Moche panel fragment with four figures
Crossing geographic and disciplinary borders

About Us

The department encourages the crossing not only of geographic but also disciplinary borders through exploration of a wide range of fields including architecture, urban planning, critical and post-colonial theory, media studies, the sciences and social history.

More about the department

Contacts Faculty Profiles

Upcoming Events

Feb 10
Tuesday 04:04 PM

A Call to Wonder: From Angels and Armless Calligraphers to Ordinary Marvels

A. D. White House Guerlac Room
Feb 24
Tuesday 04:04 PM

How Modern Art Became Islamic

Goldwin Smith Hall G22
Feb 26
Thursday 05:15 PM

Open House: The Hum of Life

Johnson Museum of Art
Feb 27
Friday 09:00 AM

Workshop: Ancient Copies, Modern Methods: Replication, Translation, and Reception in the Work of Margarete Bieber

A. D. White House
Apr 10
Friday 04:45 PM

New Date: Ravinder Binning (Colgate University), "The Visionary Mode in Medieval Nubian Painting"

See all events

'Firing the Canon'

Associate Professor Annetta Alexandridis is featured in 'Firing the Canon: The Cornell Casts and Their Discontents':

Panels from the Mnemosyne Atlas
Aby Warburg, Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, panel 39 (recovered, detail)

Mnemosyne: Meanderings through Aby Warburg's Atlas

Begun in 1924 and left unfinished at the time of his death in 1929, the Mnemosyne Atlas is Aby Warburg’s attempt to map the “afterlife of antiquity,” or how images of great symbolic, intellectual, and emotional power emerge in Western antiquity and then reappear and are reanimated in the art and cosmology of later times and places, from Alexandrian Greece to Weimar Germany. Focusing especially on the Renaissance, the historical period where he found the struggle between the forces of reason and unreason to be most palpable, Warburg hoped that the Mnemosyne Atlas would allow its spectators to experience for themselves the “polarities” that riddle culture and thought.

Click here to explore ten panels from the Mnemosyne Atlas.

Department News

Pop Art and South Asia Conference in Jaffna, Sri Lanka

Pop Art and South Asia Conference in Jaffna, Sri Lanka

Pop Art and South Asia  Conference December 15-16, 2025 Jaffna Thiruvalluvar Cultural Center Jaffna, Sri Lanka This conference focuses on South Asian art’s engagement with popular culture from the mid-twentieth century through the present. The rapid development of capitalism, urbanism, me...

Read more
More News
Image caption:
Moche panel fragment with four figures (detail), 500-700 AD. Moche (Peru). Camelid wool on cotton. Bequest of Michael A. McCarthy, Class of 1956. Object number2002.122. Herbert F Johnson Museum of Art
Top