Department of Art History

ARTH 30033. Iconology East and West. 100 Units.

Iconology is the study of images across media and cultures. It is also associated with philosophical reflections on the nature of images and their relation to language-the interplay between the "icon" and the "logos." A plausible translation of this compound word into Chinese would describe it as "Words in Pictures, Pictures in Words":  诗中有画，画中有诗. This seminar will explore the relations of word and image in poetics, semiotics, and aesthetics with a particular emphasis on how texts and pictures have been understood in the Anglo-European-American and Chinese theoretical traditions. The interplay of painting and poetry, speech and spectacle, audition and vision will be considered across a variety of media, particularly the textual and graphic arts. The aims of the course will be 1) to critique the simplistic oppositions between "East" and "West" that have bedevilled intercultural and intermedial comparative studies; 2) to identify common principles, zones of interaction and translation that make this a vital area of study. (Theory; 20th/21st)

Instructor(s): WJT Mitchell     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Enrollment in the course will be with the consent of instructor; it is open to students at all levels, but enrollment will be limited to 15. Students should send a one page statement of their interest to W. J. T. Mitchell (wjtm@uchicago.edu)
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 30230, ENGL 30230, ENGL 20230, ARTH 20033, ARTV 30033, CMLT 20230, ARTV 20033

ARTH 30228. William Blake: Poet, Painter, and Prophet. 100 Units.

A survey of the major poetic and pictorial works of William Blake, centrally focussed on his illuminated books, from the early Songs of Innocence and Experience to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and the books of the revolutionary period of the 1790s: Europe, America, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, and The Book of Urizen. We will also consider the later prophecies, Milton: A Poem and Jerusalem, along with Blake's work as an illustrator of Milton, Chaucer, and the Bible. Blake's engagement with the political and religious controversies of his time will provide context, along with his pioneering exploration of dialectical modes of thought and radical forms of humanism (Poetry, 1650-1830, Theory; 18th/19th)

Instructor(s): W. J. T. Mitchell     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 20228, ENGL 20228, FNDL 20228, ENGL 30228

ARTH 30700. Understanding the Built Environment. 100 Units.

This course aims to equip students with the basic skills and knowledge required to analyze architecture and the built environment. It offers an introduction to the methods and procedures of the architectural historian. These include practical tasks such as understanding architectural terminology, reading and interpreting architectural drawings, engaging with buildings "on site," and studying buildings in urban context, relative to surrounding buildings, street networks and public spaces. At a broader level, the course will entail critical discussion about the relationship between architecture and society, the building as a historically specific object that also changes over time, the cultural representation of architecture, and modes of perceiving/experiencing the built environment.

Instructor(s): Wei-Cheng Lin      Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Students must attend first class to confirm enrollment. Please note that the course entails an 80-minute meeting on Tuesdays and a 170-minute meeting on Thursdays. The long meetings accommodate off-campus field trips and allow for some travel time. Field trips will be scheduled so students can get back to campus for classes starting at 12:30.
Equivalent Course(s): CHST 20700, ARCH 20000, ARTH 20700

ARTH 30704. Traveling Studio: From Detail to City at Taliesin. 100 Units.

The course is designed to immerse students in architectural drawing and making at a site of prolific drawing and making past, in a remarkable environment both natural and built. Working both individually and together, we will use our surroundings at Taliesin to tackle five short projects, increasing in scale, from the tiniest architectural details up through consideration of city and region. As part of the latter portion of the course, we will also consider the Driftless region of Wisconsin specifically, and issues facing this unique rural area in 2023, including environmental challenges, questions of housing, and rural foodways. Typical days will include studio time in the Hillside studio, ample exploration of the Taliesin grounds both programmed and free, conversations with guests familiar with the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and others who spent time at Taliesin, excursions across the Driftless region (including additional buildings designed by Wright and others close to him), and a modest amount of work helping to maintain the Taliesin site.

Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ENST 20704, CEGU 20704, ARCH 20704, ARTH 20704

ARTH 31206. History and Culture of Printmaking in Early Modern Europe. 100 Units.

This course will consider the practice and theory of visual art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Among the subjects that will drive our narrative will be the rise of modernism and postmodernism, art during the postcolonial era, pop art, the aesthetics of 1960s-era social movements, the relationship between popular media and feminism, the concept of spectacle, conceptual art, the appearance of a global art industry after 1989, "relational aesthetics," the fate of art in the age of the internet, the art of the post-studio moment, and what happens to art when it engages with *everything*.

Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 21206

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): ARCH 21300, BCSN 21300, HIST 24008, REES 21300, BCSN 31303, REES 31303, ARTH 21333, GLST 21301

ARTH 31451. Rhoades Seminar: Reading Ancient Egyptian Art. 100 Units.

For millennia ancient Egyptian artists constructed visual narratives on tomb chapel walls, temple structures, and other material remains - such as stelae - that provide glimpses of lived experiences in the land that gave rise to this ancient African culture. Focusing on two-dimensional representations produced in Egypt (ancient Kemet) between approximately 3000-1069 BCE, this course will consider the functions of such pictorial accounts within their original contexts and explore approaches to reading and interpreting them. We will investigate topics including depictions of "daily life" on the Nile, royal sojourns to foreign lands, and the imagined landscapes of the underworld, deconstructing scenes and the ancient artistic conventions used to produce them. Particular emphasis will be placed on how the natural environment of North Africa is reflected in the arts of ancient Egypt, from detailed renderings of indigenous flora and fauna to interpretations of the physical landscape. Sources will include ancient texts in translation and firsthand examination of Egyptian artifacts in Chicagoland museums, including the ISAC Museum.

Instructor(s): A. Arico     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): NEHC 31451, NEHC 21451, ARTH 21451

ARTH 32106. Introduction to the Study of Iconography. 100 Units.

TBD

Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 22106, HCHR 32106, RLST 28320, RLIT 32106

ARTH 32305. Spiritual and Protective Lives of Objects in African Art. 100 Units.

This seminar explores visual culture and historical arts of Africa primarily from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is not an exhaustive geographical and temporal survey of the continent's object-making traditions, but rather, an introduction through a number of case studies highlighting religious practices and uses for art and objects of devotion and everyday life. Investigations will consider objects' tangible and intangible elements to examine their spiritual and protective dimensions through various lenses: organized religions, including Islam and Christianity, 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 special exhibitions for in-person, close looking and to fuel discussions surrounding the role of museums and museum display and interpretation.

Instructor(s): J. Purdy     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Consent only
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 22305

ARTH 32811. Experiments in Digital Mapping: Reconstructing the Early Modern City. 100 Units.

Course Description Coming Soon

Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 22811

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
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 22816

ARTH 34255. Postcolumbian: The Ancient Americas in Modern and Contemporary Art. 100 Units.

In this seminar we will examine the varied ways in which modern and contemporary artists have engaged with the art of Aztec, Maya, Inca, and other ancient American Indigenous art traditions. We will examine modernist appropriations, later Chicano and Chicana movements, and contemporary re-inventions of Precolumbian art as new forms of Latin American and Latinx expression, commentary, and critique. Artists include Frank Lloyd Wright, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Henry Moore, Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Enrique Chagoya, Yolanda López, Yreina D. Cervántez, Guadalupe Maravilla, Mariana Castillo Deball, Ana de Obregoso, Kukuli Velarde, among others. We will consider the ways artists have used forms of the past in a range of political, social, and aesthetic contexts, and ask what agency iconic forms of the past may have exerted, and continue to exert, on the present. Readings on modern and contemporary episodes in this "Post-Columbian" history will be paired with discussions of ancient art and visual culture, as we entwine understandings of early artworks with later histories.

Instructor(s): C. Brittenham     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): LACS 34255, LACS 24255, ARTH 24255

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: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ARCH 24651, ARTH 24651

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
Equivalent Course(s): NEHC 24815, NEHC 34815, HIST 30509, HIST 20509, ARTH 24815

ARTH 34816. Museums Today. 100 Units.

Through a series of case studies, this course examines how museums are radically rethinking their function, their audiences, and their practices. What problems do they seek to redress? Who do the solutions aim to serve, and to what end? This course ultimately asks students to debate the role of the museum in the 21st century by way of course readings drawn from theory, scholarship, and the popular press; class discussions complimented by visits from guest scholars, artists, and curators; and engagement with real and virtual museum spaces.

Instructor(s): M. Taft     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 24816

ARTH 34910. INSECT MEDIA. 100 Units.

How have insects affected ways of knowing and relating to the world? This course opens a dialogue between insects and Japanese audiovisual cultures, including fiction, poetry, visual art, manga, anime, and film. We aim to address the important and profound challenge that recent trends in animal studies, environmental humanities, and eco-criticism pose to received ways of studying human cultures and societies. The challenge lies in offering alternatives to the entrenched reliance on a nature-culture divide, which gives culture explanatory preference over nature. In the case of Japan and insects, for instance, there exists a fairly significant body of scholarship on how Japanese people respond to, interact with, and represent insects, and yet priority is generally given to culture, and Japan is treated monolithically. To offer alternatives to this monolithic culturalism, in this course we will (a) open dialogue between culture accounts of insects and scientific accounts and (b) explore different forms of media offering different milieus where human animals and more-than-human insects come into relation without assuming the ascendency of one over the other.

Instructor(s): Chelsea Foxwell and Thomas Lamarre     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Consent of Instructor required: interested students should submit one paragraph of interest to Professors Foxwell and Lamarre.
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 24910, EALC 34910, CMST 34915, CDIN 24910, CDIN 34910, CMST 24910

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
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 29005, SCTH 35009, CLAS 38020

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, MAAD 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): KNOW 35000, GRMN 35015, SCTH 35000, GRMN 25015, ARTH 25115, CLAS 35014

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): RDIN 25119, ARCH 25119, RDIN 35119, ARTH 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): ARTH 25140, GRMN 23523, GRMN 33523

ARTH 35402. The Invisible within Visual Art. 100 Units.

What the work of art looks like isn't too important." This is what U.S.-American artist Sol Lewitt wrote about conceptual art in 1967. This course takes Lewitt's statement seriously, asking: how can we consider the non-visible dimensions of artworks? How do we interpret artworks that rely upon extra-visual material, including other sensory material like touch, taste, sound, and smell, but also ideas? How do aspects that the viewer must imagine impact the way that artworks make meaning? Taking a broad approach to the category of conceptual art, this course will explore the history of art that is rooted in ideas from the 1910s to the present, investigating case studies of conceptual works from around the globe. Considering artworks that take a wide variety of forms, from paintings and sculptures, to documentary photographs and faked documentary photographs, to performances, installations, and participatory invitations, we will test Lewitt's statement. If what a given artwork looks like isn't all that important, how might the invisible inform our understanding of that artwork instead?

Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 25402

ARTH 35545. Cartography & the Early Modern State. 100 Units.

This seminar focuses on concurrent watersheds in drawing, cartography, and information technology - the rise of hand-drawn maps in government archives. This occurred in fifteenth-century Venice, the first state to combine surveying, drawing, and text in the systematic collection, storage, delivery, and analysis of geospatial data concerning its territories. A radical departure from classical and medieval cartography, Venice's paper maps synced perspectival pictures with nested layers of toponyms, informational legends, directional indicators and scale bars, requiring a new kind of literacy and hardware to calculate distance. No precedent existed for this analog GIS (geographic information system); other chancery collections came later or did not have the same functionality. We will compare Venice's paper maps to contemporary landscape painting and print culture's bird's eye views and maps. We will address their increasingly dynamic interface, methods of indexing, and storage and retrieval before the arrival of filing cabinets; the addition of polychrome reliefs with their heightened sense of being there; and the increase in flattening abstractions through the end of the Venetian empire (1797). These abstractions anticipated modern mapping before the advent of digital GIS (also a government initiative) and cartography's return to embedding the user. Students are welcome from across the disciplines and may choose related topics for supervised research projects.

Instructor(s): K. Barzman     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 25545

ARTH 35711. Exhibiting Photographs. 100 Units.

This course traces the history of photography through a progression of landmark exhibitions, exploring the ongoing and reciprocal relationship between theories of photography and modes of public display. From the first public demonstrations of the new invention(s) through the emergence of photographic salons in the late nineteenth century, the forms of early exhibitions mirrored photography's fluid and indeterminate cultural status. By the interwar period, new theories of display and visual communication developed by the European and American avant-garde helped to elevate photography's standing in museums, transforming its liminal position between art and mass culture into a modernist virtue. For each case study, students will assess the ways that photographic exhibitions embody cultural and aesthetic values, political ideologies, shifts within the art market, and underlying ideas about photography itself. Along with these historical investigations, the course will include several visits to a multisite exhibition of contemporary photography to engage with current issues tied to curating and display.

Instructor(s): C. Folder     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 25711

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.

Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 25712

ARTH 35731. Gender Before Gender: Constructing Bodies in Ancient American Art. 100 Units.

In this course, we will seek to test the possibilities and limits of understanding gender and sex in premodernity through an inquiry into the artistic traditions of the ancient Americas. Works of art constitute a primary means by which we can access ideas about what we call gender and sex. Based on what we can reconstruct from visual, textual, and archaeological sources, these cultures conceptualized and represented gender in ways that might seem unfamiliar, in the process putting into question our own preconceptions. Indeed, pre-modern works of art might not have served to simply record conventions of gender but also helped construct the very idea of a sexed body within a given cultural context. As we discover commonalities and divergences between these Indigenous American traditions, we will learn to think across cultural contexts and disciplinary divides, putting into question some of our own assumptions. We will see that gender is not an immutable construct but something actively brought into being in different ways in different times and places.

Instructor(s): C. Brittenham     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Consent of instructor required; email Professor Brittenham a paragraph-long description about what you bring and what you hope to get out of this seminar.
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 25731, GNSE 30138, LACS 25731, LACS 35731, GNSE 20138

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
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 26501, CMST 36505, CMST 26505, MAAD 26501

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.

Instructor(s): A. Schachman     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): While this class does not require prior experience, all ARCH studio courses require consent. Starting July 31, 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): ARTH 26616, CHST 26616, ARCH 26616

ARTH 36624. Ekphrasis. 100 Units.

What happens when a text gives voice to a previously mute art work? Ekphrasis - the verbal representation of visual art - continues to be a central concern of word and image studies today. The understanding of ekphrasis as an often hostile paragone between word and image exists alongside notions of a more reciprocal model involving a dialogue or "encounter" between visual and verbal cultures. The affective dimension of the relationship -- ekphrastic hope, ekphrastic fear -- has also been prominent in recent scholarship, as well as attention to the "queerness" of ekphrasis. Drawing on literary works and theories from a range of periods and national traditions, the course will examine stations in the long history of ekphrasis. Why are certain literary genres such as the novel or the sonnet privileged sites for ekphrasis? How can art history inform our understanding of such encounters, and to what extent can we say that it is a discipline based in ekphrasis? What can we learn from current work on description, intermediality, narrative theory, and translation theory? Readings from Homer, Philostratus, Lessing, Goethe, Keats, A.W. Schlegel, Kleist, Sebald, Genette, among others.

Instructor(s): Catriona MacLeod     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): GRMN 26624, ENGL 36624, CMLT 26624, ENGL 26624, GRMN 36624, ARTH 26624, CMLT 36624

ARTH 36705. Approaches to Contemporary Chinese Art. 100 Units.

The aim of this course is to introduce a history of contemporary art from China since the 1970s. The course begins with a brief overview of modern art activities in China during the early 20th century along with art production amidst the Cultural Revolution era (1966-1976), under Mao. The course will then focus on contemporary avant-garde movements during the 1970s and 1980s, the response to urbanization in art at the onset of the new millennium, the influence of globalization since 2000, and a new generation of young artists from China as well as Chinese diasporic artists working transnationally. Critical attention will be paid to ways in which artists respond to the obsolescence of physical environments and interactions due to major investments in robotics, AI technologies, online communication platforms, and virtual monetary exchange applications. In addition to working with important secondary texts focused on contemporary art from China, students will have the unique opportunity to examine primary documents that I have obtained during my ongoing research activities in China. These include video footage, photo documentation, archival materials, and real artworks. We will also access Gao Minglu's extensive archives of contemporary Chinese art documents.

Instructor(s): E. Larson     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): EALC 36705, ARTH 26705, EALC 26705

ARTH 36710. Eisenstein. 100 Units.

TBD

Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 26710, CMST 26610, FNDL 26504, 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 36909. Realism: Art or Metaphysics? 100 Units.

Besides its historical role as the first capital-letter avant-garde in painting and literature, Realism is making a return in many current artistic and, for that matter, cultural and journalistic contexts. But whether one examines its entanglement with reputed adversaries like Romanticism and Idealism, its origins in ancient and medieval metaphysics, or its strange side career as a label for amoral pragmatism in political theory and practice, the many-sidedness of realism makes pinning it down quite a challenge. Is there any common thread binding Plato and Courbet, Virginia Woolf and García Marquez, Catherine Opie and Ai Weiwei? Can there be a realism of dreams and desire, such as one might find in Freud? And is realism a revolutionary venture, or a consolidating surveillance of social types? What role do new technologies and forms of spectatorship, from oil painting to photography, the printed book to streaming media, play in its rise and evolution? Readings in art history, fiction, and philosophy will alternate with film screenings and gallery visits.

Instructor(s): A. Pop, M. Widrich     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 26909

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): KNOW 27032, ARTH 27032, KNOW 37032, REES 27032, REES 37032, ANTH 27032, ANTH 37032

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
Note(s): Enrollment is limited and permission of instructor is required. Preference will be given to students with a background in the visual arts or writing about the arts. Please email the instructor (mehring@uchicago.edu) explaining relevant background.
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 27314, ARTV 37314, ARTV 27314

ARTH 37316. Crafting Modernity. 100 Units.

This course proposes that craft defined artmaking in the United States during the the period after World War I and through to the post-World War II era. For the purposes of the course, craft will be broadly understood to encompass handmade items designed for practical use as well as artworks that, through concepts, materials, and/or processes, trace their lineage to a functional and handmade past. In framing this modernist history through craft, and discussing pedagogy, practitioners, objects,and theories of making, the course positions craft as a primary propagator of modernity. Artists with diverse material practices, such as Anni Albers, Emma Amos, Ruth Asawa, Faith Ringgold, and Lenore Tawney, will be central to the discussion and will foster an assessment and interrogation of craft's role in producing and popularizing modern art more broadly. In addition to foregrounding the ubiquity of craft and its wide-reaching impacts on culture and society (including educational initiatives and programs, exhibitions and museum collections, and publications), this course will also question craft's relative absence (until recently) in narratives oftwentieth-century modernism in the United States. Furthermore, while craft has the potential to surface the classism, sexism, and media hierarchies in modern art historical discourse, the need to critically examine craft's relationship with colonialism, racism, and sexism will also be addressed

Instructor(s): E. Warren     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 27316

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): HIST 36704, RLST 27440, SALC 37440, RLVC 37440, ARTH 27440, HREL 37440, SALC 27440

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): HREL 37490, SALC 27490, SALC 37490, RLVC 37490, RLST 27490, ARTH 27490

ARTH 37705. Revivals: Colonial, Gothic, and Craft. 100 Units.

This course will examine so-called stylistic revivals in the history of modern decorative arts and design. Through an examination of "revival" objects, the philosophies informing their facture, and the critical discourse surrounding their function and reception, the course will consider questions such as: What constitutes a "revival"? How are decorative art and designed objects marshalled for different ideological ends/purposes/narratives? What values appear to be imbued in certain materials and aesthetics? How have such associations been made/become naturalized? What assumptions regarding race, class, gender, and power are embedded in these associations and narratives?

Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 27705

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
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 27799

ARTH 38003. Islamic Art: Private Collections on Public Display. 100 Units.

In the past decade, two museums in Texas - the MFA Houston and the Dallas Museum of Art -- have suddenly emerged as major centers for Islamic art. Usually, well-developed displays of Islamic art build on sustained institutional commitment to curation over several generations. However, these Texas museums both quickly transformed their abilities to exhibit Islamic art by securing long term loans of significant private collections. With the al-Sabah Collection and the Hossein Afshar Collection, MFA Houston more than doubled its display space for Islamic art in 2023; and similarly, the Dallas Museum of Art has displayed the Keir Collection since 2014. This travelling seminar brings students to Texas for two weeks, facilitating direct study of an expansive range of Islamic arts produced from the medieval period to the present, in materials ranging from silk, parchment, ceramic, and rock crystal; to lacquer, sandstone, metal, jade, and plexiglass. Students will learn basic classification systems for navigating the vast range of Islamic arts, and will also each select a specific work for close study. Upon return to campus, students will develop their thoughts on the object in relation to questions of collection and display. What force does a given object have in shaping, confirming, or challenging logics of collection and display? What might the same object achieve differently within the context of a different, possibly thematic, exhibition?

Instructor(s): P. Berlekamp     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Consent Only
Equivalent Course(s): NEHC 28003, ARTH 28003, NEHC 38003

ARTH 38201. Art on My Mind. 100 Units.

A critic who began as an abstract painter, bell hooks (Gloria Watkins) was also a queer woman of color and among the most penetrating cultural observers in recent US history. This course centers on the close reading of hooks' 1995 book, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics, which fearlessly and sympathetically took as its subject a perennial conundrum wherein black artists and critics' relationship to art and aesthetics threatens to be subsumed by their efforts to challenge an art world bent on marginalization and exclusion. By hooks's own account, she designed this collection of essays and interviews to continue discussions of art and aesthetics begun in earlier work-specifically, to further engage the politics of feminism in conjunction with liberatory Black struggle. The result did a great deal more than this already considerable feat of intersectional study. Art on My Mind demonstrates then-new, still-woefully-underutilized means to think about visual art, write about visual art, and create actual spaces for 'dialogue across boundaries.' Art on My Mind, then, remains a model for confronting what addles critical consideration of the work of artists and cultural producers in all groups marginalized by structures of domination. This makes it also a book about transgression, and an excellent object to debate at a moment when generative meetings across boundaries seem increasingly unlikely.

Instructor(s): D. English     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 28201

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): CLCV 25923, ARTH 28311, RLST 28311, KNOW 38311, RLVC 38311, MDVL 28311, CLAS 35923

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): RLST 28325, CLCV 28323, ARTH 28325, RLVC 38325, MDVL 28325, KNOW 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): RLST 28330, RLVC 38330, ARTH 28330, CLCV 28322, CLAS 38322

ARTH 38424. Displacing Caravaggio: Art, Media, and Contemporary Visual Culture. 100 Units.

Caravaggio is a central figure in the history of Italian art and in the global image of Italy. Caravaggio is also and above all a master of Baroque painting with whom we feel a particular closeness in the name of the themes and modes of his painting. We feel him as our "contemporary" or, maybe, thanks to his works, we are the ones who move another time and another space. This course examines the peculiar relevance of Caravaggio in contemporary visual culture. On one side, we explores the ways in which Caravaggio's techniques, themes, and iconography have been appropriated and reinterpreted in modern and contemporary art and media. On the other hand, Caravaggio's painting is observed through an "anachronistic" perspective, bringing forth valuable insights for critically reflecting on contemporary media practice and visual culture.

Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 28424, ITAL 38424, ITAL 28424

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): Allyson Field     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): CMST 48500, ARTV 20002, CMLT 22400, CMST 28500, ENGL 48700, ENGL 29300, MAAD 18500, MAPH 33600, ARTH 28500, CMLT 32400

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): ARTH 28600, CMST 48600, ARTV 20003, REES 45005, CMST 28600, CMLT 22500, REES 25005, ENGL 29600, MAPH 33700, ENGL 48900, MAAD 18600, CMLT 32500

ARTH 38607. Art, Science, and the Environment. 100 Units.

Did human activity-from the detonation of atomic weapons to the proliferation of plastics-change the Earth and life on it? Rather than study air or water, this seminar will look at art and visual culture since 1945 to find deposits, traces, and effects of such activities. The course will survey scholarly texts from art history as well as the histories of science and technology to pursue these and other related questions: How have historians framed developments in postwar and contemporary art in relation to concurrent developments of scientific ways of knowing and imagining the environment, broadly defined? Moreover, how has the advance of scientific knowledge beyond our planet informed visual culture? From smart devices to immersive digital art installations, what forms of techno-ecologies surround us today? Through visits to the Smart Museum of Art, as well as other campus collections, students will have the opportunity to study and write about original works of art.

Instructor(s): T. Shabtay     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 28607

ARTH 39001. Painting and Description in the Roman World: Philostratus' Imagines. 100 Units.

This course explores the single most thoughtful, playful and creative text on naturalistic painting written in antiquity. Arguably, it is the most interesting exploration of the brilliance and the problems of naturalism ever written in the Western tradition. The text uses the device of the description of paintings (known as ekphrasis) to create a cultural commentary in the third century CE on the rhetorical, religious, and educational world of its times, including athletics, mythology and sexuality. A reading knowledge of Greek could not be described as a disadvantage (!) but is not a necessary requirement. The course will be taught over 5 weeks in the Spring Quarter on an intensive (let us hope not an excessively intensive) schedule. Before the course begins, read the Imagines of the Elder Philostratus in the Loeb Classical Library translation (by Arthur Fairbanks, 1931, Harvard U.P., much reprinted). This book is not exorbitantly expensive and is worth buying, as we will all need a copy throughout.

Instructor(s): Jaś Elsner     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Before the course begins, read the Imagines of the Elder Philostratus in the Loeb Classical Library translation (by Arthur Fairbanks, 1931, Harvard U.P., much reprinted).
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 39001, ARTH 29001, GNSE 29001, RLST 29001, RLVC 39001

ARTH 39609. Realism: Art or Metaphysics? 100 Units.

Besides its historical role as the first capital-letter avant-garde in painting and literature, Realism is making a return in many current artistic and, for that matter, cultural and journalistic contexts. But whether one examines its entanglement with reputed adversaries like Romanticism and Idealism, its origins in ancient and medieval metaphysics, or its strange side career as a label for amoral pragmatism in political theory and practice, the many-sidedness of realism makes pinning it down quite a challenge. Is there any common thread binding Plato and Courbet, Virginia Woolf and García Marquez, Catherine Opie and Ai Weiwei? Can there be a realism of dreams and desire, such as one might find in Freud? And is realism a revolutionary venture, or a consolidating surveillance of social types? What role do new technologies and forms of spectatorship, from oil painting to photography, the printed book to streaming media, play in its rise and evolution? Readings in art history, fiction, and philosophy will alternate with film screenings and gallery visits.

Instructor(s): Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich      Terms Offered: Autumn. Autumn
Prerequisite(s): No Consent Required
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 25999, KNOW 25010, SCTH 25010, KNOW 35010, SCTH 35010, CMLT 35999, ARTH 29609

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.

Equivalent Course(s): NEHC 39765, KNOW 29675, NEHC 29765, KNOW 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): Pires, Leah     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): ENGL 48000, CMST 40000, MAPH 33000

ARTH 39943. Exhibiting the Art of the Ancient Americas. 100 Units.

This course will consider the history of exhibiting the art of the ancient Americas from the colonial period until the present. From the European Wunderkammer to the development of the modern museum, we will consider how colonial institutions and categories shaped the reception of visually elaborated objects from past Indigenous cultures. Paying close attention to the choice of objects presented in exhibitions as well as to the museographical decisions that shaped their presentation-to the extent that they can be reconstructed from archival materials-we will explore how exhibitions both reflected and shaped changing understandings of the ancient American past.

Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 29943

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): CMLT 40010, RLIT 40010, CDIN 40010

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 33405, MAPH 40160, ITAL 23405, RLLT 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): RLVC 50204, CDIN 50204, HREL 50204, CMLT 50204, SALC 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): KNOW 40307, CHSS 40307, CMST 47007

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): CLAS 44916, KNOW 40301, HIST 64202, ANCM 44916, CDIN 40301, HREL 40301, LACS 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): CHSS 40410, KNOW 40310, ARTV 40310

ARTH 40400. Ekphrasis: Art & Description. 100 Units.

This course explores the rich tradition of ekphrasis in Greco-Roman and Christian antiquity - 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 and Rome (both prose and verse) - in order to establish what might be called the ancestry of a genre in the European tradition -- there will be opportunity in the final paper to range beyond this into questions of religious writing about art, comparative literature, art (history) writing and ekphrasis in other periods or contexts. The course is primarily intended for graduates - and a reading knowledge of Greek and Latin could not be described as a disadvantage! 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): J. Elsner     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): RLVC 40400, CLAS 42600, NTEC 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): DVPR 49002, RLVC 49002, CMLT 49002, CDIN 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 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): RLVC 41750, CDIN 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, RLVC 45200, HCHR 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 42911. 21st Century Art. 100 Units.

This course will consider the practice and theory of visual art since 1989. We will focus on questions of art's location within society and art's varied development in differing locales.

Instructor(s): M.J. Jackson     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Instructor's consent is required.
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 39901

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): RLVC 44004, HCHR 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.

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): FREN 34420, CMLT 44410, CDIN 44420, TAPS 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 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): SCTH 47219, GRMN 47219

ARTH 47603. Public History Practicum I. 100 Units.

In this two-quarter course students will engage in the theory and practice of public history in partnership with organizations doing community-oriented work in a variety of areas. In the winter colloquium, we will read and discuss the theory and practice of public history as well as materials relevant to the projects you will pursue in the spring. In the spring practicum, you will work in groups of 3-5 directly with one of the partner organizations. All of the project-based work will be done collaboratively; working with partners means that there will be hard deadlines. Projects and coursework will be designed to be adaptable to current public health conditions. A showcase presentation of the projects is scheduled for the end of the spring quarter, by which time you will have become acquainted with current scholarship on public history and with experience in its actual practice. The final projects will be part of your portfolio and may be listed on your c.v.

Instructor(s): L. Auslander     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Consent only; email Prof. Auslander by 7th wk of Aut qtr (lausland@uchicago.edu) if interested in taking the course. Partner organizations/projects will be advertised in advance of that deadline; an info session will explain the sequence's details. The Win qtr counts as a History grad colloquia.
Note(s): Every effort will be made to place students in their first choice of project; contact Prof. Auslander for further information. The course is open to PhD students in the Social Sciences, Humanities, and Divinity School at any point in their residency as well as to MA students.
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 47603, ANTH 34611, SOCI 50126, CHSS 67603, RDIN 47603

ARTH 47604. Public History Practicum II. 100 Units.

In this two-quarter course students will engage in the theory and practice of public history in partnership with organizations doing community-oriented work in a variety of areas. In the winter colloquium, we will read and discuss the theory and practice of public history as well as materials relevant to the projects you will pursue in the spring. In the spring practicum, you will work in groups of 3-5 directly with one of the partner organizations. All of the project-based work will be done collaboratively; working with partners means that there will be hard deadlines. Projects and coursework will be designed to be adaptable to current public health conditions. A showcase presentation of the projects is scheduled for the end of the spring quarter, by which time you will have become acquainted with current scholarship on public history and with experience in its actual practice. The final projects will be part of your portfolio and may be listed on your c.v.

Instructor(s): A. Green     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): HIST 67603; Students must take Public History Practicum I (HIST 67603) and II in sequence.
Equivalent Course(s): SOCI 50127, RDIN 47604, HIST 47604, CHSS 67604, ANTH 34612

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 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: Winter
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): FREN 37000, CMLT 38600, 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 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): FREN 49100, CMST 69110

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.

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): TBD     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. Mehring     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