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.
Many of the world’s most celebrated works of art and architecture and enduring styles were created in the ancient cultures of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Iran, Greece, and the Roman Empire. In this course we investigate their artistic traditions, styles, materials and techniques, and built environments, focusing on the highlights—by general consensus—of these cultures’ artistic and technological achievements. Primary objectives are to analyze the key monuments that have influenced both Western and global art over the centuries, along with acquiring broader skills in visual literacy and an understanding of art historical methods and aims. Another goal is to gain insight into the specific historical contexts in which buildings, sculptures, and paintings were produced and reproduced, and the particular political, social, economic, and religious functions they served. Specific case studies will supplement introductory readings that address the development of art and styles throughout the region.
ART_HIST 226 / MENA 290-6-1 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 260 / ART 270 Introduction to Contemporary Art
This slide-lecture survey course is designed to give both art majors and non-majors an introduction to the myriad forms and concerns of art from the 1960s to the present. We will begin in the present and work our way backwards, looking first at the impact of globalization on the conditions underlying art making, exhibiting and viewing. Emerging paradigms will be examined, such as the superseding of images by information, and of art exhibition by communication and media platforming. We will consider some of the different ways that artists handle information and new media and technology, for example how they have appropriated relatively new forms like networks and databases. The social and technological changes associated with globalization and the artistic responses to such changes will lead us to track shifts in art\'s relationship to audiences and culture at large, and to question the relevance today of distinctions between high and low, margin and mainstream. With these developments as our framework, we will then review and update notions of modernism and postmodernism in the visual arts, and question the status today of more traditional media like painting and sculpture, as well as re-evaluate the idea of the avant-garde and its long-held desire to merge art and life.
ART_HIST 320-3 Medieval Art: Late Medieval: Gothic Architecture and Art
From the towering heights of Chartres and Amiens to the pages of personalized manuscripts, late medieval architecture and art were vital forces within a rapidly changing world. This course investigates European artistic production from the rise of Gothic architecture in the Ile-de-France in the mid-twelfth century to the end of the Middle Ages. Special attention will be given to the role of the senses in the search for knowledge, the complex interactions between European and other cultures made visible in their artistic production, the motivations behind the technical developments showcased in the great cathedrals and decorative arts, and the changing status of the artist.
ART_HIST 322 / MENA 390-6-1 Art and Architecture of the 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.
This course examines works of art in all media produced in Italy and Spain during the Baroque era, with a focus on painting and sculpture. It pays particular attention to the social and cultural contexts of art objects, touching upon themes such as the impact of religious reforms on the visual arts; contemporary struggles with race, class, gender, and sexuality as reflected in objects and the built environment; and arts patronage as an expression of power. Rome, Madrid, Naples, and Seville feature prominently as settings, yet the course situates these places within a wider geographical framework encompassing other parts of Europe as well as Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Students will become familiar with works by a range of artists including Annibale Carracci, Caravaggio, Gianlorenzo Bernini, Artemisia Gentileschi, Diego Velázquez, Jusepe Ribera, Luisa Roldán, Francisco de Zurbarán, and Juan Correa in addition to their modern interpreters.
ART_HIST 359 Special Topics in 19th Century Art: Architecture, Ecology, and Empire in 19th-Century Africa
This course studies the relationship between buildings, cities, and their ecologies to show that African architecture developed during the nineteenth century a wide range of climate design techniques—an approach we will discuss as environmentally modern and inscribed within an Afropolitan framework of globally facing architectural knowledge. Many contemporary architects worldwide today turn to sustainable building methods by tracing their precedents to African architecture, drawing on materials such as earth, clay, wood, and even coral. Often, however, these historical methods are relegated to a category of timeless building traditions that seem to have existed in Africa since time immemorial. This has the effect of freezing African architectural culture in time (what philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò calls “socio-cryonics”). We will explore a history of African architecture from an Afropolitan perspective, spanning from the Age of Revolutions—marked, among other events, by the formation of the Sokoto Empire in 1804—until the early decades of the twentieth century, when European colonialism reached its peak. Throughout the quarter, we will study invention and change in African architecture with historical specificity, understanding how the nineteenth century was a period of environmental creativity in response to an ever more globalized world.
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. Historically, textiles were 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; postwar Latin American artists such as Gego and Cecilia Vicuña, as well as the Arpillera workshops in Chile resisting the Pinochet regime; US feminist artists of the 1960s and 1970s who upended the masculine art world 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, such as the Black quilters of Gee’s Bend.
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.
ART_HIST 388 / MENA 290-4-1 Special Topics in the Art of the Middle East and North Africa: Babylon: Myth, Reality, and Memory
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. 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 Babylon firsthand.
ART_HIST 389 Special Topics in the Arts of Asia: Painting Nature in British India
As the East India Company consolidated its authority in India in the eighteenth century, European officials, naturalists and artists sought to map the subcontinent’s landscapes and record the region’s flora and fauna. They often worked with Indian artists and draftsmen to devise conventions through which the natural world was observed, classified and represented. Through a look at landscape drawings, gardens and estates, and studies of plants, birds, and animals, this seminar takes the depiction of the natural world as a site of encounter among artistic traditions and differing modes of vision, where scientific inquiry and colonial power converged. Drawing on primary sources and recent scholarship, the seminar will investigate the trajectory of natural history painting from sixteenth and seventeenth-century Mughal court painting to Company sponsored works, and the continuation of this genre within studio and academic art practices in the nineteenth century.
ART_HIST 390 Undergraduate Seminar: Marie Antoinette: Art & Legacy
“Let them eat cake!” Few figures in Western history are as burdened by myth as Marie Antoinette (1755-1793), the Queen of France in the years leading up to the French Revolution of 1789. The ill-fated queen—married at fourteen, crowned at eighteenth, and guillotined at thirty-seven—has become shorthand for aristocratic decadence, frivolity, and excess. This course reconsiders Marie Antoinette’s controversial biography through her role as artistic patron, cultural tastemaker, and enduring muse. Moving beyond the apocryphal legend, we will consider how Marie Antoinette shaped the visual and material cultural of her own time through the study of painting, sculpture, fashion, garden design, and the decorative arts. How did this artistic output help construct (or defy) the myth of Marie Antoinette? How did this fiction influence art, fashion, film, and popular culture from the nineteenth century to the present day? This course invites students to reconsider the artistic life and afterlives of Marie Antoinette and ask the question: doomed queen or misunderstood muse?
One of art history’s foundational tools is the practice of close — or, slow — looking. Yet, the institutional economies and media ecologies in which we live, work, and look push us at a punishing pace toward productivity and efficiency. In this course, we will consider slowness as both object and mode of inquiry, attending to its possibilities as feeling, action, and praxis. And we will do it slowly. We will spend extended periods looking at a single artwork. We will sift through archives. We will read one text—whether theory, poetry, or fiction—and then read it again. We will become bored and investigate that boredom. We will contemplate the deep time of the ground beneath our feet. In doing so, we will reconsider what comprises art and its histories, and what we might see, do, and feel by slowing down.
These explorations will be informed by theories of temporality, movement, and duration drawn from Black studies, disability studies, environmental studies, new materialism, and phenomenology. Through sustained engagement with performance, video art, conceptual art, land art and earthworks (and the works of the earth), we will investigate questions of embodiment, objecthood, and animacy.
This seminar is intended for upper-level undergraduates with coursework in the arts or humanities interested in developing original research questions and pursuing sustained, independent inquiry. Students will benefit most if they are prepared to invest time in reading and looking, and are curious about developing their own scholarly and/or creative practices.
This seminar provides an introduction to art historical research methods for undergraduates, particularly those interested in writing an honors thesis. The seminar will survey the history of Art History with a focus on debates and interventions within the field (e.g. feminist, 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 sources? What constitutes “evidence,” and how is the dominant perception of “evidence” shaped by art history’s origins?
ART_HIST 395 Museums Seminar: William Blake and the Ecologies of Empire
William Blake’s relief etchings, illuminated books, hand-colored prints, and poems emerged amid the American and French Revolutions, British imperial expansion, Atlantic slavery, abolitionist struggle, and the accelerating transformation of land, labor, and natural life. This graduate/undergraduate museum seminar examines how Blake’s visual and poetic practices register, reproduce, and resist the intertwined forces of empire, racial formation, extraction, industrialization, religion, and political economy.
Close study of objects in Northwestern’s Deering Special Collections and the Art Institute of Chicago’s Prints and Drawings collection will be paired with postcolonial, critical race, and ecological theory, allowing students to test Blake’s radical claims against his historical limitations and to trace the afterlives of the structures he confronted.
Students will investigate print as a material process, the image-text as a political form, and museums and archives as producers of historical knowledge.
ART_HIST 395 Museums Seminar: Japanese Woodblock Prints: From 1660 to the Present
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 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.
All classes are taught on site at the Art Institute of Chicago.
ART_HIST 401 Methods and Historiography of Art History: Proseminar
Art history occupies a prominent place in the humanities. Whether one traces its origins to antiquity, the sixteenth century, or modern times, it is a discipline that has evolved and transformed considerably over the past century. This course takes stock of art history’s history with the objective of asking students interested in buildings, objects, and visual culture broadly conceived what art history has done and what it might do going forward. Participants will engage with scholarship from a range of historical periods and covering broad geographies. They will be assessed on preparation for and participation in weekly seminar meetings; an oral presentation centered on an object or building; a series of brief writing assignments in response to course readings; and a research prospectus on a topic related or adjacent to an envisioned dissertation project.
Intended primarily for first-year art history graduate students, Art History 401 also welcomes students from across the humanities interested in pursuing research topics that engage with visual culture and/or the built environment and for whom exploring the methods and approaches of art and architectural historians can be useful. Through collective learning, the course aims to offer a community building experience at the initiation of graduate study in the humanities.
The Objects and Materials Seminar focuses on sustained, close engagement with art objects. The course considers key themes in the field of object studies by considering how materials, representational strategies, use, and conservation shape and are shaped by the life of the art object. This year's iteration will focus on materials from the Thoma collection that will be on loan to the Block for the exhibition "Pasados Presentes". The course is required for first- and second-year Art History graduate students at Northwestern.
ART_HIST 440 Studies in 17th & 18th Century Art: William Blake and the Ecologies of Empire
William Blake’s relief etchings, illuminated books, hand-colored prints, and poems emerged amid the American and French Revolutions, British imperial expansion, Atlantic slavery, abolitionist struggle, and the accelerating transformation of land, labor, and natural life. This graduate/undergraduate museum seminar examines how Blake’s visual and poetic practices register, reproduce, and resist the intertwined forces of empire, racial formation, extraction, industrialization, religion, and political economy.
Close study of objects in Northwestern’s Deering Special Collections and the Art Institute of Chicago’s Prints and Drawings collection will be paired with postcolonial, critical race, and ecological theory, allowing students to test Blake’s radical claims against his historical limitations and to trace the afterlives of the structures he confronted.
Students will investigate print as a material process, the image-text as a political form, and museums and archives as producers of historical knowledge.
ART_HIST 450 Studies in 19th Century Art: Visual Language of Protest
This graduate seminar examines themes and case studies in the visual language of protest from the early 19th century to the late 20th century with a focus on print culture, graphic arts, photography, film, and performance, with case studies chosen from local (Chicago-area), national, and international contexts. Activist themes could include abolition, labor organizing, revolution and decolonization, the Black Arts Movement and the Black Panthers, Indigenous, feminist, queer, antiwar, environmental, and anti-police violence movements. We will bear in mind relationships to conventional “fine arts” and discuss theories of collective action, violence, and communication. For those seeking a “breadth” credit in the nineteenth century, the topic of your final paper and your discussion leading day must fall primarily between 1789 and 1914; other students may choose to write on contemporary topics outside the chronological scope of the class. Assessments include participation in discussion, miscellaneous short writing prompts, a final research paper with a proposal and a partial draft, leading class for one session and presenting on the final paper topic. Students are invited to contribute ideas about specific case studies and historical and geographic areas of interest.
ART_HIST 460 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Art: Black Art in Minor Keys
In 2025, the pathbreaking Cameroonian-Swiss curator Koyo Kouoh passed away as she was set to coordinate one of the world’s most acclaimed contemporary art exhibitions, the Venice Biennale. Before her death, she organized a team of curators to carry out her vision for the Biennale (which opens in May and runs through November 2026). This seminar uses Kouoh’s central conceptual framework, “In Minor Keys,” as a provocation to reorient the study of contemporary art. Minor keys is approached as a set of overlapping frameworks—sonic, spatial, and social—through which artists produce meaning within conditions of historical violence, ecological crisis, and epistemic erasure. As a sonic and affective register, the minor key foregrounds tone, rhythm, and feeling. Drawing on Black expressive traditions, students will explore how artists mobilize mood, quiet, resonance, poetic persistence, the fugitive, and the withdrawn to generate affective worlds beyond dominant visual frameworks. As a spatial and ecological model, the seminar draws on Édouard Glissant to examine archipelagic thinking and the “creole garden” as figures for dense, interdependent worlds—artistic “oases” that sustain life within larger systems of power. The minor key, as a relational and social practice, highlights collectivity and “polyphonous assembly,” positioning art as a site for gathering, listening, and worldmaking. Finally, the seminar examines new models of curation inspired by the Biennale. We consider the poetics and politics of curating and art-making after loss, taking the posthumous realization of Kouoh’s exhibition as a case study in collective authorship, mourning, and continuation.
ART_HIST 480 Studies in Asian Art: Mughal to Modern
South Asia’s long 18th century was marked by the rapid fragmentation and violent end of the Mughal Empire (1526-1857), the concurrent rise of Britain’s corporate arm, the East India Company, followed by British crown rule, the Raj (1860-1947). At the core of this transformation from court to Company to the Raj were artists who were tasked with materializing a colonial vision of India as they moved beyond the court to the city. This seminar brings parallel art histories of Late Mughal and British colonial and crown rule together to examine the complex modes of artistic experimentation in this period where artists built on the longstanding legacy of cosmopolitanism of Mughal court painting to bridge Mughal and Company tastes, participate in imperial art exhibitions, and service a marketplace for ‘industrial arts.’ From British surveys of India’s lands and people to the institutionalization of an ‘Indian’ art, this seminar will study interactions between Indian artists and their European counterparts across the genres of painting, printmaking, and photography to examine the nature of modernity within a colonial paradigm.
