Fall 2024 Class Schedule: Department of Art History

Fall 2024 Class Schedule

Art History offerings for the 2024-25 school year are tentative and subject to change without notice.

Undergraduate Students
Graduate Students

Course #	Course Title	Instructor	Day/Time
UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS
ART_HIST 101-7	First-Year College Seminar: Spaces of Learning: The Architecture and Experience of College Campuses	Bell	MW 11-12:20p
ART_HIST 101-7 First-Year College Seminar: Spaces of Learning: The Architecture and Experience of College Campuses This seminar is designed to support your transition to college by taking as its subject the university campus itself. What are college campuses, and how are they designed and built? How do campus environments shape and reflect the college experience? How do campuses relate to their surrounding towns or cities? This course explores the unique architectural and spatial environments of college campuses, with a special focus on Northwestern. We will learn how the architectural styles of different buildings reflect the university’s priorities at various points in its history and examine how students utilize campus space to either align with or challenge institutional aims. Much of this course will take us across the unique spaces of Northwestern’s campus—even within its archives—to examine campuses as a product of disparate visions of the built environment's role in producing a landscape of learning. While the course topic centers on the campus space around us, the seminar’s goals are to set you up for success as a college student, directly addressing the shifts and often unspoken expectations that come with beginning university learning. You will participate in campus walks, uncover hidden histories embedded in the built environment, produce multimedia reflections on campus space, and learn about the incredible resources available to you as a Northwestern student. The course is intended to help you strengthen your abilities as an observant reader, persuasive writer, and critical thinker. While we discuss what sort of implicit values might be legible within the campus environment, we will also explore practical guidance on navigating college life and building a supportive community.
ART_HIST 225	Introduction to Medieval Art (300-1450)	Normore	TTh 11-12:20p
ART_HIST 225 Introduction to Medieval Art (300-1450) 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, spiritual, and economic 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.
ART_HIST 359 / MENA 390-6-1	Special Topics in 19th Century Art: Cairo/Paris: Art & Empire in the Modern City	Dowad	TTh 12:30-1:50p
ART_HIST 359 / MENA 390-6-1 Special Topics in 19th Century Art: Cairo/Paris: Art & Empire in the Modern City This course explores the co-evolution of artistic modernity and the colonial metropolis in the 19th century with a focus on Ottoman Cairo and its connections to the traditional center of scholarship on art, empire, and modernity: Paris. Beginning with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 and ending with the country’s occupation by the British in 1882, this course will trace Cairo’s cultural transformations through close attention to a range of objects and sites—paintings, political cartoons, urban monuments, museums, world’s fairs, architecture, and scientific illustration—produced at the nexus of Franco-Ottoman rivalry and cooperation. This course challenges conventional binaries of East vs. West, traditional vs. modern, and local vs. global by exploring art's active roles in shaping urban life across these two cities. Special attention will be paid to the transcultural formation of national, racial, gender, and sexual identities.
ART_HIST 368	Special Topics in Modern Art: Women and Textiles	Kiaer	MW 12:30-1:50p
ART_HIST 368 Special Topics in Modern Art: Women and Textiles This course examines woman artists of the twentieth century who worked with textiles—as fine art, as collective industrial production, and as craft. Textiles were historically associated with “women’s work” and domestic life and not taken seriously as art. We will investigate such topics as the modernist artists of the 1910s-1930s who challenged this division between craft and high art, such as Anni Albers at the Bauhaus, Sonia Delaunay in Paris, Liubov Popova of the Soviet avant-garde, and Norwegian Hannah Ryggen’s acclaimed narrative tapestries; the female collectives of industrial textile designers of mid-century Italy and the Soviet Union (with a focus on acclaimed designer Anna Andreeva); the feminist artists of the 1960s and 1970s who upended the masculine art world status quo through their shared knowledge of traditional and experimental textile techniques, such as Faith Ringgold, Harmony Hammond, Miriam Schapiro and the Womanhouse collective; and throughout, the particular importance of textiles to speak to stories of exclusion and marginalization for artists of color and indigenous artists.
ART_HIST 378 / MENA 390-6-2	The Global City: Babylon	Topçuoğlu	MW 2-3:20p
ART_HIST 378 / MENA 390-6-2 The Global City: Babylon Considered one of the greatest cities of antiquity, Babylon was the seat of successive powerful empires, a center of culture and political power in the ancient world. And yet, no ancient city was so desired and feared, so admired and despised. Babylonian citizens saw their city as a paradise—the center of the world and symbol of cosmic harmony, while Greek historian Herodotus called it the world’s most splendid city. But for the Jews, it was a city of sin and pride. For millennia, the city and the myth of Babylon have inspired artists, writers, and philosophers all over the world. In this course, we will explore the art, architecture, and urban history of Babylon from its foundations to the present day, as well as the artistic legacy of this ancient city in the modern world. We will survey the visual culture of Babylon in a variety of media from the miniature art of cylinder seals to the grandeur of its monuments like the Ishtar Gate. We will study the city’s palaces, temples, and colossal walls as representations of imperial ideology, and inspiration for fantastic structures, like the Tower of Babel and the Hanging Gardens. In addition to the ancient artistic legacy of Babylon, we will consider the historical and cultural memory of the city in the modern world, through grand artistic depictions since the Renaissance, and visual representations in popular culture from films to video games to sci-fi and opera. Finally, we will examine how the city and its monumental buildings were instrumentalized by Saddam Hussein as symbols of nationalism and propaganda in the 1970s and ‘80s.
ART_HIST 395 / ENVR_POL 390-0-25 / AMER_ST 310-0-20	Museums Seminar: Black Art and Ecology	Zorach	F 1-3:50p
ART_HIST 395 / ENVR_POL 390-0-25 / AMER_ST 310-0-20 Museums Seminar: Black Art and Ecology In conjunction with several exhibitions and public installations on view in the fall of 2024, this course will study the ways in which Black artists in Chicago have engaged with environmental justice, social and natural ecologies, and the space of the city over the past 80 years. We will study artists' use of sustainable practices and reclaimed materials, the critique of spatial inequality and the space of the city itself as an artistic medium through urban farming, public art, and community engagement. Readings include theoretical and historical texts, but the primary object of study will be the artworks, exhibitions, and installations themselves. As a museum seminar, we consider the methods of institutions of different scales and types, including alternative galleries and artist-led projects, as they collect and present work by contemporary and historical Black artists. Students must be able to attend site visits that will often extend 1-2 hours past class hours on Fridays because of transportation time.
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GRADUATE STUDENTS
ART_HIST 401	Methods and Historiography of Art History: Proseminar	Dowad	W 2-4:50p
ART_HIST 401 Methods and Historiography of Art History: Proseminar The historical juncture at which we presently find ourselves—wracked by the compounding catastrophes of the global pandemic, ecological disaster, and postcolonial neoliberalism—demands a radical rethinking of art history as an academic discipline. The urgency of redressing art history’s lingering complicities with white supremacy, coloniality, and the profit motive propels us to reconsider foundational questions: What is art? What is history? What is an object? What is scholarship? What is a material? What is an archive? This seminar addresses these and other questions from perspectives both within and beyond art history, including Black Studies, Indigenous Studies, feminist and queer theory, postcolonial theory, new materialisms, among others. Rather than assimilating subaltern voices into a hegemonic “global art history,” the seminar begins with the premise that art history needs rebuilding from the ground up. The goal is to work proactively and collectively towards new horizons of art historical scholarship by attending to a diverse body of methodologies that offer dynamic ways of reconceptualizing art historical narration, (inter)disciplinarity, canonization, and research.
ART_HIST 420	Studies in Medieval Art: Art and Patronage under the Valois	Normore	M 2-4:50p
ART_HIST 420 Studies in Medieval Art: Art and Patronage under the Valois Part planner, part money-bags and part intended audience, the figure of the patron looms large in art historical writing about the Middle Ages. But what do we really know about the patron's part in either art making or art viewing? This class seeks to problematize this familiar concept through both critical group discussion of general theories of patronage and student-conducted case studies of individual examples. The first half of the course will consider definitions of the patron, the question of patronage and agency and theories of collecting. In the second half of the course students will select an individual patron connected to the well-documented Valois family and present weekly on their relationship to various types of art making.
ART_HIST 440	Studies in 17th & 18th Century Art: Materiality	Caticha	T 2-4:50p
ART_HIST 440 Studies in 17th & 18th Century Art: Materiality The materiality of art is central to how art is made, how it looks, what it means, and how it is preserved. Art history’s recent material turn has challenged art historians to look beyond the fine arts to material culture while also expanding the field’s geographic and temporal focus. However, this trend in scholarship obscures art history’s long tradition of object-oriented study. This seminar examines this historiographic tradition while also looking towards current theoretical approaches to materiality, including, but not limited to, theories of agency (the means through which objects shape human behavior), making (the processes of creation, the transmission of artistic knowledge, and the global movement of makers), exchange (the movement of objects through space as they are gifted, purchased, sold, or simply used), and matter (the physical substances that comprise all objects).
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Fall 2024 Class Schedule

UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS

GRADUATE STUDENTS