Courses

Upon viewing Carolee Schneemann's Fuses, fellow avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas proclaimed it the film of the year, saying, "It is so gorgeous… so dangerous." While Fuses was censored as pornographic, Schneemann reflects that it's lasting impact as a work of art can be attributed to how it differed from pornography, in visually conveying female pleasure: "There's no objectification or fetishization of the woman." In pushing boundaries of representation, Schneemann and her feminist cohort were considered dangerous, and they are not alone in the history of art. Female artists can be situated among other educated women in their presumptive ability to disrupt the natural (patriarchal) order of things. This course considers: women artists connoted as dangerous, from Frida Kahlo to Kara Walker; how women have been villainized in the visual record, from witches to suffragettes; and the pioneering scholars who uncover and interpret these issues, from Linda Nochlin to Deborah Willis. Ultimately, we will connect danger to power.

Full details for ARTH 1160 - FWS: Dangerous Women

In this course, students will explore the political roles of art in Latin America in a selection of works ranging from the 7th to the 21st century. How can we conceive of aesthetics as politics in Latin America under a variety of historical regimes, including the Maya, Aztecs, Spanish colonial rule, revolutionary governments, military dictatorships, and the contemporary neo-liberal state? This course also investigates as possible political interventions, visual and performative works traditionally not classified as "political art," including abstract art, performance, theater, installation, new media, and site-specific work.

Full details for ARTH 1166 - FWS: Latin American Art as Politics

Explores how different styles of writing about art such as manifestos, art criticism, catalogue essays, and art history papers have attempted to give resolution to the larger question: what is Latin American art? While most scholars today agree that there is nothing inherently "Latin American" in the art of the region, this was a central concern for many of the artists who will be covered in class: Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and Joaquin Torres Garcia. Through a discussion on artistic movements between the years of 1920 to 1950, such as Mexican Muralism, Surrealism, Geometric Abstraction, and Neo-Figuration, this course will explore how these different styles of writing about art have themselves helped construct the category "Latin American Art."

Full details for ARTH 1167 - FWS: Latin American Modernism

Why do so many societies create statues, and why do they set them up in prominent spaces within their communities? How and why do statues loom so large in the public imagination? Looking both to the cultures of Ancient Greece and Rome and to the modern West, this course examines the social, political, religious, and erotic power attributed to statues across diverse periods and contexts. Drawing on dynamic "Active Learning" methods, we will explore topics including the foundational role of statues for political states (from the Athenian Tyrannicides to the Statue of Liberty), the destruction of statues (from Christian iconoclasm to Confederate monuments), creative "statue-hacks" (from Rome's Pasquino to Wall Street's "Fearless Girl") and objects of cult (from Olympian Zeus to weeping Madonnas). The course will encourage active engagement with statues relevant to students themselves, including the Cornell cast collection, statues on campus, and those in your own home town.

Full details for ARTH 1704 - Statues and Public Life

This course introduces the field of Visual Studies.  Visual Studies seeks to define and improve our visual relationship to nature and culture after the modern surge in technology and knowledge.  It contains objects, images, and problems that lie beyond the Art History and experimental science, yet is grown from both cultures.  It teaches the physical and legal limits of human, animal, and machine vision, how knowledge and power get into images, how spectacle drives the economy, and techniques of analysis that can deliver fresh perspectives across disciplines.

Full details for ARTH 2000 - Introduction to Visual Studies

This course explores Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) knowledge and its application across the disciplines and through time. In particular, it offers a glimpse into Cornell's local indigenous culture through Haudenosaunee understanding of themselves as a unique people, maintaining traditional teachings and fulfilling ancient responsibilities in the world. Students will engage multiple primary sources including: art, archives, material and expressive culture and interact with Haudenosaunee knowledge holders, intellectuals, and elders.

Full details for ARTH 2101 - Indigenous Ingenuities as Living Networks

What was it like to live in the Roman world?  What did that world look, taste and smell like?  How did Romans raise their families, entertain themselves, understand death, and interact with their government? What were Roman values and how did they differ from our own?  This course takes as its subject the everyday lives of individuals and explores those lives using the combined tools of archaeology, architecture and art, as well as some primary source readings.  In doing so, it seeks to integrate those monuments into a world of real people, and to use archaeology to narrate a story about ancient lives and life habits. Some of the topics explored will include the Roman house; the Roman family, children and slaves; bathing and hygiene; food; gardens, agriculture and animals.

Full details for ARTH 2221 - Archaeology/Roman Private Life

This course is designed to introduce students to Latin American art from the pre-Columbian period to the present.  It will cover the arts of ancient civilizations including the Olmec, Maya, Aztec, Moche, and Inca, as well as the colonial, modern, and contemporary arts of Latin America and the Latino/a diaspora.  Major themes include the relationship between art and religion, innovations and transformations in Latin American art across time, art and identity, as well as Indigenous and Afro-Latin American contributions to the visual arts.  This course examines the societal relevance of images across Latin American cultures by paying close attention to the historical and political contexts in which they were created.  Course readings are drawn from the disciplines of art history, anthropology, and history, along with theoretical perspectives on colonialism, postcolonialism, identity, race, and ethnicity.

Full details for ARTH 2550 - Introduction to Latin American Art

Who are 'the poor' in the United States? Who are the largest recipients of federal welfare and entitlement spending? Why is there an unprecedented simultaneous increase in wealth and poverty in the United States at this point in its history? What role does photography play in our understanding and misunderstanding of poverty in 'the greatest country in the world?' In this course we will explore the perceptions of poverty in the United States through three major American newspapers.

Full details for ARTH 3010 - Photography and the American Dream

This interdisciplinary undergraduate lecture examines the visual culture of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade from the 16th century to the present. Lectures present artifacts, prints, paintings, photographs, sculpture, film and installation art that images the history of slavery and its profound contemporary resonance. Lectures and assignments consider the following themes: how does the gaze structure vision and influence the control of historical narratives? Which themes dominate the visual culture of slavery? How does visual culture encode memory, violence or racism? How did the visual culture of slavery produce and circulate new technologies of vison? Where is the history of slavery visible in the built environment or the local landscape? Students study artifacts in the May Anti-Slavery Collection at Kroch Library and artworks at the Johnson Museum. Field trip to nearby anti-slavery sites of memory.

Full details for ARTH 3506 - Slavery and Visual Culture

This course introduces the New German Cinema (1962-85), an influential movement of West German filmmakers including Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Alexander Kluge, Margarethe von Trotta, and Wim Wenders. Like the French New Wave, the New German Cinema is known not only for grappling with the nation's complex history, but also for experimenting with early multimedia forms. Watching the movement's celebrated films and reading its controversial texts, we will discuss the complex search for national identity after World War II; problems of authorship, genre, and cinematic traditions; and the changing conceptions of media and the public sphere. Students without experience in film studies are welcome—the course will also double as an introduction to discussing and analyzing film. Screenings in German with English subtitles.

Full details for ARTH 3535 - New German Cinema

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.

Full details for ARTH 3850 - The Arts of Southeast Asia

Full details for ARTH 3856 - Performing Angkor: Dance, Silk and Stone

Full details for ARTH 4015 - Photography and the Archive

This course will look at visual representations of cross-cultural encounters throughout the early modern period with a special emphasis on exchanges between Europe and the Americas (15th-18th centuries). The visual encounters are considered within the context of an increasingly interconnected global system. This course will be organized around a set of case studies that explore a diverse array of artworks, including prints, manuscripts, cartographic illustrations, portraits, and the decorative arts. Topics to be covered include European images of Amerindian peoples and lands, botanical illustrations, the impact of European prints on Latin American art, and collections of New World artifacts in European cabinets of curiosity. This course will explore issues of visual translation and dissemination in the creation of New World artistic traditions. In turn, it also examines the reception of New World objects by European patrons. Readings will be drawn from the disciplines of art history, the history of science, and literary theory, linked by a common framework of visuality and cross-cultural exchange.

Full details for ARTH 4165 - Visual Encounters in the Early Modern World

An examination and analysis of the major trends in art from Neoclassicism and Romanticism through Post Impressionism and the dawn of the twentieth century. Lectures and readings will concentrate on the historical context of great masterpieces by seminal artists. The class will investigate the imagery and theoretical foundation of nineteenth-century European and American art using a selection of appropriate methodological approaches. Major figures to be discussed include David, Copley, Goya, Delacroix, Courbet, Cole, Manet, Morisot, Monet, Degas, Cassatt, Sargent, Eakins, Homer, Rodin, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne, and Toulouse-Lautrec. Part of each class will be devoted to discussions of the readings. Two classes will be held in the National Gallery of Art at times and dates to be determined. Exams, a term paper, and class participation will be used for evaluative purposes.

Full details for ARTH 4171 - 19th Century Art and Culture

This seminar will offer a survey of film theory and history tailored for art historians, especially but not exclusively for modernists.  The influence of cinema on twentieth-century aesthetics cannot be overstated, yet art historians routinely work without enough knowledge about the history of cinema or the grammar and rhetoric of its techniques.  The history of montage, continuity editing, cinematography, and narrative form will be covered as we encounter major works from world cinema in dialogue with significant movements in modern art.  German Expressionism, Surrealism, Italian Neorealism, Film Noir, Hollywood Auteurism will be among the major movements covered, as will the entry into the fine art world of moving image media.

Full details for ARTH 4540 - Film History for Art Historians

In this course, we will explore the long and varied history of abstraction as both a practice and an ideal. We will survey this history by drawing on two distinct bodies of thought relevant to the problem of abstraction, forming a parallel discourse across the length of the course. The theoretical framing will begin by considering Aristotle on aphareisis before proceeding to consider various writings by Marx, Simmel, Husserl, Heidegger and Derrida. The specifically art historical material will begin by addressing the origins of perspectival space before considering practices of abstraction in nineteenth and twentieth century art. We will conclude by examining postwar global variants of abstraction for insights into the history of modernism.

Full details for ARTH 4590 - Theory and History of Abstraction

The body is a universal. How we construct our understandings of it is not. In this class we will investigate conceptions and treatment of the early-modern body (1400-1700) mainly in Europe with excursions to China, Japan, Africa. Among our topics will be: classical understanding of the body and gender; cross-cultural practices of medicine and anatomy; aesthetics and the nude; definitions of beauty and the grotesque. Criminal, sinful and saintly bodies; death, the macabre, and  the mortal, divine body of Christ; the ambiguous gender of children; the formation of identity through portraiture; the science of sexuality and art of erotics as well as correspondences among bodies, domestic and public spaces, the macrocosm and microcosm will round out our study. We will work with historical materials with an eye for current practices in bodily identities.

Full details for ARTH 4601 - Space, Gender, Body in Early Modern Art

While globalization is a process unfolding over many centuries, it has arguably intensified in recent decades. The incorporation of the communist world and independent nation-states into global finance and transnational capitalism from the 1970s onwards has resulted in temporal acceleration and spatial compression on a planetary scale. In the world of art, this has resulted in multifaceted developments. The rise of a spectacular global installation art in biennials and art fairs is also accompanied with myriad local practices that engage with society and politics. This seminar will examine contemporary art in multiple historical and methodological frameworks. Topics covered will include the relation between art and institutions, new patronage structures, neoliberal subjectivities, new materialisms, informal life worlds, digital and social medias, violence, migration, and ecological destruction.

Full details for ARTH 4691 - Art and Globalization

During Europe's colonial era, the modern museum emerged as a site of cultural and scientific authority. This course investigates the history of imperial collections and collectors, with a focus on Britain and the East India Company in the nineteenth century. Examples of topics include: the "supply chain" for artifacts and knowledge resources; changing conceptions of intellectual property, ownership and access; household versus public versus for-profit collections; museums and the narration of social values and cultural identities; debates over the function or aims of museums and related institutions; the collections and the administration of the empire; the collections and the growth of the sciences; the postcolonial legacies of colonial collections.

Full details for ARTH 4720 - Curating the British Empire

This seminar explores how patterned cloths serve as a symbolic medium, functioning on multiple levels of understanding and communication. As spun, dyed, and woven threads of consequence, textiles can be seen to enter into all phases of social, economic, political, religious, and performance processes, often assuming unusual properties and attributes. As bearers of talismanic messages, signifiers of rank, and as the recipients of influences from maritime trade and touristic demand, textiles are read between the folds of complex exchange mechanisms in South and Southeast Asia.

Full details for ARTH 4855 - Threads of Consequence: Textiles in South and Southeast Asia

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 4992 - Independent Study

The student under faculty direction prepares a senior thesis.

Full details for ARTH 4999 - Honors Work II

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 5992 - 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 5994 - Supervised Study

This graduate seminar explores the making of photographic archives, the narratives they tell, and the parameters that define them as objects of study. As visual collections, photographic archives present specific concerns - especially as digital technologies change the way knowledge is classified, stored, retrieved and disseminated. To be sure, differential power relations determine what is collected - what is remembered or forgotten - by societies and institutions. Social and economic histories as well as experiences of race, class, gender and sexuality affect the construction, acquisition and maintenance of archives and their ability to influence knowledge production. Students in this course study archival practices by choosing a unique photographic archive at Cornell for a research project, which may be realized as an exhibition (online or otherwise), a documentary film, or a digital humanities project.

Full details for ARTH 6015 - Photography and the Archive

This course will look at visual representations of cross-cultural encounters throughout the early modern period with a special emphasis on exchanges between Europe and the Americas (15th-18th centuries). The visual encounters are considered within the context of an increasingly interconnected global system. This course will be organized around a set of case studies that explore a diverse array of artworks, including prints, manuscripts, cartographic illustrations, portraits, and the decorative arts. Topics to be covered include European images of Amerindian peoples and lands, botanical illustrations, the impact of European prints on Latin American art, and collections of New World artifacts in European cabinets of curiosity. This course will explore issues of visual translation and dissemination in the creation of New World artistic traditions. In turn, it also examines the reception of New World objects by European patrons. Readings will be drawn from the disciplines of art history, the history of science, and literary theory, linked by a common framework of visuality and cross-cultural exchange.

Full details for ARTH 6165 - Visual Encounters in the Early Modern World

This seminar will offer a survey of film theory and history tailored for art historians, especially but not exclusively for modernists.  The influence of cinema on twentieth-century aesthetics cannot be overstated, yet art historians routinely work without enough knowledge about the history of cinema or the grammar and rhetoric of its techniques.  The history of montage, continuity editing, cinematography, and narrative form will be covered as we encounter major works from world cinema in dialogue with significant movements in modern art.  German Expressionism, Surrealism, Italian Neorealism, Film Noir, Hollywood Auteurism will be among the major movements covered, as will the entry into the fine art world of moving image media.

Full details for ARTH 6540 - Film History for Art Historians

In this course, we will explore the long and varied history of abstraction as both a practice and an ideal. We will survey this history by drawing on two distinct bodies of thought relevant to the problem of abstraction, forming a parallel discourse across the length of the course. The theoretical framing will begin by considering Aristotle on aphareisis before proceeding to consider various writings by Marx, Simmel, Husserl, Heidegger and Derrida. The specifically art historical material will begin by addressing the origins of perspectival space before considering practices of abstraction in nineteenth and twentieth century art. We will conclude by examining postwar global variants of abstraction for insights into the history of modernism.

Full details for ARTH 6590 - Theory and History of Abstraction

The body is a universal. How we construct our understandings of it is not. In this class we will investigate conceptions and treatment of the early-modern body (1400-1700) mainly in Europe with excursions to China, Japan, Africa. Among our topics will be: classical understanding of the body and gender; cross-cultural practices of medicine and anatomy; aesthetics and the nude; definitions of beauty and the grotesque. Criminal, sinful and saintly bodies; death, the macabre, and  the mortal, divine body of Christ; the ambiguous gender of children; the formation of identity through portraiture; the science of sexuality and art of erotics as well as correspondences among bodies, domestic and public spaces, the macrocosm and microcosm will round out our study. We will work with historical materials with an eye for current practices in bodily identities.

Full details for ARTH 6601 - Space, Gender, Body in Early Modern Art

While globalization is a process unfolding over many centuries, it has arguably intensified in recent decades. The incorporation of the communist world and independent nation-states into global finance and transnational capitalism from the 1970s onwards has resulted in temporal acceleration and spatial compression on a planetary scale. In the world of art, this has resulted in multifaceted developments. The rise of a spectacular global installation art in biennials and art fairs is also accompanied with myriad local practices that engage with society and politics. This seminar will examine contemporary art in multiple historical and methodological frameworks. Topics covered will include the relation between art and institutions, new patronage structures, neoliberal subjectivities, new materialisms, informal life worlds, digital and social medias, violence, migration, and ecological destruction.

Full details for ARTH 6691 - Art and Globalization

Some of our very best evidence for Roman art survives in the form of frescoes in Rome, Ostia and the Bay of Naples. Exploring imperial palaces, rural villas, town houses, shops, baths, tombs, taverns and gardens, we will examine the visual dynamics and socio-cultural significance of wall-paintings within their original archaeological contexts. The study of frescoes offers an exciting means of tackling important questions relating to Roman social history alongside the complexities of representation within the Greco-Roman visual tradition, including the relationship between art and nature, the use of myth, the spatial dynamics of interior decorative schemes, visual-verbal relations, and concepts of ornament, medium, and abstraction. This course will be taught as a Traveling Seminar, which will include a trip to Rome and Bay of Naples over spring break. Spaces are limited.

Full details for ARTH 6714 - Traveling Seminar in Roman Painting

During Europe's colonial era, the modern museum emerged as a site of cultural and scientific authority. This course investigates the history of imperial collections and collectors, with a focus on Britain and the East India Company in the nineteenth century. Examples of topics include: the "supply chain" for artifacts and knowledge resources; changing conceptions of intellectual property, ownership and access; household versus public versus for-profit collections; museums and the narration of social values and cultural identities; debates over the function or aims of museums and related institutions; the collections and the administration of the empire; the collections and the growth of the sciences; the postcolonial legacies of colonial collections.

Full details for ARTH 6720 - Curating the British Empire

This seminar explores how patterned cloths serve as a symbolic medium, functioning on multiple levels of understanding and communication. As spun, dyed, and woven threads of consequence, textiles can be seen to enter into all phases of social, economic, political, religious, and performance processes, often assuming unusual properties and attributes. As bearers of talismanic messages, signifiers of rank, and as the recipients of influences from maritime trade and touristic demand, textiles are read between the folds of complex exchange mechanisms in South and Southeast Asia.

Full details for ARTH 6855 - Threads of Consequence: Textiles in South and 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 course introduces the field of Visual Studies.  Visual Studies seeks to define and improve our visual relationship to nature and culture after the modern surge in technology and knowledge.  It contains objects, images, and problems that lie beyond the Art History and experimental science, yet is grown from both cultures.  It teaches the physical and legal limits of human, animal, and machine vision, how knowledge and power get into images, how spectacle drives the economy, and techniques of analysis that can deliver fresh perspectives across disciplines.

Full details for VISST 2000 - Introduction to Visual Studies

Film industries in the Middle East, as in much of the rest of the world, emerged out of efforts at the national level. In the Arab world and Israel, the film industries reflect upon struggles of self-determination. The Iranian film industry underwent significant changes following the Islamic Revolution of 1979. By viewing a range of films from the Arab world, including North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean, as well as from Turkey, Israel, and Iran, we will consider the significance of these national rubrics and how they have shaped the work of filmmakers throughout the Middle East.   Films also reach beyond the boundaries of the nation, and so, we will consider how these films transcend national borders. On the one hand we will consider limit factors, like censorship, and the role of language and dialect on film viewership and distribution. And, on the other hand, we will consider the influence of external forces, such as the influence of foreign film markets in Europe and North America on filmmakers in the Middle East, as well as the effects of foreign financing—both from Europe and the Gulf States.  All films will be screened with English subtitles.

Full details for VISST 2193 - Middle Eastern Cinema

This course is designed to introduce students to Latin American art from the pre-Columbian period to the present.  It will cover the arts of ancient civilizations including the Olmec, Maya, Aztec, Moche, and Inca, as well as the colonial, modern, and contemporary arts of Latin America and the Latino/a diaspora.  Major themes include the relationship between art and religion, innovations and transformations in Latin American art across time, art and identity, as well as Indigenous and Afro-Latin American contributions to the visual arts.  This course examines the societal relevance of images across Latin American cultures by paying close attention to the historical and political contexts in which they were created.  Course readings are drawn from the disciplines of art history, anthropology, and history, along with theoretical perspectives on colonialism, postcolonialism, identity, race, and ethnicity.

Full details for VISST 2550 - Introduction to Latin American Art

Who are 'the poor' in the United States? Who are the largest recipients of federal welfare and entitlement spending? Why is there an unprecedented simultaneous increase in wealth and poverty in the United States at this point in its history? What role does photography play in our understanding and misunderstanding of poverty in 'the greatest country in the world?' In this course we will explore the perceptions of poverty in the United States through three major American newspapers.

Full details for VISST 3010 - Photography and the American Dream

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 3176 - Global Cinema II

This course maintains a critical focus on the role of the moving body in the history of dance offering comparisons in theatre, film and other forms of media and live performance. Moving from the 16th century to present day, particular attention will be directed to the use of abstraction versus narrative and the role of process in the creation of body-centered works. Working both chronologically and conceptually, topics such as utopia, narrative impulse, technology, comparative modernities, political and social theory will enter the discussion. Attendance to live performance, film screenings, music concerts, museum visits and architectural and urban site visits will be required.

Full details for VISST 3227 - Global Dance II

This interdisciplinary undergraduate lecture examines the visual culture of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade from the 16th century to the present. Lectures present artifacts, prints, paintings, photographs, sculpture, film and installation art that images the history of slavery and its profound contemporary resonance. Lectures and assignments consider the following themes: how does the gaze structure vision and influence the control of historical narratives? Which themes dominate the visual culture of slavery? How does visual culture encode memory, violence or racism? How did the visual culture of slavery produce and circulate new technologies of vison? Where is the history of slavery visible in the built environment or the local landscape? Students study artifacts in the May Anti-Slavery Collection at Kroch Library and artworks at the Johnson Museum. Field trip to nearby anti-slavery sites of memory.

Full details for VISST 3506 - Slavery and Visual Culture

This course introduces the New German Cinema (1962-85), an influential movement of West German filmmakers including Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Alexander Kluge, Margarethe von Trotta, and Wim Wenders. Like the French New Wave, the New German Cinema is known not only for grappling with the nation's complex history, but also for experimenting with early multimedia forms. Watching the movement's celebrated films and reading its controversial texts, we will discuss the complex search for national identity after World War II; problems of authorship, genre, and cinematic traditions; and the changing conceptions of media and the public sphere. Students without experience in film studies are welcome—the course will also double as an introduction to discussing and analyzing film. Screenings in German with English subtitles.

Full details for VISST 3535 - New German Cinema

Computers are powerful tools for working, playing, thinking, and living. Laptops, PDAs, webcams, cell phones, and iPods are not just devices, they also provide narratives, metaphors, and ways of seeing the world. This course critically examines how computing technology and society shape each other and how this plays out in our everyday lives. Identifies how computers, networks, and information technologies reproduce, reinforce, and rework existing cultural trends, norms, and values. Looks at the values embodied in the cultures of computing and considers alternative ways to imagine, build, and work with information technologies.

Full details for VISST 3560 - Computing Cultures

What role should imaginative arts play in debates about transnational migration, one of the principal factors re-shaping community and communication today?  Focusing on literature and film from the late 20th and early 21st centuries, with primary examples drawn from Germany, France and the United States—in relation to Turkey, Hungary, Tunisia, Iran, Nigeria, China, Mexico, and Japan—this course explores how creative arts rework the fabric of social life affected by migration.  Seminar-style discussion of assigned readings and viewings, with occasional lectures on other arts and regions.  Thematic units organized around key concepts such as borders and movement, ethnoscapes and citizenship, reading and viewing, labor and leisure, cityscapes and place-making, mediascapes and personhood, lawfulness and illegality, language and speech, art and perception.   

Full details for VISST 3581 - Imagining Migration in Film and Literature

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.

Full details for VISST 3696 - The Arts of Southeast Asia

This course will look at visual representations of cross-cultural encounters throughout the early modern period with a special emphasis on exchanges between Europe and the Americas (15th-18th centuries). The visual encounters are considered within the context of an increasingly interconnected global system. This course will be organized around a set of case studies that explore a diverse array of artworks, including prints, manuscripts, cartographic illustrations, portraits, and the decorative arts. Topics to be covered include European images of Amerindian peoples and lands, botanical illustrations, the impact of European prints on Latin American art, and collections of New World artifacts in European cabinets of curiosity. This course will explore issues of visual translation and dissemination in the creation of New World artistic traditions. In turn, it also examines the reception of New World objects by European patrons. Readings will be drawn from the disciplines of art history, the history of science, and literary theory, linked by a common framework of visuality and cross-cultural exchange.

Full details for VISST 4165 - Visual Encounters in the Early Modern World

Mounting a script into a show is a process of adaptation from page to stage. This course challenges the boundaries of text to discover the possibilities of performance. Asks: How do we translate inspiration into tangible (or intangible) theatrical imagery? Working in workshop format as actors and writers, students explore the process of developing theatre pieces based on a variety of sources. 

Full details for VISST 4260 - Adaptation: Text/Theatricality

Concentrates on designing lighting for different genres of performance in various venues. Emphasis is placed on developing both the visual sophistication and the technical artistry of the lighting designer. Commitment, personal style, and professional presentation are stressed.

Full details for VISST 4563 - Lighting Design Studio II

The body is a universal. How we construct our understandings of it is not. In this class we will investigate conceptions and treatment of the early-modern body (1400-1700) mainly in Europe with excursions to China, Japan, Africa. Among our topics will be: classical understanding of the body and gender; cross-cultural practices of medicine and anatomy; aesthetics and the nude; definitions of beauty and the grotesque. Criminal, sinful and saintly bodies; death, the macabre, and  the mortal, divine body of Christ; the ambiguous gender of children; the formation of identity through portraiture; the science of sexuality and art of erotics as well as correspondences among bodies, domestic and public spaces, the macrocosm and microcosm will round out our study. We will work with historical materials with an eye for current practices in bodily identities.

Full details for VISST 4601 - Space, Gender, Body in Early Modern Art

While globalization is a process unfolding over many centuries, it has arguably intensified in recent decades. The incorporation of the communist world and independent nation-states into global finance and transnational capitalism from the 1970s onwards has resulted in temporal acceleration and spatial compression on a planetary scale. In the world of art, this has resulted in multifaceted developments. The rise of a spectacular global installation art in biennials and art fairs is also accompanied with myriad local practices that engage with society and politics. This seminar will examine contemporary art in multiple historical and methodological frameworks. Topics covered will include the relation between art and institutions, new patronage structures, neoliberal subjectivities, new materialisms, informal life worlds, digital and social medias, violence, migration, and ecological destruction.

Full details for VISST 4691 - Art and Globalization

This seminar explores how patterned cloths serve as a symbolic medium, functioning on multiple levels of understanding and communication. As spun, dyed, and woven threads of consequence, textiles can be seen to enter into all phases of social, economic, political, religious, and performance processes, often assuming unusual properties and attributes. As bearers of talismanic messages, signifiers of rank, and as the recipients of influences from maritime trade and touristic demand, textiles are read between the folds of complex exchange mechanisms in South and Southeast Asia.

Full details for VISST 4855 - Threads of Consequence: Textiles in South and Southeast Asia

The body is a universal. How we construct our understandings of it is not. In this class we will investigate conceptions and treatment of the early-modern body (1400-1700) mainly in Europe with excursions to China, Japan, Africa. Among our topics will be: classical understanding of the body and gender; cross-cultural practices of medicine and anatomy; aesthetics and the nude; definitions of beauty and the grotesque. Criminal, sinful and saintly bodies; death, the macabre, and  the mortal, divine body of Christ; the ambiguous gender of children; the formation of identity through portraiture; the science of sexuality and art of erotics as well as correspondences among bodies, domestic and public spaces, the macrocosm and microcosm will round out our study. We will work with historical materials with an eye for current practices in bodily identities.

Full details for VISST 6601 - Space, Gender, Body in Early Modern Art

This seminar explores how patterned cloths serve as a symbolic medium, functioning on multiple levels of understanding and communication. As spun, dyed, and woven threads of consequence, textiles can be seen to enter into all phases of social, economic, political, religious, and performance processes, often assuming unusual properties and attributes. As bearers of talismanic messages, signifiers of rank, and as the recipients of influences from maritime trade and touristic demand, textiles are read between the folds of complex exchange mechanisms in South and Southeast Asia.

Full details for VISST 6855 - Threads of Consequence: Textiles in South and Southeast Asia