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

How can a painting serve as a map of political displacement and cultural survival? This seminar investigates the transformation of Chinese modernism as its center of gravity shifted from the cosmopolitan 1930s Shanghai—to the postwar Hong Kong. By examining film, woodcut prints, and ink painting, students will explore how artists negotiated national identity during times of radical change. As a first-year writing seminar, the course emphasizes visual literacy, teaching students to translate complex visual evidence into persuasive academic prose. Through a scaffolded sequence of assignments, including formal analyses and responses to archival documents, students will engage in a rigorous process of drafting and peer review. This course invites students from all majors to develop their critical voice by analyzing how art responds to historical upheaval.

Full details for ARTH 1158 - FWS: Chinese Modernism: From Shanghai to Hong Kong

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.

Full details for ARTH 2000 - Introduction to Visual Studies

This course offers an introduction to Greek mythology and its representation in Greek art, specifically vase-painting. It covers material from the late Geometric (8th c. BCE) to the Classical period (4th c. BCE) and beyond. We will examine how Greek myths were adapted and transformed across different contexts, and the ways in which textual and visual representations of myth diverged. Along with a focus on stories, styles, and iconographies, the class will explore issues surrounding Greek vase-painting and the material and techniques of production. Alternating between a chronological investigation and mythological subject matter, the lectures will explore representations of Greek athletics, rituals, the prevalent symposiastic culture, women, and death in light of socio-historical, cultural, and political contexts. Students will also be introduced to overarching themes: dynamics of trade, theories of viewership, pictorial narrative, status of the artist, gender, and historiographical concerns of connoisseurship and collecting.

Full details for ARTH 2222 - Greek Myth and Vase Painting

Why did the ancient Egyptians build pyramids, and why did they stop building them? Why did they depict things in ways that seem stiff and unnatural? Is ancient Egyptian art ?art?? These are some of the questions explored in this course, which spans late prehistory (c. 3500 BCE) to the Roman period (early centuries CE). We will take a thematic approach, progressing chronologically and introducing key genres where appropriate. First, we will explore central issues of symbolism, landscape, and materials through the architecture and furnishings of temples and royal tombs. Next come the social worlds of art. Can we speak of artists? How were gender, class, and ethnicity represented? Finally, we will survey the legacies of Egyptian visual culture in antiquity and the modern West. (ARKEO-RMNE)

Full details for ARTH 2240 - The Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt

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

Photography created a global image culture in the 20th century, thanks to the invention of film and the hand camera. This class surveys its modern uses for journalism, medicine, colonialism and its resistance, color photography, memory making, movie making, surveillance, racial justice, identity formation, space exploration, microscopy, and more. Special emphasis, however, is placed on the development of photography as a cornerstone of fine art around the world. The history of photography is outlandishly broad; so are the scope of this course’s lectures, in order to offer a powerful view of the kinds of pictures photography has made and how its magic has worked.

Full details for ARTH 2501 - 20th-21st Century Photography: You Push the Button, We Do the Rest

This survey course introduces students to key movements and figures in North American Art, Architecture, and Design across the twentieth century. Engaging with works of art and design from within the cannon as well as vernacular and everyday objects, students will explore the intersections of politics and visual culture, with particular attention to questions of race, gender, colonialism, and labor across geographic space. Questions we will consider include: How have art and material culture produced particular relationships to landscape and national identity? How have borders and the experience of migration forged unique forms of artistic practice and urban life? How have technological innovations transformed cities, spaces, and media? And what does it mean to engage critically with these historical forces through diverse forms of representation?

Full details for ARTH 2650 - 20th Century North American Art, Architecture, and Design

This course offers a survey of the art and culture of China from the Neolithic period to the twenty-first century to students who have no previous background in Chinese studies. The course begins with an inquiry into the meaning of national boundaries and the controversial definition of the Han Chinese people, which will help us understand and define the scope of Chinese culture. Pre-dynastic (or prehistoric) Chinese culture will be presented based both on legends about the origins of the Chinese and on scientifically excavated artifacts. Art of the dynastic periods will be presented in light of contemporaneous social, political, geographical, philosophical and religious contexts. This course emphasizes hands-on experience using the Chinese art collection at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art for teaching and assignments. In addition to regular sections conducted in the museum, students are strongly encouraged to visit the museum often to appreciate and study artworks directly. (ASIAN-SC)

Full details for ARTH 2800 - Introduction to the Arts of China

What can objects produced in the port cities of the Indo-Pacific world teach us about early modern globalization? Movement into and out of key trade centers in the Indo-Pacific became more interconnected during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this course we study the peoples, animals, objects, and oceanic forces “in motion” that encountered one another in these contact zones, paying particular attention to how such objects are read as evidence of exchange. With a particular focus on the circulation of Japanese material culture and export artworks, our inquiry enables us to re-examine the conceptual and geographic boundaries of identity and artmaking in the early modern world. By tracing the mobilities of the Japanese diaspora through South and Southeast Asia and the Americas, we examine the emergence of diverse hybrid cultures and the creolization of local and global artistic traditions in Nagasaki, Macau, Manila, Goa, Batavia, Acapulco, and beyond. Alongside these case studies, we develop the methods of close looking, provenance research, and material analysis that illuminate objects whose makers and meanings often sit outside the traditional canon. This course also has a curatorial component: each student researches an object related to Asian port cities held in the Herbert F. Johnson Museum collection. Students prepare an exhibition with the selected objects in the Education Gallery, learning to draft object labels, shape a narrative for visitors, and consider the choices that go into presenting art to the public. (ASIAN -SC)

Full details for ARTH 3392 - Objects in Motion: Transoceanic Japan and the Port Cities of Asia

How do we understand black home and black place? Are these stable sites? Black homes and black spaces are disproportionately interrupted by the racialized force of disinvestment, gentrification, redlining, eminent domain, and more. We will explore how this spatial instability affects the aesthetics and architecture of black place as well its forms of domesticity, gender, and familial relations. This will include the study of visual artists such as Carrie Mae Weems, popular culture like Donald Glover’s Atlanta (2016-2022) and a spatial case study of Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We’ll consider these in relation to work from scholars W.E.B. Du Bois, bell hooks, Angela Davis, and more.

Full details for ARTH 3515 - The Black Home in Theory, Art, and Architecture

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 3550 - Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art

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 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.

Full details for ARTH 4155 - Topics in Latin American Art

An introduction both to the History of Art and to an interdisciplinary approach to research and analysis through close study of these two works. Beginning with a sampling of Said's Orientalism and its critics, we will follow with a group read and analysis of each illustrated work, including text-image consideration and analysis. There will be heavy focus on multi-media primary source material in Kroch library, the Johnson Museum, and my own personal collection; consideration of both works in their 19th-c context, as well as medieval and earlier roots. We will devote half the semester to each, with 'hinge point' marked by a study day at Olana. Final product could include small exhibition, in tandem with individual papers/projects.

Full details for ARTH 4320 - Tales of the Alhambra and Lalla Rookh: Case Studies in Orientalism

This seminar examines “experimental media”, an umbrella term for experimental literature, poetry, film, video, photography, music, radio, theater, sound art, computer games, and other new media. With a focus on the twentieth- and twenty-first-century German-speaking world, we will discuss aesthetic experiments with form, structure, and materiality. With a view toward interdisciplinarity, our guiding questions will address the distinctions between art and non-art, amateurs and experts, and experimental and commercial media, as well as the possibilities of collaboration and the limits of the experimental method. While coursework will primarily involve reading, writing, and thinking about aesthetic texts and humanistic scholarship, there will be some hands-on work with media objects and experimental media archeology. Taught in English.

Full details for ARTH 4444 - Experimental Media

Does abstraction free us from the burden of the racialized body? For some black artists and thinkers abstraction in visual art has that potential and for others it all enables exploration of blackness’s exclusion from normative bodily form. In this class we study the work of artists such as, Norman Lewis, Melvin Edwards, Jack Whitten, Howardena Pindell, and Torkwase Dyson to consider the way that abstraction helps us understand blackness not as a stable visible identity but as something more complex. We will study these works through the lens of black critical theorists including Hortense Spillers, Rizvana Bradley, Huey Copeland and more.

Full details for ARTH 4515 - Black Abstraction

Museum Histories considers current and ongoing crises in arts institutions (COVID, labor issues, underrepresentation of minorities, calls for restitution of wrongfully-acquired objects) in relation to both the history of museums and collections and the kinds of histories they are able to tell. Readings will focus particularly on the 18th and 19th centuries and the ways in which museums developed alongside and in support of nationalist and imperialist agendas, asking to what extent present problems are informed by choices and alignments made in the past. We will also invite curators to discuss how museums can best address the issues covered and how curatorial strategies might address inherent inequalities within our institutions. Students are welcome to do their final projects on an aspect of contemporary museum practice as informed by the history discussed in the seminar.

Full details for ARTH 4630 - Museum Histories

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

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? (ASIAN-SC)

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. (ASIAN-SC)

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. (ASIAN-SC)

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

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

An introduction both to the History of Art and to an interdisciplinary approach to research and analysis through close study of these two works. Beginning with a sampling of Said's Orientalism and its critics, we will follow with a group read and analysis of each illustrated work, including text-image consideration and analysis. There will be heavy focus on multi-media primary source material in Kroch library, the Johnson Museum, and my own personal collection; consideration of both works in their 19th-c context, as well as medieval and earlier roots. We will devote half the semester to each, with 'hinge point' marked by a study day at Olana. Final product could include small exhibition, in tandem with individual papers/projects.

Full details for ARTH 6320 - Tales of the Alhambra and Lalla Rookh: Case Studies in Orientalism

This seminar examines “experimental media”, an umbrella term for experimental literature, poetry, film, video, photography, music, radio, theater, sound art, computer games, and other new media. With a focus on the twentieth- and twenty-first-century German-speaking world, we will discuss aesthetic experiments with form, structure, and materiality. With a view toward interdisciplinarity, our guiding questions will address the distinctions between art and non-art, amateurs and experts, and experimental and commercial media, as well as the possibilities of collaboration and the limits of the experimental method. While coursework will primarily involve reading, writing, and thinking about aesthetic texts and humanistic scholarship, there will be some hands-on work with media objects and experimental media archeology. Taught in English.

Full details for ARTH 6444 - Experimental Media

Abstract art poses generative problems and possibilities for thinking racial blackness. Some accounts posit a turn from figurative representation to visual abstraction of blackness/black experience as a move toward freer artistic expression, unburdened by confining cultural markings of race. We will question the supposed freedom of this turn to abstraction and explore the conditions of violent exclusion from normative bodily and representational form that confine blackness to abstraction. Modernist abstraction’s move to dismantle illusionism and emphasize materiality enables an understanding of blackness not as a stable, visible identity category but as free-floating trace, concept, formlessness, and obdurate materiality. This course analyzes practices and theories of abstraction in the twentieth century to the present, from the racialized contours of the Western avant-garde and black abstractionists.

Full details for ARTH 6515 - Black Abstraction

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

Museum Histories considers current and ongoing crises in arts institutions (COVID, labor issues, underrepresentation of minorities, calls for restitution of wrongfully-acquired objects) in relation to both the history of museums and collections and the kinds of histories they are able to tell. Readings will focus particularly on the 18th and 19th centuries and the ways in which museums developed alongside and in support of nationalist and imperialist agendas, asking to what extent present problems are informed by choices and alignments made in the past. We will also invite curators to discuss how museums can best address the issues covered and how curatorial strategies might address inherent inequalities within our institutions. Students are welcome to do their final projects on an aspect of contemporary museum practice as informed by the history discussed in the seminar.

Full details for ARTH 6630 - Museum Histories

What can objects produced in the port cities of the Indo-Pacific world teach us about early modern globalization? Movement into and out of key trade centers in the Indo-Pacific became more interconnected during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this course we study the peoples, animals, objects, and oceanic forces “in motion” that encountered one another in these contact zones, paying particular attention to how such objects are read as evidence of exchange. With a particular focus on the circulation of Japanese material culture and export artworks, our inquiry enables us to re-examine the conceptual and geographic boundaries of identity and artmaking in the early modern world. By tracing the mobilities of the Japanese diaspora through South and Southeast Asia and the Americas, we examine the emergence of diverse hybrid cultures and the creolization of local and global artistic traditions in Nagasaki, Macau, Manila, Goa, Batavia, Acapulco, and beyond. Alongside these case studies, we develop the methods of close looking, provenance research, and material analysis that illuminate objects whose makers and meanings often sit outside the traditional canon. This course also has a curatorial component: each student researches an object related to Asian port cities held in the Herbert F. Johnson Museum collection. Students prepare an exhibition with the selected objects in the Education Gallery, learning to draft object labels, shape a narrative for visitors, and consider the choices that go into presenting art to the public.

Full details for ARTH 6692 - Objects in Motion: Transoceanic Japan and the Port Cities of Asia

This course takes advantage of recent theoretical work in Archaeology, Anthropology, and Art History to focus on the significance of materials such as marble, bronze, clay, gold, ivory, and precious stones in ancient Mediterranean visual culture and their relationship to practices of making. We will examine the relationship between medium, technology, style and iconography across a range of contexts, such as the role by played by clay-molding and bronze-casting in the development of Greek naturalism; the influence of chryselephantine techniques on depictions of the gods; the relationship between colored marbles and the iconography of empire; the application of pigments to sculptural surfaces; and the use of gems as personal seals. Throughout, our emphasis will not only be on the relationship between medium, facture, and habits of consumption and display, but also on the affordances and phenomenological qualities of different materials and their influence on ancient modes of viewing and representation. As part of the Yale-Cornell Consortium for the Study of Ancient Art, this course will also bring students of both institutions together in a workshop to be held at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Students will develop research papers based on objects in the MFA collections and have a chance to learn about curatorial approaches and careers from museum experts.

Full details for ARTH 6740 - Materiality and Making in Ancient Mediterranean Art

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? (ASIAN-SC)

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. (ASIAN-SC)

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. (ASIAN-SC)

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

Practices associated with sound art can be found throughout the global twentieth century, but it emerged as a concept around 1980. What does it mean to say that a concept emerged? We will discuss this historiographical question at length in the seminar, tracing the genealogy of the sound-art concept and comparing its uneven historical development with various attempts at definition since 1980. Although many have advanced a logical definition based on identity conditions, we will instead adopt a historical approach. Our template will be Lydia Goehr’s influential argument about the concept of the musical work; other important authors will include Foucault, Davidson, and Hacking.

Full details for ARTH 7323 - History of Sound Art

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.

Full details for VISST 2000 - Introduction to Visual Studies

Contemporary World Cinema offers an introduction to some of the most acclaimed international films of the 21st century. We will consider narrative, documentary, animation, and experimental films from multiple national and transnational contexts. We will examine both dominant and alternative forms of storytelling, how funding institutions, festivals, and awards shape the global circulation of films, how genres get transformed internationally, and how films intervene in how we think about specific social issues and political contexts. Specific films and case studies may vary from year to year. (PMA-HTC)

Full details for VISST 2512 - Contemporary World Cinema

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. (ARKEO-COS)

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.

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

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. (ARKEO-COS)

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

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. We will look at the values embodied in the cultures of computing and consider alternative ways to imagine, build, and work with information technologies.

Full details for VISST 3560 - Computing Cultures

Anchoring the East and West coasts, New York and Los Angeles have been celebrated and excoriated in films. On the edge literally and metaphorically, these cities seem to be about competing visions of urban form, culture, and modernity. The iconic forms of New York (tenements and skyscrapers) and of Los Angeles (highways and suburban homes) have fascinated film makers from the nineteenth century to the present day. We will both evoke and complicate the contrasts between New York and Los Angeles by mapping the intersections of each city with cinema. We explore how the urban experience gives rise to particular cinematic forms and how cinematic styles are translated or not into urban design. (PMA-HTC)

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

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.

Full details for VISST 4155 - Topics in Latin American Art

This seminar examines “experimental media”, an umbrella term for experimental literature, poetry, film, video, photography, music, radio, theater, sound art, computer games, and other new media. With a focus on the twentieth- and twenty-first-century German-speaking world, we will discuss aesthetic experiments with form, structure, and materiality. With a view toward interdisciplinarity, our guiding questions will address the distinctions between art and non-art, amateurs and experts, and experimental and commercial media, as well as the possibilities of collaboration and the limits of the experimental method. While coursework will primarily involve reading, writing, and thinking about aesthetic texts and humanistic scholarship, there will be some hands-on work with media objects and experimental media archeology. Taught in English.

Full details for VISST 4444 - Experimental Media

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

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. (ASIAN-SC)

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

This seminar examines “experimental media”, an umbrella term for experimental literature, poetry, film, video, photography, music, radio, theater, sound art, computer games, and other new media. With a focus on the twentieth- and twenty-first-century German-speaking world, we will discuss aesthetic experiments with form, structure, and materiality. With a view toward interdisciplinarity, our guiding questions will address the distinctions between art and non-art, amateurs and experts, and experimental and commercial media, as well as the possibilities of collaboration and the limits of the experimental method. While coursework will primarily involve reading, writing, and thinking about aesthetic texts and humanistic scholarship, there will be some hands-on work with media objects and experimental media archeology. Taught in English.

Full details for VISST 6444 - Experimental Media

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. (ASIAN-SC)

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