Ingrid Christian     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): GRMN 33523, ARTH 25140, GRMN 23523

ARTH 35203. The History of Collecting from Treasury to Museum. 100 Units.

Renaissance collecting transcended the traditions of medieval treasuries, developed out of modes of categorization derived from antiquity, and ultimately became the foundation for the rise of the museum in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Motivated by aesthetic consideration, curiosity, a quest for order and knowledge, and an interest in personal display, renaissance princes, noblewomen, emperors, naturalists and artists alike acquired art, objects, flora, fauna, ethnographic materials and exotica within a variety of different collecting spaces such as studioli, gardens, libraries, and kunst and wunderkammern. Through an examination of primary sources such as inventories, accounts and letters, of secondary sources about particular collections and collectors, and of various modern theories regarding possessing, consuming and gift giving things, this course explores the multifarious Renaissance collections of Europe, primarily focusing on Italy, Spain, Germany, France, the Netherlands and England.

Instructor(s): L. Markey     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): This course fulfills the following requirements in the ARTH major and minor: European and American, pre-modern (pre-1800)
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 25203

ARTH 35204. Early Modern Italian Literature and Art. 100 Units.

In this course we will analyse the tight connections between Italian literature and art in early modern times. We will read selected passages from various authors, including, but not limited to, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso. We will observe how artists reacted to literary novelties and incorporated them in their artistic production in Italy, Europe and the Americas. We will investigate different ways in which poets and artists entered in contact, collaborated, competed, became friends, and influenced each other, and how and why artists drew from literature to develop iconographic themes and motifs, while contributing (or not) to the canonization of recently-published literary works. We will analyse selected case studies, examining literary sources and works of art in various techniques (from painting to sculptures, from small decorative objects to monumental frescos, from drawings to prints), including relevant illustrated books from the Regenstein collections and the Newberry Library, as well as works of art from the Smart Museum and the Art Institute.

Instructor(s): Federica Caneparo     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Taught in English.
Equivalent Course(s): ITAL 23888, ARTH 25204, ITAL 33888

ARTH 35712. Photography and Political Ecology. 100 Units.

This seminar explores the role of photographic imagery in the global environmental movement from the 1960s through the present. We will investigate the uses of photography in shaping, documenting, and disseminating narratives surrounding ecological crises, activism, and public policy. Through a survey of photographic works in a variety of formats and media, we will explore how visual culture has shaped ecological thought and international politics over the last half-century, starting with the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. Adopting an interdisciplinary human-centered framework, this course foregrounds questions of environmental justice, sustainability, and the impacts of colonialism on landscapes and communities, offering insight into the role of photographic media as a catalyst for societal change.

Instructor(s): C. Fuldner     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 35712, ARTH 25712

ARTH 35723. Photography, Literature, and the Archive. 100 Units.

This course, co-taught between English and Art History, considers the fertile cross-pollination between photography and literature in the United States from the late nineteenth century through the present. Tracing the reciprocal influence of text and image-based practices, we will look to photographs in social documentary tradition as a creative foundation for works of prose, poetry, and fiction, while also analyzing the integration of these literary modes into visual media like photobooks and exhibitions. Using archival theories as a critical frame, we will consider photographs as a basis for historical knowledge, as well as sites of creative intervention and revision. The aim of our comparative investigations will be to develop an interdisciplinary toolkit and critical vocabulary to bridge literature, art history, and cultural studies. The course will include multiple visits to museums and campus archives.

Instructor(s): C. Fuldner, M. Tusler      Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Consent Only
Note(s): Fulfills the following categories in the ARTH major and minor: European and American, modern (post-1800), Theory and Historiography
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 25713

ARTH 36001. Religion and Visual Culture in the Late Antique Mediterranean. 100 Units.

In this seminar, we examine sacred sites and artifacts of early Christians and their neighbors in the regions around the Mediterranean from the third century to about 750 CE. Case studies will illustrate the wealth of religious art and architecture associated with different religions that existed side by side-Christianity, Judaism, polytheism, and emerging Islam. This course has five main objectives: (1) to examine how the designs of religious spaces, buildings, and objects respond to specific spiritual or ritualistic needs; (2) to gain familiarity with typical features characterizing the arts of each religion or sect; (3) to identify elements of a common visual language that result from shared traditions or artistic cross-pollination; (4) to examine different ways in which material artifacts were employed as means of ideological propaganda; and (5) to study art and architecture as evidence of doctrinal competition and conflict. While this course foregrounds the study of material culture, written sources (in translation) complement the analysis of the visual evidence.

Instructor(s): Karin Krause     Terms Offered: Spring. Not offered 2025–26
Note(s): This course meets the HS or LMCS Committee distribution for Divinity students.
Equivalent Course(s): NEHC 26001, RLVC 36001, CLAS 36024, CLCV 26024, JWSC 26020, ARTH 26001, MDVL 26001, HCHR 36001, RLST 26001

ARTH 36107. Moving Objects, Dispersed Cultures: Case Studies from China and the Middle East. 100 Units.

In this course, we will delve into "big problems" created by the movement, relocation, or displacement of objects that are assigned special cultural, artistic, and historical values in new contexts. We will follow the movement of artifacts across both geographical and disciplinary boundaries, challenging established notions of cultural heritage and art. We often study and read ancient texts as primary sources, but we don't always pause to consider that those texts were written on physical objects like pieces of wood, leaves, or animal skin. Similarly, we're familiar with the display of ancient artwork inside museums or galleries, but have we wondered about the journey of individual objects to those new locations? How do objects move from their original place to modern collections? How do they become art? And how do they become historical sources? Guided by an art historian and a social historian, this course presents different ways to look at "objects that move", both as sources about past societies and as mirrors for contemporary ones. Through studying examples from the history of China and the Middle East, we will reconsider concepts such as cultural heritage, national patrimony, or even art that have been taken for granted. We will learn about the different histories of the dispersal of cultural heritages in those two regions, from nation-building and colonial projects in the twentieth century to the illicit trade in antiquities and the creation of digital replicas today.

Instructor(s): Wei-Cheng Lin, Cecilia Palombo     Terms Offered: May be offered 2025-26
Prerequisite(s): PQ: Third or fourth-year standing.
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 16107, NEHC 16107, NEHC 36107, BPRO 27100, RLST 26107, EALC 16107, EALC 36107

ARTH 36501. Straight-line sensibilities. A hidden history of 20th Century Art. 100 Units.

The proliferation of straight lines in 20th Century art and architecture is generally associated with rational and universalist procedures and perspectives, and closely associated with the rise of industrial society. This course will look at straight lines in modern art from a very different perspective. We will study a hidden genealogy of straight lines that all seem to evoke the vagaries of sensory realities and capacities and that are aesthetic through and through. These type of straight lines are all, in their various ways, related to the close interaction between bodies and media technologies - one of the major themes in modern art. The question, of course, is how and why straight lines comes to express this relationship. To look at this question, we will study artworks and ideas that extend from the mid 19th-century to 21st century art and that includes a wide range of media and expressions, including architecture, painting, drawing, film, video and computer art.

Instructor(s): I. Bloom     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Fulfills the following requirements in the ARTH major and minor: European and American, modern (post-1800), Theory and Historiography
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 26501, MADD 26501, CMST 26505, CMST 36505

ARTH 36616. Tracing Time. 100 Units.

Tracing Time is a hybrid seminar and studio. The first portion of the course will invite students to engage with a curated selection of techniques for representing time as a broad category of concerns, containing a wide range of nuanced conceptual frameworks and constructs: subjective time, objective time, proper time, coordinate time, sidereal time, emergent time, encoding time, relativistic time, time dilation, reaction time, spacetime, etc. The second portion of the course will invite students to develop their own models, visualizations, and representations of time or temporal phenomenon as a support for considering time as a factor of change in relation to their own research or interest in a particular concern or context, or where time is bound to physical, psychological, ecological, climatic, biological, geological, economic, historical, geographic, or other entangled processes. This course requires no preparation and is therefore open to students from any discipline who share a general interest in urban design, architecture and the arts or who specifically wish to develop a deeper understanding of drawings, models, photographs, video and other graphic mediums as material supports for inquiry. While this class does not require prior experience, all ARCH studio courses require consent. Starting November 18, please visit arthistory.uchicago.edu/archconsent to request instructor consent for this class or other ARCH studios. (Please do not send consent requests by email.

Instructor(s): A. Schachman     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): While this class does not require prior experience, all ARCH studio courses require consent. Starting November 18, please visit arthistory.uchicago.edu/archconsent to request instructor consent for this class or other ARCH studios. (Please do not send consent requests by email.
Equivalent Course(s): ARCH 26616, ARTH 26616, CHST 26616

ARTH 36710. Eisenstein. 100 Units.

TBD

Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 26504, ARTH 26710, CMST 26610, CMST 36610

ARTH 36810. Topics in Curating Indigenous Art. 100 Units.

In twenty-first century museums, the curation of Indigenous objects brings with it many dynamically changing responsibilities and considerations, as well as ethical and legal questions that vary by region, country, and legislation. These topics are essential knowledge for students studying Indigenous art and archaeology in their curriculum and who may be considering careers in related fields. That said, even scholars who do not directly study Indigenous art may someday find themselves responsible for it, whether as a department chair or museum director, making familiarity with these issues essential preparation. Ultimately, the curation of Indigenous art is shaping the leading edge of curatorial practice in museums today-as well as popular discourse.

Instructor(s): A. Hamilton     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 26810

ARTH 37032. Bodies, Objects, Cognition. 100 Units.

This course explores the differences between objects and embodiment as examined in varied historical periods and artistic genres. We will probe the ontological indeterminacy of embodied beings versus machines in terms of agency, autonomy, subjectivity, and artificiality. Our main operative mode is a visual-verbal comparison and its perception. Through discussions of such visual strategies as pareidolia, abstraction, bodyscape, as well as the scientific phenomena of cloning and humanoid robotics, the course will destabilize once fundamental epistemologies to present a cognitive moment when the traditionally stable object-body dichotomy is understood anew as a dynamic site of affective, biological, representational, and mechanical relations. Visual artists, writers and critics studied will include Leonardo da Vinci, Hans Holbein, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Tadeusz Borowski, Stanislaw Lem, Allan Teger, Magdalena Abakanowicz, W.T.J. Mitchell and others. All readings are in English.

Instructor(s): Bozena Shallcross     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): REES 37032, REES 27032, ANTH 37032, KNOW 27032, ARTH 27032, KNOW 37032, ANTH 27032

ARTH 37314. Writing Art Criticism. 100 Units.

This course is a practicum in writing art criticism. Unlike art historians, art critics primarily respond to the art of their time and to developments in the contemporary art world. They write reviews of Chicago exhibitions that may be on view in galleries or museums and that may focus on single artists or broad themes. Importantly, art critics often produce the very first discourse on a given art, shaping subsequent thinking and historiography. Accordingly, art criticism is a genre that requires particular skills, for example, identifying why and how artworks matter, taking a fresh look at something familiar or developing a set of ideas even if unfamiliar with a subject, expressing strong yet sound opinions, and writing in impeccable and engaging ways. Students will develop these skills by reading and writing art criticism. We will examine the work of modern art critics ranging from Denis Diderot to Peter Schjeldahl and of artists active as critics ranging from Donald Judd to Barbara Kruger. Class discussions will be as much about the craft of writing as about the art reviewed. We will deliberate the style and rhetoric of exhibition reviews, including details such as first and last sentences, order of paragraphs, word choices, and the like. This seminar is writing intensive with a total of six exhibition reviews, four of which will be rewritten substantially based on instructor, visitor, and peer feedback and general class discussion. Off-campus field trips also required.

Instructor(s): C. Mehring     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Permission of instructor required. Preference given to students with background in visual arts or architectural practice or writing. Please email mehring@uchicago.edu explaining relevant background. Fulfills the following requirements in the ARTH major and minor: European and American, modern (post-1800), Theory and Historiography
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 37314, ARTH 27314, ARCH 27314, ARTV 27314, CHST 27314

ARTH 37440. Buddha Then and Now: Transformations from Amaravati to Anuradhapura. 100 Units.

The Buddhist sculptures in Amaravati are arguably the earliest to influence the early Buddhist art of the other parts of the sub-continent as well as south and southeast Asia. The course begins with the discussion of the context in which the Buddha images were made in Amaravati and the factors including Buddhist doctrinal developments that contributed to the spread of these images to various parts of Sri Lanka. Then it traces the course and function of Buddhist iconography in Sri Lanka until into the 21st century to assess the role of geopolitical factors. The positionality and portrayals of the images of Buddha are also considered and analyzed. The course traces the trajectories that transformed the image of the Buddha from a symbol of peace to jingoist assertiveness. Through the study of the images of the Buddha, the aim is to comprehend the ways Buddhism has changed over centuries from an inclusive posture which helped it sustain and spread to different parts of the world only later to become exclusionary.

Instructor(s): Sree Padma Holt     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): SALC 27440, RLST 27440, HREL 37440, SALC 37440, RLVC 37440, HIST 36704, ARTH 27440

ARTH 37441. Interregionalism in Modern and Contemporary Asian Art. 100 Units.

This course introduces "interregional art history" as an alternative to the dominant nation-state-based framework in the study of Asian art. The robust discourse on global art history in recent decades has generated a range of methodological approaches, including comparison, transnationalism, internationalism, regionalism, and the global contemporary. These approaches are also reflected in practice, as seen in artist-led collaborations, traveling exhibitions, and biennales. To capture the diversity of interregionalist thought and praxis, the course adopts a case study approach. Key themes include artistic engagements with Pan-Asianism, the 1955 Bandung Conference, Southeast Asian regionalism and ASEAN, Afro-Asia, Transpacific migration, the construction of the Third World and Global South, and the Asia Pacific Triennial (1993-present). While the course materials focus on East and Southeast Asia, students with diverse geographical interests are welcome. A significant portion of class time and assignments will be devoted to critically assessing the strengths, limitations, and future directions of global art history.

Instructor(s): S Ryu     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): This course fulfills the following requirements in the ARTH major and minor: Asian post-1800, Theory and Methodology
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 27441

ARTH 37490. Art as Buddhism in Ancient India: Explorations in the Stupa of Amaravati and Other Monuments. 100 Units.

This course will examine the visual construction of early Buddhism in India, focusing in particular on stūpas and especially on the art of the great stūpa (mahachaitya) at Amarāvatī in Andhra Pradesh. We will examine questions of Buddhology, of the diversity and range of conversations within early Buddhism, leading to the rise of the Mahāyāna, in relation to the visualization of Buddhist theory and narrative in the extensive and extraordinary decorations of the major sites. The course will introduce those taking it to the rich visual, material and epigraphic culture of the Buddhist stūpas as well as the vibrant textual world of Indian Buddhist writing - from stories to suttas to commentaries. Students will have the opportunity to develop their own final papers in relation to this material or comparatively with other material in which they also retain an interest (not necessarily only Buddhist).

Instructor(s): Jaś Elsner     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): The course will be taught over 5 weeks in the Spring Quarter on an intensive schedule. This course meets the HS or LMCS Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students.
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 27490, RLST 27490, HREL 37490, SALC 27490, RLVC 37490, SALC 37490

ARTH 37799. Materiality and Artistic Intent: The Object, Conservation and Art History-Suzanne Deal Booth Seminar. 100 Units.

This course will investigate materiality in the context of art-historical study. Thirty years ago technical art history was a burgeoning field of study among a small number of museum conservators, curators and scientists. Today curatorial/conservation partnerships are common and analytic methods to examine and characterize artworks are sophisticated and often nondestructive. The intersection of the three disciplines - art history, conservation and materials science - has made it possible to study art in a more holistic and objective manner by understanding the art-making materials, the methods of using them, and the conscious choices made by artists to achieve their aesthetic goals. Additionally, changes to works of art, whether the result of inherent instability, external environmental factors, or artist's intent may be more readily identified and assessed. Case studies will be presented to show how artists' methods and materials can be informative within a broader art-historical context. The course will address the meaningful integration of technical study into one's own curatorial/art history practice. Students will examine works of art firsthand to determine the materials and methods used in their making, to assess their condition, and to see how various manipulations of different art-making materials inform their appearance. Students will evaluate selected readings and recent technical studies. Class participation is encouraged and expected.

Instructor(s): H. Strauss     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): This course fulfills the following requirements in the ARTH major and minor: Theory and Methodology
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 27799

ARTH 38105. Body, Space, Desire; Feminist Theories of Visuality. 100 Units.

TBD

Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 28102, ARTH 28105, GNSE 38105

ARTH 38311. Image, Iconoclasm, Animation. 100 Units.

This course will explore the fantasies of the animation of images both ancient and early Christian, both secular and sacred, as the backdrop to examining the phenomenon of iconoclasm as an assault on the image from pre-Christian antiquity via Byzantium to the Protestant Reformation. It will tackle both texts and images, the archaeological context of image-assault and the conceptual (indeed theological) contexts within which such assault was both justified and condemned. These historical issues cannot be separated, in our scholarly approaches and responses, from a vibrant contemporary culture around question of virtuality, animation, image-worship and image-destruction in the current world. The course will provide space to reflect on the problems raised by this. The course will be taught over the first four and a half weeks in the Spring Quarter on an intensive schedule. It will be examined on the basis of a paper, due on a subject to be agreed and on a date to be agreed at the end of the Spring quarter.

Instructor(s): Jaś Elsner     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): The course will be taught over the first 4 and a half weeks in the Spring Quarter on an intensive schedule.
Note(s): This course meets the HS or LMCS Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students.
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 28311, KNOW 38311, CLCV 25923, RLST 28311, RLVC 38311, CLAS 35923, MDVL 28311

ARTH 38319. Iconophobia: The Prohibition and Destruction of Religious Images. 100 Units.

This course examines concepts of art that reflect iconophobia, "fear of images," in the Abrahamic religions-Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Since antiquity, iconophobia has led to theological debates that resulted in the prohibition of images in sacred spaces, rituals, and other forms of religious practice. In extreme cases, iconophobia has caused acts of iconoclasm, the violent destruction of art. In all three religions, fear of idolatry ("idol worship") has been the main cause of iconophobia. We will examine what exactly constitutes an idol and how the definitions of idols differ from iconophile ("image-loving") assessments of religious art. Both iconophobic and iconophile arguments shed light on the various functions and effects of religious images and illustrate their power. Furthermore, they reveal attitudes towards artistic creation, materiality, aesthetics, sensory perception, and truth in art. In order to understand the causes and manifestations of iconophobia, we will examine a range of primary sources, both textual and visual, and engage with the relevant scholarship. We will take a comparative approach, but also pay attention to phenomena and developments that are unique to each religion. Most of the topics and readings will focus on the premodern period from antiquity to the 16th century. However, we will also look at some of the effects of iconophobia in our own time.

Instructor(s): Karin Krause     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): This course meets the HS or LMCS Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students.
Equivalent Course(s): CLCV 28325, RLST 28319, MDVL 28319, CLAS 38325, ARTH 28319, HCHR 38319, GLST 28319, RLVC 38319

ARTH 38325. Art and Description in Antiquity and Byzantium. 100 Units.

This course explores the rich tradition of ekphrasis in Greco-Roman antiquity and Byzantium - as it ranges from vivid description in general to a specific engagement with works of art. While the prime focus will remain on texts from Greece, Rome and Byzantium - in order to establish what might be called the ancestry of a genre in the European tradition and especially its fascinating place between pagan polytheistic and Christian writing -- there will be opportunity in the final paper to range beyond this into questions of comparative literature, art (history) writing and ekphrasis in other periods or contexts, depending on students' interests and needs. A reading knowledge of Greek in particular could not be described as a disadvantage, but the course can be taken without knowing the ancient languages. The course will be taught over the first 4 and a half weeks in the Spring Quarter on an intensive schedule. It will be examined on the basis of a paper, due on a subject to be agreed and on a date to be agreed at the end of the Spring quarter.

Instructor(s): Jaś Elsner and Karin Krause     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): The course will be taught over the first 4 and a half weeks in the Spring Quarter on an intensive schedule.
Note(s): This course meets the HS or LMCS Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students.
Equivalent Course(s): KNOW 38325, RLST 28325, MDVL 28325, ARTH 28325, CLCV 28323, RLVC 38325, CLAS 38323

ARTH 38330. Art and Religion from the Roman to the Christian Worlds. 100 Units.

This course will be an introduction to Roman and early Christian art from the early empire to late antiquity. It will explore the significance of the changes in visual production in relation to different attitudes to religion and society; its specific and conflictive historiography; the particular issues involved in the move to Christianity and a Christian visual culture. We shall veer between an empirical inductive approach, looking at lots of stuff and a more general account of theoretical overviews that have been offered for Roman and late art - overviews that have been influential in the broader historiography of art history as a discipline.

Instructor(s): Jaś Elsner     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): The course will be taught over 5 weeks in the Spring Quarter on an intensive schedule. This course meets the HS or LMCS Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students.
Equivalent Course(s): CLCV 28322, RLVC 38330, RLST 28330, CLAS 38322, ARTH 28330

ARTH 38500. History of International Cinema I: Silent Era. 100 Units.

This course provides a survey of the history of cinema from its emergence in the mid-1890s to the transition to sound in the late 1920s. We will examine the cinema as a set of aesthetic, social, technological, national, cultural, and industrial practices as they were exercised and developed during this 30-year span. Especially important for our examination will be the exchange of film techniques, practices, and cultures in an international context. We will also pursue questions related to the historiography of the cinema, and examine early attempts to theorize and account for the cinema as an artistic and social phenomenon.

Instructor(s): Daniel Morgan     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Prior or concurrent registration in CMST 10100 is required. Course is required for students majoring or minoring in Cinema and Media Studies.
Note(s): For students majoring in Cinema and Media Studies, the entire History of International Cinema three-course sequence must be taken.
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 20002, CMLT 32400, CMST 48500, CMLT 22400, CMST 28500, ARTH 28500, ENGL 29300, MADD 18500, ENGL 48700, MAPH 33600

ARTH 38600. History of International Cinema II: Sound Era to 1960. 100 Units.

The center of this course is film style, from the classical scene breakdown to the introduction of deep focus, stylistic experimentation, and technical innovation (sound, wide screen, location shooting). The development of a film culture is also discussed. Texts include Thompson and Bordwell's Film History: An Introduction; and works by Bazin, Belton, Sitney, and Godard. Screenings include films by Hitchcock, Welles, Rossellini, Bresson, Ozu, Antonioni, and Renoir.

Instructor(s): James Lastra     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Prior or concurrent registration in CMST 10100 required. Required of students majoring or minoring in Cinema and Media Studies.
Note(s): CMST 28500/48500 strongly recommended
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 28600, ARTH 28600, ENGL 29600, CMLT 32500, REES 25005, CMLT 22500, CMST 48600, ARTV 20003, MAPH 33700, ENGL 48900, MADD 18600, REES 45005

ARTH 38717. The Veil and the Vision: Image and Cover in the Western Artistic Tradition. 100 Units.

This course will explore the fascinating culture of covering and veiling sacred icons, portraits and images that were thought to cause trauma or outrage in the European tradition. It will begin in the ancient world and explore mediaeval, Renaissance and modern art - both paintings and sculptures, as well as images that represent the covering of images… It will attempt to restore the sensual, the tactile and the performative to the experience of viewing art and engaging with its powers, by contrast to the prevailing regime of disinterested contemplation encouraged by the modernist art gallery. The course will be taught with much encouragement to students to experiment and think against the grain.

Instructor(s): Jaś Elsner     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): The course will be taught over 4.5 weeks in the Spring Quarter on an intensive schedule. This course meets the LMCS Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students.
Equivalent Course(s): RLVC 38717, ARTH 28717, RLST 28717

ARTH 38926. The Romantic Fragment. 100 Units.

A central experimental genre of Early Romanticism, the fragment was defined by Friedrich Schlegel in Athenäums-Fragment 206 as: "entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog." This seminar will consider fragments both conceptually and as isolated texts that are, however, gathered together materially in medial collections such as encyclopedias and albums. What is the relationship of the fragment to totality or coherence? What kinds of knowledge and reading practices does the fragment presuppose? What is the relationship between the literary fragment and other kinds of fragmentary artifacts such as ruins, torsos, and cut-outs? Readings will include fragments and fragmentary works by, among others, Winckelmann, Lichtenberg, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Novalis, and Karoline von Günderrode.

Instructor(s): Catriona MacLeod     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 28926, GRMN 28926, GRMN 38926, ENGL 38926, ARTH 28926

ARTH 39765. Cultural Heritage Management Crisis in Conflict Areas. 100 Units.

As a result of the widespread destruction of monuments, museums, and archaeological sites in conflict areas, combined with the creation of brand-new international funds to protect heritage in situations of armed conflict or climate change, this class presents a series of lectures and discussions by the course instructors along with guest lectures by heritage specialists who focus on the various geographical zones concerned. It will also adopt a transdisciplinary approach where several fields of expertise will be convoked, from archaeology and curatorial to international heritage protection law.

Instructor(s): Marc Maillot, Gil Stein     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): NEHC 29765, KNOW 29675, KNOW 39765, NEHC 39765

ARTH 39800. Approaches To Art History. 100 Units.

This seminar will examine a range of methodological approaches to doing the work of art history. Through close reading of key texts, we will interrogate how various authors have constructed novel ways of seeing and understanding visual and material objects. Crucially, this course doesn't assume "theory" or "methodology" to be a set of texts we use to explicate or read works of art in specific ways. Rather, we investigate how each of our authors forges new concepts in response to an object's specific exigencies. Students need not self-identify as art historians to enroll in this seminar-it will be helpful for all students who want to think deeply and in self-reflexive ways about their own approaches to visual and material objects (still or moving images, sculpture, performance, architecture, etc.), particularly if those objects feel genre-bending, difficult to theorize, or recalcitrant in any way.

Instructor(s): E. Warren     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Open to MAPH students concentrating in Art History. Others by consent only.
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 39800

ARTH 39900. Methods and Issues in Cinema Studies. 100 Units.

This course offers an introduction to ways of reading, writing on, and teaching film. The focus of discussion will range from methods of close analysis and basic concepts of film form, technique and style; through industrial/critical categories of genre and authorship (studios, stars, directors); through aspects of the cinema as a social institution, psycho-sexual apparatus and cultural practice; to the relationship between filmic texts and the historical horizon of production and reception. Films discussed will include works by Griffith, Lang, Hitchcock, Deren, Godard.

Instructor(s): S. Skvirsky     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 33000, CMST 40000, ENGL 48000

ARTH 40010. Ruins. 100 Units.

Ruins" will cover texts and images, from Thucydides to WWII, via the Reformation. We will include films (e.g. Rossellini's "Germany Year Zero"), art (e.g. H. Robert, Piranesi) archaeology, and the museum (Soane). On ruins writing, we will read Thucydides, Pausanias from within antiquity, the Enlightenment responses to the destruction and archaeological rediscovery of Pompeii, Diderot, Simmel, Freud on the mind as levels of ruins (Rome) and the analysis as reconstructive archaeologist as well as on the novel Gradiva and the Acropolis, the Romantic obsession with ruins, and the firebombing in WWII. We will also consider the photographing of ruins, and passages from the best-known works on photography (Benjamin, Sontag, Ritchen, Fried, Azoulay). The goal is to see how ruin gazing, and its depictions (textual, imagistic, photographic, etc.) change from the ancients (Greek and Roman), to the Romantic use of ruins as a source of (pleasurable) melancholy, to the technological "advances" in targeting and decimating civilian populations that describe the Second Word War.

Equivalent Course(s): RLIT 40010, CMLT 40010, CDIN 40010

ARTH 40100. Art History Methodology. 100 Units.

How do we do art history? What is it? What are its premises and where does it come from? This seminar will explore the historical foundations, formulations and applications of current art historical methods, as well as the foundations of the art historical discipline as it emerged from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Theory and practice will be considered through select texts, with special focus on art history as a distinct scholarly discipline today. Rather than attempting to cover a comprehensive history of the methodological and historiographic traditions, the readings will attempt to present a coherent, if highly complex and conflictive, narrative that remains open to continued interrogation by its practitioners.

Instructor(s): C. Foxwell     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Enrollment limited to ARTH PhD students
Note(s): Fulfills the following requirements in the ARTH major and minor: Theory and Methodology

ARTH 40160. Writing on the Walls: Art and Poetry in the Streets of Early Modern Florence. 100 Units.

Street art inscribes a story across public surfaces and urban spaces, celebrated by some for its unique representation of cultural identity while criticized by others as vandalism. Such tensions associated with street art today were no less significant in early modern Florence, where the emerging presence of art in public spaces, from murals memorializing military victories, to portraits of criminals, and sculptures occupying strategic squares, engaged deeply with political, social, and economic structures of power while addressing a diverse network of viewers. How then, does public art embody complex systems of knowledge, power, and resistance in early modern Florence, and what does it look like for writers to adopt visual modes of representation to explore subversive tensions in both real and imaginary spaces? We will explore the influence of public visibility and environment on descriptions of public art in both fictional and historical sources. From Dante drawing in the Vita Nuova, to Boccaccio's tales in the Decameron, and the political staging of Cellini's Perseus, we will situate these images and texts within the cultural modes and means of representation that generated them to investigate how street art could create artistic and literary spaces of resistance and define or affirm cultural identity in the Renaissance. Finally, we will look at street art and graffiti in contemporary Florence as well as digital media to consider the legacy of these early modern tensions.

Instructor(s): Cosette Bruhns     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): RLLT 23405, RLLT 33405, MAPH 40160, ITAL 23405, ITAL 33405

ARTH 40200. Art History Proseminar. 100 Units.

How do we do art history? What is it? What are its premises and where does it come from? This seminar will explore the historical foundations, formulations and applications of current art historical methods, as well as the foundations of the art historical discipline as it emerged from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Both theory and practice will be considered through select texts, with special focus on art history as a distinct scholarly discipline today. Required of all first year ARTH PhD students.

Instructor(s): D. English     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Open to and required of first year Art History PhD students only.

ARTH 40204. Destruction of Images, Books & Artifacts in Europe and S. Asia. 100 Units.

The course offers a comparative perspective on European and South Asian iconoclasm. In the European tradition, iconoclasm was predominantly aimed at images, whereas in South Asian traditions it was also enacted upon books and buildings. The combination of these traditions will allow us to extend the usual understanding of iconoclasm as the destruction of images to a broader phenomenon of destruction of cultural artifacts and help question the theories of image as they have been independently developed in Europe and South Asia, and occasionally in conversation with one another. We will ask how and why, in the context of particular political imaginaries and material cultures, were certain objects singled out for iconoclasm? Also, who was considered to be entitled or authorized to commit their destruction? Through a choice of concrete examples of iconoclasm, we will query how religious and political motivations are defined, redefined, and intertwined in each particular case. We will approach the iconoclastic events in Europe and South Asia through the lenses of philology, history, and material culture. Class discussions will incorporate not only textual materials, but also the close collaborative study of images, objects, and film. Case studies will make use of objects in the Art Institute of Chicago and Special Collections at the University Library.

Equivalent Course(s): CDIN 50204, RLVC 50204, SALC 50204, HREL 50204, CMLT 50204

ARTH 40307. Seeing and Knowing. 100 Units.

The concept of visuality attends to the ways in which things become seeable, knowable, and governable. Scholars who study optical instruments, architecture, cinema, and media have done much to show us how visual technologies change our ways of seeing. Others in the history of science study how practices of observation transform our understanding of nature-and ourselves. This comparative course analyzes regimes of visuality in different cultural and historical contexts. After a short introduction on the philosophy of visual experience and psychology of visual perception, we will investigate a series of configurations of seeing and knowing. These sites range from the history of disability to contemporary climate science, and students will be asked to contribute visual topics from their own research or disciplines for collective exploration in our seminar. Through comparative study, we will work to develop new categories or relationships for linking perception and knowledge.

Instructor(s): Alex Campolo     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 47007, CHSS 40307, KNOW 40307

ARTH 40310. The Discovery of Paganism. 100 Units.

How do we know what we know about ancient religions? Historians of religion often begin by turning to texts: either sacred texts, or, in the absence of such scriptures, descriptions of belief and practice by observers from outside the faith. Archaeologists focus their attention on the spaces and traces of religious practice-or at least those that survive-while art historians begin by examining images of deities and religious rites. Yet we often fail to see the extent to which the questions which we ask of all of these diverse sources are conditioned by Christian rhetoric about pagan worship. In this course, we compare two moments when Christians encountered "pagans": during the initial Christian construction of a discourse on paganism (and, more broadly, a discourse on religion) during the late Roman empire and during the Spanish discovery of the New World. Our course examines silences and absences in the textual and material records, as well as the divergences between texts and objects, in order to further our understanding of ancient religious practice. We will begin to see the many ways in which, as scholars of religion, we are in effect still Christian theologians, paving the way for new approaches to the study of ancient religion.

Equivalent Course(s): CDIN 40301, HIST 64202, CLAS 44916, HREL 40301, LACS 40301, ANCM 44916, KNOW 40301

ARTH 40311. Technology and Aesthetics. 100 Units.

New technologies regularly enable new mediums, styles, genres, and narrative forms as they offer us new ways to record the world, express ourselves, and tell stories. But the advent of each new artistic and literary form raises anew fundamental theoretical questions: what is the difference between an objective record of the world and an artistic rendition of it? Is what makes something art the creator's intent or the viewer's perception of it as art? That is, can something be experienced as art if it is not intended as such? What, even, is a narrative, given our minds' tendency to resolve any random pattern into a coherent series of cause and effect? And, finally, as new technologies offer endless new creative possibilities, how can we continuously recalibrate how we define art and engage with it? This class will span the 19th through the 21st centuries to explore how technological innovation has produced new literary and aesthetic forms while addressing the above questions. Its aim is two-fold: to offer a deeper understanding of literary and artistic movements and (often-canonical) texts by relating them to technoscientific concerns and contexts, and to strengthen students' foundation in literary and aesthetic theory. Thus, we will read key works of fiction that represent new aesthetic paradigms alongside scholarship that puts them into context and theoretical texts, including those of Walter Benjamin, Michael Saler, Catherine Gallagher, and Henry Jenkins.

Instructor(s): Anastasia Klimchynskaya     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 40310, CHSS 40410, KNOW 40310

ARTH 40400. Ekphrasis: Art, Description and Religion. 100 Units.

This course explores the rich traditions of description - ekphrasis - from Greco-Roman antiquity into the middle ages. It tackles texts (both prose and verse) in order to establish the ramifications of a genre in the European tradition, and its applications in particular to visual culture and religion. There will be opportunity in the final paper to range beyond these into questions of comparative literature, art (history) writing, religious imagination and ekphrasis in all periods or contexts, as well as into the use of images or films as themselves forms of descriptive response. The course is intended for graduates but interested undergraduates are very welcome. It will be examined on the basis of a paper, due on a subject to be agreed and on a date to be agreed at the end of the Spring quarter.

Instructor(s): Jaś Elsner     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): This course will be taught virtually for the last two weeks of the quarter. This course meets the HS or LMCS Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students.
Equivalent Course(s): CLAS 42600, ARTH 21702, RLST 29004, CLCV 29600, MDVL 29004, RLVC 40400, BIBL 40400

ARTH 40401. Ekphrasis: Description, Vision and Imagination in Art and Religion. 100 Units.

This course explores the rich traditions of the description - ekphrasis -- from Greco-Roman antiquity to modernity. It tackles texts (both prose and verse) in order to establish the ramifications of a genre in the European tradition, and its applications in particular to visual culture and religion. There will be opportunity in the final paper to range beyond these into questions of comparative literature, art (history) writing, religious imagination and ekphrasis in all periods or contexts, as well as into the use of images or films as themselves forms of descriptive response. The course is primarily intended for graduates but interested undergraduates are welcome. The course will be taught over 5 weeks in the Spring Quarter on an intensive schedule. It will be examined on the basis of a paper, due on a subject to be agreed and on a date to be agreed at the end of the Spring quarter.

Instructor(s): Jaś Elsner and Francoise Meltzer     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Note: Consent of instructor required for undergraduates; email Professors Meltzer and Elsner a paragraph long description about what you bring and what you hope to get out of this seminar. (CDI seminar enrollment is capped at 18 students.)
Equivalent Course(s): CDIN 49002, CMLT 49002, DVPR 49002, RLVC 49002

ARTH 40702. Tokyo: Architecture and Urban Analysis. 100 Units.

This graduate seminar course aims to introduce what is arguably the most complex product of society and Japanese society in particular - the city, and to concentrate on the city of Tokyo. Our study will encompass a range of issues concerning the city and the consequences of urban development under modern and contemporary conditions. We will observe how the city has defined, and has been defined by, a particular reality at a particular time, beginning in Edo period and concluding in the present. Such approach emphasizes a need to examine the city within a certain context, particularly its social, cultural, and political circumstances. Thus, we will look at the creation and recreation of the city's physical texture, at architecture, urban landscape, infrastructure, and technology, and at the same time observe the city as a social product determined by everyday life and habitual practices, organization of the immediate surrounding, personal rites and the micro-politics of life in the city. In the same manner, we will look at buildings and neighborhoods per-se, as a material construct guided by geometry and legal code, but at the same time recognize how the pragmatics of this built environment interrelate with cultural expressions such as literature and film, and thus examine the mechanisms that relate the city to culture.

Instructor(s): E. Golani Solomon     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Consent only

ARTH 41031. The South American 1970s. 100 Units.

This course will examine major developments in art practices from the late 1960s through the early 1980s in key site across South America. Questions and themes will include: the emergence and theorization of non-objectual and conceptual art practices in the region, the relationship between art and repressive political regimes, the establishment of new networks of exchange, and the formation of new definitions of a "Latin American art." Our goal will be both to analyze the works of art under study and to interrogate leading scholarly approaches to that material. Cases will be drawn primarily from Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, with a focus on recent literature in the field, but students are welcome to work on artists from other countries in the region for their individual research projects.

Instructor(s): M. Sullivan     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Consent Only
Equivalent Course(s): LACS 41031

ARTH 41150. Art & the World Religions: First Millennium from India to Ireland. 100 Units.

This course, building on the recent Empires of Faith project at the British Museum will explore the interface of visual and religious identity in the formative period when all the religions currently considered 'world religions' were developing their characteristic iconographies. The course will attempt to open comparative and historical perspectives on religion through material culture, interrogating the normative models of constructing religion through written rather than visual sources. Students will be encouraged to work from images as well as texts. The course is open to graduates as well as undergraduates, and will be taught in a speeded up form twice a week for the first five weeks of the quarter.

Instructor(s): Jas Elsner     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): RLVC 41150

ARTH 41310. Images and Science. 100 Units.

TBD

Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 51310, CHSS 51310

ARTH 41313. Media Archeology vs. Media Aesthetics. 100 Units.

The course stages an encounter between media archeology and media aesthetics, two distinct but related research perspectives that are at times seen as incommensurable approaches to the media technological environment. Media archeology focuses on the non-human agencies and complex machinic arrangements that are at work in technologies whose microtemporal operations cannot be grasped by human perception: media archeology typically refuses phenomenological approaches. In contrast, media aesthetics focuses on the phenomenological interface between machine systems and human perception and sensation, and various forms of cultural and political negotiations of a lifeworld that is increasingly dominated by technologies that both store and produce time. We will read key texts from both fields and discuss how we may understand their differences as well as their points of intersection.

Instructor(s): I. Blom     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Students must attend 1st class to confirm enrollment.
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 47801

ARTH 41602. The Cult of Relics in Byzantium and Beyond. 100 Units.

The cult of relics played a vital role in Byzantine culture and, consequently, left a strong imprint on the artistic production. Not only did the veneration of relics find expression in personal devotion, but the image of the Byzantine court was largely modeled on the claim that the emperors possessed the most precious of all sacred remains, first and foremost those associated with the Passion of Christ and the Virgin Mary. The outstanding treasure of relics housed in the imperial palace significantly contributed to the understanding in the medieval Christian world of Constantinople as the "New Jerusalem. We will begin our investigation in the ancient Near East, where major centers of pilgrimage developed from the fourth century on. These sites considerably fueled the early Byzantine cult of relics and the associated artistic production. The chief focus of the seminar will be on the major urban centers of the Byzantine Empire, especially the capital city of Constantinople. We will closely study different types of reliquaries manufactured in the Byzantine Empire over the centuries and investigate how their design responded to devotional needs, ritual practice and political claims. Historical developments and primary texts (in English translation) will be addressed throughout to better understand the circumstances of the acquisition of relics and the motivations guiding their veneration.

Instructor(s): Karin Krause     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): This course meets the HS or SCSR Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students.
Equivalent Course(s): HCHR 41604, RLVC 41604

ARTH 41750. The Sacred Gaze: Beholding as a Spiritual Exercise in the European Artistic Tradition. 100 Units.

This course spans the history of Western Art from the ancient Greeks to the Early Modern Period. It explores the sacred gaze, construed as a series of technologies for constructing the relationship between images and their viewers and as a key piece of social equipment for the ethopoiesis of the human subject. It asks how vision became the object of a moral discourse in Greco-Roman antiquity in both sacred and 'philosophical' contexts, and what happened to this problematic in the historical emergence and development of Christianity. We will do some comparative work on similar processes in relation to Buddhism. Drawing on ideas in the philosophical work of Michel Foucault, Pierre Hadot and Arnold Davidson, our hypothesis is that these issues precipitate in encounters with visual representations, such that the beholding of inter alia statues and paintings became a topic of concern, with the implication that a suitably attentive and informed study of those images will be informative for prehistorians of the aesthetic subject. Although the course will give weight to description and theological/philosophical investigation, the principal focus will be on objects themselves and their own material/visual articulation of the conditions of seeing.

Instructor(s): Jaś Elsner, Richard Neer     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CDIN 41750, RLVC 41750

ARTH 42205. The Holy Land in the Middle Ages. 100 Units.

This course will examine written and visual material that testifies to the medieval encounters of the Abrahamic religions in a sacred landscape where the histories of Jews, Christians, and Muslims overlap. While bearing witness to the cultural wealth and religious pluralism that characterize the Holy Land during the Middle Ages, texts and visual artifacts likewise testify to religious competition, conflict, loss, and exclusion. Among the primary textual sources we will read (in English translation) are accounts by pilgrims and other travelers to the Holy Land, extracts from medieval chronicles, and eye-witness accounts from the period of the Crusades. In addition to the textual material, we will study art and architecture created for different religious communities (e.g., synagogues and their richly decorated mosaic floors, sites and souvenirs of Christian pilgrimage, major works of Islamic art and architecture). We will also investigate phenomena of the reception of the Holy Land's sacred sites and dynamic history in medieval Europe (e.g., replicas and evocations of the Holy Sepulchre, narratives of the "Holy Grail" and associated artifacts).

Instructor(s): Karin Krause     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ARCH 45200, HCHR 45200, RLVC 45200

ARTH 42605. Refashioning the Forbidden City: Emperor Qianlong and Qing Court Art and Interior Decoration. 100 Units.

During his long reign from 1735 to 1796, Qianlong made numerous innovations in Qing court art and interior decoration. This course investigates these innovations from two new perspectives. First, instead of studying them in the separated domains of architecture, object, and painting, it will explore the interconnections of these three visual forms within Qianlong's specific art/architectural projects. Second, after identifying these projects, the course will use "space" as the central analytical concept to reconstruct their content and process, and to explore Qianlong's intention, imagination, and experimentation.

Instructor(s): Wu Hung     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Reading ability of Chinese, the instructor’s consent

ARTH 42813. Advanced Reading in South Asian Art History. 100 Units.

In this seminar, we will read recent scholarship in the field of South Asian art history. Sections of the class will also focus on writing reviews, whether of a single volume or of a thematic kind. Some prior knowledge of South Asian art history and/or methods of art history would be necessary.

Instructor(s): M. Manohar     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Class is geared towards graduate students, with the instructor’s prior approval. Advanced undergraduate (years 3 and 4), with some training in South Asian history and/or culture, may write to take this course, with the instructor’s prior approval.

ARTH 42913. New Readings in the History of Modern Art. 100 Units.

This course focuses on recently published works in the field of modern art, especially those published in the last five years. Our emphasis will be on emerging methodologies and approaches in the field, especially regarding the study of modernism outside of the North Atlantic and the participation within modernism of subjects usually excluded from its canons and discourses.

Instructor(s): M. Sullivan     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Previous coursework in the history of modern art needed. Consent only.

ARTH 42914. Art of the Sixties in Europe. 100 Units.

Counter to the narrative of "How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art," this seminar examines Continental European art coming into its own. Between the late 1950s and early 1970s, Western European artists increasingly disentangled themselves from a crippling competition with North American art and focused on issues and ways of making that emerged out of their specific social, political, and cultural contexts. We will investigate the ways in which artists engaged with the Cold War, decolonization, urbanism, "68," a limited art market, and an emerging pan-European identity and continental networks. With few exceptions, the class will focus on the art of France, Italy, the Benelux and German speaking countries. We will emphasize primary source documents, art with no or limited scholarship, and recently published books.

Instructor(s): C. Mehring     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Familiarity with postwar art and reading knowledge of at least one West European language—German, French, or Italian—is essential. Consent Only

ARTH 44002. COSI Objects & Materials Seminar. 100 Units.

Team-taught between Northwestern, the Art Institute of Chicago and University of Chicago, this course focuses on sustained, close engagement with art objects in the AIC collection and the methods and questions such inquiry raises. Students will be introduced to basic techniques of stylistic and scientific analysis as well as recent theoretical debates that resituate art history as a study of physical things as well as their disembodied images. Required for all first-year art history graduate students.

Instructor(s): Wei-Cheng Lin     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Open to and required of first year art history PhD students only. This course will meet at the Art Institute of Chicago.

ARTH 44014. The Veneration of Icons in Byzantium: History, Theory, and Practice. 100 Units.

In order to appreciate the pivotal religious significance icons had in Byzantium for private devotion, in the liturgy, in civic ritual, and in military campaigns, we will survey the visual evidence along with a vast array of written sources. We will explore the origins of the Christian cult of icons in the Early Byzantine period and its roots in the ancient Greco-Roman world. Through the close analysis of icons executed over the centuries in different artistic techniques, we will examine matters of iconography, style, and aesthetics. We will also have a close look at image theory, as developed by Byzantine theologians and codified in the era of Iconoclasm. Typically, meetings will consist of both lecture and interactive discussion sections. Students are expected to prepare the mandatory readings for each week, which serve as a basis for an informed, and thus productive, classroom discussion.

Instructor(s): Karin Krause     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): This course meets the HS or SCSR Committee distribution requirement for Divinity students.
Equivalent Course(s): HCHR 44004, RLVC 44004

ARTH 44705. The Long Nineteenth Century in Japanese Art. 100 Units.

This course centers around the Smart's preparations to host the exhibition Meiji Modern: Fifty Years of New Japan. Reading primary and secondary sources in Japanese and European languages, we will assess the history of collecting and exhibiting Meiji art and debate the relevance of a long nineteenth-century approach that emphasizes continuities across the Edo-Meiji divide. Ample attention will be paid to craft, three dimensional objects, and the built environment in addition to paintings and prints. Themes include: gender and the body; the development of a metalanguage through which to discuss art; the changing position of Chinese art and culture; issues of "orientalism" and "occidentalism;" and the designation of "craft" and "calligraphy" as new fields on the margins of the beaux-arts.

Instructor(s): C. Foxwell     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Consent only
Equivalent Course(s): EALC 44705

ARTH 45011. Toward a "material" approach in studying Chinese Art. 100 Units.

This course explores the predominant significance of materials, rather than image or style, in conveying the intended meaning of works of art and in manifesting artists' aesthetic judgement or social critique. These materials can be natural or artificial, personal or generic. They are "selected" either collectively or individually to become the major means of making art over a significant period in history or an artist's career. What are the sources of power of such materials? How are they transformed into works of art? What are their connections with technology, environment, economy, society, religion, culture, and personal experience? Students are expected to conduct individual studies on selected cases (from any time in Chinese history) and to actively respond to other presentations.

Instructor(s): Wu Hung     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): The instructor’s consent.
Equivalent Course(s): EALC 45011

ARTH 45012. Materializing China's Cultural Ephemera. 100 Units.

This seminar explores how a wide range of texts, paintings, and calligraphy originally meant to be ephemeral gain multilayered cultural values over time through materialization in different media. In particular, we will focus on Song and Ming-Qing periods (before modern era) when learned people avidly amassed, compiled, and published these cultural ephemera, an interest further stimulated by the proliferation of printing and a pronounced nostalgia and resulting antiquarianism. The focus of our inquiry will be on the ways in which materiality and media played a critical role in not only transmitting but also enriching and recreating, intentionally or not, their cultural significance, even though the ephemera often survived only in fragments.

Instructor(s): Wei-Cheng Lin     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Reading Chinese is required to register

ARTH 45013. Rethinking Northern Qi (550-577 CE) Art. 100 Units.

Northern Qi (Bei Qi) is one of the short regimes established during the chaotic Northern and Southern Dynasties period from the fourth to sixth centuries. Archaeological excavations in the past half century have revealed that it was a pivotal moment in Chinese art history, creating numerous works of art with innovative styles and iconography. How could a brief regime of only twenty-seven years produce so many works, including those of monumental scales? What were the sources of new images and where did the inspirations come from? Why did this wave of creativity appear across the fields of Buddhist art, funerary art, and secular painting? Who financed these art projects and organized them? This course hopes to respond to these questions by examining existing archaeological finds, transmitted paintings, and historical documents. Students are expected to conduct independent research and to give biweekly presentations.

Instructor(s): Wu Hung     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Prerequisite: reading ability of Chinese, the instructor’s consent

ARTH 45885. Practices of Classicism in the French Seventeenth Century. 100 Units.

This seminar has two goals. One is to combine the text-based tradition of French literary studies with the image-based, comparative tradition of art history-and, in so doing, to change the taxonomies of both. The other is to re-evaluate French Classicism by attending to practices of reading, writing, performing, looking and making. The seminar's breadth is designed to appeal to all graduate students interested in the theory and history of aesthetics, and the interleaving of visual and literary evidence. Looking will be no less important than reading, as we will conduct sessions with original objects in the Art Institute and in Regenstein Special Collections. Authors studied will include Corneille, Molière, La Fontaine, Pascal, and Descartes; among the artists, Poussin, Claude Lorrain, La Tour, and Callot. Critical readings will range from Leo Spitzer to Louis Marin and Foucault. The seminar will be conducted in English; all primary texts will be made available in both English translation and, for those with reading knowledge, in the French original. This seminar will travel to Paris during exam week (March 13-21, 2020); airfare and lodging covered by university. Consent of instructors required.

Instructor(s): Larry Norman and Richard Neer     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 44410, FREN 34420, TAPS 44420, CDIN 44420

ARTH 46005. Algorithms and Aesthetics. 100 Units.

This class will explore questions raised by the use of algorithms, and similar systemic processes, in the arts. Recent developments in computational tools have dramatically increased the availability, and complexity, of algorithmic methods. This seminar will reach back to examine cases-with and without electronic computation-over the last century in a range of artistic fields, including architecture, painting, sculpture, music, and literature. We will consider the challenges that algorithmic methods present for concepts such as authorship, intentionality, originality, meaning, beauty, taste, and art itself.

Equivalent Course(s): CDIN 46005

ARTH 47102. Reading Chinese Architecture. 100 Units.

This class investigates different ways and contexts in which text and architecture are related. The most obvious evidence of their relationship comes from literature, e.g., lyrics, poems, travelogues, diaries, etc., epigraphic documents, and official records. Material texts could also be inscribed on the buildings as traces that reveal practices of building trade, beliefs, or conventions. Religious texts in spells or talismans could also be applied to architecture to exorcise unwanted forces. More extreme examples can be found in the so-called sutra pagodas, literally constructed on paper by sutra texts. Conversely, architecture was also built to contain texts, such as libraries or sutra pavilions. The primary inquiry of the class is to ask how Chinese architecture can be redefined and its cultural/religious/political significance enriched, teasing out not just its spatiality but temporality through text.

Instructor(s): W. Lin     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Consent only. Chinese reading proficiency is required

ARTH 47211. What Was Mise-en-scène? 100 Units.

Mise-en-scène is often understood as a synonym for the act of directing, especially in theater. In film style it is associated with the importance accorded to the placement of props and characters within the film frame, usually in combination with camera movement. This concept was especially important in film criticism of the fifties and sixties and often connected with key post-WWII filmmakers such as Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk and Otto Preminger. This seminar will explore the concept both as historical critical concept, and as an ongoing way to discuss the nature of film style.

Equivalent Course(s): CMST 67211

ARTH 47219. The Romantic Book. 100 Units.

In his Gespräch über den Roman, Friedrich Schlegel declared programmatically: "Ein Roman ist ein romantisches Buch." The convoluted relationship between Roman and romantisch will give us the point of departure for the seminar - but is the third term, Buch, so obvious? We will thus also attempt to offer some definitions of what a book is in the period around 1800. To that end, we will consider works that reflect on Romantic scenarios of manuscript and book production (Schreibszenen) and collecting, as well as evolving forms of literary mixed media around 1800, such as the illustrated book and the Taschenbuch. Our readings will include works by F. Schlegel, A. W. Schlegel, Wackenroder and Tieck, Novalis, E. T.A. Hoffmann, Arnim and Brentano, the Grimms, Runge; and scholarly works by Kittler, Campe, Piper, Spoerhase, and others. The seminar will make use of the holdings of the Rare Book Collection and other area resources; and it will introduce students to working with material texts. Good reading knowledge of German required.

Instructor(s): Catriona MacLeod     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Good reading knowledge of German required.
Equivalent Course(s): GRMN 47219, SCTH 47219

ARTH 47220. Temporal Dunhuang. 100 Units.

This course examines multiple temporalities of the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang, as implied in the history of the entire cave complex, the construction process of individual caves, the successive creation of "family caves," the relationship of specific caves to the central government and local regimes, and the temporal structures of different pictorial and sculptural programs. It is hoped that such investigations will lay a methodological basis to envision a new history of the Dunhuang Caves. Students will conduct independent research on well-chosen topics.

Instructor(s): Wu Hung     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Consent Required, Chinese reading ability is required.

ARTH 47606. Narrating the Artist in East Asia and Beyond. 100 Units.

For the past century, the artist's monograph -the 'life and works' account- has been a mainstay of museum research and art historical publication, even though the genre has been garnering criticism for some time. In the wake of the deconstruction of the author and the emergence of new theories of subjecthood, what is to be gained by writing an extended study of a single artist? Is the model hopelessly encumbered by assumptions about the artist as (white, male) creator-genius, or is there still something important to be accomplished by the intimate study of an individual and her works? How is this project affected as we turn our attention to artists in different centuries and locales?

Instructor(s): C. Foxwell     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Preferred: Arts of Japan or Art of the East: China
Note(s): Registration is granted by permission only. Students must attend first class to confirm enrollment.
Equivalent Course(s): EALC 47606

ARTH 48211. Modern Dunhuang. 100 Units.

After its modern discovery, Dunhuang-the home of Buddhist grottoes constructed between the 4th and 14th centuries-had been a site of intensive research that paved the way for the rise of Dunhuang Studies later in the twentieth century, including research in cave art and retrieved manuscripts. While these earlier endeavors made an indelible contribution to our knowledge of Dunhuang, this course posits a complexity in building the site into the discourse of modern China and a dialectic relationship between modern Dunhuang and the research of historical Dunhuang. To better understand this complexity, this course foregrounds how Dunhuang came to be known and studied in the politics of Western colonialism and the restructuring of modern China. The course will also trace the trajectory in which modern Dunhuang developed through a spectrum of different "representations" -architectural diagrams, photographs, paintings, exhibitions, etc. By focusing on these representations, students will analyze the agenda in the conception of Dunhuang as a site of national pride and heritage and consider its role in narratives of twentieth-century East Asian Art.

Instructor(s): W. Cheng Lin     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Consent Only
Equivalent Course(s): EALC 48211

ARTH 48301. Neoclassical Aesthetics: Transnational Approaches. 100 Units.

Though "aesthetic" philosophy first developed as an autonomous field in the mid-eighteenth century, it has important roots in earlier eighteenth- and seventeenth-century debates concerning literature and the arts. In the wake of Cartesian rationalism, could reasoned method be reconciled with non-rational creativity, or decorous order with the unruly "sublime"? Just what kind of "truth" was revealed by poetry or painting? What is the value of the Greco-Roman models versus authorial innovation? We will consider the relation between literature and other media (particularly opera and the visual arts) and read French texts in dialogue with other, and often contending, national trends (British, German, Italian). Readings will include Descartes, Pascal, Perrault, Félibien, Dryden, Du Bos, Addison, Vico, Montesquieu, Staël, and A.W. Schlegel.

Instructor(s): Larry Norman     Terms Offered: Course not taught in 2025-26
Prerequisite(s): Reading knowledge of French is required. Undergrads permitted with consent of instructor.
Note(s): Taught in English. Students seeking FREN credit must complete all readings and written work in French.
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 38600, FREN 37000, SCTH 37000

ARTH 48905. Style and Performance from Stage to Screen. 100 Units.

Actor is the oldest profession among arts. Cinema is the youngest art there is. What happens with faces, gestures, monologues, and voices; ancient skills like dance or mime; grand histrionics etc. when arts of performance hit the medium of screen? This course will focus on the history of acting styles in silent films, mapping "national" styles of acting that emerged during the 1910s (American, Danish, Italian, Russian) and various "acting schools" that proliferated during the 1920s ("Expressionist acting," "Kuleshov's Workshop," et al.). We will discuss film acting in the context of various systems of stage acting (Delsarte, Stanislavsky, Meyerhold) and the visual arts.

Equivalent Course(s): CMST 68400

ARTH 49208. Modernism in the Black Metropolis. 100 Units.

TBD

Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 49200

ARTH 49213. New Readings in the History of Modern Art. 100 Units.

This course focuses on recently published works in the field of modern art, especially those published in the last five years. Our emphasis will be on emerging methodologies and approaches in the field, especially regarding the study of modernism outside of the North Atlantic and the participation within modernism of subjects usually excluded from its canons and discourses.

Instructor(s): M. Sullivan     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Previous coursework in the history of modern art is required. Consent only.

ARTH 49700. The Archive: Materiality, Aesthetics, Visual Culture. 100 Units.

This graduate seminar will prepare students to conduct archival research, and to build a research archive from different historical, methodological, and theoretical perspectives. While we will engage a range of texts on archival methodology, theory, and the phenomenology of the archive, we will also examine questions concerning aesthetics, materiality, visual culture, and the digital that inform our understanding of archives today. The seminar will be partially organized around case studies that foreground different archival modes of discovery, evaluation, and interpretation-including those that constitute the "counter archive." Students will learn practical skills for conducting research in filmic, paper and print, and internet archives, and develop the investigative, analytical abilities that are necessary for building an archive around either material objects or theoretical questions.

Instructor(s): Jennifer Wild     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 69110, FREN 49100

ARTH 49800. Independent Research: Art. 100 Units.

Individualized study focused on PhD research in Art History. This course can also be used as the preliminary exam reading course.

Instructor(s): Staff     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter

ARTH 49808. Qualifying Paper Course I. 100 Units.

Individualized study for Art History students working on their Qualifying Paper; first of two quarters.

Instructor(s): Staff     Terms Offered: Autumn,Spring,Winter

ARTH 49809. Qualifying Paper Course II. 100 Units.

Individualized study for Art History students working on their Qualifying Paper; first of two quarters.

Instructor(s): Staff     Terms Offered: Autumn,Spring,Winter

ARTH 49820. Preliminary Exam Reading Course. 100 Units.

Individualized study for Art History students working on their Preliminary Exams.

Instructor(s): Staff     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter

ARTH 50100. Teaching Colloquium. 100 Units.

In the fall of their third year, students register for the Art History Department Teaching Colloquium. The requirements for this class, fulfilled over the course of the entire academic year, consist of attending three department-sponsored teaching workshops, one each quarter, in addition to at least six hours of programming at the Chicago Center for Teaching and Learning (CCTL), chosen by each student to match their individual pedagogical training needs. All faculty and graduate students in the department are welcome at the quarterly teaching workshops, the topics of which are determined with student input and may include: the structure of the art history college core course program in which all faculty and students teach; instructor authority and classroom dynamics; leading discussion; effective lecturing; strategic use of images in classroom teaching; small-group class projects; designing and grading assignments; preparing lesson plans; designing syllabi. The department requires third-year students to participate fully in the workshops and in their chosen CCTL programming, to register for the teaching colloquium for credit, and to earn a Pass, which will be recorded once the requirements are completed in Spring quarter.

Instructor(s): C. Brittenham     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Fulfills the following requirements in the ARTH major and minor: Theory and Methodology

ARTH 50101. Teaching Colloquium. 100 Units.

Led by a faculty member each fall, this seminar meets weekly for 80 minutes, to address various topics through discussion with visitors (especially department faculty members) and occasionally through discussion of assigned readings. On the premise that one learns the most about teaching not well in advance but rather by reflecting with peer and senior colleagues on techniques and problems when one is in the midst of the challenge, this forum is meant to address participants' specific concerns and experiences, especially those related to art history. The quarter's topics are determined with student input and may include: the structure of the art history college core course program in which all faculty and students teach; the jobs of course assistant and writing intern; instructor authority and classroom dynamics; leading discussion; effective lecturing; strategic use of pictures in classroom teaching; small-group class projects; designing and grading assignments; designing syllabi. From year to year, the colloquium may address similar topics but the emphasis and tips will change depending on the participants. The department requires third-year students to participate fully in the colloquium, register for credit, and earn a Pass. More advanced students who have previously taken the colloquium are welcome to return on an occasional or regular basis to share experiences, strategies, and to seek advice on new teaching challenges.

Instructor(s): M. Ward     Terms Offered: Autumn Winter
Note(s): Required of all third year ARTH PhD students.

ARTH 50200. Dissertation Workshop. 100 Units.

This course is conducted by a faculty member every spring to introduce third-year students to the tasks of preparing grant proposals and applications. The aim of the workshop is to help you produce a finished dissertation proposal by the early autumn of your fourth year and to prepare you to apply for grants at that time. The department requires third-year students to participate fully in the workshop, register for credit, and earn a Pass.

Instructor(s): C Foxwell     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Consent only
Note(s): Open to third year art history PhD students only.

ARTH 50400. Logic, Truth, and Pictures. 100 Units.

The course aims at the logic of pictures, but because it is controversial whether such a topic exists, or should exist at all (some arguing that pictures are alogical, others that they require a logic sui generis), the course will be less a primer in "visual logic" or "logic of artifacts" than a preliminary investigation of what sets pictures apart from and how they are like other modes of thinking. Resemblance, reference, and fiction will be recurring topics; we begin with questions about the nature and peculiarity of pictures and move on to the prospects of arguing about and through pictures, concluding with the questions of their relation to truth. We will actually look at pictures besides talking about them. We will also ask what kind of objects beside conventional two-dimensional images and sculptures might usefully be called pictures. Reading will include classics (Plato, Gombrich), as well as some of the instructor's own work in progress, based on the ideas of Gottlob Frege.

Terms Offered: Not offered 21-22.
Equivalent Course(s): SCTH 50400

ARTH 70000. Advanced Study: Art History. 300.00 Units.

Advanced Study: Art History