ART_HIST 101-7 First-Year College Seminar: Photography and African American Culture
This seminar introduces students to histories of photography and lens-based practices, attentive to the role the medium has played in Black communities in the United States from the mid nineteenth century to the present. Studying photographic technologies from the daguerreotype to the meme, the course explores how notions of citizenship, justice, social visibility, criminality, race, and gender have been variously negotiated through engagements with photography. We also explore the meaning of photographic forms from the U.S. in the Caribbean and Africa.
Course goals and learning objectives: This course is both an exploration of photography and a forum for students to hone the skills and habits of mind needed to succeed at Northwestern. This includes identifying and evaluating arguments and presenting ideas orally and in writing. We will also spend time discussing how to navigate the university and how to keep your balance in the years to come.
ART_HIST 101-7-2 First-Year College Seminar: Bubble: The Art of Economic Boom and Bust
Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble: This course surveys the art and visual culture of economic boom and bust. We begin with historical examples from Dutch still life painting and its relationship to "tulipmania," to colonialism, print culture, and paper money in the "Mississippi Bubble," to Hollywood and the Great Depression. We then discuss selected modern art movements in relation to poverty, anti-work movements, gentrification, and the 2008-9 housing bubble (otherwise known as the subprime mortgage crisis). You will learn skills in interpreting art, understanding art movements, and analyzing the relationship of art and society. There will be short writing assignments and a final project that involves holding a debate on what the next bubble to "burst" will be. Generative AI and the contemporary art market are two possible examples.
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 101-8 First-Year Writing Seminar: Black Portraiture
In recent decades, portraiture of Black individuals has taken on heightened visibility, its prominence ebbing and flowing across museum collections, major exhibitions, public art commissions, popular culture, and contemporary debates about race and representation. This first-year writing seminar examines Black portraiture as a cultural, social, and political practice from the advent of the twentieth century to the present. Encompassing a wide range of media, including painting, photography, sculpture, film, music, and comics, the course will critically question what portraiture promises, what it obscures, and whose interests it ultimately serves.
A central emphasis of the course is the process of writing. With scaffolded assignments, peer review, and sustained revision, students will develop facility and confidence in articulating complex ideas about race, portraiture, and material culture in written form. We will interrogate the role of art criticism and the art market in shaping the value, reception, and institutionalization of portraiture. Through museum visits and close engagement with artworks, students will develop skills in first-hand observation, visual analysis, and the formal description of objects, grounding their writing in sustained encounters with artworks. Students will ultimately develop a deeper understanding of recurring approaches to producing and theorizing the likeness of Black subjects, while also gaining insight into the cultural and political stakes of portraiture as a genre of representation.
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, economic and spiritual contexts. Lectures and discussion sections will trace the shifting ways that 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 226 Art and Visual Culture of the Islamic World
This course surveys the diverse arts and visual cultures of the Islamic world from the seventh century to the present day. Following the rise of Islam as a new faith in the Judeo-Christian line, the Middle East developed a dynamic cultural order that integrated earlier traditions, including those of Byzantium and Iran. Our course traces the emergence and development of art, architecture, and archaeology in Islamic regions, beginning in the Arabian Peninsula and extending to the Mediterranean, North and Sub-Saharan Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, Iran, Turkey, Central Asia, China, and the Indian subcontinent. We will start with the Ka‘ba in Mecca, the revelation of the Qur’an, and the significance of calligraphy in Islam, analyzing how Islamic art and visual cultures have engaged and connected with local, regional, and global traditions for over a millennium. We will investigate monuments, urban planning, architectural styles, portable objects, calligraphic designs, paintings, and prints that have circulated among dynasties, kingdoms, and empires across time and space. Contemporary artistic and visual expressions in Muslim-majority regions continue to thrive today by drawing on historical practices and adapting traditional forms. Through calligraphy, figural representation, or geometric patterns, the arts and visual traditions of Islam offer significant insights into human creativity, artistic exchange, and cultural heritage.
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 São 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 240 Introduction to Asian Art: Art and Architecture of South Asia
This survey serves as a first introduction to ancient, medieval and modern/contemporary artistic practices of South Asia, its relationship with East Asia (China, Japan), Central Asia, and Europe. Key examples of art and architecture will focus on a selection of artistic traditions, styles, built environments (archaeological sites and monuments) and media (prints, painting, sculpture, decorative arts, photography). Course materials will take up a thematic as well as object/site-oriented case-study based approach, drawing upon the role of religion, cultural interactions, trade, and entanglements of art with imperialism, colonialism, modernization and war and current issues around museum display and exhibitions. The survey is aimed at developing skills of visual literacy, analysis, and awareness of art-historical debates and will provide opportunities to engage with close reading of objects and their larger historical, cultural, and scholarly contexts.
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.
Contemporary art names a field of cultural practice defined by its relation to time—by being of, responsive to, and in dialogue with the social, political, and economic realities of a given moment. Proceeding in a roughly chronological fashion from the 1960s to the present, this introductory course surveys key artworks, exhibitions, movements, and debates that have shaped contemporary art across media and geographies. The course will emphasize the movement of artworks, exploring how meaning and value are produced across sites of encounter ranging from artist studios, galleries, museums, alternative art spaces, community centers, and the street to publications, the internet, auction blocks, and the domestic interior. Through this lens, students will examine how artworks are displayed, interpreted, and contested as they move through public and private, local and transnational contexts. Together, we will grapple with the illuminating and challenging questions artists ask of their audiences, examining how artworks can function as critical reflections on society and its values. By examining artistic responses to concerns including love and community, political conflict and catastrophe, and issues of attention, citizenship, humor, and justice, the course foregrounds contemporary art’s potential to alter our ways of thinking and being. Assignments will include section presentations, short writing responses, a midterm exam, and an open-format final project.
ART_HIST 301 Art of Revolution & Empire: Empire and Revolution in Russia and the USSR
This course examines the art and visual culture of the Russian revolution in the context of empire, from the revolt against tsarist empire in 1905, to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 that led to the formation of the Soviet Union, to the Stalin Revolution of the 1930s that aimed to establish an anti-imperialist socialist empire. Artists of the Russian empire were among the first to invent abstraction in the 1910s, and, after 1917, Soviet artists were the first to experiment with the avant-garde slogan “art into life.” With particular attention to woman artists and artists from Ukraine and other regions of the Russian empire and the USSR, we will study 19th century realism and Impressionism, Neo-primitivism, Cubo-futurism, Suprematism, Constructivism, photomontage, photography and experimental film, and the invention of Socialist Realism as modern public art.
ART_HIST 317 / HUM 317 Monsters, Art, and Civilization
Griffins, sphinxes, demons, and other fabulous creatures appear frequently in the art of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Eastern Mediterranean world. They stand at the intersection of the normal and abnormal, the natural and unnatural. Why did these images become so widespread, and what cultural functions did they serve? Can we connect their invention and dissemination with key moments in human history and cross-cultural interaction? What was the role of material representations of the supernatural in preventing and healing disease, and in coping with other human misfortunes? Why have they become a significant subject in the study of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and their neighbors?
This course explores the supernatural subject in ancient art with new perspectives drawn from art history, history, anthropology, cognitive science, and archaeology. Employing art historical methodologies of formal and stylistic analysis and iconographic interpretation, we will examine a wide range of objects and representations (including architectural sculptures, figurines, seals, amulets, and other media) along with ancient texts that help us understand their meaning and function. Since these objects and their images largely formed the visual culture encountered in the daily lives of many individuals, we are able to engage with numerous objects belonging to non-elite members of society and that remain outside the established canon of histories of ancient art. We are also able to understand how ideas about the supernatural developed in response to specific circumstances of environment, history, and culture.
This course examines the formation and development of Byzantine art from the foundation of Constantinople in the 4th century to the city’s fall to Ottoman forces in 1453, as well as its subsequent legacy. Special attention will be given to the debates surrounding the role and nature of images in the Iconoclast controversy, the use of images in Orthodox practice, and the networks of cultural exchange and competition that linked the Byzantines to their neighbors and spread their artistic influence from the Italian peninsula to Russia and beyond.
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 the course, we will investigate the medieval art, architectural elements, 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. These figures will guide our investigation into the movement, migration, exchange, and patronage across the region while exploring the role of art and architecture in the sacred and secular lives of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities. Through our study of monuments (including architecture, mosaics, and wall paintings), objects (such as ceramics, metalwork, coins, ivory, and textiles), and historical texts, we will examine the cultural and political dynamics that defined the medieval Mediterranean world. We will also engage with spatial thinking and digital tools through ArcGIS StoryMaps as part of the Digital Mediterranean project, gaining skills in mapping artistic exchange. A visit to the library’s Map Room will offer hands-on experience with medieval and early modern maps to explore how the Mediterranean was represented and navigated, while a Block Museum study session focused on Shahnameh folios will provide a close analysis of artistic techniques in Persian illustrated manuscripts.
ART_HIST 330-1 Early Modern European Art 1400-1500
Most people, if they’ve heard of one premodern artist, have heard of Leonardo da Vinci, who lived in Italy and France from 1452 to 1519. But what can we say about Leonardo’s broader social and artistic worlds? This class studies those worlds, examining European art from the late 14th to the early 16th century, with an emphasis on Italy and with reference to its global context. The course seeks to help you develop answers to the question “what was the Renaissance?”—or maybe, in light of newer ideas about the period, “was there a Renaissance?” It will help you look at Renaissance art, understand how it was made, and interpret what it means. We study the proliferation of types of religious and secular subject matter, emerging interests in nature and the human body, ideas about history, gender, and violence, changes in commerce and colonization, and artistic media, techniques, and materials. Class will be taught with a combination of lectures (including online lectures), class discussion, and museum visits.
ART_HIST 359 Special Topics in 19th Century Art: Paris: Fashion Capitol of the 18th & 19th Centuries?
This course considers the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Parisian fashion through the lens of European colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade. Marie-Antoinette’s lavish gowns and towering wigs, the empire-waist dresses of the Napoleonic Era, and richly printed calico muslins, among other objects, will be understood through the histories of race, colonialism, science, and industry. Who made these garments? What materials did they use and where were these materials from? How was fashion deployed as a tool to perform power, gender, race, and national identity? How has the history of Parisian fashion systematically erased the contributions of black women and women of color? How were the very same styles and fashions worn by white Europeans (and particularly French women) transformed by free and enslaved black women as a tool of resistance and expression of identity? Throughout this course, we will also engage with contemporary art and popular culture with the goal of understanding the historical legacy and fetishization of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century period dress.
ART_HIST 359 / MENA 390 Studies in 19th Century Art: Art & Revolution, 1789-1917
The nineteenth century was an age of revolutions—not only in Europe but across the globe. As the Industrial Revolution rapidly reshaped the world’s material and social relations, popular revolutions erupted to overthrow corrupt ruling classes and experiment with new forms of political and social organization. Some of these revolutions are well-known, such as the French Revolution (1789) and the Russian Revolution (1917); others deserve more attention, such as the Ottoman Constitutional Revolution (1908). At the same time, the nineteenth century witnessed the massive expansion of European imperialism in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, igniting numerous anti-colonial revolutions, including the Haitian Revolution (1791) and the Indian Rebellion (1857). These revolutions posed a direct challenge to “modern” Europe and its professed liberal values.
Moving between these diverse political and cultural contexts, this course investigates art’s role in representing revolutionary ideals and producing new kinds of political subjects in the nineteenth century. This course takes a global frame that centers capitalism, interimperial competition, race, and gender as the primary forces that drove revolutionary art-making throughout the world. Instead of a broad survey, this course closely analyzes individual artworks in a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture, architecture, drawing, prints, photography, and political cartoons.
ART_HIST 369 Special Topics in Contemporary Art: Against Brain Rot: Attention, the Arts, and Civic Engagement
From doom-scrolling through highly visual social media platforms to the PR strategies of reigning political parties, our attention is being flooded at unprecedented rates with a barrage of content. Not only does this frenzied rhythm fracture our ability to focus, but it also hinders our ability to respond effectively to today’s interwoven crises. This course will pair Art History’s study of attention with political and social mobilization theory through case studies of public art, endurance art, new media art, and other interventional genres from the last 100 years. Together, we will ask: what can we learn about civic and public life through leveraging attention in and with the arts? How do state and private enterprises leverage attention, and how do they encourage citizens to pay attention, as in the “attention economy”? How can a deeper understanding of attention through the arts open new possibilities of active participation in social, civic life?
Weekly topics include holding vs fracturing attention, attention as or vs action, and collective manifestations of attention, such as public demonstrations. Exercises include weekly attention reflection journals, analysis of artworks through recreation/restaging, meditation and mindfulness practices, extended object analysis, etc. This course is built with varied learning needs in mind, angled towards encouraging resilient practices of attention while fostering a supportive environment for all types of learners. This course is designed for advanced undergraduate students who have taken several art history classes, though students with a breadth of other humanities classes are encouraged to enroll.
This course provides students with an in-depth understanding of major developments in architectural, urban, and landscape history, from 1750 to 1890. Charting a period of significant change that animated architectural discourse and practice, students will explore the highly innovative and experimental ways in which key architects and planners responded to the challenges of a rapidly changing and globalizing world and to the possibilities introduced by new technologies and materials. While this course focuses on developments that took place within the European and North American frame, they are situated in relation to global processes including trade, imperialism, nationalism, migration, and industrialization. Each lecture is organized around keynote transformations in architectural culture during this period: We will explore how the era of revolutions, from the late 18th to the early 19th century, expanded the role of architecture in the creation of new types of public and political space; how industrial production and prefabrication gave rise to radically new architectural vocabularies and catalyzed debates about national styles and aesthetic and environmental “character”; and how new housing, labor, and urban reform movements, such as utopian socialism, offered visionary spatial strategies in pursuit of an elusive social equality. This course prioritizes discussion and critical reflection and emphasizes the study of primary sources.
This course will explore seven centuries of architecture and urbanism in North America’s largest city. First founded in 1325 as Tenochtitlan, the city served as the ceremonial and political center for an expanding Mexica, or Aztec, empire that commanded vast territories across Mesoamerica. Two centuries later, following the Spanish invasion and conquest of the Mexica capital, Tenochtitlan was transformed into a new kind of center and renamed Ciudad de México. As capital of the Spanish Viceroyalty of New Spain—a realm that encompassed modern-day Mexico, parts of the Central America and the USA, as well as islands in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean—Mexico City became the crossroads for global commerce and exchange connecting four continents. Nineteenth-century independence from Spain and early twentieth-century revolution led to Mexico City’s further physical as well as cultural transformation into the megalopolis of 22 million inhabitants we can experience today. This course will trace how the ecology and terrain of this remarkable place has evolved over time. We will consider everyday buildings and public spaces as well as monuments, both surviving and lost. From streets, parks, and boulevards to stepped pyramids, basilica-plan churches, and sports complexes designed for the Olympic Games, the course explores architecture and urbanism as a reflection of Mexico City’s complex history from a global vantage.
Required: Attendance and participation, including contributing to class discussion and writing (and sometimes sketching) weekly responses to readings and/or visual prompts. Participants should plan on one weekend outing (Friday or Saturday TBD) in Chicago.
ART_HIST 386 Art of Africa: Photography and Africa
This course examines how photography has shaped and transformed ideas of Africa—its peoples, cultures, and geographies—from the late nineteenth century to the present. Across colonial and postcolonial contexts, we will consider how artists, amateur and professional photographers, exhibitions, and publications register and respond to social, cultural, and political change on the continent. We will probe the ethics and politics of photography—authorship and consent; how ethnicity, race, gender, and class shape the making and reading of images; and how forms of conflict influence how images are used, what they signify, and where they circulate. Through readings, lectures, and study-room visits, we will engage a range of forms—including colonial ethnography, studio portraiture, film, advertising, photojournalism, and contemporary art. We will pay close attention to the global circulation and reception of photographic images, and to their material shifts over time and across space. Case studies will track images as they move between archives, albums, magazines, commercial galleries, and museum walls, asking how format, captioning, sequencing, and display shape interpretation and value.
ART_HIST 388 / MENA 290-6-1 / ANTHRO 290-0-3 Special Topics in the Art of the Middle East and North Africa: Tomb Robbers, Smugglers, and Millionaires: Looting and Trafficking of Antiquities In The Middle East
Often referred to as the cradle of civilization, the Middle East is home to some of the world’s earliest civilizations, whose physical remains provide invaluable insights into the development of human societies. However, this rich cultural heritage is constantly threatened by looting and illicit trafficking, especially during times of political and economic instability. Looting devastates cultural heritage, erasing invaluable historical records on humanity's shared history and depriving communities of their cultural identity.
In this course, we will explore the complex and multifaceted issue of looting and trafficking of antiquities in the Middle East. We will survey the rich archaeological heritage of the region and the historical significance of its antiquities as well as the history of looting and destruction of cultural material since antiquity. We will examine the historical, cultural, and economic factors that contribute to the illicit trade of cultural heritage, including poverty, conflict, and the demand for antiquities in the global market. We will consider the organized criminal networks involved in the trafficking of antiquities, from local looters to international dealers. We will investigate specific instances of looting and trafficking in countries such as Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Egypt, and the efforts to recover stolen artifacts. Finally, we will discuss international laws, conventions, and ethical considerations related to the protection of cultural heritage. Through lectures, guest speakers, readings, and discussions, we will gain a comprehensive understanding of the challenges and complexities involved in protecting cultural heritage in the Middle East. The course includes an optional field trip to the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC) Museum at the University of Chicago to experience artifacts from the ancient Middle East firsthand.
ART_HIST 390 Undergraduate Seminar: The Art of Listening
How have artists theorized listening as simultaneously an aesthetic practice and a political act? What visual forms have they given to sound’s sensory, spatial, and affective dimensions? This undergraduate seminar explores these questions through artistic practices spanning the mid-twentieth century to the present. Through diverse case studies, we examine how artists have mobilized the body and sound technologies—radios, tape recorders, public address systems, and megaphones—to condition and politicize listening within situated struggles for liberation and democratic participation. We will analyze how artists amplify and spatialize sound in public space and in galleries, exploring how relational modes and formal strategies (including debate, feedback loops, sound bleed, flash mobs, and sensory deprivation) redistribute attention, negotiate access, and challenge institutional power. We will also consider how contemporary artistic practices extend listening into the evidentiary realm through audio forensics projects in which artists reconstruct contested events and challenge official narratives, demonstrating listening’s role in investigative and testimonial practice. Course readings will draw from art history, media and sound studies, political theory, feminist theory, and museum studies.
ART_HIST 390 Undergraduate Seminar: Art & the French Revolution
The French Revolution is often described as an origin point of modern liberal democracy, epitomized by its famous motto: “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” Yet its realities were far more complex—and far less idealistic. The French Republic confronted crisis after crisis as it struggled to integrate the working classes, women, immigrants, and racial and religious minorities into the new nation. At the same time, France’s Caribbean colonies and their hundreds of thousands of enslaved people posed fundamental challenges to the Revolution’s universalist claims, ultimately paving the way for the expansion of French imperial power under Napoleon. Amid these upheavals, France’s revolutionaries turned to the arts as indispensable tools for building political community, producing citizens, and visualizing Revolutionary values.
This undergraduate seminar examines how art and architecture both responded to and actively shaped the political and social transformations of the French Revolution. In addition to canonical artists and architects, such as Jacques-Louis David, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, and Étienne-Louis Boullée, the course examines popular visual and material culture, including political cartoons, festivals, and costumes. While centered on Paris, the seminar also explores revolutionary art-making in colonial contexts, including the Caribbean and Egypt. Students will develop skills in close visual and material analysis, alongside the historical and theoretical knowledge needed to understand how artworks functioned as sites of revolutionary struggle and political experimentation.
This seminar provides an introduction to art historical research methods for undergraduates and is intended for students in their junior year. The seminar will survey the history of Art History with a focus on recent debates and interventions in the field. 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 is it critical for mapping out and developing an original thesis statement and argument? What constitutes "evidence," and how is the dominant perception of "evidence" shaped by the origins of Art History as an academic field of study?
ART_HIST 395 Museums Seminar: Block Party Tonight!: Impromptu Publics and Progressive Pedagogies in/as Art since the 1970s
Over the past century, Chicago has been the site of countless creative initiatives that have continually re-shaped the landscape of the city itself. In art classrooms and mural-adorned streets, at house parties, balls, shared meals, and committee meetings for grassroots social justice movements, artists in Chicago have engaged public spaces outside traditional museums and galleries to amplify marginalized voices, coalesce communities, and imagine alternate collective futures. Organized concurrently with several exhibitions on view during Fall 2025, this course will examine how art has influenced the formation of publics and counterpublics, and how artists have critiqued traditional forms of art’s creation and exhibition through performances, installations, and community events. Visits to the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Chicago History Museum, and the Block Museum’s print collections will include conversations with curators, archivists, and exhibition designers. Students will explore how institutions preserve and present multimedia artworks outside their original contexts—namely, ephemeral and site-specific interventions into public space and civic life. Looking beyond the walls of the museum, we will speak with several such artists and educators to discuss how their practices have presented and preserved the city itself as both stage for and participant in art’s political force. Assessment will be based on participation, short writing assignments, and a final research project that draws on Chicago-based artworks and collections. Off-campus site visits will occur during class time, but students should allow for commutes.
ART_HIST 395 Museums Seminar: Displaying Empire: Company Paintings and the Art of Colonialism
The term Company Painting has come to stand in for works produced by Indian and British artists associated with the East India Company over the course of the consolidation of the British Empire in India from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Works in this broad category range from depictions of customs and occupations, natural history subjects, and topographical paintings embodying the complex visual processes that shaped Britain’s reimagination of India as a colony and extension of its empire.
This museum seminar will focus on developing an exhibit based on a cache of East India Company-associated paintings, prints, and illustrated books in the Charles Deering McCormick Library’s Special Collection and University Archives. Students will conduct individual and collaborative research through the direct study of selected works, their art historical contexts, and gain exposure to techniques of painting and print making and conservation science methods through the participation of Library’s curators and conservators as well as colleagues at the Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts. The seminar will involve a combination of independent research and collaborative work. The course output will include wall texts and labels for a physical exhibit at the Library planned for Spring 2026, and contributions to a companion digital site featuring the artworks.
ART_HIST 395 / ANTHRO 390-0-39 Museums Seminar: Museums and Responsibility
In 2020, ICOM (International Council of Museums) ratified an updated definition of “museum,” which states: A museum is a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage. Open to the public, accessible and inclusive, museums foster diversity and sustainability. They operate and communicate ethically, professionally and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection, and knowledge sharing.
In this course we will consider the responsibility of museums, a question that undergirds the ICOM definition, through a close look at some of the most pressing issues in museums today. Topics will include the restitution and repatriation of artworks; the threatened sale of museum collections to cover debt; the role of museums in the global climate crisis; and collaborative curatorial practices that build and sustain community relationships. Among the questions that will be raised and debated in the course are: what responsibilities do museums have for the care and stewardship of their collections? What do museums owe to individuals and communities with connections to the objects currently in their care? What obligations do museums have to donors, founders, and funders? What makes museums good neighbors in the communities where they are based? How should museums take account of their histories and their sites? We will focus on several case studies through readings, dialogue with practitioners and knowledge sharers, class discussions, and engagement with current Block exhibitions—Hamdia Traoré’s Des marabouts de Djenné and Muslim Portraiture in Mali and Teresa Montoya’s Tó Łitso (Yellow Water): Ten Years after the Gold King Mine Spill.
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 Covid-19 pandemic, global political turmoil, 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.
The Chicago Objects Study Initiative (COSI) aims at enhancing art historical coursework and training for doctoral students in object-driven research through intensive direct study of artworks, exposure to conservation and heritage science approaches to materials, and tools and methods of technical research on art objects and their materiality. This year, COSI will be centered within Northwestern’s Block Museum, the Charles Deering McCormick Library Special Collections and the Center for Scientific Study in the Arts. Following previous offerings of the course, it will focus on major themes such as materials, properties, and afterlives. Through assigned objects reflecting their area of interest, students will develop research and writing methodologies through examples of current scholarship in object-driven art history, conservation, technical, and scientific studies. The course will feature contributions by conservation scientists, specialists, and museum professionals who will address the complex workings of object-focused research. This course is restricted to second year graduate students.
ART_HIST 420 Studies in Medieval Art: The Once and Future Medieval Wing
This course considers the past and future of medieval art collections in light of recent critical museology and curatorial practice and the current political moment. Through thematic discussions and selected case studies, we will consider the history of the ‘medieval wing’ in encyclopedic museums as well as dedicated museums of medieval art. We will interrogate some of the modern uses of the medieval as a category and European medieval art as materials in the formation of national, religious, imperial and White racial identities in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as some ways that the medieval has been used to counter hegemonic claims. We will also consider the future of medieval collections and their display, particularly in light of the current calls for a ‘global medieval’. Our goal will be to find a path forward that resists the supposed universalism and neutrality of the presentation of the European past. To this end, for their final project students may write a traditional research paper or offer a proposal for the reinstallation of a section of a current medieval collection.
ART_HIST 420 Studies in Medieval Art: Landscapes of Healing in the Premodern World
This graduate seminar examines how healing was conceptualized and practiced across the premodern world, with particular emphasis on the art, architecture, archaeology, and material culture of the eastern Mediterranean and the global Middle Ages. The course adopts a broad definition of “landscape,” encompassing natural formations (springs, mountains, caves), built and institutional environments (baths, gardens, hospitals, infirmaries, madrasas, monasteries), sacred spaces (shrines, tombs, pilgrimage sites), and urban settings where healing occurred in daily life. We will explore how landscapes of healing were shaped and materially expressed through objects, ritual practices, and embodied experience. Seminar content investigates the multi-layered intersections between people and the built environment in pursuit of treating physical, mental, and spiritual disorders and illnesses. Graduate students will engage with critical and theoretical readings, debate methodological approaches and models, and participate actively in discussions. The seminar culminates in a substantial written paper or project that situates interdisciplinary methods and the chronologies of healing landscapes within broader premodern contexts.
ART_HIST 430 Studies in Early Modern Art: The World’s Europe, 1500 to 1700
This seminar will explore scholarship on European and European colonial objects and buildings across the globe, assessing the state of early modern art history in the three decades since the publication of a groundbreaking volume edited by Claire Farago, Reframing the Renaissance of 1995. The book was an early effort to de-center Europe in what was then overwhelming called Renaissance and Baroque art history via a consideration of cultural exchange. The scholarly project of decentering continues today with renewed political urgency as well as new terminology. Seminar readings will include studies about Europe’s place in the early modern world that are sometimes traditional and other times radically imaginative in tackling the topic of people, ideas, and things on the move across space and time. Readings will draw from art history and history, engaging with postcolonial, global, and interconnected methods. Although focused on the early modern period, the seminar will be of interest to students of art and empire or transnational and transcultural exchange during any historical era. In addition to contributing actively to seminar discussions, participants will write a 1,500-word book review and a 6,000-word research paper or research prospectus.
ART_HIST 450 Studies in 19th Century Art: Drawing: Theories, Practices, Materials
Giorgio Vasari famously dubbed drawing the “father of the arts.” Yet the pencil’s powers have never belonged solely to the artist. Its union of gesture and concept, line and sign, hand and mind, has also made drawing indispensable to the scientist, the philosopher, the writer, and the technocrat. Traversing disciplinary contexts from history and psychology to semiotics, art history, and the history of science, this graduate seminar explores drawing along three interrelated axes. First, it examines theories of drawing both past and present, from early modern notions of disegno and les arts du dessin to postmodern theories of the trace. We will consider how drawing has been understood to mediate between the inner worlds of thought and imagination and the external world of observable phenomena. Second, it explores specific practices of drawing from the late medieval to the modern period (including sketches, doodles, and diagrams), asking how drawing intervened in various fields of art-making and knowledge, with special attention paid to its role in colonialism, to drawing education in state- and empire-building, and to its relationship with writing. Finally, the seminar turns to the materials of drawing—paper, graphite, ink, and others—and the impact of the draftsperson’s tools on both the practice and the conceptualization of drawing across time.
ART_HIST 460 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Art: Pan-Transdisciplinary Experimentalism and the Art of Black Study
This course engages and expands existing understandings of “Black study,” scholarly orientations and methodologies that arise from Black communities (primarily in the United States and the Caribbean). The seminar especially attends to how studies emerging from Black life might call for, demand, transdisciplinary (or undisciplined) and multimodal forms of scholarly work. Focused on scholars and artists who work across scholarly writing, studio arts, film, fiction, photography, and/or book arts, we examine the work of Elizabeth Catlett, Kevin Adonis Browne, Lisa Gail Collins Simone Leigh, Joshua Myers, Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, and Deborah Thomas, among others. We also look at the significance of sociality, retreats, and rest as forms of Black study. In addition, we explore experimental forms of writing related to Black study highlighting elements like the footnote, redaction, erasure. Students are responsible for weekly response papers, co-leading one presentation of the readings, and creating and presenting on a final research project.
ART_HIST 460 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Art: Refusal
This course examines "refusal" in 20th and 21st century art, theory, and politics, mostly in the US, beginning with earlier short stories: Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" (with his famous "I prefer not to") and Franz Kafka's "The Hunger Artist." The idea is to get at modes of resistance and negation that might be quiet, obdurate, modest, slow, sometimes withdrawing from view or barely legible. Topics include the labor, care, and negotiations involved in the production of so called passive resistance; the deployment of silence, slowness, and immobility; artists' refusal of representation, of making objects, or of making art at all, in the case of individual artist projects but also strikes and boycotts; "anti-work" theory and practice; Arte Povera and analogues; activist practices of sitting in and occupying (in civil rights, environmental, and anticapitalist activism); techniques of reduction, withdrawal, coded language, obstruction, blockade, boycott, sit-ins and die-ins, cancellation, slowdowns, and stoppages; queer/resistant temporality and care; forms of withdrawal that might include utopia, asceticism, voluntary exile, and withdrawal, or escape, fugitivity, and petit-marronage. Readings may include work by Theodor Adorno, Homi Bhabha, Tina Campt, Elizabeth Freeman, David Getsy, Fred Moten, Kathi Weeks, among others; readings and art and artist examples are open to the interests of the class. This is not intended as an endorsement of these modes of resistance over more confrontational approaches, but an interest in exploring them as a body of work that resonates across the divide of art and politics.
ART_HIST 470 Studies in Architecture: Land as Archive: The Aesthetics of Depletion and Refiguration
Activated by the urgency of planetary climate crisis, the status of the ruin, and by extension the fragment, have gained new significance as “sites that condense alternative senses of history.” This seminar turns to the refiguration of these artifacts as potent mechanisms to reflect upon the ways in which land, and the contest over land, have been written into and out of histories of the built environment. Recent critical movements in scholarship have called forward a vital notion of the land as an archive of forcibly obscured stories, demanding new aesthetic and ethical engagements with the residual, the fragmentary, and the weathered spaces modernity. Through a series of readings and case studies drawn from across the globe, that cut across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into the present, that track what might broadly be called infrastructures of extraction, this seminar will explore how aesthetic media forms—architecture, sculpture, photography, print, film, and even computational media, have contributed to material and imaginative processes of depletion (and dispossession). It explores, in turn, how scholarly attention to these relations create radical spaces of care that provide grounds for naming new possibilities for equitable planetary futures.
This graduate seminar provides an overview of the methods and practices of teaching in art and architectural history. This course serves graduate students by doubling as a quarter-length series of pre-professional practica, devised to prepare you for a time when you will be designing and instructing your own courses and preparing application dossiers. You will learn not just how to lead a productive section and how to assess student work effectively, but also how to help students think and write in visual terms, how to guide them to a more critical mode of reading, how to direct them in independent research, and how to ensure that they work to the best of their potential. This seminar will also provide guidance on how to develop and articulate your own scholarly and pedagogical approaches, including in teaching statements, fellowship and job applications, and interviews. Throughout the quarter we will also be talking about the job market, the interview process, and the art of a persuasive and compelling job talk. Over the course of the quarter, you will be devising a class that you would like to teach some day in your field. You will make up paper assignments and exams for that class, and eventually you will draft a syllabus and part of your first lecture for that class. Your final project will be a “teaching portfolio” which will incorporate your syllabus, assignments, and a “teaching statement” explaining your personal philosophy of teaching.
