Courses

This lecture course introduces students to the History of Art as a global and interdisciplinary field. Team-taught by a selection of professors from the department, in collaboration with members of the staff and faculty of the Herbert Johnson Museum of Art, its primary aim is to familiarize students with the most significant geographical areas, epochs and works of art, as well as with methods employed in their study and analysis. The course will be organized around a changing selection of themes central to the history of art. The theme for fall 2023 is "Ornament," departing from a broad understanding of just what constitutes a work of art (in addition to painting, sculpture, and architecture, we will consider a range of objects of material culture, from ceramics to metalwork to the human body itself), paying particular attention to intersections of aesthetics and utility, and the attitudes of various cultures, from antiquity to the present, toward adornment and its interpretation.

Full details for ARTH 1100 - Art Histories: An Introduction

This course offers an introduction to the diverse global encounters and exchanges that shaped early modern European art and material culture, c.1400-1650. The course will be structured around nine European imperial and/or cosmopolitan centres and their connections between one another, and with the Ottoman Empire, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. We will explore how global commerce influenced material and artistic consumption, and the ways in which early modern slavery was part and parcel of Europe's art world. Special focus discussions will deepen students' knowledge of artistic materials and media and the ways in which global connections impacted the making of early modern art. Students will gain a broad understanding of early modern art and practices of making, the historical contexts in which art objects were produced, and their social and cultural uses. Students will become familiar with the language and approaches of art history and material culture studies, as well as with key methodologies including globalized, decolonial, critical race, and gender theories.

Full details for ARTH 2400 - Introduction to Early Modern Art: Cosmopolitanism and Empire

Provides a lecture survey of the history of photography over a course of two centuries. Starting with its invention in the 1830s, covers the subject topically and chronologically. During the nineteenth century, focus is on technical developments and on the complex relations that situate photography in relation to painting, portraiture, urban life, war, anthropology and ethnology, exploration and travel, and science and industry. Over the course of the twentieth century, photography is enriched by new developments: its use as a modernist and experimental art form, in social documentary and photojournalism, in propaganda, in advertising and fashion. In recent decades, photography has assumed a centrality in the practice of conceptual postmodern art, and is currently undergoing a major transformation in the age of digital media.

Full details for ARTH 2500 - Introduction to the History of Photography

This course offers a broad introduction to some of the artistic practices that have come to be known as "modern" in Europe and the United States. Beginning with the upheavals of the French Revolution and carrying through to the turmoil of two world wars, we will survey the role of both fine art and visual culture in a period of great political, social, and technological change. The very definition of art was revolutionized in this moment, as an emphasis on materials and experiments with new media like photography and cinema took precedence over the production of highly-skilled masterpieces. Particular attention will be given to exchanges between western representation and that of other cultures. Topics covered include revolutionary propaganda; romantic unreason; caricature and political critique; the changing pace of the modern city; architecture in the machine age; the place of women in modernity; and the impact of new technology on spectatorship. Students should leave the course with increased familiarity with key art movements in the modern era and the skills to analyze and appreciate art and visual culture from any period. 

Full details for ARTH 2600 - Introduction to Modern Western Art: Materials, Media, and the End of Masterpieces

These seminars offer an introduction to the humanities by exploring historical, cultural, social, and political themes. Students will explore themes in critical dialogue with a range of texts and media drawn from the arts, humanities, and/or humanistic social sciences. Guest speakers, including Cornell faculty and Society for the Humanities Fellows, will present from different disciplines and points of view. Students will make field trips to relevant local sites and visit Cornell special collections and archives. Students enrolled in these seminars will have the opportunity to participate in additional programming related to the annual focus theme of Cornell's Society for the Humanities and the Humanities Scholars Program for undergraduate humanities research.

Full details for ARTH 2750 - Introduction to Humanities

This course tells the history of the Roman empire through the urban development of its capital from the early 1st millennium BCE to the advent of Christian emperors in the 4th century CE. What does the archeology reveal about how the geography and environment of this site, its society and political systems, military conquests, economy, infrastructure, resources, and technologies interacted to create the center of an empire? Special focus is on how the appropriation of other peoples and cultures shaped the metropolis itself. Did it manage to integrate individuals from Africa, the Near East, from North of the Alps and Britain, and if so, how? The history of excavations and the reception of the city's architecture in the 19th and 20th centuries will provide a critical lens for analyzing some of the master narratives associated with ancient Rome and its ruins.

Full details for ARTH 3210 - The Archaeology of the City of Rome

Introduction and training in dendrochronology (tree-ring dating) and its applications in archaeology, art history, climate and environment through lab work and participation in ongoing research projects using ancient to modern wood samples from around the world. Supervised reading and laboratory/project work. Possibilities exists for summer fieldwork in the Mediterranean, Mexico, and New York State.

Full details for ARTH 3250 - Introduction to Dendrochronology

In this course, we will examine the role of electronic and digital technologies in the arts of the late 20th and 21st centuries with emphasis on Europe and North America. Beginning with the cybernetically and systems-inspired work of the late sixties, we will explore early uses of computer technology, including early experiments in synthetic video in the 1970s. An overview of pre-internet telematic experiments will lead to an investigation of net art and later currents of digital art. The ongoing development of behavioral art forms will be a central theme. Critical evaluation of various attitudes concerning technology will be encouraged.

Full details for ARTH 3650 - History and Theory of Digital Art

The arts of Southeast Asia are studied in their social context, since in traditional societies creative processes are often mapped on the sequence of events that compose human lives. We will be looking particularly at the gendered ways in which bodies are mapped on the land, and how these various framings are often reflected in the unique relationships that emerge between works of art and textual sources. The South Asian epics of the Ramayana (Story of Rama) and the Mahabharata will be explored during the semester as infinitely renewable sources of inspiration.

Full details for ARTH 3850 - The Arts of Southeast Asia

Works of art have always engendered political, social, and cultural meanings. This seminar presents an introduction to the methods used by art historians and the objects and ideas that constitute the historiography of their discipline. If art history was once understood as the study of the development of style in "European art", over the past century its practitioners have attempted to embrace a "global" perspective and to address issues of class, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, and gender. Readings will focus on historically situating methods and the implications of their cross-cultural application. They will be discussed in the framework of institutions, apparatuses and practices that have shaped the field, identifying how these have contributed to systemic mechanisms of hegemony and exclusion. Papers will encourage students to put methods into practice, realizing in the process that subject matter is not an isolated choice to which methods are applied, but something that profoundly affects the approach that the researcher brings to the writing and conceptualizing and doing of art history. 

Full details for ARTH 4101 - Proseminar: Introduction to Methods

Topic: Cyberfeminism in the Visual Arts; What was/is cyberfeminism? In this seminar, we will investigate the emergence of cyberfeminism in theory and art in the context of the accelerated technological developments of the latter half of the twentieth century. Since the early 1990's, critics have identified numerous manifestations in the visual arts as cyberfeminist yet this art sits uneasily between the histories of media arts, feminist, and activist art. Artistic production categorized as cyberfeminist centers on digital media and can expand to art in earlier media. We will explore the relation of cyberfeminism to current and previous feminist art and theory.

Full details for ARTH 4153 - Topics in Feminist Media Arts

Topics Rotate. Spring 23 topic: Humans and Animals. As Greek and Roman societies relied fundamentally on hunting and agriculture, animals constituted a crucial point of reference in their conception of the world. Animals occupied different functions and roles for humans, such as foe or protector and companion, food and resource, sacrificial victim, subject and object of prodigies, but also status symbol, pet, object of entertainment, object of scientific study etc. We will look at how the different forms of interaction between humans and animals resulted from man's views of other species, but also how such interactions themselves helped shape these views. How did they eventually intersect with discourses on gender, age, class, and race? We will investigate written sources covering the whole range of literary genres; images; and archaeological material. Readings will also refer to the modern debate on the relationship between humans and animals.

Full details for ARTH 4233 - Greek and Roman Art and Archaeology

Full details for ARTH 4465 - Early Modern Materialities, 1400-1700

Topic for Fall 2023: Tutorial. The history of photography as an art has been mostly on the page, not on the wall. This course refocuses the standard museum and gallery history of photography back to the book. Significantly, it takes advantage, through field trips, of the proximity of Cornell to the George Eastman House in Rochester, whose library houses the most important photobooks from around the world, including the best creations from Russia, Japan, and the United States.  Students will learn the basics of photographic printing, book construction, the role of the photobook in the rise of the artist's book in the twentieth century, as well as advanced skills in analysis of the photographic picture and sequencing. Major themes will include the scientific photobook of the nineteenth century, the documentary photobook of the 1930s, the propaganda photobook of the communist era, the postwar photobooks of Japan, the personal/domestic turn of the 1970s, and the present state of the photobook in the digital era. 

Full details for ARTH 4545 - The Photobook

This seminar explores the images and objects produced, collected, and displayed in the context of the British and French empires of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Drawing on a range of perspectives—including postcolonial studies, critical race studies, and indigenous studies—we will develop a critical vocabulary for addressing the history of colonialism and the ongoing process of decolonization, asking what particular problems and opportunities art history presents for the study of empire. In what ways were aesthetics entangled with imperial ideology? How did works of art support or challenge dominant political, social, and cultural narratives? And what does a study of historic empires have to offer to our understanding of globalization today? We will also engage with the ways in which the legacy of empire is treated in contemporary museology. Readings on France and Britain will be combined with theoretical texts that have informed scholarship on the history of imperialism more broadly. Participants in the seminar are encouraged to apply the themes covered to a geographical area and time period of their choice in their final paper.

Full details for ARTH 4621 - Art and Empire in Britian and France

The materiality of art as willful agents will be considered from ontology to an Indigenous expression of "more than human relations." Located at the intersection of multiple modernities, art and science; the shift from art historical framings of form over matter and connoisseurship to viewing materiality as an active process that continues to map larger social processes and transformation will be discussed. Archives will be sites of investigation across varied Indigenous geographies marking place, space, bodies and land. This class is designed to introduce the latest methodologies in the field of art history, material culture and Indigenous Studies. Students will consult the archive, do hands-on evaluation of art, material culture, and expand their historic and theoretical knowledge about materiality. Beyond the theoretically and historically grounded critique this class provides, it will also introduce students to working with original documents and / or conduct on-site research. Students will consult the Cornell University library holdings of the Huntington Free Library's Native American Collection and conduct original archival research with historic and contemporary art and material culture at Haudenosaunee cultural centers, museums and exhibitions spaces through a class trip or individual visits.

Full details for ARTH 4774 - Indigenous Spaces and Materiality

Shadowplay is a superb medium for storytelling. As with many performing arts in Asia, neither the highly stylized images of puppets, nor its musical, or linguistic complexity detract from its wide popularity. Why does an art that appears so obscure exercise such broad appeal? This seminar explores the playful and politically adept fluctuations of shadows across screens from India to Mainland and Island Southeast Asia. We will also briefly examine East Asian developments, particularly in China and Japan. In each of the countries where shadow theatre exists it has acquired its own repertory and a distinct technique and style of its own. This aesthetic has translated locally into paint, sculpture, architecture, cinema, and modern and contemporary installation art. Classes will meet regularly in the Herbert F. Johnson Museum.

Full details for ARTH 4852 - Shadowplay: Asian Art and Performance

Individual investigation and discussion of special topics not covered in the regular course offerings, by arrangement with a member of the department.

Full details for ARTH 4991 - Independent Study

A course for senior Art History majors working on honors theses, with selected reading, research projects, etc., under the supervision of a member of the History of Art faculty.

Full details for ARTH 4998 - Honors Work I

Individual investigation and discussion of special topics not covered in the regular course offerings, by arrangement with a member of the department.

Full details for ARTH 5991 - Supervised Reading

Individual investigation and discussion of special topics not covered in the regular course offerings, by arrangement with a member of the department.

Full details for ARTH 5993 - Supervised Study

This seminar introduces graduate students to a range of methodologies and approaches to teaching and researching topics in art history and visual studies. Each week, a member of the faculty will present his or her work to the seminar, highlighting unique research approaches, areas of specialty, technological challenges, and professional and pedagogical rewards. Topics include defining a research question; conducting archival research and fieldwork; syllabus design; identifying funding sources; and grant proposal writing. This course is required for all art history Ph.D. students and open to graduate students from other departments. Students are encouraged to use current technologies for presenting their coursework, including the creation of a blog for documenting ongoing research questions related to their teaching and dissertation.

Full details for ARTH 6000 - Graduate Research Methods in Art History

Works of art have always engendered political, social, and cultural meanings. This seminar presents an introduction to the methods used by art historians and the objects and ideas that constitute the historiography of their discipline. If art history was once understood as the study of the development of style in "European art", over the past century its practitioners have attempted to embrace a "global" perspective and to address issues of class, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, and gender. Readings will focus on historically situating methods and the implications of their cross-cultural application. They will be discussed in the framework of institutions, apparatuses and practices that have shaped the field, identifying how these have contributed to systemic mechanisms of hegemony and exclusion. Papers will encourage students to put methods into practice, realizing in the process that subject matter is not an isolated choice to which methods are applied, but something that profoundly affects the approach that the researcher brings to the writing and conceptualizing and doing of art history. 

Full details for ARTH 6101 - Proseminar: Introduction to Methods

Topic: Cyberfeminism in the Visual Arts; What was/is cyberfeminism? In this seminar, we will investigate the emergence of cyberfeminism in theory and art in the context of the accelerated technological developments of the latter half of the twentieth century. Since the early 1990's, critics have identified numerous manifestations in the visual arts as cyberfeminist yet this art sits uneasily between the histories of media arts, feminist, and activist art. Artistic production categorized as cyberfeminist centers on digital media and can expand to art in earlier media. We will explore the relation of cyberfeminism to current and previous feminist art and theory.

Full details for ARTH 6153 - Topics in Feminist Media Arts

This course tells the history of the Roman empire through the urban development of its capital from the early 1st millennium BCE to the advent of Christian emperors in the 4th century CE. What does the archeology reveal about how the geography and environment of this site, its society and political systems, military conquests, economy, infrastructure, resources, and technologies interacted to create the center of an empire? Special focus is on how the appropriation of other peoples and cultures shaped the metropolis itself. Did it manage to integrate individuals from Africa, the Near East, from North of the Alps and Britain, and if so, how? The history of excavations and the reception of the city's architecture in the 19th and 20th centuries will provide a critical lens for analyzing some of the master narratives associated with ancient Rome and its ruins.

Full details for ARTH 6210 - The Archeology of the City of Rome

Topics Rotate. Spring 23 topic: Humans and Animals. As Greek and Roman societies relied fundamentally on hunting and agriculture, animals constituted a crucial point of reference in their conception of the world. Animals occupied different functions and roles for humans, such as foe or protector and companion, food and resource, sacrificial victim, subject and object of prodigies, but also status symbol, pet, object of entertainment, object of scientific study etc. We will look at how the different forms of interaction between humans and animals resulted from man's views of other species, but also how such interactions themselves helped shape these views. How did they eventually intersect with discourses on gender, age, class, and race? We will investigate written sources covering the whole range of literary genres; images; and archaeological material. Readings will also refer to the modern debate on the relationship between humans and animals.

Full details for ARTH 6233 - Greek and Roman Art and Archaeology

This seminar analyzes the contours of early modern Europe's material landscape and the ways in which global exchanges and technological advancements impacted material production and consumption. Working within an interdisciplinary framework, we will explore the dynamic material, global, and social dimensions of objects, and the meanings that different materials could generate in art production. Each week we will investigate an early modern art material – from ivory, to amber, shells, and pearls – and its use and/or representation in a range of artworks. Students will learn to "think materially;" they will be introduced to multiple techniques of production, harvesting, and fashioning of materials, and will consider the broader social, economic, political, and environmental factors that shaped material culture.

Full details for ARTH 6465 - Early Modern Materialities, 1400-1700

Topic 2023: Tutorial. The history of photography as an art has been mostly on the page, not on the wall. This course refocuses the standard museum and gallery history of photography back to the book.  Significantly, it takes advantage, through field trips, of the proximity of Cornell to the George Eastman House in Rochester, whose library houses the most important photobooks from around the world, including the best creations from Russia, Japan, and the United States. Students will learn the basics of photographic printing, book construction, the role of the photobook in the rise of the artist's book in the twentieth century, as well as advanced skills in analysis of the photographic picture and sequencing. Major themes will include the scientific photobook of the nineteenth century, the documentary photobook of the 1930s, the propaganda photobook of the communist era, the postwar photobooks of Japan, the personal/domestic turn of the 1970s, and the present state of the photobook in the digital era.

Full details for ARTH 6545 - The Photobook

This seminar explores the images and objects produced, collected, and displayed in the context of the British and French empires of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Drawing on a range of perspectives—including postcolonial studies, critical race studies, and indigenous studies—we will develop a critical vocabulary for addressing the history of colonialism and the ongoing process of decolonization, asking what particular problems and opportunities art history presents for the study of empire. In what ways were aesthetics entangled with imperial ideology? How did works of art support or challenge dominant political, social, and cultural narratives? And what does a study of historic empires have to offer to our understanding of globalization today? We will also engage with the ways in which the legacy of empire is treated in contemporary museology. Readings on France and Britain will be combined with theoretical texts that have informed scholarship on the history of imperialism more broadly. Participants in the seminar are encouraged to apply the themes covered to a geographical area and time period of their choice in their final paper.

Full details for ARTH 6621 - Art and Empire in Britain and France

In this course, we will examine the role of electronic and digital technologies in the arts of the late 20th and 21st centuries with emphasis on Europe and North America. Beginning with the cybernetically and systems-inspired work of the late sixties, we will explore early uses of computer technology, including early experiments in synthetic video in the 1970s. An overview of pre-internet telematic experiments will lead to an investigation of net art and later currents of digital art. The ongoing development of behavioral art forms will be a central theme. Critical evaluation of various attitudes concerning technology will be encouraged.

Full details for ARTH 6653 - History and Theory of Digital Art

The materiality of art as willful agents will be considered from ontology to an Indigenous expression of "more than human relations." Located at the intersection of multiple modernities, art and science; the shift from art historical framings of form over matter and connoisseurship to viewing materiality as an active process that continues to map larger social processes and transformation will be discussed. Archives will be sites of investigation across varied Indigenous geographies marking place, space, bodies and land. This class is designed to introduce the latest methodologies in the field of art history, material culture and Indigenous Studies. Students will consult the archive, do hands-on evaluation of art, material culture, and expand their historic and theoretical knowledge about materiality. Beyond the theoretically and historically grounded critique this class provides, it will also introduce students to working with original documents and / or conduct on-site research. Students will consult the Cornell University library holdings of the Huntington Free Library's Native American Collection and conduct original archival research with historic and contemporary art and material culture at Haudenosaunee cultural centers, museums and exhibitions spaces through a class trip or individual visits.

Full details for ARTH 6774 - Indigenous Spaces and Materiality

The arts of Southeast Asia are studied in their social context, since in traditional societies creative processes are often mapped on the sequence of events that compose human lives. We will be looking particularly at the gendered ways in which bodies are mapped on the land, and how these various framings are often reflected in the unique relationships that emerge between works of art and textual sources. The South Asian epics of the Ramayana (Story of Rama) and the Mahabharata will be explored during the semester as infinitely renewable sources of inspiration.

Full details for ARTH 6850 - The Arts of Southeast Asia

Shadowplay is a superb medium for storytelling. As with many performing arts in Asia, neither the highly stylized images of puppets, nor its musical, or linguistic complexity detract from its wide popularity. Why does an art that appears so obscure exercise such broad appeal? This seminar explores the playful and politically adept fluctuations of shadows across screens from India to Mainland and Island Southeast Asia. We will also briefly examine East Asian developments, particularly in China and Japan. In each of the countries where shadow theatre exists it has acquired its own repertory and a distinct technique and style of its own. This aesthetic has translated locally into paint, sculpture, architecture, cinema, and modern and contemporary installation art. Classes will meet regularly in the Herbert F. Johnson Museum.

Full details for ARTH 6852 - Shadowplay: Asian Art and Performance

This course is an introductory design studio.  The primary course objective is to introduce principles of visual literacy as it pertains to two-dimensional and three-dimensional issues in design at all scales.  Concepts about representation, expression, composition, color, form, light, structure, and function will be explored through project based learning.  The emphasis will be on learning explicit compositional concepts, visualization skills, and media techniques as well as implicit design sensitivities to serve the student throughout the rest of his or her DEA experience and beyond.

Full details for VISST 1101 - Visual Literacy and Design Studio

This colloquium presents students with diverse approaches at the art-science interface used to interest, educate and motivate people to consider, address and solve environmental and sustainability challenges. It consists of a series of lectures given by experts, people with different expertise and perspectives who are addressing a variety of environmental and sustainability problems with regard to humanistic concern.

Full details for VISST 2002 - Environment and Sustainability Colloquium

This colloquium presents students with diverse approaches at the art-science interface used to interest, educate and motivate people to consider, address and solve environmental and sustainability challenges. It consists of a series of lectures by experts with different perspectives addressing a variety of environmental and sustainability problems with regard to humanistic concern. The small group discussion session allows in-depth engagement with the art-science interface. Building on the possibilities shared by our expert visitors, students in the discussion section will develop their own approach to addressing environmental issues. We will analyze how the ways in which information is shared is as significant as the information itself, and consider "artistic" and "scientific" perspectives as mutually beneficial tools for exploring and communicating our relationship to the environment.

Full details for VISST 2012 - Discussions of Environment and Sustainability

Full details for VISST 2300 - American Cinema

Provides a lecture survey of the history of photography over a course of two centuries. Starting with its invention in the 1830s, covers the subject topically and chronologically. During the nineteenth century, focus is on technical developments and on the complex relations that situate photography in relation to painting, portraiture, urban life, war, anthropology and ethnology, exploration and travel, and science and industry. Over the course of the twentieth century, photography is enriched by new developments: its use as a modernist and experimental art form, in social documentary and photojournalism, in propaganda, in advertising and fashion. In recent decades, photography has assumed a centrality in the practice of conceptual postmodern art, and is currently undergoing a major transformation in the age of digital media.

Full details for VISST 2500 - Introduction to the History of Photography

Students compose and present short studies that are discussed and reworked. Problems are defined and explored through class improvisations. Informal showing at end of semester. Includes informal showing of work. Weekly assignments in basic elements of choreography.

Full details for VISST 2511 - Beginning Dance Composition

This course offers an introduction to the diverse global encounters and exchanges that shaped early modern European art and material culture, c.1400-1650. The course will be structured around nine European imperial and/or cosmopolitan centres and their connections between one another, and with the Ottoman Empire, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. We will explore how global commerce influenced material and artistic consumption, and the ways in which early modern slavery was part and parcel of Europe's art world. Special focus discussions will deepen students' knowledge of artistic materials and media and the ways in which global connections impacted the making of early modern art. Students will gain a broad understanding of early modern art and practices of making, the historical contexts in which art objects were produced, and their social and cultural uses. Students will become familiar with the language and approaches of art history and material culture studies, as well as with key methodologies including globalized, decolonial, critical race, and gender theories.

Full details for VISST 2645 - Introduction to Early Modern Art: Cosmopolitanism and Empire

This course combines hands-on instruction in gamelan, Indonesia's most prominent form of traditional music, and the academic study of the broader range of music found in contemporary Indonesia, including Western-oriented and hybrid popular forms. Students thus engage with music directly, and use it as a lens to examine the myriad social and cultural forces that shape it, and that are shaped by it.

Full details for VISST 2744 - Gamelan in Indonesian History and Cultures

The course will offer an overview of video art, alternative documentary video, and digital installation and networked art. It will analyze four phases of video and new media: (1) the development of video from its earliest turn away from television; (2) video's relation to art and installation; (3) video's migration into digital art; (4) the relation of video and new media to visual theory and social movements. Screenings will include early political and feminist video (Ant Farm, Rosler, Paper Tiger TV, Jones), conceptual video of the '80s and '90s (Vasulka, Lucier, Viola, Hill), gay and multicultural video of the '90s (Muntadas, Riggs, Piper, Fung, Parmar), networked and activist new media of the 21st century (Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Disturbance Theater, SubRosa, Preemptive Media). Secondary theoretical readings on postmodernism, video theory, multicultural theory, and digital culture will provide students with a cultural and political context for the discussion of video and new media style, dissemination, and reception.

Full details for VISST 3115 - Video and New Media: Art, Theory, Politics

Global Cinema I and II together offer an overview of international film history from the late nineteenth century to today. Through a focus on key films and significant epochs, the course traces the evolution of form, style and genre, the medium's changing technologies and business models, as well as film's relation to broader cultural, social and political contexts. Screenings of narrative, documentary and experimental films will be accompanied by readings in film theory and history.

Full details for VISST 3175 - Global Cinema and Media

This course considers issues, approaches, and complexities in the contemporary television landscape. As television has changed drastically over the past fifteen years, this course provides students with a deeper understanding of the changes in narratives, technologies, forms, and platforms that structure/restructure the televisual world. Students will grapple with how "new media" forms such as web-series and on-demand internet streaming services have changed primetime television. We will balance our look at television shows with nuanced readings about the televisual media industry. By watching, analyzing, and critiquing the powerful medium of television, students will situate their understanding within a broader consideration of the medium's regulation, production, distribution, and reception in the network and post-network era.

Full details for VISST 3463 - Contemporary Television

What are comics? While it's easy to identify a cartoon, graphic novel, or comic book, it's hard to understand the wide world of comics. As a medium, comics are part of a global tradition of visual storytelling and sequential art, including premodern tapestries, early modern pamphlets, and modern children's books, political cartoons, and animated films. With a focus on the German-speaking world, we will examine a wide range of comics genres (e.g., fiction, history, autobiography, journalism, comix) and formats (e.g., books, strips, pamphlets, zines). Our discussions will address questions of taste, aesthetics, materiality, censorship, representation, and word-image relations. While we will primarily be reading and writing about comics and comics studies, students will also gain some exposure to making comics.

Full details for VISST 3555 - Comics as a Medium

In this course, we will examine the role of electronic and digital technologies in the arts of the late 20th and 21st centuries with emphasis on Europe and North America. Beginning with the cybernetically and systems-inspired work of the late sixties, we will explore early uses of computer technology, including early experiments in synthetic video in the 1970s. An overview of pre-internet telematic experiments will lead to an investigation of net art and later currents of digital art. The ongoing development of behavioral art forms will be a central theme. Critical evaluation of various attitudes concerning technology will be encouraged.

Full details for VISST 3650 - History and Theory of Digital Art

The arts of Southeast Asia are studied in their social context, since in traditional societies creative processes are often mapped on the sequence of events that compose human lives. We will be looking particularly at the gendered ways in which bodies are mapped on the land, and how these various framings are often reflected in the unique relationships that emerge between works of art and textual sources. The South Asian epics of the Ramayana (Story of Rama) and the Mahabharata will be explored during the semester as infinitely renewable sources of inspiration.

Full details for VISST 3696 - The Arts of Southeast Asia

Focused, practical exercises teach the student fundamental staging techniques that bring written text to theatrical life. A core objective is to increase the student's awareness of why and how certain stage events communicate effectively to an audience. Each student directs a number of exercises as well as a short scene.

Full details for VISST 3798 - Fundamentals of Directing I

Works of art have always engendered political, social, and cultural meanings. This seminar presents an introduction to the methods used by art historians and the objects and ideas that constitute the historiography of their discipline. If art history was once understood as the study of the development of style in "European art", over the past century its practitioners have attempted to embrace a "global" perspective and to address issues of class, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, and gender. Readings will focus on historically situating methods and the implications of their cross-cultural application. They will be discussed in the framework of institutions, apparatuses and practices that have shaped the field, identifying how these have contributed to systemic mechanisms of hegemony and exclusion. Papers will encourage students to put methods into practice, realizing in the process that subject matter is not an isolated choice to which methods are applied, but something that profoundly affects the approach that the researcher brings to the writing and conceptualizing and doing of art history. 

Full details for VISST 4101 - Proseminar: Introduction to Methods

Topic: Cyberfeminism in the Visual Arts; What was/is cyberfeminism? In this seminar, we will investigate the emergence of cyberfeminism in theory and art in the context of the accelerated technological developments of the latter half of the twentieth century. Since the early 1990's, critics have identified numerous manifestations in the visual arts as cyberfeminist yet this art sits uneasily between the histories of media arts, feminist, and activist art. Artistic production categorized as cyberfeminist centers on digital media and can expand to art in earlier media. We will explore the relation of cyberfeminism to current and previous feminist art and theory.

Full details for VISST 4153 - Topics in Feminist Media Arts

An understanding of performance as object and lens, modality and method, is integral to scholarship and research across the humanities and social sciences. Charting the advent and defining principles of performance studies, this course explores the interdisciplinary history of the field, including its association with anthropology, visual studies, theater, gender studies, sociology, psychology, literature, philosophy, and critical race studies. This class examines performance as a means of creative expression, a mode of critical inquiry, and an avenue for public engagement. We will attend to both the practice of performance - as gesture, behavior, habit, event, artistic expression, and social drama - and the study of performance - through ethnographic observation, spectatorship, documentation, reproduction, analysis, and writing strategies. Through a study of research paradigms and key issues related to performance, we will explore not only what this highly contested term "is" and "does," but when and how, for whom, and under what circumstances.

Full details for VISST 4835 - Performance Studies: Theories and Methods

Shadowplay is a superb medium for storytelling. As with many performing arts in Asia, neither the highly stylized images of puppets, nor its musical, or linguistic complexity detract from its wide popularity. Why does an art that appears so obscure exercise such broad appeal? This seminar explores the playful and politically adept fluctuations of shadows across screens from India to Mainland and Island Southeast Asia. We will also briefly examine East Asian developments, particularly in China and Japan. In each of the countries where shadow theatre exists it has acquired its own repertory and a distinct technique and style of its own. This aesthetic has translated locally into paint, sculpture, architecture, cinema, and modern and contemporary installation art. Classes will meet regularly in the Herbert F. Johnson Museum.

Full details for VISST 4852 - Shadowplay: Asian Art and Performance