Courses

Courses by semester

Courses for

Complete Cornell University course descriptions are in the Courses of Study .

Course ID Title Offered
ARTH1171 FWS:Nineteenth Century Europe in Twelve Works of Art
This course follows the traces of the social, aesthetic, political, and economic transformations that made the nineteenth century "The Age of Revolutions" on the canvases of Courbet, Cassatt, and Ensor, the printing plates of Daumier, Toulouse-Lautrec and Vallotton, on the streets of Haussmann's new Paris and in the spectacular pavilions of the World Expositions. Each week we focus on a major theme—mass culture, imperialism, orientalism, technologies of reproduction, fashion, capitalism, gender, urbanization, environmentalism, revolutionary struggles, and utopian imaginations—each unpacking one aspect of the complex legacy of the European 19th century. Though the course primarily follows the artistic and political developments in France, we will also discuss artworks and events from Belgium, Britain, and Germany and their political and social contexts.

Full details for ARTH 1171 - FWS:Nineteenth Century Europe in Twelve Works of Art

Spring.
ARTH2000 Introduction to Visual Studies
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

Spring.
ARTH2200 Introduction to the Classical World in 24 Objects
Did the Greeks really paint their marble statues? Did the Romans make wax death masks? Should the British Museum return the Parthenon Marbles to Greece? Come and explore all these questions and more in "An Introduction to the Ancient World in 24 Objects". Each class will focus on a single artefact, showing how it is exemplary of key trends and historical moments in Greek and Roman culture, from the temples of ancient Athens to the necropoleis of Roman Egypt and the rainy outposts of Hadrian's Wall. In addition to the history of Greco-Roman art in antiquity, we will explore the influence of Classical art on later Western culture, paying special attention to its complex (and often problematic) political ramifications. While focusing on major monuments from Classical antiquity in class, we will also examine Cornell's collection of plaster casts, ancient objects in the Johnson Museum, and the Greek and Roman collections in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Full details for ARTH 2200 - Introduction to the Classical World in 24 Objects

Spring.
ARTH2355 Introduction to Medieval Art and Culture
Survey lecture course covering the creation, encoding, and reception of Medieval (roughly AD 500-1500) European, Byzantine, and Islamic architecture, ornament, manuscripts, liturgical and luxury objects.  The approach is thematic but chronologically grounded; attention is also given to cultural interaction in the Mediterranean basin.

Full details for ARTH 2355 - Introduction to Medieval Art and Culture

Spring.
ARTH3651 Women in New Media Art
The work of women artists has been central to the development of new media art. These rich and varied practices include installation, virtual reality environments, net art, digital video, networked performance, tactical media, video games, remix and robotics. This course will begin with an overview of feminist art and early experiments in performance and video art to then investigate multiple currents of digital media. Discussions will focus primarily on works by women artists from Europe, the Americas and Australia.

Full details for ARTH 3651 - Women in New Media Art

Spring.
ARTH4155 Topics in Latin American Art
This seminar will investigate question such, such as: How does the inclusion of technologically engaged practices in the history of Latin American art challenge our understanding of this art? Are there regional specificities to the use and understanding of media technologies? Are modern technologies relevant to the representation of national identities? Has the dissemination of digital technologies contributed to preserve cultural memory? To what extent do technologically engaged practices contribute to indigenous social movements and aesthetics? To what extent do contemporary media artists invoke the indigenous and colonial past in their work? Is Latin American digital art indifferent to social realities? Are existing theories of globalization and comparative modernities adequate to understand this work? Can artists' engagements with technology stimulate the development of new historical and critical discourses about Latin American art? Diverse disciplinary and methodological approaches will be included and welcomed.

Full details for ARTH 4155 - Topics in Latin American Art

Spring.
ARTH4171 19th Century Art and Culture
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

Fall, Spring.
ARTH4305 Looking for Love: Visual and Literary Cultures of Love in the Medieval Mediterranean, 1100 - 1400 AD
A comparative and interdisciplinary seminar whose focus is the visual world created by the pan-Mediterranean (Iberian Peninsula, Maghreb, France, Italy, Turkey, Egypt, and Persia) culture of "Courtly Love" beginning during the 11th century ad, and continuing as a principle factor in medieval cultural production for the remainder of the period. Particular attention will be paid to the ways in which the visual dimensions of this culture nuance, compliment, contradict, or at times even exist independently of, its oral and written spheres. Reading knowledge of any Romance or Semitic language and/or Persian, in addition to English, is highly advantageous.

Full details for ARTH 4305 - Looking for Love: Visual and Literary Cultures of Love in the Medieval Mediterranean, 1100 - 1400 AD

Spring.
ARTH4451 The World on Paper: Early Modern Printmaking (1475-1798)
Printmaking in early modern Europe ushered in a revolution in the production and perception of images, relatively cheap and available to a wide public. What kinds of images emerged, and what purposes did they serve? What did the buying public do with these images on paper? The course meets in the Johnson Museum using its extensive collection of prints and is co-taught with curator of European Art, Andrew Weislogel. The first aim of this seminar is to experience original masterworks by the most prominent printmakers of the period, including Mantegna, Dürer, Goltzius, Rembrandt, and Hogarth. We will consider the techniques and materiality of prints, look at fakes and forgeries, and discuss patterns of publishing and collecting. A second aim is to examine through analysis of weekly readings themes that concerned printmakers and their viewers. Among class topics are religion and allegory, witches and beggars, humor and satire, portraits of people, cities, and landscapes, issues of self-fashioning, invention, and replication, and prints as sites of knowledge about the expanding world.

Full details for ARTH 4451 - The World on Paper: Early Modern Printmaking (1475-1798)

Spring.
ARTH4540 Film History for Art Historians
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, Documentary Film, Film Noir, Hollywood Auteurism, East Asian Auteurism, and Bollywood Cinema will be among the major movements covered, as will the late entry into the fine art world of moving image media.

Full details for ARTH 4540 - Film History for Art Historians

Spring.
ARTH4690 Comparative Modernities
Since the late 19th century, the effects of capitalism across the globe have been profoundly transformative and have intensified with the demise of the older colonial empires, the rise of nationalism and independent states, and the onset of neoliberal globalization. These transformations are manifested in the domains of high art, mass culture and popular culture, yet remain inadequately studied. This seminar theorizes and explores non-Western modernist and contemporary art practice in a comparative framework. Taught as a seminar, it assumes active participation by advanced undergraduate and graduate students who have a prior knowledge of Euro-American modernism and art history, and who wish to better understand the great artistic and visual transformations from the beginning of the 20th century onwards in a global context.

Full details for ARTH 4690 - Comparative Modernities

Spring.
ARTH4698 Legal Issues in the Arts
ARTH4816 Modern Chinese Art
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 4816 - Modern Chinese Art

Spring.
ARTH4992 Independent Study
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

Spring.
ARTH4999 Honors Work II
The student under faculty direction prepares a senior thesis.

Full details for ARTH 4999 - Honors Work II

Fall, Spring.
ARTH5992 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 5992 - Supervised Reading

Spring.
ARTH5994 Supervised Study
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

Spring.
ARTH6010 Connecting Research with Practice: Mellon Curatorial Practicum for Graduate Students
This Curatorial Practicum evolved out of a Johnson Museum of Art's Andrew W. Mellon Foundation initiative in 2014. The seminar is collaborative and thematic, combining the expertise of museum curators with professors in the History of Art and Visual Studies. Drawing from the Johnson Museum's holdings and the wealth of Indonesian archival collections of Dayak material at the Cornell University Library, students will be encouraged to explore the politics of display, museum interventions and institutional critique, and shifting attitudes toward performance and rituals of spectatorship. They will also be invited to examine questions of heritage tourism, small-scale artisanal activity, provenance, repatriation, and community engagement.  This interdisciplinary course will engage theory with museum practice. For the final project, students will be encouraged to engage with works in the collections that connect with their chosen area of research.

Full details for ARTH 6010 - Connecting Research with Practice: Mellon Curatorial Practicum for Graduate Students

Spring.
ARTH6155 Topics in Latin American Art
This seminar will investigate question such, such as: How does the inclusion of technologically engaged practices in the history of Latin American art challenge our understanding of this art? Are there regional specificities to the use and understanding of media technologies? Are modern technologies relevant to the representation of national identities? Has the dissemination of digital technologies contributed to preserve cultural memory? To what extent do technologically engaged practices contribute to indigenous social movements and aesthetics? To what extent do contemporary media artists invoke the indigenous and colonial past in their work? Is Latin American digital art indifferent to social realities? Are existing theories of globalization and comparative modernities adequate to understand this work? Can artists' engagements with technology stimulate the development of new historical and critical discourses about Latin American art? Diverse disciplinary and methodological approaches will be included and welcomed.

Full details for ARTH 6155 - Topics in Latin American Art

Spring.
ARTH6190 Comparative Modernities
Since the late 19th century, the effects of capitalism across the globe have been profoundly transformative and have intensified with the demise of the older colonial empires, the rise of nationalism and independent states, and the onset of neoliberal globalization. These transformations are manifested in the domains of high art, mass culture and popular culture, yet remain inadequately studied. This seminar theorizes and explores non-Western modernist and contemporary art practice in a comparative framework. Taught as a seminar, it assumes active participation by advanced undergraduate and graduate students who have a prior knowledge of Euro-American modernism and art history, and who wish to better understand the great artistic and visual transformations from the beginning of the 20th century onwards in a global context.

Full details for ARTH 6190 - Comparative Modernities

Spring.
ARTH6451 The World on Paper: Early Modern Printmaking (1475-1798)
Printmaking in early modern Europe ushered in a revolution in the production and perception of images, relatively cheap and available to a wide public. What kinds of images emerged, and what purposes did they serve? What did the buying public do with these images on paper? The course meets in the Johnson Museum using its extensive collection of prints and is co-taught with curator of European Art, Andrew Weislogel. The first aim of this seminar is to experience original masterworks by the most prominent printmakers of the period, including Mantegna, Dürer, Goltzius, Rembrandt, and Hogarth. We will consider the techniques and materiality of prints, look at fakes and forgeries, and discuss patterns of publishing and collecting. A second aim is to examine through analysis of weekly readings themes that concerned printmakers and their viewers. Among class topics are religion and allegory, witches and beggars, humor and satire, portraits of people, cities, and landscapes, issues of self-fashioning, invention, and replication, and prints as sites of knowledge about the expanding world.

Full details for ARTH 6451 - The World on Paper: Early Modern Printmaking (1475-1798)

Spring.
ARTH6510 Contemporary Aesthetic Theory and its Discontents
After having been reduced to a mere ideological formation of bourgeois origin, aesthetics has recently made a strong comeback in the field of theory. This course probes the reasons for this historical change. From the arguments of the critics we will derive a catalogue of criteria for a viable aesthetics in order to examine how contemporary aesthetic theory relates to cognitive theories, the historicity of art and taste (including specific practices and institutions), and the emancipatory potentials of ethics and politics. Readings may include Adorno, Berger, de Bolla, Bourdieu, Noël Carroll, Cavell, Danto, Derrida, Dickie, Eagleton, Goodman, Guillory, Gumbrecht, Halsall, Luhmann, Lyotard, de Man, Walter Benn Michaels, Obrist, Ohmann, Scarry, Seel, Shustermann, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Williams and others.

Full details for ARTH 6510 - Contemporary Aesthetic Theory and its Discontents

Spring.
ARTH6540 Film History for Art Historians
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, Documentary Film, Film Noir, Hollywood Auteurism, East Asian Auteurism, and Bollywood Cinema will be among the major movements covered, as will the late entry into the fine art world of moving image media.

Full details for ARTH 6540 - Film History for Art Historians

Spring.
ARTH6698 Legal Issues in the Arts
ARTH6816 Modern Chinese Art
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

Spring.
VISST1101 Visual Literacy and Design Studio
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

Fall, Spring.
VISST2000 Introduction to Visual Studies
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

Spring.
VISST2300 American Cinema
From the beginning of the twentieth century to the present moment, movies -- and in particular Hollywood -- have profoundly influenced the ways in which people see, think and talk about the world. Focusing mostly on Hollywood film, this course introduces the study of American cinema from multiple perspectives: as an economy and mode of production; as an art form that produces particular aesthetic styles; as a cultural institution that comments on contemporary issues and allows people to socialize. We will consider the rise of Hollywood in the age of mass production; the star system; the introduction of sound and the function of the soundtrack; Hollywood's rivalry with television; censorship; the rise of independent film, etc. Weekly screenings introduce major American genres (e.g. science fiction, film noir, the musical) and directors (e.g. Hitchcock, Kubrick, Tarantino).

Full details for VISST 2300 - American Cinema

Spring.
VISST3115 Video and New Media: Art, Theory, Politics
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

Spring.
VISST3176 Global Cinema II
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

Spring.
VISST3260 Staging Gay and Transgender Histories
How have movements for sexual liberation used performance as a means of self-expression and strategies for social justice? How have theatrical stages served as sites of queer sociality and crucibles of invention, where history is made and remade by social actors?

Full details for VISST 3260 - Staging Gay and Transgender Histories

Spring.
VISST3318 Literature and Media in Japan
Beginning with the mid-nineteenth century, the course traces dynamic relays and reciprocal influences among woodblock prints, maps, fiction, films, anime, comics, and digital arts in Japan. We will consider the extensive cultural commentary that has surrounded the emergence of new media in an attempt to assess their transformative aesthetic, social, and political implications. The course will use materials with translations or subtitles in English.

Full details for VISST 3318 - Literature and Media in Japan

Spring.
VISST3560 Computing Cultures
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

Spring.
VISST3651 Women in New Media Art
The work of women artists has been central to the development of new media art. These rich and varied practices include installation, virtual reality environments, net art, digital video, networked performance, tactical media, video games, remix and robotics. This course will begin with an overview of feminist art and early experiments in performance and video art to then investigate multiple currents of digital media. Discussions will focus primarily on works by women artists from Europe, the Americas and Australia.

Full details for VISST 3651 - Women in New Media Art

Spring.
VISST3758 Technology and the Moving Body I
Formally titled "technosomakinesics," this class works to expand the specific aesthetics related to dance as embodied performance. Included in the process is the analysis of built environments that both inspire and are designed to be inhabited by these disciplines. This studio course explores the resulting neoperformance forms being created within the range of digital media processing; such as gallery installations, multimedia dance-theatre, personal interactive media (games and digital art) and web projects. Computer-imaging and sound-production programs are examined and used in the class work (human form-animation software, vocal recording and digital editing, digital-imaging tools. The new context of digital performance raises questions concerning the use of traditional lighting, set, costume, and sound-design techniques that are examined as they are repositioned by digital-translation tools with the goal of creating experimental and/or conceptual multimedia performance and/or installation work. Theoretical texts on dance and theatrical performance, film studies, the dynamic social body, architecture, and digital technology are also used to support conceptual creative work.

Full details for VISST 3758 - Technology and the Moving Body I

Spring.
VISST4155 Topics in Latin American Art
This seminar will investigate question such, such as: How does the inclusion of technologically engaged practices in the history of Latin American art challenge our understanding of this art? Are there regional specificities to the use and understanding of media technologies? Are modern technologies relevant to the representation of national identities? Has the dissemination of digital technologies contributed to preserve cultural memory? To what extent do technologically engaged practices contribute to indigenous social movements and aesthetics? To what extent do contemporary media artists invoke the indigenous and colonial past in their work? Is Latin American digital art indifferent to social realities? Are existing theories of globalization and comparative modernities adequate to understand this work? Can artists' engagements with technology stimulate the development of new historical and critical discourses about Latin American art? Diverse disciplinary and methodological approaches will be included and welcomed.

Full details for VISST 4155 - Topics in Latin American Art

Spring.
VISST4451 The World on Paper: Early Modern Printmaking (1475-1798)
Printmaking in early modern Europe ushered in a revolution in the production and perception of images, relatively cheap and available to a wide public. What kinds of images emerged, and what purposes did they serve? What did the buying public do with these images on paper? The course meets in the Johnson Museum using its extensive collection of prints and is co-taught with curator of European Art, Andrew Weislogel. The first aim of this seminar is to experience original masterworks by the most prominent printmakers of the period, including Mantegna, Dürer, Goltzius, Rembrandt, and Hogarth. We will consider the techniques and materiality of prints, look at fakes and forgeries, and discuss patterns of publishing and collecting. A second aim is to examine through analysis of weekly readings themes that concerned printmakers and their viewers. Among class topics are religion and allegory, witches and beggars, humor and satire, portraits of people, cities, and landscapes, issues of self-fashioning, invention, and replication, and prints as sites of knowledge about the expanding world.

Full details for VISST 4451 - The World on Paper: Early Modern Printmaking (1475-1798)

Spring.
VISST4460 Lightscapes
Sunset, polar night, Times Square, satellites in space—these are just four lightscapes. Light is essential to humanity in multifaceted ways. It both reflects and shapes human interactions with the environment. Yet light is also complex, multiple, and contested. This seminar explores diverse lightscapes in varied contexts. How do we know light? How does light define and shape landscapes and nightscapes? How have people managed, transformed, and valued different lightscapes over time? This course draws primarily from the history of science and technology, STS, and environmental history with forays into anthropology, environmental humanities, geography, media studies, and more. We will examine texts and images, and engage with lightscapes at Cornell and in Ithaca. The seminar culminates in a class project centered on student-selected lightscapes. 

Full details for VISST 4460 - Lightscapes

VISST4546 Shakespeare in (Con)text
Examines how collaboration among stage directors, designers, and actors leads to differing interpretations of plays. The course focuses on how the texts themselves are blueprints for productions with particular emphasis on the choices available to the actor inherent in the text.

Full details for VISST 4546 - Shakespeare in (Con)text

Spring.
VISST4563 Lighting Design Studio II
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

Spring.
VISST4641 Comparative Modernities
Since the late 19th century, the effects of capitalism across the globe have been profoundly transformative and have intensified with the demise of the older colonial empires, the rise of nationalism and independent states, and the onset of neoliberal globalization. These transformations are manifested in the domains of high art, mass culture and popular culture, yet remain inadequately studied. This seminar theorizes and explores non-Western modernist and contemporary art practice in a comparative framework. Taught as a seminar, it assumes active participation by advanced undergraduate and graduate students who have a prior knowledge of Euro-American modernism and art history, and who wish to better understand the great artistic and visual transformations from the beginning of the 20th century onwards in a global context.

Full details for VISST 4641 - Comparative Modernities

Spring.
VISST4643 Life in Ruins
How do humans live with the ruins we create? What lifeways and lifeforms do ruins sustain? What forces cause the remnants of late modernity to endure or erode? Through the lens of archaeology, anthropology, philosophy, cultural geography, art, and architecture, this interdisciplinary seminar interrogates ruination as a condition of the human experience—one that has intensified in the afterlife of modernity, and one whose study might help us cope with advancing planetary decline, even as we work to curb it. For longer description and instructor bio, visit societyhumanities.as.cornell.edu/courses

Full details for VISST 4643 - Life in Ruins

Spring.
VISST4648 The Visual Economy of Work
With a focus on the pivotal period from the invention of photography until World War II, this course examines the economy of work within modern visual culture. It addresses the mediation and representation of industrial labor by way of photographic reportage and cinéma vérité, and how these visual forms contrast with modern artistic practice in Europe, Asia, and North America. A range of materials, including illustrated magazines, advertisements, films, and world exhibitions, are considered. For longer description and instructor bio, visit societyhumanities.as.cornell.edu/courses.

Full details for VISST 4648 - The Visual Economy of Work

Spring.
VISST4793 Advanced Film and Video Projects
A continuation of PMA 3570, Introduction to Visual Storytelling, students will dive deeper into creating story driven short form narratives. Students will have the opportunity to develop and produce a short film over the course of the semester. The expectation is the follow through of the filmmaking process, from story development, preproduction, production, post production and distribution. Students are expected to collaborate heavily and crew on each other's film productions, in various roles. Final film projects will be screened in a public, open-campus event at the end of the semester.

Full details for VISST 4793 - Advanced Film and Video Projects

Fall, spring.
VISST4945 Body Politics in African Literature and Cinema
The course examines how postcolonial African writers and filmmakers engage with and revise controversial images of bodies and sexuality--genital cursing, same-sex desire, HIV/AIDS, genital surgeries, etc. Our inquiry also surveys African theorists' troubling of problematic tropes and practices such as the conception in 19th-century racist writings of the colonized as embodiment, the pathologization and hypersexualization of colonized bodies, and the precarious and yet empowering nature of the body and sexuality in the postcolonial African experience. As we focus on African artists and theorists, we also read American and European theorists, including but not certainly limited to Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Joseph Slaughter, detecting the ways in which discourses around bodies in the African context may shape contemporary theories and vice versa.

Full details for VISST 4945 - Body Politics in African Literature and Cinema

Spring.
VISST6155 Topics in Latin American Art
This seminar will investigate question such, such as: How does the inclusion of technologically engaged practices in the history of Latin American art challenge our understanding of this art? Are there regional specificities to the use and understanding of media technologies? Are modern technologies relevant to the representation of national identities? Has the dissemination of digital technologies contributed to preserve cultural memory? To what extent do technologically engaged practices contribute to indigenous social movements and aesthetics? To what extent do contemporary media artists invoke the indigenous and colonial past in their work? Is Latin American digital art indifferent to social realities? Are existing theories of globalization and comparative modernities adequate to understand this work? Can artists' engagements with technology stimulate the development of new historical and critical discourses about Latin American art? Diverse disciplinary and methodological approaches will be included and welcomed.

Full details for VISST 6155 - Topics in Latin American Art

Spring.
VISST6500 Contemporary Aesthetic Theory and its Discontents
After having been reduced to a mere ideological formation of bourgeois origin, aesthetics has recently made a strong comeback in the field of theory. This course probes the reasons for this historical change. From the arguments of the critics we will derive a catalogue of criteria for a viable aesthetics in order to examine how contemporary aesthetic theory relates to cognitive theories, the historicity of art and taste (including specific practices and institutions), and the emancipatory potentials of ethics and politics. Readings may include Adorno, Berger, de Bolla, Bourdieu, Noël Carroll, Cavell, Danto, Derrida, Dickie, Eagleton, Goodman, Guillory, Gumbrecht, Halsall, Luhmann, Lyotard, de Man, Walter Benn Michaels, Obrist, Ohmann, Scarry, Seel, Shustermann, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Williams and others.

Full details for VISST 6500 - Contemporary Aesthetic Theory and its Discontents

Spring.
VISST6619 Translation, in Theory
The course provides an introduction to various aspects of translation theory, and emphasizes relations between translation theory and trauma theory, post-structuralism, post-colonial theory, and debates on comparative literature, "world literature," and area studies.

Full details for VISST 6619 - Translation, in Theory

Spring.
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