Full details for ARTH 1154 - FWS: Museum of the Sea: Curating Ocean Worlds

This course provides an introduction to modes of vision and the historical impact of visual images, visual structures, and visual space on culture, communication, and politics. It examines all aspects of culture that communicate through visual means, including 20th-century visual technologies—photography, cinema, video, etc., and their historical corollaries. The production and consumption of images, objects, and events is studied in diverse cultures. Students develop the critical skills necessary to appreciate how the approaches that define visual studies complicate traditional models of defining and analyzing art objects.

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

Full details for ARTH 2000 - Introduction to Visual Studies

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.

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

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

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

Trade in and to Asia proved to be a key force in creating our modern "globalized" world. The Indian Ocean and the China Seas converged on Southeast Asia, where a cosmopolitan array of ships from every shore plied their trade, set sail, and returned with the monsoon winds. People, goods, and ideas also traveled on camelback across the undulating contours of the Gobi Desert, connecting India, the Near East and Central Asia with China, Korea, and Japan. This course introduces students to the raw ingredients of things in motion, poised interactively in time and space, as material worlds collide. Wood, bamboo, bronze, clay, earthenware, ink, spices, textiles and tea - students will navigate sites of encounter at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum from pre modern to the present.

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

Full details for ARTH 2805 - Introduction to Asian Art: Material Worlds

This lecture introduces students to the multivalent attitudes towards and understandings of the body in early modern Europe, and how artmakers contributed and responded to these forces between 1400 and 1650. Bringing together the histories of art, science, and philosophy, as well as social, cultural, medical, and global history methodologies, this course explores how artworks and objects reveal the fluid cultural practices and societal norms of early modern Europe. Lecture topics will include the "rediscovery" of the classical bodily ideal; the influence of humoral theory and anatomical studies on artmaking; the interactions of art and the bodily senses; global encounters with non-European "monstrous" bodies, and the gendered, racialized, eroticized, divine, aging, and/or disabled body. Students will gain a nuanced comprehension of how early modern people saw and understood themselves and their bodies, in life, and in art.

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

Full details for ARTH 3400 - Art, Identity, and the Human Body in Early Modern Europe

This course concerns a selection of influential artistic movements in Latin American from the early twentieth century to the present. Attention is given to issues such as the effects of colonialism and imperialism on Latin America's visual arts, the creation of national art, the relation of Latin American art and artists to cultural centers in Europe, The United States and other regions of the globe, the interaction of high art and popular culture, and the role of gender and race in various aspects of artistic practice. Students will also become acquainted with Latin American and Latinx artists working with new technologies.

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

Full details for ARTH 3550 - Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art

This course discusses new art practices since the 1960s. Although numerous artistic experiments took place during the first half of the twentieth century, it was with the declining importance of modernist painting and sculpture by the late 1950s that newer modes of artistic practice became established. The course will explore the rise of Fluxus, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Land Art, Video and Performance, Postmodernism, and Postcolonialism. These practices are situated in relation to intellectual and social movements since the 1960s, including counterculture, feminism, race, ecology, institutional critique, and globalization. This course focuses primarily on Western European and North American art, but also incorporates selected global developments.

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

Full details for ARTH 3600 - Contemporary Art: 1960-Present

This course explores the practice, theory, and methodology of humanities research, critical analysis, and communication through writing and oral presentation. We will study the work and impact of humanists (scholars of literature, history, theory, art, visual studies, film, anthropology, gender and sexuality studies), who pose big questions about the human condition. By reading and analyzing their scholarship—critiquing them and engaging their ideas—we will craft our own methods and voices. Students will refine their research methods (library research, note taking, organizing material, bibliographies, citation methods, proposals, outlines, etc.) and design their own independent research project.

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

Full details for ARTH 3755 - Humanities Scholars Research Methods

How does art, architecture, and urban space interface with one another and what is the role of art in public space and public life? This course considers these questions within the context of China's unprecedented urban transformation at the turn of the 21st century, paying attention to the ways in which art and architecture are at once resistant to and at the same time entangled with capitalist and governmental forces. From Beijing's Tiananmen Square to Guangzhou's skyscraper construction sites; from virtual cities to New York City—a center of the Chinese diaspora—we will look transregionally at how different types of urban spaces prompted new aesthetic forms and how such creative acts contributed, in turn, to the transformation of these very spaces.

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

Full details for ARTH 3803 - Urban Interfaces: Art, Architecture, and Urbanism in China at the turn of the 21st Century

Topic: Latin American Moderinsims and Technology. The involvement of Latin American artists with modern media technologies dates at least to the late nineteenth century and has especially flourished in the last three decades. The canonical histories and criticism of Latin American art for the most part depict a history of artistic production in which technology plays a minor or invisible role. This construction of history reinforces the assumption that experimentation, innovation, and theorization in technological art are exclusive provinces of the developed world. As the history of art expands to include diverse areas of media arts and visual culture, the recognition of Latin American artists' involvement with technology is not only overdue but also essential to the development of more diverse and rigorous understandings of both modernity and modernism.

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

Full details for ARTH 4155 - Topics in Latin American Art

A seminar on the archaeology of the Byzantine Empire, from the late Roman through to the early modern periods. Topics to be covered include: long-term changes in settlement patterns and urban development; the material traces of state and monastic control over productive landscapes; the idea of the border and the nature of its defense; and the fraught relationship between "Byzantine" and "classical" archaeologies.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS)

Full details for ARTH 4354 - Byzantine Archaeology

This seminar explores the ways in which artists and craftspeople created representations of non-Europeans that shaped, negotiated, and challenged pluralistic biological and symbolic conceptions of race between 1450 and 1700. Against the backdrop of increasing global contact, European colonial enterprises, and the explosion of the Atlantic slave trade, this seminar will critically explore constructions of Blackness, whiteness, and racialized "otherness" and will consider the roles played by art and material culture in practices of race-making. Thinking materially, students will assess the impact of different artistic media on understandings of racialized difference. Considering race at its intersections with gender, class, religion, science, and disability, this seminar will analyze how artworks reveal and obscure the real, complex experiences of non-Europeans in Europe.

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

Full details for ARTH 4520 - Reading Race Early Modern Art

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.

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

Full details for ARTH 4540 - Film History for Art Historians

Exploring a genealogy of Latinx, Afro-Latinx, Black, Indigenous, and Chicana/o/x theorizations of modernity and identity, the course asks, what is the decolonial? Is it a space between the colonial and post-colonial? Is it a creative process, an intellectual theorization, or a historical period? Is it a performance, intervention, or embodied experience? Tracing a historical trajectory of the decolonial in poetry, performance, installation, and visual art, the course examines decolonial modes of making and being from the sixteenth to the twenty first century. 

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

Full details for ARTH 4556 - Decolonial Poetics and Aesthetics: Arts of Resistance in the Americas

This seminar explores readings in the "blue humanities" as they relate to art history, with a particular focus on the genre of the seascape as a means of framing human-oceanic, interspecies, and cross-cultural encounters. After establishing a theoretical basis in oceanic thought, we will explore the methodological potential such watery thinking offers for an art history attuned to cross currents, fluid interactions, and unsettled narratives. Though anchored in the Western perspective of the "seascape," course readings will also be attentive to the long history of fluid models of identity and objecthood in diverse Indigenous cultures, and to the limitations inherent in the terrestrial bias of much Western scholarship.

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

Full details for ARTH 4625 - Liquidities: Seascapes in Art and as History

Students will explore sculpture that was commissioned and displayed in mainland Greece between the Archaic and Imperial periods, with a focus on the city of Athens and the panhellenic sanctuaries of Delphi and Olympia. We will examine architectural sculpture, tombs, votive dedications, and civic monuments, with a focus on the relationship between these objects and the religious, political, and funerary contexts in which they were displayed, informed by close visual analysis. The course will be followed by a trip to Greece during Spring Break, when we will visit many of the sites covered during the semester, as well as major collections of sculpture in local museums. Students will give presentations on site in preparation for an extended research paper.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS)

Full details for ARTH 4711 - Traveling Seminar: Greek Sculpture in Context

Tea is a ubiquitous commodity across time and cultures. The craze for tea has become a global phenomenon. The goal of this course is not only to elucidate the exchanges and transmissions that gave rise to the phenomenon, but also to unpack the definition of tea culture through the exploration of objects and rituals. How are tea objects related to rituals, etiquette, and movement? What do tea objects reveal about craftsmen/craftswomen and collectors? How are the objects related to religious, political, social, and economic environments of their times? Lastly, what is the importance of tea culture in shaping national and cultural identity in modern East Asia?

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

Full details for ARTH 4822 - Objects, Rituals, and Tea

An explosive period of artistic experimentation occurred in China following the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). The new artistic practices that were developed from the late 1970s onwards—from painting to sculpture, installation, performance, video—quickly came to be known as "contemporary Chinese art." This course charts its development with a historiographic attention to the ways in which it has been narrativized by domestic and international critics, curators, and art historians. Analyzing artworks, exhibitions, and translated texts, we will explore major trends and discursive issues to reflect on how we tell the story of this art in its domestic and global contexts.

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

Full details for ARTH 4844 - The Rise of Contemporary Chinese Art: Narratives in the Making of New 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.

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

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

Topic: Latin American Modernisms and Technology. The involvement of Latin American artists with modern media technologies dates at least to the late nineteenth century and has especially flourished in the last three decades. The canonical histories and criticism of Latin American art for the most part depict a history of artistic production in which technology plays a minor or invisible role. This construction of history reinforces the assumption that experimentation, innovation, and theorization in technological art are exclusive provinces of the developed world. As the history of art expands to include diverse areas of media arts and visual culture, the recognition of Latin American artists' involvement with technology is not only overdue but also essential to the development of more diverse and rigorous understandings of both modernity and modernism.

Full details for ARTH 6155 - Topics in Latin American Art

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

A seminar on the archaeology of the Byzantine Empire, from the late Roman through to the early modern periods. Topics to be covered include: long-term changes in settlement patterns and urban development; the material traces of state and monastic control over productive landscapes; the idea of the border and the nature of its defense; and the fraught relationship between "Byzantine" and "classical" archaeologies.

Full details for ARTH 6354 - Byzantine Archaeology

This lecture introduces students to the multivalent attitudes towards and understandings of the body in early modern Europe, and how artmakers contributed and responded to these forces between 1400 and 1650. Bringing together the histories of art, science, and philosophy, as well as social, cultural, medical, and global history methodologies, this course explores how artworks and objects reveal the fluid cultural practices and societal norms of early modern Europe. Lecture topics will include the "rediscovery" of the classical bodily ideal; the influence of humoral theory and anatomical studies on artmaking; the interactions of art and the bodily senses; global encounters with non-European "monstrous" bodies, and the gendered, racialized, eroticized, divine, aging, and/or disabled body. Students will gain a nuanced comprehension of how early modern people saw and understood themselves and their bodies, in life, and in art.

Full details for ARTH 6400 - Art, Identity, and the Human Body in Early Modern Europe

This seminar explores the ways in which artists and craftspeople created representations of non-Europeans that shaped, negotiated, and challenged pluralistic biological and symbolic conceptions of race between 1450 and 1700. Against the backdrop of increasing global contact, European colonial enterprises, and the explosion of the Atlantic slave trade, this seminar will critically explore constructions of Blackness, whiteness, and racialized "otherness" and will consider the roles played by art and material culture in practices of race-making. Thinking materially, students will assess the impact of different artistic media on understandings of racialized difference. Considering race at its intersections with gender, class, religion, science, and disability, this seminar will analyze how artworks reveal and obscure the real, complex experiences of non-Europeans in Europe.

Full details for ARTH 6520 - Reading Race Early Modern Art

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

This course concerns a selection of influential artistic movements in Latin American from the early twentieth century to the present. Attention is given to issues such as the effects of colonialism and imperialism on Latin America's visual arts, the creation of national art, the relation of Latin American art and artists to cultural centers in Europe, The United States and other regions of the globe, the interaction of high art and popular culture, and the role of gender and race in various aspects of artistic practice. Students will also become acquainted with Latin American and Latinx artists working with new technologies.

Full details for ARTH 6550 - Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art

Exploring a genealogy of Latinx, Afro-Latinx, Black, Indigenous, and Chicana/o/x theorizations of modernity and identity, the course asks, what is the decolonial? Is it a space between the colonial and post-colonial? Is it a creative process, an intellectual theorization, or a historical period? Is it a performance, intervention, or embodied experience? Tracing a historical trajectory of the decolonial in poetry, performance, installation, and visual art, the course examines decolonial modes of making and being from the sixteenth to the twenty first century. 

Full details for ARTH 6556 - Decolonial Poetics and Aesthetics: Arts of Resistance in the Americas

Full details for ARTH 6600 - Contemporary Art: 1960-Present

This seminar explores readings in the "blue humanities" as they relate to art history, with a particular focus on the genre of the seascape as a means of framing human-oceanic, interspecies, and cross-cultural encounters. After establishing a theoretical basis in oceanic thought, we will explore the methodological potential such watery thinking offers for an art history attuned to cross currents, fluid interactions, and unsettled narratives. Though anchored in the Western perspective of the "seascape," course readings will also be attentive to the long history of fluid models of identity and objecthood in diverse Indigenous cultures, and to the limitations inherent in the terrestrial bias of much Western scholarship.

Full details for ARTH 6622 - Liquidities: Seascapes in Art and as History

Students will explore sculpture that was commissioned and displayed in mainland Greece between the Archaic and Imperial periods, with a focus on the city of Athens and the panhellenic sanctuaries of Delphi and Olympia. We will examine architectural sculpture, tombs, votive dedications, and civic monuments, with a focus on the relationship between these objects and the religious, political, and funerary contexts in which they were displayed, informed by close visual analysis. The course will be followed by a trip to Greece during Spring Break, when we will visit many of the sites covered during the semester, as well as major collections of sculpture in local museums. Students will give presentations on site in preparation for an extended research paper.

Full details for ARTH 6711 - Traveling Seminar: Greek Sculpture in Context

How does art, architecture, and urban space interface with one another and what is the role of art in public space and public life? This course considers these questions within the context of China's unprecedented urban transformation at the turn of the 21st century, paying attention to the ways in which art and architecture are at once resistant to and at the same time entangled with capitalist and governmental forces. From Beijing's Tiananmen Square to Guangzhou's skyscraper construction sites; from virtual cities to New York City—a center of the Chinese diaspora—we will look transregionally at how different types of urban spaces prompted new aesthetic forms and how such creative acts contributed, in turn, to the transformation of these very spaces.

Full details for ARTH 6803 - Urban Interfaces: Art, Architecture, and Urbanism in China at the turn of the 21st Century

Tea is a ubiquitous commodity across time and cultures. The craze for tea has become a global phenomenon. The goal of this course is not only to elucidate the exchanges and transmissions that gave rise to the phenomenon, but also to unpack the definition of tea culture through the exploration of objects and rituals. How are tea objects related to rituals, etiquette, and movement? What do tea objects reveal about craftsmen/craftswomen and collectors? How are the objects related to religious, political, social, and economic environments of their times? Lastly, what is the importance of tea culture in shaping national and cultural identity in modern East Asia?

Full details for ARTH 6822 - Objects, Rituals, and Tea

An explosive period of artistic experimentation occurred in China following the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). The new artistic practices that were developed from the late 1970s onwards—from painting to sculpture, installation, performance, video—quickly came to be known as "contemporary Chinese art." This course charts its development with a historiographic attention to the ways in which it has been narrativized by domestic and international critics, curators, and art historians. Analyzing artworks, exhibitions, and translated texts, we will explore major trends and discursive issues to reflect on how we tell the story of this art in its domestic and global contexts.

Full details for ARTH 6844 - The Rise of Contemporary Chinese Art: Narratives in the Making of New 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 ARTH 6855 - Threads of Consequence: Textiles in South and Southeast Asia

This course provides an introduction to modes of vision and the historical impact of visual images, visual structures, and visual space on culture, communication, and politics. It examines all aspects of culture that communicate through visual means, including 20th-century visual technologies—photography, cinema, video, etc., and their historical corollaries. The production and consumption of images, objects, and events is studied in diverse cultures. Students develop the critical skills necessary to appreciate how the approaches that define visual studies complicate traditional models of defining and analyzing art objects.

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

Full details for VISST 2000 - Introduction to Visual Studies

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

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

What does it mean to call a film is "Jewish"? Does it have to represent Jewish life? Does it have to feature characters identifiable as Jews? If artists who identify as Jews—actors, directors, screenwriters, composers—play significant roles in a film's production does that make it Jewish? Our primary point of entry into these questions will be Hollywood, from the industry's early silent films, through the period generally considered classical, down to the present day. We will also study films produced overseas, in countries that may include Israel, Egypt, France, Italy, and Germany. Our discussions will be enriched by contextual material drawn from film studies, cultural studies, Jewish studies, American studies, and other related fields. Students will be expected to view a significant number of films outside of class—an average of one per week—and engage with them through writing and in-class discussion. The directors, screenwriters, composers, and actors whose work we will study may include: Charlie Chaplin, Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, Fanny Brice, Billy Wilder, Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Aviva Kempner, Joan Micklin Silver, the Marx Brothers, and the Coen Brothers.

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

Full details for VISST 2790 - Jewish Films and Filmmakers: Hollywood and Beyond

Trade in and to Asia proved to be a key force in creating our modern "globalized" world. The Indian Ocean and the China Seas converged on Southeast Asia, where a cosmopolitan array of ships from every shore plied their trade, set sail, and returned with the monsoon winds. People, goods, and ideas also traveled on camelback across the undulating contours of the Gobi Desert, connecting India, the Near East and Central Asia with China, Korea, and Japan. This course introduces students to the raw ingredients of things in motion, poised interactively in time and space, as material worlds collide. Wood, bamboo, bronze, clay, earthenware, ink, spices, textiles and tea - students will navigate sites of encounter at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum from pre modern to the present.

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

Full details for VISST 2805 - Introduction to Asian Art: Material Worlds

An introduction to the history and theory of writing systems from cuneiform to the alphabet, historical and new writing media, and the complex relationship of writing technologies to human language and culture. Through hands-on activities and collaborative work, students will explore the shifting definitions of "writing" and the diverse ways in which cultures through time have developed and used writing systems. We will also investigate the traditional divisions of "oral" vs. "written" and consider how digital technologies have affected how we use and think about writing in encoding systems from Morse code to emoji.

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

Full details for VISST 2812 - Hieroglyphs to HTML: History of Writing

Global Cinema and Media offers a survey of international film and media 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 and media's relation to broader cultural, social and political contexts. Screenings of narrative, documentary and experimental films and video will be accompanied by readings in film and media theory and history.

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

Full details for VISST 3175 - Global Cinema and Media

Our present technology allows us to transmit and display information through a variety of media. To make the most of these media channels, it is important to consider the limitations and abilities of the human observer. The course considers a number of applied aspects of human perception with an emphasis on the display of visual information. Topics include "three-dimensional" display systems, color theory, spatial and temporal limitations of the visual systems, attempts at subliminal communication, and "visual" effects in film and television.

Catalog Distribution: (ETM-AS) (KCM-AG)

Full details for VISST 3342 - Human Perception: Application to Computer Graphics, Art, and Visual Display

This course discusses new art practices since the 1960s. Although numerous artistic experiments took place during the first half of the twentieth century, it was with the declining importance of modernist painting and sculpture by the late 1950s that newer modes of artistic practice became established. The course will explore the rise of Fluxus, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Land Art, Video and Performance, Postmodernism, and Postcolonialism. These practices are situated in relation to intellectual and social movements since the 1960s, including counterculture, feminism, race, ecology, institutional critique, and globalization. This course focuses primarily on Western European and North American art, but also incorporates selected global developments.

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

Full details for VISST 3600 - Contemporary Art: 1960-Present

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 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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS)

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

Topic: Latin American Moderinsims and Technology. The involvement of Latin American artists with modern media technologies dates at least to the late nineteenth century and has especially flourished in the last three decades. The canonical histories and criticism of Latin American art for the most part depict a history of artistic production in which technology plays a minor or invisible role. This construction of history reinforces the assumption that experimentation, innovation, and theorization in technological art are exclusive provinces of the developed world. As the history of art expands to include diverse areas of media arts and visual culture, the recognition of Latin American artists' involvement with technology is not only overdue but also essential to the development of more diverse and rigorous understandings of both modernity and modernism.

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

Full details for VISST 4155 - Topics in Latin American Art

Exploring a genealogy of Latinx, Afro-Latinx, Black, Indigenous, and Chicana/o/x theorizations of modernity and identity, the course asks, what is the decolonial? Is it a space between the colonial and post-colonial? Is it a creative process, an intellectual theorization, or a historical period? Is it a performance, intervention, or embodied experience? Tracing a historical trajectory of the decolonial in poetry, performance, installation, and visual art, the course examines decolonial modes of making and being from the sixteenth to the twenty first century. 

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

Full details for VISST 4556 - Decolonial Poetics and Aesthetics: Arts of Resistance in the Americas

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.

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

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

Topic: Latin American Modernisms and Technology. The involvement of Latin American artists with modern media technologies dates at least to the late nineteenth century and has especially flourished in the last three decades. The canonical histories and criticism of Latin American art for the most part depict a history of artistic production in which technology plays a minor or invisible role. This construction of history reinforces the assumption that experimentation, innovation, and theorization in technological art are exclusive provinces of the developed world. As the history of art expands to include diverse areas of media arts and visual culture, the recognition of Latin American artists' involvement with technology is not only overdue but also essential to the development of more diverse and rigorous understandings of both modernity and modernism.

Full details for VISST 6155 - Topics in Latin American Art

Exploring a genealogy of Latinx, Afro-Latinx, Black, Indigenous, and Chicana/o/x theorizations of modernity and identity, the course asks, what is the decolonial? Is it a space between the colonial and post-colonial? Is it a creative process, an intellectual theorization, or a historical period? Is it a performance, intervention, or embodied experience? Tracing a historical trajectory of the decolonial in poetry, performance, installation, and visual art, the course examines decolonial modes of making and being from the sixteenth to the twenty first century. 

Full details for VISST 6556 - Decolonial Poetics and Aesthetics: Arts of Resistance in the Americas

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