DEPARTMENT OF ART HISTORY

Course Catalog

Undergraduate Students

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 101-8 – First-Year Writing Seminar: Empires of Fashion

ART_HIST 101-8 – First-Year Writing Seminar: Medieval Sports and Art

Chariot-racing, archery, tennis, and jousting were just some sports enjoyed over the 1000 years (4th–15th centuries CE) known as the "Middle Ages." Kings and queens, monks and nuns, and nobles and peasants engaged in these to gain athletic prowess, fame, status, wealth, love, sex, and fun. This course examines the powerful visual expressions of various sports and games developed, cultivated, and encouraged or discouraged over the medieval era in the Mediterranean world. The evidence includes athletic monuments, illustrated manuscripts, tapestries, and relatively unexpected objects such as mirrors and combs. Modern material, such as films and TV excerpts, shall also be used. Key issues explored are the spectacle and spectatorship of medieval sports; gender, class, and religion in the practice of sports; the body, fashion, and the spaces of sports (stadiums, arenas, etc.), and comparisons between their medieval and modern versions.

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 230 – Introduction to Art of the United States: Native Modern and Contemporary Art

ART_HIST 232 – Introduction to the History of Architecture: 1400 to the Present

How does the built environment shape social meaning and reflect historical change? In this introductory-level course, we will survey the human designed environment across the globe, from 1400 to the present day. Through in-depth analysis of buildings, cities, landscapes, and interiors, we will observe how spatial environments are created and invested with meaning. From Tenochtitlan, riverine capital of the Aztec empire, to the Forbidden City in Beijing and the Palazzo Medici in Florence, from the Palace of Rudolf Manga Bell in Douala to the Colonial Office of the Bank of London, and from Lina Bo Bardi's Glass House in Sao Paulo to David Adjaye's National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., this course will introduce students to the changing technologies, materials, uses, and aesthetics that have helped define architecture's modernity across time and geographies. Through detailed visual analysis and the study of primary source documents, students will become familiar with architectural terminology and historical techniques of architectural visualization. Through written exercises and guided slow looking, students will learn how to critically analyze and historically interpret the built environment at various scales.

ART_HIST 250 – Introduction to Early Modern European Art

ART_HIST 255 – Introduction to Modernism

This undergraduate lecture course introduces one of the most contested terms of art historical inquiry today: modernism. Broadly, the term refers to the collective efforts of cultural producers to respond to the ever-shifting conditions of perception and social life brought on by modernity. The course examines some of the key moments in global modernity from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. It provides a critical introduction to the rise of modern art practices from a range of locales, pushing against the hegemonic discourses upholding the Western canon to underscore the interdependencies between the Global North and the Global South.

From anti-colonial modernism in India to considerations of race and modernism in mid-century Jamaica, this course takes seriously the diversity of experiences of global modernity by examining movements and moments formed in opposition to the ravages of capitalism, colonialism, industrialization, imperialism, and war that continue to define our world. We will examine how the aesthetic of newness, ideas of "progress," and radical formal invention characteristic of modernism were rooted in the societal transformation of modernity. The work of the course contests the idea of modernism as a purely European or American phenomenon while considering artists' efforts to elaborate internationalist artistic languages, reflecting and refracting the concurrent rise of the modern nation-state. Across the quarter, we will focus on how modernist traditions transformed through their circulation across cities, nations, and continental borders. The overarching goal of this course is the consideration of how the formal concerns of distinct movements in modern art, responding to modernization, emerged out of specific historical and cultural contexts and how each movement pushed against the tastes of society at large to radically challenge ideas about art itself.

ART_HIST 329 – Special Topics in Medieval Art: Medieval Mediterranean World

This course explores the medieval Mediterranean world's art, architecture, archaeology, and material culture from late antiquity to the early modern period, or between the late 4th and 16th centuries. While the Renaissance blossomed in Italy in the 1400s, in this course we will investigate the medieval art and art forms that circulated among Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities around the Mediterranean until the 16th century. We will study the geographies of the Mediterranean Sea—including Italy, Spain, Egypt, North Africa, the Balkans, Anatolia, the Holy Land, and the Middle East—focusing on their rulers, kingdoms, merchants, craftsmen, pilgrims, and travelers in order to explore the means and spread of artistic and architectural patronage across the area. We also will explore the role of art and architecture in the sacred and secular lives of the region's Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities. Among others, we will learn about monuments (architecture, mosaics, wall paintings), objects (ceramics, metalwares, coins, and textiles), and historical texts to better understand the medieval Mediterranean's artistic, cultural, and political dynamics.

ART_HIST 342 – 18th Century European Art

ART_HIST 389 – Studies in 19th Century Art: Impressionism

An art form called "Impressionism" was born in Paris in 1874 when a group of like-minded painters and print-makers showed together in an independent art exhibition. The last of six such shows took place in 1886. Its practitioners continued to hold sway in vanguard circles, and to develop into the 1890s. The key artists were Cassatt, Pissarro, Degas, Caillebotte, Morisot, Renoir and Monet. What were the defining characteristics of this new style called "Impressionism"? The paintings and prints represented only the contemporary urban and suburban world (no history; no religion; no mythology) and in startingly novel ways: the pictures were brighter, more freely handled, and oddly evasive than any made before. The 2024 celebration of the 1874 exhibition's 150th birthday renewed interest in the history and meanings of Impressionism. The course will take a broad perspective on its interpretation by investigating a wide array of topics: questions of globality, colonialism, and the environment as well as matters of gender, class, modernity, technology, medium and technique. We shall also dip into the work of the successor generation of innovative artists, the so-called "Post-Impressionists" (including Seurat, Signac, Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin). Together – through your responses to lectures and readings and in the context of class discussion – we will try to make some of the most familiar and admired paintings and prints of the later nineteenth century strange and problematic again.

ART_HIST 359 – 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 360-1 – 20th Century Art 1: European Modernisms, 1900-1945

This lecture course examines modern art and culture in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, a period marked not only by ongoing European imperialism and colonialism, but also by the end of major empires (such as the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires) and the birth of new nation states within Europe. How did artists in Europe engage with the experience and legacy of colonialism? How did they respond to the rupture of old political regimes and the consequent rise of extreme political ideologies both on the left and the right? We will study the key modernist movements, including Primitivism, Cubism, Futurism, Suprematism, Activism, Bauhaus, international and Soviet Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism, socialist realism, and Zenitism. Focusing on both the major European centers of the avant-garde and the less canonical, “other” Europes, we will explore how artistic practices related to new technologies, changing gender structures, revolutions, mass-scale wars, and a new type of mass commodity culture.

ART_HIST 367 – Special Topics in Art of the Americas: African American Photography: From Frederick Douglass to Carrie Mae Weems

Since the early days of photography African Americans have specifically engaged the medium to navigate African diasporic identity. Seminal Black thinkers such as Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. DuBois argued for photography's importance in the construction of African American identity. Organized chronologically, this course traces the shifting social status of African Americans from the 1850s to today and examines the relationship between African Americans and the medium of photography. This chronology will also help us map the rapid development of different photographic technologies over 150+ years. Putting primary sources in conversation with art historical texts, this course will introduce students to major thinkers that have contributed to African American art history including Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, Angela Davis, Deborah Willis, Shawn Michelle Smith, bell hooks, Saidiya Hartman, and Tina Campt. While focused on the intersection of African American identity and photography, we will also draw connections to the broader African diaspora. Students will have the opportunity to examine art in person at The Block Art Museum and/or the Art Institute of Chicago which each hold important key photographs related to the course topic. Through course discussion, short writing assignments, and visits to local art collections, we will explore these topics together and strengthen core art historical skills of visual literacy, analytic writing, and critical reading skills.

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 368 – Special Topics in Modern Art: Transnational Avant-Gardes: Imagining the Future

This course explores the movement of future-oriented art practices across the overlapping geopolitical spaces of modernity, 1900-1968. We focus on five paradigms that sought to place art in the position of the vanguard of social and political change. We engage these movements and their use and claims of art and architecture as "avant-garde" forces against established conventions. We examine Futurism, Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism, and Socialist Realism, tracing their formations and transformations across multiple geographies, including the Soviet Union, the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America, India, China, Japan, and elsewhere. We will engage these practices first from a historical perspective, examining the broad spectrum of new and critical art that emerged in the twentieth century. Our historical lens will focus on the transnational movement and connectivity of people and ideas, taking into consideration how the global economy of an unequal distribution of resources contributed to these practices. Secondly, and interconnected to these historical and economic shifts, we will adopt a historiographic perspective, questioning how the avant-garde has been depicted and acclaimed—assessed for meaning—for historians, artists, and collectives during various periods of transformation and resistance (and even revolution). Rather than drawing a strict division between the historical and so-called "neo" avant-garde movements, our aim is to recognize the continued exchanges and interplays between the avant-garde projects that preceded World War II and those that emerged after. This trans-temporal line of inquiry allows us to contemplate the continuation of avant-garde practices as artists navigated new contradictions and contexts in the ostensibly bipolar Cold War order.

ART_HIST 370-1 – Architecture & Landscapes, 1750-1890

ART_HIST 375 – Media Theory: New Media, New Publics

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 386 – Art of Africa: Contemporary African Art

This course examines the contributions of African artists to contemporary art practice and discourse from the 1980s to the present. Students will explore the critical networks, strategies, politics, and institutions that have shaped and supported the making, circulation, and reception of African art practices in recent history. The course will strive to analyze objects from multiple vantage points, considering the ways in which the meaning and value imputed to African art practices shifts across local and international contexts. Students will gain substantial insight into the role of museum exhibitions, art biennials, publishing platforms, and transnational collaborations in defining the field of contemporary African art. We will question how artists today interrogate geopolitical power arrangements and engage issues related to gender, identity, and sexuality. We will also explore how artists grapple with the insights and limitations of theories ranging from decolonization, feminism, modernism, and globalization to ideas of Posthumanism and the Anthropocene. The course will address a spectrum of media including film, installation, painting, photography, performance, sculpture, and sound.

ART_HIST 390-0-1 – Undergraduate Seminar: Black Portraiture

ART_HIST 390 – Undergraduate Seminar:  On Our Own Terms: Political Solidarities and Aesthetic Alliances in Latinx Art

“Chicano,” “Hispanic,” “Post-Chicano,” "mestiza," “brown," "Latinx.” Since the 1960s, each of these terms has been used to establish a common ground and a commons for people of diverse nationalities and ethnicities whose commonality is that they share a lineage in the pre-conquest Americas and live in the United States. What are the stakes of these ethno-political identities when used to describe artists and their work? This class foregrounds intergenerational perspectives of artists, curators, and critics in artworks, exhibitions, and writings to explore the politics, aesthetics, and material sensibilities associated with each term. Students will nuance the shifting definitions of identity forged in relation to the Americas, the nation-state, settler-colonialism, indigeneity, immigration, race, and hegemonic society, across six decades of art and community initiatives artists, who are described today as Latinx, living in the United States.

ART_HIST 390 – Undergraduate Seminar: Global Medieval: Problems and Possibilities

This course has two parts. For the first two thirds of the class we will read key texts in the emerging field of global medieval art history in order to familiarize students with the broad outlines of the
historiography and current debates. In the second half of the course, each student will choose a key location or route (to be selected the first day of class with help from the instructor) and prepare several short weekly presentations on it in relation to topics such as architecture, portable objects, patrons and artisans. These presentations and their attendant research will build to allow each student to create a final 15-minute long presentation (a standard length for conference panel papers in the field) and are intended to help students develop their skills as public, scholarly speakers as well as to give the class as a whole a set of case studies for comparison.

ART_HIST 391 – Undergraduate Methods Seminar

This seminar introduces art historical research methods for majors in their third (junior) year. The seminar will survey the history of art history with a focus on recent debates and interventions within the field (e.g. intersectional, critical race theory, and decolonial approaches). The seminar will also provide students with concrete tools to develop, research, and write a piece of original art historical scholarship. What does it mean to ask an original art historical research question? What is historiography and how it is critical for mapping out and developing an original thesis statement and argument? How does one effectively analyze and implement primary and secondary sources? What constitutes "evidence," and how is the dominant perception of "evidence" shaped by art history's origins?

ART_HIST 395-0-1 – Museums Seminar

ART_HIST 395-0-1 – Museums Seminar

The production of commercial prints in Japan was the result of a popular revolution in Japanese society. Japan's great premodern cities, especially Edo (now Tokyo), were home to an increasingly prosperous, sophisticated, and literate urban dweller who would purchase images of their favorite celebrities of the day or the latest illustrated novel. This class will explore the birth of the commercial Japanese print, and its many incarnations leading to the designs of contemporary artists. During our discussions we will consider the changing role of the artist and issues of use and reception, including the part the West played in maintaining the popularity of Japanese prints into the 20th century. Along with art historical analysis and a study of the commercial context of the prints, issues of connoisseurship will feature strongly in this class taught from a curatorial point of view. As this class will be conducted largely in the Art Institute's Japanese print storage area, it is a rare opportunity to view works of art up close and unframed, essential for an understanding of printing techniques and collecting practices.

ART_HIST 395 / ENVR_POL 390-0-25 / AMER_ST 310-0-20 – Museums Seminar: Black Art and Ecology

Graduate Students

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 403 – Objects & Materials Seminar

This course focuses on sustained, close engagement with art objects in area collections and the methods and questions such inquiry raises. Students will be introduced to the material histories of objects and global media practices, basics of technical and scientific analysis and related theoretical debates that resituate art history as a study of physical things as well as their disembodied images. Required for all second-year art history graduate students and limited to second-year graduate students.

ART_HIST 406 – Dissertation Prospectus Writing Seminar

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 430 – Studies in Early Modern Art: Materiality, Mobility, Mind: Early Modern Printed Images

How did printed images translate and circulate ideas, both as independent objects and in early modern books? This graduate course will interrogate the culture of print and its many manifestations in the early modern period (fifteenth through eighteenth century) with a focus on Europe and its zones of contact.

Through class discussions online and hands-on sessions at the Newberry, the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Library at the University of Chicago, and the Art Institute of Chicago’s Prints and Drawings Department, the course will track the form, use, collection, and dissemination of the printed image. The course will culminate with a visit to the Art Institute exhibition [Lines of Connection], curated by Jamie Gabbarelli (AIC) and Edina Adam (Getty).

Sponsored by the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry, which requires an application to track enrollment numbers. For more information and to apply, go to: https://www.newberry.org/calendar/materiality-mobility-mind-early-modern-printed-images. Class will be held at the Newberry and other local collections, with some sessions on Zoom.

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).

ART_HIST 440 – Studies in 17th & 18th Century Art

ART_HIST 460 – Studies in 20th & 21st Century Art

ART HIST 460 – Studies in 20th & 21st Century Art: Pan-Africanism: Histories, Aesthetics, and Politics

Concurrent with the opening of the exhibition Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica (December 15–March 30, 2025) at the Art Institute of Chicago, this course considers the cultural and political dimensions of Pan-Africanism, beginning with its origins in the late-nineteenth century and extending to the present day. Students will critically examine the process of narrating art and cultural histories through the multivalent form of the exhibition, it's catalogue, and its institutional context within an encyclopedic museum.

Students in this course will meet at the Art Institute of Chicago weekly and will engage with the exhibition as the primary case study for considering a range of questions, including: 1) How does the exhibition’s layout, design, checklist, and use of media support its overall arguments about Pan-Africanism's evolution and endurance as a force in culture? 2) What other kinds of spaces, sites, or institutions have enabled attention to and the circulation of Pan-Africanist ideas? 3) How do the intersections of class, gender, race, and sexuality, shape our understanding of Pan-Africanism’s influence on art and politics?

This course will consist of weekly reading assignments and a final project; discussions will be supplemented by in-class conversations with visiting artists, curators, and a range of public programs, including symposia and film screenings. Students should be prepared to travel to the museum weekly. This course will also include graduate students from the University of Chicago, and so space will be limited.