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 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.
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 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 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 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.
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: 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.
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 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.
