DEPARTMENT OF ART HISTORY

This course offers an introduction to major artistic monuments and artistic developments of the medieval period (roughly 300-1450 CE) with a focus on Europe. It surveys a diverse range of works of art and architecture from this period and positions them within their original social, political, economic and spiritual contexts. Lectures and discussion sections will trace the shifting ways in which images were defined and perceived over time and consider how the flow of objects and styles linked Europeans to broader world systems. We will also identify key moments in the birth and development of architectural forms still common today such as churches and mosques. Students will develop skills in visual analysis and gain a basic understanding of the methods and aims of art historical study.

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Writing in the twentieth century, Walter Benjamin declared Paris to be the “Capitol of the Nineteenth Century.” But how did it come to be known as such? This course will take up the history of Paris from 1800 to 1848 to understand how Paris became synonymous with art and fashion all during an era of political revolution. Covering the French Revolution of 1789, the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), and the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, we will look at how popular culture, fashion, race, and politics coalesced in the artworks of Jacques-Louis David, Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Antonio Canova, Théodore Géricault, and Honoré Daumier, among others.

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This seminar unpacks the entangled histories of colonial, imperial, court art and the marketplace in late 18^th to early 20^thcentury South Asia. The course examines the role of images as markers of social and cross-cultural encounters addressing key shifts within visual culture, patronage and collecting practices engaging with a wide of media from drawings, paintings, prints, ivory souvenirs and photographs. Focusing on South Asia’s transition period, spanning regional court culture to the end of colonial rule under the Raj, the course will situate the study of this era’s visual culture within the broader framework of the modernity-tradition bind, the rise of nationalism, and the struggle for independence.  

Textbooks – there are two reference readings that will form the background of the course. The students are not required to buy the books, but can consult them as needed.

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This course examines art work that engages the fictional and looks too at art historical discourses as kinds of fictions.  Special attention will be paid to these practices in the African diaspora.  More broadly, the class explores art historical, literary, and historical methodologies that offer new interpretations of the past through critical fabulation and the fictional.  Students will read the work of Saidiya Hartman, Coco Fusco, Hannah Crafts, and Katherine McKittrick.

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The Mughal empire occupied a position of political, economic, and demographic dominance in the early modern period surpassing others such as the Safavids and the Ottomans. Its visual culture absorbed the intellectual heritage of Indic and Central Asian traditions expressed in its lndo-Persianate court culture that positioned itself globally. The concurrent rise of European mercantile and colonial interests of the English, Dutch and French East India Companies in the region further contributed to a ‘worlding’ of Mughal aesthetics. This course will address global and cross-cultural themes in art and visual culture of South Asia between the 16^th and 19^th centuries covering the diverse arts of the Mughal State to address the broader cultural and epistemological contexts within which Mughal-era art and architecture flourished.

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