This team-taught course introduces students to the History of Art as a global and interdisciplinary field. Led by a selection of professors from the department, in collaboration with staff and faculty of the Herbert F. 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 2024 is "Materiality." Considering how artists and artisans from antiquity to the present have mobilized a broad range of materials and processes to create works of art, we will explore the intimate relationship between makers, matter, and meaning.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ARTH 1100 - Art Histories: An Introduction

This course attempts to reconcile the split between art and science through a pluralistic perspective of environmental artistic processes. What is the role of visual culture in sustainable development? Cataclysmic change in the world has forced a turn in environmental art from isolated practices to having a fundamental role in shaping the transformation of our relationships to nature. Informed by Western and Indigenous philosophies, trace how artists enact ecological micro-utopias from earth art to ecological art as a catalyst for social change.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS)

Full details for ARTH 2255 - Ecocriticism and Visual Culture

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

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. 

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

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

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.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for ARTH 3250 - Introduction to Dendrochronology

This course introduces students to the arts of the ancient Americas from circa 2000 BC to the Spanish invasions of the 15th and 16th centuries. The inhabitants of the Americas produced outstanding works of art and architecture that showcased their diverse aesthetic contributions. This course covers the arts of indigenous Mesoamerica (Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras), the Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and the Greater and Lesser Antilles), and Andean South America (Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile). Students will become familiar with the history, archaeology, and visual arts of the earliest cultures that populated these regions up through the Inca, Aztec, and Maya cultures that encountered the Spaniards. This course will also explore the legacies of pre-Columbian art in colonial, modern, and contemporary Latin America.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS)

Full details for ARTH 3566 - Art and Architecture of the Pre-Columbian Americas

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. Special emphasis will be devoted to localized encounters in Indonesia, Cambodia, Burma/Myanmar, Vietnam, and Thailand.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

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. 

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ARTH 4101 - Proseminar: Introduction to Methods

The colonial period in Latin America (circa 1521-1820s) witnessed the formation of one of the most diverse societies in the world. Labor regimes, religious activities, marriage alliances, and commercial contacts engendered by the Spanish colonial enterprise brought Spaniards, Africans, and Indigenous peoples into dynamic contact. This cross-fertilization of cultures resulted in the construction of new cultural categories and colonial identities whose reverberations continue to be felt into the present day. This course explores the role that visual culture played in the articulation of identity in Latin America. For the purposes of this seminar, "identity" can be loosely defined as the overlapping allegiances to which one ascribes, whether racial, cultural, gendered, religious, or community-based. The visual culture of colonial Latin America can reveal multitudes on the construction of self and community across temporal and geographical contexts. We will explore a variety of colonial Latin American objects and images, including paintings, textiles, and material culture. Our discussions of images will be guided by readings on hybridity, coloniality, cross-cultural exchange, and the early modern Atlantic world.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ARTH 4160 - Topics in Colonial Encounters

What is authenticity and why does it matter? Connoisseurship—the expertise required to make discerning judgments—involves assessments of quality,authenticity, historical and cultural significance, and many other issues. This course focuses on connoisseurship in the fine arts, archaeology, and ethnography in both academic contexts and the art world. Emphasis is on developing a nuanced understanding of authentication, at the core of the art market and an important determinant of relevant data for academic art historians and archaeologists. Topics include the role of authenticity in assigning value; looting and faking in relation to antiquities markets; technical analysis and forgery detection.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ARTH 4231 - Fakes and the Authentic: Connoisseurship, Value, and Judgement

Topic: Writing Through the Forest in Search of Trees. Hello, Humanities Student! Are you a plotter or a pantser? Not sure? Come and join us to find out, and to gain valuable insight into what kind of a writer you are, and how to manage that writer most effectively and productively. This theme-centered methods seminar, through a communal focus on trees, woods, glens, and copses in the pre-modern world, will hone in on the most indispensable tool in the humanist's belt: writing. From the generation of ideas, to their organization into an outline (or a blueprint, or whatever euphemism we, as a group or as individuals, decide to apply to the initial, tangled pile of yarn) to the first draft. Followed by frank and constructive criticism of the initial draft as a group and in pairs, and then on to the part that all students—really, all humanists…okay, all writers—find to be the greatest struggle: "Your paper has some good ideas, but it really needs a rewrite." Now what do you do? As we write, and rewrite, we will also read widely. In addition to primary sources, scholarly articles and essays, we will include criticism, personal essay, theory, excerpts from fiction, and more, in an effort to open students' writing up to a myriad of possibilities for persuasive and compelling written communication.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ARTH 4310 - Methods in Medieval

Full details for ARTH 4361 - Staffage: Figures for Scale, 1500-1850

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

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

Satisfies Tutorial Requirement. 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. 

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ARTH 4545 - The Photobook

How can a small sculpture produce monumental effects? Recent shifts in metal-detecting and excavation practices have transformed our understanding of the scope of figural art after the Roman empire's collapse; the field is newly flooded with evidence of toys, puppets, and other tiny bodies. Working across the disciplines of anthropology, archaeology, art history, philosophy, and gender studies, this course investigates how figurines shaped space, ritual, and concepts of personhood in the early medieval world.

Full details for ARTH 4706 - The Poetics of Embodiment: Figurines in the Early Middle Ages

This seminar provides a higher-level general introduction to, and survey of, contemporary theories, methods, and approaches in the archaeology of the Mediterranean world. Rather than focusing on a specific geographical sub-region or chronological period, this course examines and critically assesses the practice and distinctive character of Mediterranean archaeology more broadly.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS)

Full details for ARTH 4754 - Themes in Mediterranean Archaeology

China, a cultural giant of East Asia, made a passive entrance into modernity. With the advent of Western and American colonialism and imperialism, coupled with recent successes in westernization by the Japanese, Chinese artists had to redefine their roles as well as their visions. This turmoil bore witness to a vibrant beginning in modern Chinese art. Interactions between the Chinese themselves, and Chinese interactions with foreigners in the major cities of Shanghai and Beijing, fostered new directions in Chinese art and helped shape western visions of Chinese art history. Issues covered include: Chinese debates on western influence--their theoretical foundations and rationales; New visions for the future of Chinese art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; Pluralistic approaches and arguments on "Chinese identity" in the modern era; Collecting art and the vision of history; The identity of traditional literati painters in the modern era-their roles, artworks, and deeds; Foreigners in China-the formation of major European collections of Chinese art, and the formation of "Chinese art history" in the West.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ARTH 4816 - Modern Chinese Art

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 graduate seminar introduces a range of research methods in art history and visual studies. We will read and discuss a series of texts related to the history and current practice of the discipline of art history. In addition, each week, a member of the faculty will visit the seminar to discuss their own research practice. This course is required of all first-year Ph.D. students in History of Art, and is open to graduate students from other fields.

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

Full details for ARTH 6060 - Visual Ideology

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

The colonial period in Latin America (circa 1521-1820s) witnessed the formation of one of the most diverse societies in the world.  Labor regimes, religious activities, marriage alliances, and commercial contacts engendered by the Spanish colonial enterprise brought Spaniards, Africans, and Indigenous peoples into dynamic contact.  This cross-fertilization of cultures resulted in the construction of new cultural categories and colonial identities whose reverberations continue to be felt into the present day.  This seminar explores the role that visual culture played in the articulation of identity in Latin America.  For the purposes of this seminar, "identity" can be loosely defined as the overlapping allegiances to which one ascribes, whether racial, cultural, gendered, religious, or community-based.  The visual culture of colonial Latin America can reveal multitudes on the construction of self and community across temporal and geographical contexts.  We will explore a variety of colonial Latin American objects and images, including paintings, textiles, and material culture.  Our discussions of images will be guided by readings on hybridity, coloniality, cross-cultural exchange, and the early modern Atlantic world.

Full details for ARTH 6160 - Topics in Colonial Encounters

Topic: Writing Through the Forest in Search of Trees. Hello, Humanities Student! Are you a plotter or a pantser? Not sure? Come and join us to find out, and to gain valuable insight into what kind of a writer you are, and how to manage that writer most effectively and productively. This theme-centered methods seminar, through a communal focus on trees, woods, glens, and copses in the pre-modern world, will hone in on the most indispensable tool in the humanist's belt: writing. From the generation of ideas, to their organization into an outline (or a blueprint, or whatever euphemism we, as a group or as individuals, decide to apply to the initial, tangled pile of yarn) to the first draft. Followed by frank and constructive criticism of the initial draft as a group and in pairs, and then on to the part that all students—really, all humanists…okay, all writers—find to be the greatest struggle: "Your paper has some good ideas, but it really needs a rewrite." Now what do you do? As we write, and rewrite, we will also read widely. In addition to primary sources, scholarly articles and essays, we will include criticism, personal essay, theory, excerpts from fiction, and more, in an effort to open students' writing up to a myriad of possibilities for persuasive and compelling written communication.

Full details for ARTH 6310 - Methods in Medieval

Full details for ARTH 6361 - Staffage: Figures for Scale, 1500-1850

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 2024: 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 course introduces students to the arts of the ancient Americas from circa 2000 BC to the Spanish invasions of the 15th and 16th centuries. The inhabitants of the Americas produced outstanding works of art and architecture that showcased their diverse aesthetic contributions. This course covers the arts of indigenous Mesoamerica (Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras), the Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and the Greater and Lesser Antilles), and Andean South America (Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile). Students will become familiar with the history, archaeology, and visual arts of the earliest cultures that populated these regions up through the Inca, Aztec, and Maya cultures that encountered the Spaniards. This course will also explore the legacies of pre-Columbian art in colonial, modern, and contemporary Latin America.

Full details for ARTH 6566 - Art and Architecture of the Pre-Columbian Americas

How can a small sculpture produce monumental effects? Recent shifts in metal-detecting and excavation practices have transformed our understanding of the scope of figural art after the Roman empire's collapse; the field is newly flooded with evidence of toys, puppets, and other tiny bodies. Working across the disciplines of anthropology, archaeology, art history, philosophy, and gender studies, this course investigates how figurines shaped space, ritual, and concepts of personhood in the early medieval world.

Full details for ARTH 6706 - The Poetics of Embodiment: Figurines in the Early Middle Ages

China, a cultural giant of East Asia, made a passive entrance into modernity. With the advent of Western and American colonialism and imperialism, coupled with recent successes in westernization by the Japanese, Chinese artists had to redefine their roles as well as their visions. This turmoil bore witness to a vibrant beginning in modern Chinese art. Interactions between the Chinese themselves, and Chinese interactions with foreigners in the major cities of Shanghai and Beijing, fostered new directions in Chinese art and helped shape western visions of Chinese art history. Issues covered include: Chinese debates on western influence--their theoretical foundations and rationales; New visions for the future of Chinese art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; Pluralistic approaches and arguments on "Chinese identity" in the modern era; Collecting art and the vision of history; The identity of traditional literati painters in the modern era-their roles, artworks, and deeds; Foreigners in China-the formation of major European collections of Chinese art, and the formation of "Chinese art history" in the West.

Full details for ARTH 6816 - Modern Chinese 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. Special emphasis will be devoted to localized encounters in Indonesia, Cambodia, Burma/Myanmar, Vietnam, and Thailand.

Full details for ARTH 6850 - The Arts of Southeast Asia

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for VISST 2012 - Discussions of Environment and Sustainability

In this introductory course, participants will study the economic and technological history of the television industry, with a particular emphasis on its manifestations in the United States and the United Kingdom; the changing shape of the medium of television over time and in ever-wider global contexts; the social meanings, political stakes, and ideological effects of the medium; and the major methodological tools and critical concepts used in the interpretation of the medium, including Marxist, feminist, queer, and postcolonial approaches. Two to three hours of television viewing per week will be accompanied by short, sometimes dense readings, as well as written exercises.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for VISST 2160 - Television

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for VISST 2511 - 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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

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

This course raises profound theoretical questions about embodiment, agency, power, and race in virtual spaces. How do digital identities in their intersection with something called race, interact with physical bodies and material conditions? What are the possibilities and limitations of digital technologies in creating emancipatory futures for raced life? In tackling these questions, the interdisciplinary course explores key dimensions of digital feminism, including activism and advocacy, community building, critique of digital culture, criticism of techno-capitalism, call for inclusive design, artistic and cultural productions.

Full details for VISST 2723 - Digital Feminism and Race

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

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

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 VISST 2750 - Introduction to Humanities

Full details for VISST 3545 - Imagining the Middle Ages: Films, Games, and Media

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for VISST 3555 - Comics as a Medium

This course introduces students to the arts of the ancient Americas from circa 2000 BC to the Spanish invasions of the 15th and 16th centuries. The inhabitants of the Americas produced outstanding works of art and architecture that showcased their diverse aesthetic contributions. This course covers the arts of indigenous Mesoamerica (Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras), the Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and the Greater and Lesser Antilles), and Andean South America (Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile). Students will become familiar with the history, archaeology, and visual arts of the earliest cultures that populated these regions up through the Inca, Aztec, and Maya cultures that encountered the Spaniards. This course will also explore the legacies of pre-Columbian art in colonial, modern, and contemporary Latin America.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS)

Full details for VISST 3566 - Art and Architecture of the Pre-Columbian Americas

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. Special emphasis will be devoted to localized encounters in Indonesia, Cambodia, Burma/Myanmar, Vietnam, and Thailand.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for VISST 3798 - Fundamentals of Directing I

Full details for VISST 3812 - Edge Cities: Celluloid New York and Los Angeles

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. 

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for VISST 4101 - Proseminar: Introduction to Methods

The colonial period in Latin America (circa 1521-1820s) witnessed the formation of one of the most diverse societies in the world. Labor regimes, religious activities, marriage alliances, and commercial contacts engendered by the Spanish colonial enterprise brought Spaniards, Africans, and Indigenous peoples into dynamic contact. This cross-fertilization of cultures resulted in the construction of new cultural categories and colonial identities whose reverberations continue to be felt into the present day. This course explores the role that visual culture played in the articulation of identity in Latin America. For the purposes of this seminar, "identity" can be loosely defined as the overlapping allegiances to which one ascribes, whether racial, cultural, gendered, religious, or community-based. The visual culture of colonial Latin America can reveal multitudes on the construction of self and community across temporal and geographical contexts. We will explore a variety of colonial Latin American objects and images, including paintings, textiles, and material culture. Our discussions of images will be guided by readings on hybridity, coloniality, cross-cultural exchange, and the early modern Atlantic world.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for VISST 4160 - Topics in Colonial Encounters

How do queer people make family? What cultural and artistic practices sustain queer bonds? To answer these questions, this course examines queer and trans kinship narratives across a range of genres, including literature, film, television, and critical theory. We will theorize kinship's relationship to cis-heteronormativity, capitalism, white supremacy, and colonialism, and debate whether queer and trans kinships can model new political forms.

Full details for VISST 4705 - How to Make Queer Kin: Sustaining Bonds in LGBTQ Culture

Full details for VISST 4711 - Staffage: Figures for Scale, 1500-1850

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

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

How do queer people make family? What cultural and artistic practices sustain queer bonds? To answer these questions, this course examines queer and trans kinship narratives across a range of genres, including literature, film, television, and critical theory. We will theorize kinship's relationship to cis-heteronormativity, capitalism, white supremacy, and colonialism, and debate whether queer and trans kinships can model new political forms.

Full details for VISST 6705 - How to Make Queer Kin: Sustaining Bonds in LGBTQ Culture

Full details for VISST 6711 - Staffage: Figures for Scale, 1500-1850