History of Art (ARTH)

ARTH 1100 - Art Histories: An Introduction (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with SHUM 1100  
This team-taught course introduces students to the History of Art as a global and interdisciplinary field. Led by a selection of professors from the department, in collaboration with staff and faculty of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, its primary aim is to familiarize students with the most significant geographical areas, epochs and works of art, as well as with methods employed in their study and analysis. The course will be organized around a changing selection of themes central to the history of art. The theme for fall 2024 is Materiality. Considering how artists and artisans from antiquity to the present have mobilized a broad range of materials and processes to create works of art, we will explore the intimate relationship between makers, matter, and meaning.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021  
ARTH 1132 - FWS: Seeing, Reading, and Writing the Alhambra (3 Credits)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2020, Fall 2019, Fall 2009  
ARTH 1154 - FWS: Museum of the Sea: Curating Ocean Worlds (3 Credits)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025  
ARTH 1173 - FWS: Portraiture (3 Credits)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2022  
ARTH 1174 - FWS: Photographs and Text (3 Credits)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023, Fall 2022  
ARTH 1175 - FWS: Archaeological Collections (3 Credits)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023  
ARTH 1176 - FWS: Can Art Change the World? (3 Credits)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023  
ARTH 1178 - FWS: Looking and Writing the City: Rear Windows/Sideview Mirrors (3 Credits)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2024  
ARTH 2000 - Introduction to Visual Studies (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with VISST 2000, COML 2000, AMST 2000  
This course provides an introduction to modes of vision and the historical impact of visual images, visual structures, and visual space on culture, communication, and politics. It examines all aspects of culture that communicate through visual means, including 20th-century visual technologies-photography, cinema, video, etc., and their historical corollaries. The production and consumption of images, objects, and events is studied in diverse cultures. Students develop the critical skills necessary to appreciate how the approaches that define visual studies complicate traditional models of defining and analyzing art objects.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, ETM-AS), (CA-AG, KCM-AG, LA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022  
ARTH 2200 - Introduction to the Classical World in 24 Objects (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with CLASS 2700, ARKEO 2700  
The art of Ancient Greece and Rome has a complex legacy within western culture that is inseparable from ideas about power, beauty, identity, and knowledge. As such, 'Classical' art has been appropriated for all kinds of ends, many of them deeply problematic. But what did ancient statues, paintings, vessels, or buildings mean for the cultures that originally created, viewed, and lived alongside them? How were they embedded within political and social structures, religious practices, and public or domestic spaces? What can they tell us about practices of representation and story-telling? How might they help us access ancient attitudes to gender, ethnicity, or social status? And why is any of this still relevant today? This course on Greek and Roman art and archaeology will address all these questions. Covering the time span from the Bronze Age (3rd millennium BCE) to the late Roman Empire (4th century CE), we will focus on one object or monument each lecture, considering how it can be considered exemplary for its time. Where possible, we will engage with artefacts in our collections at Cornell, including the plaster-casts, as we develop skills in viewing, analyzing, and contextualizing material evidence.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Summer 2025, Winter 2025, Fall 2022, Fall 2021  
ARTH 2221 - Archaeology of Roman Private Life (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with CLASS 2743, ARKEO 2743  
What was it like to live in the Roman world? What did that world look, taste and smell like? How did Romans raise their families, entertain themselves, understand death, and interact with their government? What were Roman values and how did they differ from our own? This course takes as its subject the everyday lives of individuals and explores those lives using the combined tools of archaeology, architecture and art, as well as some primary source readings. In doing so, it seeks to integrate those monuments into a world of real people, and to use archaeology to narrate a story about ancient lives and life habits. Some of the topics explored will include the Roman house; the Roman family, children and slaves; bathing and hygiene; food; gardens, agriculture and animals.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2019, Spring 2012, Spring 2009  
ARTH 2240 - The Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with NES 2433, ARKEO 2433  
Why did the ancient Egyptians build pyramids, and why did they stop building them? Why did they depict things in ways that seem stiff and unnatural? Is ancient Egyptian art “art”? These are some of the questions explored in this course, which spans late prehistory (c. 3500 BCE) to the Roman period (early centuries CE). We will take a thematic approach, progressing chronologically and introducing key genres where appropriate. First, we will explore central issues of symbolism, landscape, and materials through the architecture and furnishings of temples and royal tombs. Next come the social worlds of art. Can we speak of artists? How were gender, class, and ethnicity represented? Finally, we will survey the legacies of Egyptian visual culture in antiquity and the modern West.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS)  
Exploratory Studies: (CU-ITL)
ARTH 2255 - Ecocriticism and Visual Culture (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with AMST 2255  
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS)  
ARTH 2355 - Introduction to Medieval Art and Culture (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with MEDVL 2355  
Survey lecture course covering the creation, encoding, and reception of Medieval (roughly AD 500-1500) European, Byzantine, and Islamic architecture, ornament, manuscripts, liturgical and luxury objects. The approach is thematic but chronologically grounded; attention is also given to cultural interaction in the Mediterranean basin.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2022, Spring 2021, Spring 2020  
ARTH 2400 - Introduction to Early Modern Art: Cosmopolitanism and Empire (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with VISST 2645  
This course offers an introduction to the diverse global encounters and exchanges that shaped early modern European art and material culture, c.1400-1650. The course will be structured around nine European imperial and/or cosmopolitan centres and their connections between one another, and with the Ottoman Empire, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. We will explore how global commerce influenced material and artistic consumption, and the ways in which early modern slavery was part and parcel of Europe's art world. Special focus discussions will deepen students' knowledge of artistic materials and media and the ways in which global connections impacted the making of early modern art. Students will gain a broad understanding of early modern art and practices of making, the historical contexts in which art objects were produced, and their social and cultural uses. Students will become familiar with the language and approaches of art history and material culture studies, as well as with key methodologies including globalized, decolonial, critical race, and gender theories.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2018, Fall 2017  
ARTH 2500 - Introduction to the History of Photography (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with VISST 2500  
Provides a lecture survey of the history of photography over a course of two centuries. Starting with its invention in the 1830s, covers the subject topically and chronologically. During the nineteenth century, focus is on technical developments and on the complex relations that situate photography in relation to painting, portraiture, urban life, war, anthropology and ethnology, exploration and travel, and science and industry. Over the course of the twentieth century, photography is enriched by new developments: its use as a modernist and experimental art form, in social documentary and photojournalism, in propaganda, in advertising and fashion. In recent decades, photography has assumed a centrality in the practice of conceptual postmodern art, and is currently undergoing a major transformation in the age of digital media.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2017, Fall 2009  
ARTH 2550 - Introduction to Latin American Art (4 Credits)  
This course is designed to introduce students to Latin American art from the pre-Columbian period to the present. It will cover the arts of ancient civilizations including the Olmec, Maya, Aztec, Moche, and Inca, as well as the colonial, modern, and contemporary arts of Latin America and the Latino/a diaspora. Major themes include the relationship between art and religion, innovations and transformations in Latin American art across time, art and identity, as well as Indigenous and Afro-Latin American contributions to the visual arts. This course examines the societal relevance of images across Latin American cultures by paying close attention to the historical and political contexts in which they were created. Course readings are drawn from the disciplines of art history, anthropology, and history, along with theoretical perspectives on colonialism, postcolonialism, identity, race, and ethnicity.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Spring 2021, Spring 2019, Spring 2017  
ARTH 2600 - Introduction to Modern Western Art: Materials, Media, and the End of Masterpieces (4 Credits)  
This course offers a broad introduction to some of the artistic practices that have come to be known as modern in Europe and the United States. Beginning with the upheavals of the French Revolution and carrying through to the turmoil of two world wars, we will survey the role of both fine art and visual culture in a period of great political, social, and technological change. The very definition of art was revolutionized in this moment, as an emphasis on materials and experiments with new media like photography and cinema took precedence over the production of highly-skilled masterpieces. Particular attention will be given to exchanges between western representation and that of other cultures. Topics covered include revolutionary propaganda; romantic unreason; caricature and political critique; the changing pace of the modern city; architecture in the machine age; the place of women in modernity; and the impact of new technology on spectatorship. Students should leave the course with increased familiarity with key art movements in the modern era and the skills to analyze and appreciate art and visual culture from any period.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2021, Fall 2020  
ARTH 2711 - Archaeology of the Roman World: Italy and the West (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with CLASS 2711, ARKEO 2711, SHUM 2711  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2020, Fall 2017, Fall 2016  
ARTH 2750 - Introduction to Humanities (3 Credits)  
These seminars offer an introduction to the humanities by exploring historical, cultural, social, and political themes. Students will explore themes in critical dialogue with a range of texts and media drawn from the arts, humanities, and/or humanistic social sciences. Guest speakers, including Cornell faculty and Society for the Humanities Fellows, will present from different disciplines and points of view. Students will make field trips to relevant local sites and visit Cornell special collections and archives. Students enrolled in these seminars will have the opportunity to participate in additional programming related to the annual focus theme of Cornell's Society for the Humanities and the Humanities Scholars Program for undergraduate humanities research.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment preference given to: students accepted in the Humanities Scholars Program.  
Exploratory Studies: (CU-SBY)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2023, Fall 2022  
ARTH 2800 - Introduction to the Arts of China (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ASIAN 2288, ARKEO 2800, SHUM 2800  
This course offers a survey of the art and culture of China from the Neolithic period to the twenty-first century to students who have no previous background in Chinese studies. The course begins with an inquiry into the meaning of national boundaries and the controversial definition of the Han Chinese people, which will help us understand and define the scope of Chinese culture. Pre-dynastic (or prehistoric) Chinese culture will be presented based both on legends about the origins of the Chinese and on scientifically excavated artifacts. Art of the dynastic periods will be presented in light of contemporaneous social, political, geographical, philosophical and religious contexts. This course emphasizes hands-on experience using the Chinese art collection at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art for teaching and assignments. In addition to regular sections conducted in the museum, students are strongly encouraged to visit the museum often to appreciate and study artworks directly.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (EAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2020, Spring 2018, Spring 2017  
ARTH 2805 - Introduction to Asian Art: Material Worlds (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with VISST 2805, ASIAN 2285, SHUM 2805  
Trade in and to Asia proved to be a key force in creating our modern globalized world. The Indian Ocean and the China Seas converged on Southeast Asia, where a cosmopolitan array of ships from every shore plied their trade, set sail, and returned with the monsoon winds. People, goods, and ideas also traveled on camelback across the undulating contours of the Gobi Desert, connecting India, the Near East and Central Asia with China, Korea, and Japan. This course introduces students to the raw ingredients of things in motion, poised interactively in time and space, as material worlds collide. Wood, bamboo, bronze, clay, earthenware, ink, spices, textiles and tea - students will navigate sites of encounter at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum from pre modern to the present.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (EAAREA, SAAREA, SEAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Fall 2019  
ARTH 3100 - History of Photography (3 Credits)  
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022, Fall 2020, Fall 2018, Summer 2009  
ARTH 3111 - Making Photography Matter: A Studio Course (3 Credits)  
Photography/Image Analysis/Graphic Design is a hands-on course devoted to the practical understanding of conception, production, and innovation in the photographic image world. Each unit of the course confronts a fundamental problem of contemporary photographic communication-quality of light, framing, series, post-production, publication design, to name a few example topics-from practical, theoretical, and historical perspectives. The goal of the course is to enrich students' understanding of how to make images that solve practical social and scholarly problems in an impactful, immediate, and public way.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2022  
ARTH 3210 - The Archaeology of the City of Rome (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with CLASS 3736, ARKEO 3010  
This course tells the history of the Roman empire through the urban development of its capital from the early 1st millennium BCE to the advent of Christian emperors in the 4th century CE. What does the archeology reveal about how the geography and environment of this site, its society and political systems, military conquests, economy, infrastructure, resources, and technologies interacted to create the center of an empire? Special focus is on how the appropriation of other peoples and cultures shaped the metropolis itself. Did it manage to integrate individuals from Africa, the Near East, from North of the Alps and Britain, and if so, how? The history of excavations and the reception of the city's architecture in the 19th and 20th centuries will provide a critical lens for analyzing some of the master narratives associated with ancient Rome and its ruins.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2011  
ARTH 3225 - Archaic and Classical Greece (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with CLASS 3735, ARKEO 3225  
This lecture class centers on the formative periods of ancient Greek culture, the centuries from about 800-300 BCE. Its aim is to place Greece within the cosmopolitan networks of the Mediterranean and beyond, while simultaneously looking at specific local traditions. Only within this complex glocal frame will it become clear what is unique about Greek art. In surveying major genres such as architecture, ceramics, sculpture and painting we will also investigate the question of whether and how changing resources and modes of production, various political systems (such as democracy or monarchy) and situations (war, colonization, trade), gender, or theories of representation had an impact on the art of their time. Some of the particular themes to be discussed are: the role of the Near East for the development of Greek visual culture; city planning; images in public and private life; visualizing the human body and the individuum; Greek art in contact zones from the Black Sea to Southern Italy and Sicily; foreign art in Greece; the concept of art; reception of Greek art in modern times.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2018, Fall 2013  
ARTH 3250 - Introduction to Dendrochronology (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with CLASS 3750, ARKEO 3090, MEDVL 3750  
Introduction and training in dendrochronology (tree-ring dating) and its applications in archaeology, art history, climate and environment through lab work and participation in ongoing research projects using ancient to modern wood samples from around the world. Supervised reading and laboratory/project work. Possibilities exists for summer fieldwork in the Mediterranean, Mexico, and New York State.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2022, Fall 2021, Spring 2021  
ARTH 3255 - The Byzantine Empire: Culture and Society (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with NES 3255, MEDVL 3255, CLASS 3655  
An introduction to the art, history, and literature of the Byzantine Empire, its neighbors, and successors, ca. 500-1500.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021  
ARTH 3300 - Romanesque and Early Gothic Art and Architecture: Europe and the Mediterranean, 1000-1150 A.D. (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with NES 3759, MEDVL 3300  
This course will address both Romanesque and the earliest manifestations of Gothic art and architecture as Western Mediterranean phenomena, rather than northern European ones. We will adopt a comparative approach which includes Islamic and, to a lesser extent, Byzantine cultures and material. In addition to the more usual art historical skills, such as visual and stylistic analysis and compare-and-contrast, we will use selected primary sources and historical analysis to attempt to understand the objects and monuments we address.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2010, Spring 2009  
ARTH 3400 - Art, Identity, and the Human Body in Early Modern Europe (3 Credits)  
This lecture introduces students to the multivalent attitudes towards and understandings of the body in early modern Europe, and how artmakers contributed and responded to these forces between 1400 and 1650. Bringing together the histories of art, science, and philosophy, as well as social, cultural, medical, and global history methodologies, this course explores how artworks and objects reveal the fluid cultural practices and societal norms of early modern Europe. Lecture topics will include the rediscovery of the classical bodily ideal; the influence of humoral theory and anatomical studies on artmaking; the interactions of art and the bodily senses; global encounters with non-European monstrous bodies, and the gendered, racialized, eroticized, divine, aging, and/or disabled body. Students will gain a nuanced comprehension of how early modern people saw and understood themselves and their bodies, in life, and in art.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025  
ARTH 3550 - Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with LSP 3551, LATA 3680  
This course concerns a selection of influential artistic movements in Latin American from the early twentieth century to the present. Attention is given to issues such as the effects of colonialism and imperialism on Latin America's visual arts, the creation of national art, the relation of Latin American art and artists to cultural centers in Europe, The United States and other regions of the globe, the interaction of high art and popular culture, and the role of gender and race in various aspects of artistic practice. Students will also become acquainted with Latin American and Latinx artists working with new technologies.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, GLC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (LAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Fall 2013, Fall 2008  
ARTH 3565 - Art and Architecture of Colonial Latin America (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with LATA 3565, VISST 3565  
This course surveys the artistic and architectural traditions of Latin America during the period of Spanish colonial rule (ca. 1520s-1820s). It will center primarily on visual cultures of the viceroyalties of New Spain (Mexico) and Peru, but will also cover works of art and architecture from the Caribbean and the northern Andes. The course explores the legacy of pre-Columbian visual traditions in the colonial era as well as the lasting impact of colonial artistic practices in modern and contemporary Latin America. It will also examine colonial Latin America as the crossroads of dynamic artistic and cultural interaction between Indigenous, European, and Afrodescendant groups. Topics to be explored include issues of visual translation and transmission, art and agency, and the creation of new colonial artistic practices and idioms.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2022, Spring 2018, Spring 2013  
ARTH 3566 - Art and Architecture of the Pre-Columbian Americas (3 Credits)  
This course introduces students to the arts of the ancient Americas from circa 2000 BC to the Spanish invasions of the 15th and 16th centuries. The term pre-Columbian refers to the span of time during which indigenous cultures flourished before Christopher Columbus’ voyage of 1492. This course covers the arts of indigenous Mesoamerica (Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras), the Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and the Greater and Lesser Antilles), and Andean South America (Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile). Students will become familiar with the history, archaeology, and visual arts of the earliest cultures that populated these regions up through the Inca, Aztec, and Maya cultures that encountered the Spaniards. This course also explores the legacies of pre-Columbian cultures among contemporary Chicana/o/x and Latina/o/x artists in the United States.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2018, Fall 2016, Fall 2013  
ARTH 3590 - Heritage, History, and Identity in Cambodia (3 Credits)  
This winter course on site in Cambodia will focus on Cambodian heritage past and present - how it's been created in the past, including the city of Angkor, and how that heritage and history is understood and engaged today. We will visit historical sites as well as museums and other relevant sites, including performances, where history is remembered and engaged. There will be lectures, including by Cambodian experts, as well as film showings. The course will be based in Siem Reap, in collaboration with the Center for Khmer Studies, and there will also be excursions to Phnom Penh, the capital.
Prerequisites: KHMER 1100.  
Course Fee: Course Fee, TBA. Fee varies based on year.  
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (CU-ITL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Winter 2025, Winter 2023  
ARTH 3600 - Contemporary Art: 1960-Present (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with VISST 3600  
This course discusses new art practices since the 1960s. Although numerous artistic experiments took place during the first half of the twentieth century, it was with the declining importance of modernist painting and sculpture by the late 1950s that newer modes of artistic practice became established. The course will explore the rise of Fluxus, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Land Art, Video and Performance, Postmodernism, and Postcolonialism. These practices are situated in relation to intellectual and social movements since the 1960s, including counterculture, feminism, race, ecology, institutional critique, and globalization. This course focuses primarily on Western European and North American art, but also incorporates selected global developments.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA, SAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2018, Spring 2017, Spring 2016  
ARTH 3611 - Art of South Asia, 1200-Present (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ASIAN 3382  
This course surveys the art and architecture of South Asia since 1200 CE. We cover major developments over the last eight centuries, including the architecture of the Sultanate Period, Vijaynagar, painting and architecture in the Deccan and South India, Mughal art and architecture, and Rajput painting. We look at British period colonial art and architecture, the rise of nationalism and modernism in Indian art and the circulation of vernacular images, including posters and bazaar prints in the twentieth century. The recent globalization of South Asian contemporary art is also examined. Artistic movements are situated with reference to social, economic, and political developments.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (SAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2021, Spring 2009  
ARTH 3620 - After Nature: Art and Environmental Imagination (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with AMST 3629  
This course looks at what it means to make art in, of, and after nature, and asks how that art might contribute to shaping the world we live in. Tracing a trajectory from the collection and display of natural history specimens to views of European and American landscapes to contemporary artists who address ecological crises, the course offers both a history of landscape in western art and a study of environmental imagination. We will further explore how nature is represented on Cornell's campus, including in the Johnson Museum, the Lab of Ornithology and the Botanic Gardens. This course includes opportunities to creatively reflect on our personal relationship to nature through hands-on activities. Students from all disciplines are welcome to engage with themes including natural curiosities, parks and gardens, ideas of wilderness, the picturesque, environmental preservation, earth works, and the post-natural.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (CU-SBY)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2021  
ARTH 3625 - Paris, Capital of Modernity? (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with SHUM 3625  
This course takes a critical perspective on the centrality of Paris to canonical narratives of modernity and modern art and architecture. We will look both at some of the defining art movements of the 19th century and at the influx of people and objects from other cultures-many of whom and which arrived in Paris via colonialist violence and imperialist plunder- that contributed to those movements. Beginning with the French and Haitian Revolutions, moving through Impressionist travels in North Africa and the export of Haussmanization to South America, and ending with Le Corbusier's plan for redesigning Algiers, the course aims to redress some of the silences and oversights written into the history of modern art.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, GLC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022  
ARTH 3650 - History and Theory of Digital Art (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with VISST 3650, INFO 3660, STS 3650  
In this course, we will examine the role of electronic and digital technologies in the arts of the late 20th and 21st centuries with emphasis on Europe and North America. Beginning with the cybernetically and systems-inspired work of the late sixties, we will explore early uses of computer technology, including early experiments in synthetic video in the 1970s. An overview of pre-internet telematic experiments will lead to an investigation of net art and later currents of digital art. The ongoing development of behavioral art forms will be a central theme. Critical evaluation of various attitudes concerning technology will be encouraged.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2022, Fall 2021, Fall 2020  
ARTH 3651 - Women in New Media Art (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with VISST 3651, FGSS 3655, SHUM 3651  
The work of women artists has been central to the development of new media art. These rich and varied practices include installation, virtual reality environments, net art, digital video, networked performance, tactical media, video games, remix and robotics. This course will begin with an overview of feminist art and early experiments in performance and video art to then investigate multiple currents of digital media. Discussions will focus primarily on works by women artists from Europe, the Americas and Australia.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2021, Spring 2020, Spring 2018  
ARTH 3741 - Greco-Roman Art from Alexander to Augustus (c.350 BC-AD 20) (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with CLASS 3741  
This course explores the visual arts of the Mediterranean region from the court of Alexander the Great to the principate of Augustus, the first Roman emperor. During the first half of the semester we will explore the civic, domestic and religious uses of sculpture, painting, architecture, and other media in major settlements of the Hellenistic world such as Alexandria, Pergamon and Rhodes, focusing on the third to first centuries BCE. In the second half of the semester, we will turn to the rise of the Roman empire and the relationship between native Italian artistic traditions and those of the Hellenized Mediterranean, as Republican Rome drew influences (and booty) from its conquered territories. Throughout the course we will examine visual images alongside relevant literary and archaeological material, emphasizing the role of the visual arts within broader aesthetic, intellectual and political trends.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2021, Fall 2016  
ARTH 3755 - Humanities Scholars Research Methods (4 Credits)  
This course explores the practice, theory, and methodology of humanities research, critical analysis, and communication through writing and oral presentation. We will study the work and impact of humanists (scholars of literature, history, theory, art, visual studies, film, anthropology, gender and sexuality studies), who pose big questions about the human condition. By reading and analyzing their scholarship-critiquing them and engaging their ideas-we will craft our own methods and voices. Students will refine their research methods (library research, note taking, organizing material, bibliographies, citation methods, proposals, outlines, etc.) and design their own independent research project.
Enrollment Information: Priority given to: students in the Humanities Scholars Program (HSP).  
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022  
ARTH 3803 - Urban Interfaces: Art, Architecture, and Urbanism in China at the turn of the 21st Century (3 Credits)  
How does art, architecture, and urban space interface with one another and what is the role of art in public space and public life? This course considers these questions within the context of China's unprecedented urban transformation at the turn of the 21st century, paying attention to the ways in which art and architecture are at once resistant to and at the same time entangled with capitalist and governmental forces. From Beijing's Tiananmen Square to Guangzhou's skyscraper construction sites; from virtual cities to New York City-a center of the Chinese diaspora-we will look transregionally at how different types of urban spaces prompted new aesthetic forms and how such creative acts contributed, in turn, to the transformation of these very spaces.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023  
ARTH 3820 - Introduction to the Arts of Japan (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ASIAN 3381  
As an island nation east of the Asian continent, Japan developed a unique culture that reflects both continental and indigenous characteristics. This course examines pre- and post-contact with continental culture and the process of artistic acculturation and assimilation in successive periods of Japanese art history.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (EAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2017, Spring 2016, Spring 2011  
ARTH 3850 - The Arts of Southeast Asia (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with VISST 3696, ASIAN 3350, MEDVL 3850  
The arts of Southeast Asia are studied in their social context, since in traditional societies creative processes are often mapped on the sequence of events that compose human lives. We will be looking particularly at the gendered ways in which bodies are mapped on the land, and how these various framings are often reflected in the unique relationships that emerge between works of art and textual sources. The South Asian epics of the Ramayana (Story of Rama) and the Mahabharata will be explored during the semester as infinitely renewable sources of inspiration. Special emphasis will be devoted to localized encounters in Indonesia, Cambodia, Burma/Myanmar, Vietnam, and Thailand.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (SEAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2022, Spring 2022, Spring 2019  
ARTH 4035 - Cornell's Collection of Greek and Roman Art (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with SHUM 4035, CLASS 4035, ARKEO 4035  
This class examines the history and holdings of Cornell's teaching collection of ancient Greek and Roman objects. Designed to start a systematic inventory of the collections, it requires hands-on engagement with the objects (defining their material, age, function etc.) as much as archival work. Questions concerning the ethics of collections and calls for decolonizing museums will play a central role as we ultimately think about how to make use of and display the objects in our custody.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2020  
ARTH 4101 - Proseminar: Introduction to Methods (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with VISST 4101  
Works of art have always engendered political, social, and cultural meanings. This seminar presents an introduction to the methods used by art historians and the objects and ideas that constitute the historiography of their discipline. If art history was once understood as the study of the development of style in European art, over the past century its practitioners have attempted to embrace a global perspective and to address issues of class, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, and gender. Readings will focus on historically situating methods and the implications of their cross-cultural application. They will be discussed in the framework of institutions, apparatuses and practices that have shaped the field, identifying how these have contributed to systemic mechanisms of hegemony and exclusion. Papers will encourage students to put methods into practice, realizing in the process that subject matter is not an isolated choice to which methods are applied, but something that profoundly affects the approach that the researcher brings to the writing and conceptualizing and doing of art history.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021  
ARTH 4110 - Curatorial Practice as Entanglements (3 Credits)  
This Curatorial Practicum evolved out of a Johnson Museum of Art's Andrew W. Mellon Foundation initiative in 2014. The seminar is collaborative and thematic, combining the expertise of museum curators with professors in the History of Art and Visual Studies.This curatorial practicum recognizes the curator's role in transformative socio-political change. Curatorial Practice as Entanglements is a semester-long course offered at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum in collaboration with the Department of the History of Art and Visual Studies. The Fall 2023 seminar theme posits Entanglements as transversal politics mobilizing intersectional worldmaking as curatorial strategy. This curatorial method is rooted in liberatory Black and Indigenous anti-colonial and eco-feminist theory and activism. Unpacking nationalist museum constructs, analyzing the formation of collections while interrogating the categorization of art and material culture seeks to reimagine the role of curators and museums in an anti-colonial future.Museum and library collections across campus will be set in dialogue with on-line archives, exhibitions, and virtual museums as material and digital curatorial interventions. Students will curate and stage original artworks from the Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University Library archives and on-line sources as part of their final capstone exhibition project.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021, Fall 2020  
ARTH 4151 - Topics in Media Arts (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with VISST 4151, STS 4511  
From the 20th-century to the present, artists have made art using live entities including plants, animals, cells, tissue cultures and bacteria. They have designed habitats, plants, body organs, imaged new species and attempted to salvage extinct ones. Some artists also have produced works in traditional media such as painting, sculpture, and photography. While artists always have depicted and sometimes directly engaged with aspects of the natural world in their art, bio art responds to recent developments in biology and information technologies. Because of its foundation on the life sciences this art entails significant ethical, social and political dimensions. In this seminar students will explore multiple areas of bio art with attention to pertinent artistic and critical literature and to the scientific practices in which the works are based. These interdisciplinary investigations will prepare students for a grounded assessment of bio art.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2020, Fall 2018, Fall 2016  
ARTH 4153 - Topics in Feminist Media Arts (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with FGSS 4153, VISST 4153  
Fall 2024 Topic: Feminist Posthumanisms in Visual Arts. While feminist art in new media address traditional feminist concerns such as the female body, identity, representation, feminist history, and consumerism, others directly engage with recent theoretical currents on the Anthropocene, posthumanism, and new materialisms that view humans and non-humans as co-dependent. Non-humans include environmental factors, animals, plants, bacteria, and machines. This seminar will examine work by contemporary artists from various geographical areas and cultural traditions engaged with posthumanist perspectives in relation to relevant theoretical texts and previous feminist media arts.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Spring 2021  
ARTH 4155 - Topics in Latin American Art (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with VISST 4155, LATA 4155  
Topic: Latin American Moderinsims and Technology. The involvement of Latin American artists with modern media technologies dates at least to the late nineteenth century and has especially flourished in the last three decades. The canonical histories and criticism of Latin American art for the most part depict a history of artistic production in which technology plays a minor or invisible role. This construction of history reinforces the assumption that experimentation, innovation, and theorization in technological art are exclusive provinces of the developed world. As the history of art expands to include diverse areas of media arts and visual culture, the recognition of Latin American artists' involvement with technology is not only overdue but also essential to the development of more diverse and rigorous understandings of both modernity and modernism.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023, Fall 2021, Spring 2020  
ARTH 4160 - Topics in Colonial Encounters (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with LATA 4160, VISST 4160  
The colonial period in Latin America (circa 1521-1820s) witnessed the formation of one of the most diverse societies in the world. Labor regimes, religious activities, marriage alliances, and commercial contacts engendered by the Spanish colonial enterprise brought Spaniards, Africans, and Indigenous peoples into dynamic contact. This cross-fertilization of cultures resulted in the construction of new cultural categories and colonial identities whose reverberations continue to be felt into the present day. This course explores the role that visual culture played in the articulation of identity in Latin America. For the purposes of this seminar, identity can be loosely defined as the overlapping allegiances to which one ascribes, whether racial, cultural, gendered, religious, or community-based. The visual culture of colonial Latin America can reveal multitudes on the construction of self and community across temporal and geographical contexts. We will explore a variety of colonial Latin American objects and images, including paintings, textiles, and material culture. Our discussions of images will be guided by readings on hybridity, coloniality, cross-cultural exchange, and the early modern Atlantic world.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2021, Spring 2018, Spring 2015  
ARTH 4166 - Colonial Connectivities: Curating the Arts of the Spanish Americas (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with VISST 4166, ARKEO 4166, LATA 4166  
This seminar immerses students in the diverse painting traditions of colonial Latin America (1500s-1800s), with a focus on artistic practice in Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, and the Hispanophone Caribbean. Themes include the pluralism and material makeup of devotional images, aesthetic constructions of race and class, the development of artistic workshops, and the role of rebellion and revolution in art. Students will participate in the curatorial development of Cornell's first exhibition of colonial Latin American art, scheduled to open in June 2024. They will research the paintings selected for the exhibition; devise the installation layout and design; write wall texts; and collaborate on the development of educational programming. Activities will also include a field trip to Buffalo State University observe scientific analysis of select paintings from the exhibition.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024  
ARTH 4171 - 19th Century Art and Culture (4 Credits)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021, Spring 2021  
ARTH 4231 - Fakes and the Authentic: Connoisseurship, Value, and Judgement (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ANTHR 4231, ARKEO 4231, SHUM 4231  
What is authenticity and why does it matter? Connoisseurship-the expertise required to make discerning judgments-involves assessments of quality,authenticity, historical and cultural significance, and many other issues. This course focuses on connoisseurship in the fine arts, archaeology, and ethnography in both academic contexts and the art world. Emphasis is on developing a nuanced understanding of authentication, at the core of the art market and an important determinant of relevant data for academic art historians and archaeologists. Topics include the role of authenticity in assigning value; looting and faking in relation to antiquities markets; technical analysis and forgery detection.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023  
ARTH 4233 - Greek and Roman Art and Archaeology (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with CLASS 4746, ARKEO 4233  
Topics Rotate. Fall 2024 topic: Funerary Culture in the Greco-Roman East. Tombs, grave goods, and funerary rituals are often thought to offer traces into the world of the living (the tomb as a house being a prominent metaphor), their concepts of the body, or their emotions. How, if at all, did such traditions change under imperial rule? Focusing on the Greek and Roman East means to zoom in to areas such as Greece, Anatolia, the Levant to the Middle East, or Egypt that feature century- if not millennia-old traditions which, if at all, transformed to different degrees under Roman rule. This seminar investigates opportunities and challenges of researching such constellations. Analysis of different traditions of scholarship that to this day shape our records will be critical, as well as discussion of scientific (and contested) methodologies of how to deal with human remains.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2023, Fall 2018, Fall 2014  
ARTH 4305 - Looking for Love: Visual and Literary Cultures of Love in the Medieval Mediterranean, 1100-1400 AD (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with NES 4795, MEDVL 4305  
A comparative and interdisciplinary seminar whose focus is the visual world created by the pan-Mediterranean (Iberian Peninsula, Maghreb, France, Italy, Turkey, Egypt, and Persia) culture of Courtly Love beginning during the 11th century ad, and continuing as a principle factor in medieval cultural production for the remainder of the period. Particular attention will be paid to the ways in which the visual dimensions of this culture nuance, compliment, contradict, or at times even exist independently of, its oral and written spheres. Reading knowledge of any Romance or Semitic language and/or Persian, in addition to English, is highly advantageous.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2020, Spring 2010  
ARTH 4310 - Methods in Medieval (3 Credits)  
Topic: Writing Through the Forest in Search of Trees. Hello, Humanities Student! Are you a plotter or a pantser? Not sure? Come and join us to find out, and to gain valuable insight into what kind of a writer you are, and how to manage that writer most effectively and productively. This theme-centered methods seminar, through a communal focus on trees, woods, glens, and copses in the pre-modern world, will hone in on the most indispensable tool in the humanist's belt: writing. From the generation of ideas, to their organization into an outline (or a blueprint, or whatever euphemism we, as a group or as individuals, decide to apply to the initial, tangled pile of yarn) to the first draft. Followed by frank and constructive criticism of the initial draft as a group and in pairs, and then on to the part that all students-really, all humanists?okay, all writers-find to be the greatest struggle: Your paper has some good ideas, but it really needs a rewrite. Now what do you do? As we write, and rewrite, we will also read widely. In addition to primary sources, scholarly articles and essays, we will include criticism, personal essay, theory, excerpts from fiction, and more, in an effort to open students' writing up to a myriad of possibilities for persuasive and compelling written communication.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Spring 2021, Spring 2015, Spring 2014  
ARTH 4320 - Tales of the Alhambra and Lalla Rookh: Case Studies in Orientalism (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with NES 4320  
An introduction both to the History of Art and to an interdisciplinary approach to research and analysis through close study of these two works. Beginning with a sampling of Said's Orientalism and its critics, we will follow with a group read and analysis of each illustrated work, including text-image consideration and analysis. There will be heavy focus on multi-media primary source material in Kroch library, the Johnson Museum, and my own personal collection; consideration of both works in their 19th-c context, as well as medieval and earlier roots. We will devote half the semester to each, with 'hinge point' marked by a study day at Olana. Final product could include small exhibition, in tandem with individual papers/projects.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024  
ARTH 4351 - Problems in Byzantine Art (4 Credits)  
Topic Spring 23: Portraiture.Byzantine artists produced a wide variety of images that modern interpreters have recognized as portraits. These images illuminate individual identity and visual representation in Byzantium. On the one hand, the constituent elements of a portrait (such as physiognomy, gesture, dress, and attributes) illuminate cultural understandings of personhood. On the other hand, those elements are assembled and displayed through means (composition, medium, and context) that illuminate cultural understandings of images and their ability to extend personal energy. We will focus on the primary sources, including preserved monuments (manuscripts, mosaics, sculptures, etc.) and literary witnesses (epigrams, historians' accounts, etc.), supplemented by selections from the secondary literature on identity, individuality, and subject formation in Byzantium.Seminar topics rotate each semester. Previous topics include: Ravenna, Hagia Sophia, Byzantine Iconoclasm, Spiral Relief Columns.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2016, Spring 2014  
ARTH 4353 - Sardis, A City at the Crossroads (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ARKEO 4353, CLASS 4755  
Situated at the crossroads between the Mediterranean in the West and the Anatolian plateau in the East, Sardis successively belonged to the Lydian, Persian, Seleucid, Roman, and Byzantine empires. An urban center from at least the 7th century BCE onwards, the city developed a very particular fabric of peoples and traditions over the long time of its existence. The seminar follows the history of the site and the changing relationship of city and hinterland from the bronze age to the Byzantine period, focusing on its major civic, religious, military and funerary monuments. Debates in heritage and a critical analysis of the site's exploration and excavation in modern times, including the first expedition organized by Princeton University and the current Harvard-Cornell led excavations, form an integral part of the class. The seminar includes excursions to the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Sardis Archive at Harvard University.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2021, Spring 2018  
ARTH 4354 - Byzantine Archaeology (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ARKEO 4354, NES 4354  
A seminar on the archaeology of the Byzantine Empire, from the late Roman through to the early modern periods. Topics to be covered include: long-term changes in settlement patterns and urban development; the material traces of state and monastic control over productive landscapes; the idea of the border and the nature of its defense; and the fraught relationship between Byzantine and classical archaeologies.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2019  
ARTH 4361 - Staffage: Figures for Scale, 1500-1850 (3 Credits)  
“Staffage” is a term in the history of landscape painting. It refers to little figures who populate the scene, invariably dwarfed by their surroundings. The few critics who noticed them assigned them various roles: to illustrate “the benefits which nature affords to creatures living in the region” (Goethe, 1800); or, alternatively, “to lend the landscape its specific poetic character” (Fernow, 1806). From landscape, staffage migrated into archaeological documentation and architectural illustration. Here, tiny figures gain additional roles: to convey the scale of the monuments depicted, and the societies that inhabit them. Our study of staffage alternates between close looking at a wide range of pictures, and readings from the historical and theoretical literatures on the aesthetics and politics of landscape painting.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS)  
ARTH 4460 - Fashion in Early Modern Europe (3 Credits)  
This seminar charts the rise of fashion consumption and its links to artistic and material culture in early modern Europe. This seminar brings dress and bodily adornment into conversation with notions of technological advancement, global encounters and trade, emergent colonialism, and cultural cross-fertilization. Students will examine extant garments and textiles in relation to painting, drawing, sculpture, print, and literary imaginings of dress to assess the impact of different artistic media on the rendition of dress. Students will consider the historiographical question of artistic mediation and its impact on contemporary understandings of historical clothing. Operating across the intersections of race, gender, class, and religious identities in early modern Europe, this seminar investigates how clothing and artistic production functioned in tandem to materialize markers of diverse identifications.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (CU-ITL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023  
ARTH 4465 - Early Modern Materialities, 1400-1700 (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with SHUM 4465  
This seminar analyzes the contours of early modern Europe's material landscape and the ways in which global exchanges and technological advancements impacted material production and consumption. Working within an interdisciplinary framework, we will explore the dynamic material, global, and social dimensions of objects, and the meanings that different materials could generate in art production. Each week we will investigate an early modern art material - from ivory, to amber, shells, and pearls - and its use and/or representation in a range of artworks. Students will learn to think materially; they will be introduced to multiple techniques of production, harvesting, and fashioning of materials, and will consider the broader social, economic, political, and environmental factors that shaped material culture.
Enrollment Information: Not open to: first-year students.  
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (CU-ITL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024  
ARTH 4510 - Blackness, Gender and Representation (3 Credits)  
This interdisciplinary seminar explores the conceptual challenge that racial blackness poses for representation, with a particular focus on black women’s aporic positionality. Black feminist art and theory forces us to contend with the limits of representation and forms a throughline to engage dominant practices and theories of representation that frame it variously as a shared commons for politics, aesthetics, and the mind itself. Given histories of slavery and racial violence, how is gendered blackness positioned in relation to this alleged commonality? We will utilize close textual analysis and visual analysis to interrogate the ways that black female artists illuminate, critique, and intervene on hegemonic constructions of blackness, gender, and the human that undergird modern frameworks of representation.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS)  
ARTH 4520 - Reading Race Early Modern Art (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with SHUM 4520  
This seminar explores the ways in which artists and craftspeople created representations of non-Europeans that shaped, negotiated, and challenged pluralistic biological and symbolic conceptions of race between 1450 and 1700. Against the backdrop of increasing global contact, European colonial enterprises, and the explosion of the Atlantic slave trade, this seminar will critically explore constructions of Blackness, whiteness, and racialized otherness and will consider the roles played by art and material culture in practices of race-making. Thinking materially, students will assess the impact of different artistic media on understandings of racialized difference. Considering race at its intersections with gender, class, religion, science, and disability, this seminar will analyze how artworks reveal and obscure the real, complex experiences of non-Europeans in Europe.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024  
ARTH 4540 - Film History for Art Historians (3 Credits)  
This seminar will offer a survey of film theory and history tailored for art historians, especially but not exclusively for modernists. The influence of cinema on twentieth-century aesthetics cannot be overstated, yet art historians routinely work without enough knowledge about the history of cinema or the grammar and rhetoric of its techniques. The history of montage, continuity editing, cinematography, and narrative form will be covered as we encounter major works from world cinema in dialogue with significant movements in modern art. German Expressionism, Surrealism, Italian Neorealism, Documentary Film, Film Noir, Hollywood Auteurism, East Asian Auteurism, and Bollywood Cinema will be among the major movements covered, as will the late entry into the fine art world of moving image media.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2020, Spring 2019  
ARTH 4545 - The Photobook (3 Credits)  
Satisfies Tutorial Requirement. The history of photography as an art has been mostly on the page, not on the wall. This course refocuses the standard museum and gallery history of photography back to the book. Significantly, it takes advantage, through field trips, of the proximity of Cornell to the George Eastman House in Rochester, whose library houses the most important photobooks from around the world, including the best creations from Russia, Japan, and the United States. Students will learn the basics of photographic printing, book construction, the role of the photobook in the rise of the artist's book in the twentieth century, as well as advanced skills in analysis of the photographic picture and sequencing. Major themes will include the scientific photobook of the nineteenth century, the documentary photobook of the 1930s, the propaganda photobook of the communist era, the postwar photobooks of Japan, the personal/domestic turn of the 1970s, and the present state of the photobook in the digital era.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2020  
ARTH 4556 - Decolonial Poetics and Aesthetics: Arts of Resistance in the Americas (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with LSP 4556, AMST 4556, ENGL 4556, VISST 4556  
Exploring a genealogy of Latinx, Afro-Latinx, Black, Indigenous, and Chicana/o/x theorizations of modernity and identity, the course asks, what is the decolonial? Is it a space between the colonial and post-colonial? Is it a creative process, an intellectual theorization, or a historical period? Is it a performance, intervention, or embodied experience? Tracing a historical trajectory of the decolonial in poetry, performance, installation, and visual art, the course examines decolonial modes of making and being from the sixteenth to the twenty first century.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2022, Spring 2020  
ARTH 4620 - Art and the Remapping of the World (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with SHUM 4680, VISST 4680  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023  
ARTH 4621 - Art and Empire in Britain and France (3 Credits)  
This seminar explores the images and objects produced, collected, and displayed in the context of the British and French empires of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Drawing on a range of perspectives-including postcolonial studies, critical race studies, and indigenous studies-we will develop a critical vocabulary for addressing the history of colonialism and the ongoing process of decolonization, asking what particular problems and opportunities art history presents for the study of empire. In what ways were aesthetics entangled with imperial ideology? How did works of art support or challenge dominant political, social, and cultural narratives? And what does a study of historic empires have to offer to our understanding of globalization today? We will also engage with the ways in which the legacy of empire is treated in contemporary museology. Readings on France and Britain will be combined with theoretical texts that have informed scholarship on the history of imperialism more broadly. Participants in the seminar are encouraged to apply the themes covered to a geographical area and time period of their choice in their final paper.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2021  
ARTH 4625 - Liquidities: Seascapes in Art and as History (3 Credits)  
This seminar explores readings in the blue humanities as they relate to art history, with a particular focus on the genre of the seascape as a means of framing human-oceanic, interspecies, and cross-cultural encounters. After establishing a theoretical basis in oceanic thought, we will explore the methodological potential such watery thinking offers for an art history attuned to cross currents, fluid interactions, and unsettled narratives. Though anchored in the Western perspective of the seascape, course readings will also be attentive to the long history of fluid models of identity and objecthood in diverse Indigenous cultures, and to the limitations inherent in the terrestrial bias of much Western scholarship.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024  
ARTH 4630 - Museum Histories (4 Credits)  
Museum Histories considers current and ongoing crises in arts institutions (COVID, labor issues, underrepresentation of minorities, calls for restitution of wrongfully-acquired objects) in relation to both the history of museums and collections and the kinds of histories they are able to tell. Readings will focus particularly on the 18th and 19th centuries and the ways in which museums developed alongside and in support of nationalist and imperialist agendas, asking to what extent present problems are informed by choices and alignments made in the past. We will also invite curators to discuss how museums can best address the issues covered and how curatorial strategies might address inherent inequalities within our institutions. Students are welcome to do their final projects on an aspect of contemporary museum practice as informed by the history discussed in the seminar.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022  
ARTH 4664 - Death in the City: Funerary Architecture in Muslim South Asia (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with SHUM 4664, ASIAN 4471, VISST 4664  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021  
ARTH 4673 - The Kinship of Repair: Asian and Asian American Artists in Collaboration (3 Credits)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2022  
ARTH 4684 - The Labor of Images: Encountering the Collective in Visual Cultures (3 Credits)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023  
ARTH 4690 - Comparative Modernities (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with VISST 4641  
Since the late 19th century, the effects of capitalism across the globe have been profoundly transformative and have intensified with the demise of the older colonial empires, the rise of nationalism and independent states, and the onset of neoliberal globalization. These transformations are manifested in the domains of high art, mass culture and popular culture, yet remain inadequately studied. This seminar theorizes and explores non-Western modernist and contemporary art practice in a comparative framework. Taught as a seminar, it assumes active participation by advanced undergraduate and graduate students who have a prior knowledge of Euro-American modernism and art history, and who wish to better understand the great artistic and visual transformations from the beginning of the 20th century onwards in a global context.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2021, Spring 2020, Fall 2015  
ARTH 4706 - The Poetics of Embodiment: Figurines in the Early Middle Ages (3 Credits)  
How can a small sculpture produce monumental effects? Recent shifts in metal-detecting and excavation practices have transformed our understanding of the scope of figural art after the Roman empire's collapse; the field is newly flooded with evidence of toys, puppets, and other tiny bodies. Working across the disciplines of anthropology, archaeology, art history, philosophy, and gender studies, this course investigates how figurines shaped space, ritual, and concepts of personhood in the early medieval world.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
ARTH 4716 - Classicism and Contemporary Art (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with CLASS 4716  
This course will explore how contemporary artists and designers borrow, replicate, challenge, play with, and subvert the arts of Greco-Roman antiquity. We will survey the influence of classical multiples - from bronze series and plaster casts to digital imaging and 3-D printing; the use of classical objects in critiques of art-world institutions, especially by female photographers such as Louise Lawler and Sara VanDerBeek; subversions of classical monumentality by Black artists such as Kehinde Wiley and Kara Walker; and the influence of classicism upon constructions of European heritage in contemporary fashion and interior design. As a form of critical reception studies, this course also examines the complex political legacy of classicism and the role it plays in contemporary discussions of race, from debates over the whiteness of classical sculpture to the relationship between state power and monumentality.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2021  
ARTH 4720 - Curating the British Empire (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with STS 4634, BSOC 4634, HIST 4634  
During Europe's colonial era, the modern museum emerged as a site of cultural and scientific authority. This course investigates the history of imperial collections and collectors, with a focus on Britain and the East India Company in the nineteenth century. Examples of topics include: the supply chain for artifacts and knowledge resources; changing conceptions of intellectual property, ownership and access; household versus public versus for-profit collections; museums and the narration of social values and cultural identities; debates over the function or aims of museums and related institutions; the collections and the administration of the empire; the collections and the growth of the sciences; the postcolonial legacies of colonial collections.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, HA-AG), (GLC-AS, HST-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2022, Spring 2022, Spring 2019  
ARTH 4754 - Themes in Mediterranean Archaeology (3 Credits)  
This seminar provides a higher-level general introduction to, and survey of, contemporary theories, methods, and approaches in the archaeology of the Mediterranean world. Rather than focusing on a specific geographical sub-region or chronological period, this course examines and critically assesses the practice and distinctive character of Mediterranean archaeology more broadly.
Prerequisites: some previous background in archaeology, material culture studies, ancient history, or related fields.  
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021, Spring 2016  
ARTH 4774 - Indigenous Spaces and Materiality (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ANTHR 4774, ART 3874  
The materiality of art as willful agents will be considered from ontology to an Indigenous expression of more than human relations. Located at the intersection of multiple modernities, art and science; the shift from art historical framings of form over matter and connoisseurship to viewing materiality as an active process that continues to map larger social processes and transformation will be discussed. Archives will be sites of investigation across varied Indigenous geographies marking place, space, bodies and land. This class is designed to introduce the latest methodologies in the field of art history, material culture and Indigenous Studies. Students will consult the archive, do hands-on evaluation of art, material culture, and expand their historic and theoretical knowledge about materiality. Beyond the theoretically and historically grounded critique this class provides, it will also introduce students to working with original documents and / or conduct on-site research. Students will consult the Cornell University library holdings of the Huntington Free Library's Native American Collection and conduct original archival research with historic and contemporary art and material culture at Haudenosaunee cultural centers, museums and exhibitions spaces through a class trip or individual visits (TBD).
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2017  
ARTH 4816 - Modern Chinese Art (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ASIAN 4473, SHUM 4916  
China, a cultural giant of East Asia, made a passive entrance into modernity. With the advent of Western and American colonialism and imperialism, coupled with recent successes in westernization by the Japanese, Chinese artists had to redefine their roles as well as their visions. This turmoil bore witness to a vibrant beginning in modern Chinese art. Interactions between the Chinese themselves, and Chinese interactions with foreigners in the major cities of Shanghai and Beijing, fostered new directions in Chinese art and helped shape western visions of Chinese art history. Issues covered include: Chinese debates on western influence--their theoretical foundations and rationales; New visions for the future of Chinese art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; Pluralistic approaches and arguments on Chinese identity in the modern era; Collecting art and the vision of history; The identity of traditional literati painters in the modern era-their roles, artworks, and deeds; Foreigners in China-the formation of major European collections of Chinese art, and the formation of Chinese art history in the West.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (EAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2021  
ARTH 4822 - Objects, Rituals, and Tea (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ASIAN 4424  
Tea is a ubiquitous commodity across time and cultures. The craze for tea has become a global phenomenon. The goal of this course is not only to elucidate the exchanges and transmissions that gave rise to the phenomenon, but also to unpack the definition of tea culture through the exploration of objects and rituals. How are tea objects related to rituals, etiquette, and movement? What do tea objects reveal about craftsmen/craftswomen and collectors? How are the objects related to religious, political, social, and economic environments of their times? Lastly, what is the importance of tea culture in shaping national and cultural identity in modern East Asia?
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, GLC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2023, Fall 2021  
ARTH 4844 - The Rise of Contemporary Chinese Art: Narratives in the Making of New Art (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ASIAN 4844  
An explosive period of artistic experimentation occurred in China following the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). The new artistic practices that were developed from the late 1970s onwards-from painting to sculpture, installation, performance, video-quickly came to be known as contemporary Chinese art. This course charts its development with a historiographic attention to the ways in which it has been narrativized by domestic and international critics, curators, and art historians. Analyzing artworks, exhibitions, and translated texts, we will explore major trends and discursive issues to reflect on how we tell the story of this art in its domestic and global contexts.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025  
ARTH 4852 - Shadowplay: Asian Art and Performance (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ASIAN 4442, VISST 4852  
Shadowplay is a superb medium for storytelling. As with many performing arts in Asia, neither the highly stylized images of puppets, nor its musical, or linguistic complexity detract from its wide popularity. Why does an art that appears so obscure exercise such broad appeal? This seminar explores the playful and politically adept fluctuations of shadows across screens from India to Mainland and Island Southeast Asia. We will also briefly examine East Asian developments, particularly in China and Japan. In each of the countries where shadow theatre exists it has acquired its own repertory and a distinct technique and style of its own. This aesthetic has translated locally into paint, sculpture, architecture, cinema, and modern and contemporary installation art. Classes will meet regularly in the Herbert F. Johnson Museum.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (EAAREA, SAAREA, SEAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2021, Fall 2019, Spring 2012  
ARTH 4855 - Threads of Consequence: Textiles in South and Southeast Asia (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ASIAN 4487, VISST 4855, SHUM 4455  
This seminar explores how patterned cloths serve as a symbolic medium, functioning on multiple levels of understanding and communication. As spun, dyed, and woven threads of consequence, textiles can be seen to enter into all phases of social, economic, political, religious, and performance processes, often assuming unusual properties and attributes. As bearers of talismanic messages, signifiers of rank, and as the recipients of influences from maritime trade and touristic demand, textiles are read between the folds of complex exchange mechanisms in South and Southeast Asia.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (SAAREA, SEAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Fall 2020, Spring 2019  
ARTH 4856 - Producing Cloth Cultures (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with VISST 4857, CLASS 4756, SHUM 4866  
It is a fundamental part of human activity to dress or cover one's body and environment. While the symbolic significance of such clothing has long been recognized, the activity of producing fabric itself deserves more attention. By this we do not only mean the various techniques and technological devices involved in spinning, weaving, stitching, or sewing, but also the analogical activities and metaphors they entailed. What stories did they tell? How did their connection to writing, remembering, lovemaking, or ruling one's kingdom, to name but a few examples, play out metaphorically in cloth? And how did fabrics depend on or transform the transmission of techniques, fashions and motives, but also gender, concepts of the body or the built environment?This team-taught seminar explores the presence, production, function and meaning of fabric in the built and lived environment. In a comparative approach we will explore evidence from Greco-Roman and Asian Art from the distant past to the contemporary moment.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2015  
ARTH 4858 - Dancing the Stone: Body, Memory, and Architecture (4 Credits)  
This course examines the role of temples and their sculptural programs in South and Southeast Asia as creative stimuli for performative reenactments. Choreographic encounters between imagination and memory will be mapped as they occur at various points historically and politically in Java, Bali, Cambodia and India. Since architectural choreography implies the human body's inhabitation and experience of place, the nature of ritualized behavior and its relationship to performance and politics will be explored spatially, both in organizing experience and defining or redefining identity on colonial, national, and diasporic margins. Bringing back the haptic sense (i.e. of feeling and doing at the same time) students will have the unique opportunity to balance the demands of learning a Balinese traditional dance while exploring performance traditions in historical perspective.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (SAAREA, SEAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2014  
ARTH 4991 - Independent Study (1-4 Credits)  
Individual investigation and discussion of special topics not covered in the regular course offerings, by arrangement with a member of the department.
Exploratory Studies: (CU-UG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021  
ARTH 4992 - Independent Study (1-4 Credits)  
Individual investigation and discussion of special topics not covered in the regular course offerings, by arrangement with a member of the department.
Exploratory Studies: (CU-UG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022  
ARTH 4998 - Honors Work I (4 Credits)  
A course for senior Art History majors working on honors theses, with selected reading, research projects, etc., under the supervision of a member of the History of Art faculty.
Enrollment Information: Primarily for: senior Art History majors who have been admitted to the honors program.  
Exploratory Studies: (CU-UG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021  
ARTH 4999 - Honors Work II (4 Credits)  
The student under faculty direction prepares a senior thesis.
Prerequisites: ARTH 4998.  
Exploratory Studies: (CU-UG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022  
ARTH 5991 - Supervised Reading (1-4 Credits)  
Individual investigation and discussion of special topics not covered in the regular course offerings, by arrangement with a member of the department.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: graduate students.  
Exploratory Studies: (SAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021  
ARTH 5992 - Supervised Reading (1-4 Credits)  
Individual investigation and discussion of special topics not covered in the regular course offerings, by arrangement with a member of the department.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: graduate students.  
Exploratory Studies: (SAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022  
ARTH 5993 - Supervised Study (1-4 Credits)  
Individual investigation and discussion of special topics not covered in the regular course offerings, by arrangement with a member of the department.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: graduate students.  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021  
ARTH 5994 - Supervised Study (1-4 Credits)  
Individual investigation and discussion of special topics not covered in the regular course offerings, by arrangement with a member of the department.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: graduate students.  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022  
ARTH 6000 - Graduate Research Methods in Art History (3 Credits)  
This graduate seminar introduces a range of research methods in art history and visual studies. We will read and discuss a series of texts related to the history and current practice of the discipline of art history. In addition, each week, a member of the faculty will visit the seminar to discuss their own research practice. This course is required of all first-year Ph.D. students in History of Art, and is open to graduate students from other fields.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2022, Fall 2021, Fall 2019  
ARTH 6010 - Curatorial Practice as Entanglements (3 Credits)  
This Curatorial Practicum evolved out of a Johnson Museum of Art's Andrew W. Mellon Foundation initiative in 2014. The seminar is collaborative and thematic, combining the expertise of museum curators with professors in the History of Art and Visual Studies.This curatorial practicum recognizes the curator's role in transformative socio-political change. Curatorial Practice as Entanglements is a semester-long course offered at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum in collaboration with the Department of the History of Art and Visual Studies. The Fall 2023 seminar theme posits Entanglements as transversal politics mobilizing intersectional worldmaking as curatorial strategy. This curatorial method is rooted in liberatory Black and Indigenous anti-colonial and eco-feminist theory and activism. Unpacking nationalist museum constructs, analyzing the formation of collections while interrogating the categorization of art and material culture seeks to reimagine the role of curators and museums in an anti-colonial future.Museum and library collections across campus will be set in dialogue with on-line archives, exhibitions, and virtual museums as material and digital curatorial interventions. Students will curate and stage original artworks from the Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University Library archives and on-line sources as part of their final capstone exhibition project.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021, Fall 2020  
ARTH 6035 - Cornell's Collection of Greek and Roman Art (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with CLASS 7035, ARKEO 7035  
This class examines the history and holdings of Cornell's teaching collection of ancient Greek and Roman objects. Designed to start a systematic inventory of the collections, it requires hands-on engagement with the objects (defining their material, age, function etc.) as much as archival work. Questions concerning the ethics of collections and calls for decolonizing museums will play a central role as we ultimately think about how to make use of and display the objects in our custody.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024  
ARTH 6060 - Visual Ideology (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with GERST 6600, COML 6600  
Some of the most powerful approaches to visual practices have come from outside or from the peripheries of the institution of art history and criticism. This seminar will analyze the interactions between academically sanctioned disciplines (such as iconography and connoisseurship) and innovations coming from philosophy, psychoanalysis, historiography, sociology, literary theory, mass media criticism, feminism, and Marxism. We will try especially to develop: (1) a general theory of "visual ideology" (the gender, social, racial, and class determinations on the production, consumption, and appropriation of visual artifacts under modern and postmodern conditions); and (2) contemporary theoretical practices that articulate these determinations. Examples will be drawn from the history of oil painting, architecture, city planning, photography, film, and other mass media.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023, Fall 2019, Fall 2016, Spring 2014  
ARTH 6100 - History of Photography (4 Credits)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022  
ARTH 6101 - Proseminar: Introduction to Methods (3 Credits)  
Works of art have always engendered political, social, and cultural meanings. This seminar presents an introduction to the methods used by art historians and the objects and ideas that constitute the historiography of their discipline. If art history was once understood as the study of the development of style in European art, over the past century its practitioners have attempted to embrace a global perspective and to address issues of class, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, and gender. Readings will focus on historically situating methods and the implications of their cross-cultural application. They will be discussed in the framework of institutions, apparatuses and practices that have shaped the field, identifying how these have contributed to systemic mechanisms of hegemony and exclusion. Papers will encourage students to put methods into practice, realizing in the process that subject matter is not an isolated choice to which methods are applied, but something that profoundly affects the approach that the researcher brings to the writing and conceptualizing and doing of art history.
Exploratory Studies: (SAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021  
ARTH 6111 - Making Photography Matter: A Studio Course (3 Credits)  
Photography/Image Analysis/Graphic Design is a hands-on course devoted to the practical understanding of conception, production, and innovation in the photographic image world. Each unit of the course confronts a fundamental problem of contemporary photographic communication-quality of light, framing, series, post-production, publication design, to name a few example topics-from practical, theoretical, and historical perspectives. The goal of the course is to enrich students' understanding of how to make images that solve practical social and scholarly problems in an impactful, immediate, and public way.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024  
ARTH 6133 - Visual Culture during the Enlightenment and the Age of Revolutions in the Atlantic World (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with HIST 6133  
The eighteenth century witnessed a number of important political, economic, scientific, and artistic transformations that shook the foundations of the Atlantic world. This seminar will focus on the intersections of art and liberation in the 18th century Americas. We will explore the role of visual culture, including maps, illustrations, paintings, talismanic objects, and ephemera in the mobilization of political dissent and revolution. The course will consist of a series of case studies that include the Tupac Amaru and Katari Rebellions (Peru/Bolivia), the Haitian Revolution, the Aponte Rebellion (Cuba), and various slave revolts across the Caribbean and Brazil, with a focus on the use of visuals in the spread of information and the creation of insurgent imaginaries in the years leading up to Independence in the 1820s. This course would bring in students from a variety of disciplines, including History, Art History, Visual Studies, Indigenous Studies, Latina/o Studies, and Latin American Studies, given its interdisciplinary focus and the relevance of these transformative political and social movements to the present day.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024  
ARTH 6151 - Topics in Media Arts (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with VISST 6151, STS 6511  
Topic - Biological Art (Bio Art): From the late 20th-century to the present, artists have made art using live entities including plants, animals, cells, tissue cultures and bacteria. They have designed habitats, crops, body organs, created new species and attempted to salvage extinct ones. Some artists also have produced works in traditional media such as painting, sculpture and photography. While artists always have imaged and sometimes directly engaged with aspects of the natural world in their art, bio art responds to recent developments in genetics and information technologies. Because of its foundation on the life sciences this art entails significant ethical and political dimensions. In this seminar students will explore multiple areas of bio art with attention to pertinent artistic and critical literature and to the scientific practices in which the works are based. For this purpose the class will consult with specialists and visit laboratories on campus relevant to the art covered in the course. We expect these interdisciplinary investigations to prepare students for a grounded assessment of bio art.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2020, Fall 2018, Fall 2016  
ARTH 6153 - Topics in Feminist Media Arts (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with FGSS 6153  
Fall 24 Topic: Feminist Posthumanisms in Visual Arts. While feminist art in new media address traditional feminist concerns such as the female body, identity, representation, feminist history, and consumerism, others directly engage with recent theoretical currents on the Anthropocene, posthumanism, and new materialisms that view humans and non-humans as co-dependent. Non-humans include environmental factors, animals, plants, bacteria, and machines. This seminar will examine work by contemporary artists from various geographical areas and cultural traditions engaged with posthumanist perspectives in relation to relevant theoretical texts and previous feminist media arts.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Spring 2021  
ARTH 6155 - Topics in Latin American Art (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with VISST 6155, LATA 6155  
Topic: Latin American Modernisms and Technology. The involvement of Latin American artists with modern media technologies dates at least to the late nineteenth century and has especially flourished in the last three decades. The canonical histories and criticism of Latin American art for the most part depict a history of artistic production in which technology plays a minor or invisible role. This construction of history reinforces the assumption that experimentation, innovation, and theorization in technological art are exclusive provinces of the developed world. As the history of art expands to include diverse areas of media arts and visual culture, the recognition of Latin American artists' involvement with technology is not only overdue but also essential to the development of more diverse and rigorous understandings of both modernity and modernism.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023, Fall 2021, Spring 2020  
ARTH 6160 - Topics in Colonial Encounters (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with LATA 6160  
The colonial period in Latin America (circa 1521-1820s) witnessed the formation of one of the most diverse societies in the world. Labor regimes, religious activities, marriage alliances, and commercial contacts engendered by the Spanish colonial enterprise brought Spaniards, Africans, and Indigenous peoples into dynamic contact. This cross-fertilization of cultures resulted in the construction of new cultural categories and colonial identities whose reverberations continue to be felt into the present day. This seminar explores the role that visual culture played in the articulation of identity in Latin America. For the purposes of this seminar, identity can be loosely defined as the overlapping allegiances to which one ascribes, whether racial, cultural, gendered, religious, or community-based. The visual culture of colonial Latin America can reveal multitudes on the construction of self and community across temporal and geographical contexts. We will explore a variety of colonial Latin American objects and images, including paintings, textiles, and material culture. Our discussions of images will be guided by readings on hybridity, coloniality, cross-cultural exchange, and the early modern Atlantic world.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2021, Spring 2018, Spring 2015  
ARTH 6166 - Colonial Connectivities: Curating the Arts of the Spanish Americas (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with VISST 6166, ARKEO 7166, LATA 6166  
This seminar immerses students in the diverse painting traditions of colonial Latin America (1500s-1800s), with a focus on artistic practice in Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, and the Hispanophone Caribbean. Themes include the pluralism and material makeup of devotional images, aesthetic constructions of race and class, the development of artistic workshops, and the role of rebellion and revolution in art. Students will participate in the curatorial development of Cornell's first exhibition of colonial Latin American art, scheduled to open in June 2024. They will research the paintings selected for the exhibition; devise the installation layout and design; write wall texts; and collaborate on the development of educational programming. Activities will also include a field trip to Buffalo State University observe scientific analysis of select paintings from the exhibition.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024  
ARTH 6190 - Comparative Modernities (3 Credits)  
Since the late 19th century, the effects of capitalism across the globe have been profoundly transformative and have intensified with the demise of the older colonial empires, the rise of nationalism and independent states, and the onset of neoliberal globalization. These transformations are manifested in the domains of high art, mass culture and popular culture, yet remain inadequately studied. This seminar theorizes and explores non-Western modernist and contemporary art practice in a comparative framework. Taught as a seminar, it assumes active participation by advanced undergraduate and graduate students who have a prior knowledge of Euro-American modernism and art history, and who wish to better understand the great artistic and visual transformations from the beginning of the 20th century onwards in a global context.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2021, Spring 2020, Fall 2015  
ARTH 6210 - The Archaeology of the City of Rome (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ARKEO 6110, CLASS 6766  
This course tells the history of the Roman empire through the urban development of its capital from the early 1st millennium BCE to the advent of Christian emperors in the 4th century CE. What does the archeology reveal about how the geography and environment of this site, its society and political systems, military conquests, economy, infrastructure, resources, and technologies interacted to create the center of an empire? Special focus is on how the appropriation of other peoples and cultures shaped the metropolis itself. Did it manage to integrate individuals from Africa, the Near East, from North of the Alps and Britain, and if so, how? The history of excavations and the reception of the city's architecture in the 19th and 20th centuries will provide a critical lens for analyzing some of the master narratives associated with ancient Rome and its ruins.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024  
ARTH 6225 - Archaic and Classical Greece (4 Credits)  
This lecture class centers on the formative periods of ancient Greek culture, the centuries from about 800-300 BCE. Its aim is to place Greece within the cosmopolitan networks of the Mediterranean and beyond, while simultaneously looking at specific local traditions. Only within this complex glocal frame will it become clear what is unique about Greek art. In surveying major genres such as architecture, ceramics, sculpture and painting we will also investigate the question of whether and how changing resources and modes of production, various political systems (such as democracy or monarchy) and situations (war, colonization, trade), gender, or theories of representation had an impact on the art of their time. Some of the particular themes to be discussed are: the role of the Near East for the development of Greek visual culture; city planning; images in public and private life; visualizing the human body and the individuum; Greek art in contact zones from the Black Sea to Southern Italy and Sicily; foreign art in Greece; the concept of art; reception of Greek art in modern times.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022  
ARTH 6233 - Greek and Roman Art and Archaeology (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with CLASS 7746, ARKEO 6233  
Topics Rotate. Fall 2024 topic: Funerary Culture in the Greco-Roman East. Tombs, grave goods, and funerary rituals are often thought to offer traces into the world of the living (the tomb as a house being a prominent metaphor), their concepts of the body, or their emotions. How, if at all, did such traditions change under imperial rule? Focusing on the Greek and Roman East means to zoom in to areas such as Greece, Anatolia, the Levant to the Middle East, or Egypt that feature century- if not millennia-old traditions which, if at all, transformed to different degrees under Roman rule. This seminar investigates opportunities and challenges of researching such constellations. Analysis of different traditions of scholarship that to this day shape our records will be critical, as well as discussion of scientific (and contested) methodologies of how to deal with human remains.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2023, Fall 2018, Fall 2014  
ARTH 6255 - The Byzantine Empire: Culture and Society (4 Credits)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021  
ARTH 6300 - Romanesque and Early Gothic Art and Architecture: Europe and the Mediterranean, 1000-1150 A.D. (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with MEDVL 6300, NES 6759  
This course will address both Romanesque and the earliest manifestations of Gothic art and architecture as Western Mediterranean phenomena, rather than northern European ones. We will adopt a comparative approach which includes Islamic and, to a lesser extent, Byzantine cultures and material. In addition to the more usual art historical skills, such as visual and stylistic analysis and compare-and-contrast, we will use selected primary sources and historical analysis to attempt to understand the objects and monuments we address.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024  
ARTH 6305 - Looking for Love: Visual and Literary Cultures of Love in the Medieval Mediterranean, 1100-1400 AD (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with MEDVL 6305  
A comparative and interdisciplinary seminar whose focus is the visual world created by the pan-Mediterranean (Iberian Peninsula, Maghreb, France, Italy, Turkey, Egypt, and Persia) culture of Courtly Love beginning during the 11th century ad, and continuing as a principle factor in medieval cultural production for the remainder of the period. Particular attention will be paid to the ways in which the visual dimensions of this culture nuance, compliment, contradict, or at times even exist independently of, its oral and written spheres. Reading knowledge of any Romance or Semitic language and/or Persian, in addition to English, is highly advantageous.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022  
ARTH 6310 - Methods in Medieval (3 Credits)  
Topic: Writing Through the Forest in Search of Trees. Hello, Humanities Student! Are you a plotter or a pantser? Not sure? Come and join us to find out, and to gain valuable insight into what kind of a writer you are, and how to manage that writer most effectively and productively. This theme-centered methods seminar, through a communal focus on trees, woods, glens, and copses in the pre-modern world, will hone in on the most indispensable tool in the humanist's belt: writing. From the generation of ideas, to their organization into an outline (or a blueprint, or whatever euphemism we, as a group or as individuals, decide to apply to the initial, tangled pile of yarn) to the first draft. Followed by frank and constructive criticism of the initial draft as a group and in pairs, and then on to the part that all students-really, all humanists?okay, all writers-find to be the greatest struggle: Your paper has some good ideas, but it really needs a rewrite. Now what do you do? As we write, and rewrite, we will also read widely. In addition to primary sources, scholarly articles and essays, we will include criticism, personal essay, theory, excerpts from fiction, and more, in an effort to open students' writing up to a myriad of possibilities for persuasive and compelling written communication.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2023, Spring 2021, Spring 2015  
ARTH 6320 - Tales of the Alhambra and Lalla Rookh: Case Studies in Orientalism (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with NES 6320  
An introduction both to the History of Art and to an interdisciplinary approach to research and analysis through close study of these two works. Beginning with a sampling of Said's Orientalism and its critics, we will follow with a group read and analysis of each illustrated work, including text-image consideration and analysis. There will be heavy focus on multi-media primary source material in Kroch library, the Johnson Museum, and my own personal collection; consideration of both works in their 19th-c context, as well as medieval and earlier roots. We will devote half the semester to each, with 'hinge point' marked by a study day at Olana. Final product could include small exhibition, in tandem with individual papers/projects.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024  
ARTH 6351 - Problems in Byzantine Art (4 Credits)  
Seminar topics rotate each semester. Topic for Spring 2023: Portraiture.Byzantine artists produced a wide variety of images that modern interpreters have recognized as portraits. These images illuminate individual identity and visual representation in Byzantium. On the one hand, the constituent elements of a portrait (such as physiognomy, gesture, dress, and attributes) illuminate cultural understandings of personhood. On the other hand, those elements are assembled and displayed through means (composition, medium, and context) that illuminate cultural understandings of images and their ability to extend personal energy. We will focus on the primary sources, including preserved monuments (manuscripts, mosaics, sculptures, etc.) and literary witnesses (epigrams, historians' accounts, etc.), supplemented by selections from the secondary literature on identity, individuality, and subject formation in Byzantium.Previous topics include: Ravenna, Hagia Sophia, Byzantine Iconoclasm, Spiral Relief Columns.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2016, Spring 2014  
ARTH 6353 - Sardis, A City at the Crossroads (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ARKEO 7353, CLASS 7755  
Situated at the crossroads between the Mediterranean in the West and the Anatolian plateau in the East, Sardis successively belonged to the Lydian, Persian, Seleucid, Roman, and Byzantine empires. An urban center from at least the 7th century BCE onwards, the city developed a very particular fabric of peoples and traditions over the long time of its existence. The seminar follows the history of the site and the changing relationship of city and hinterland from the bronze age to the Byzantine period, focusing on its major civic, religious, military and funerary monuments. Debates in heritage and a critical analysis of the site's exploration and excavation in modern times, including the first expedition organized by Princeton University and the current Harvard-Cornell led excavations, form an integral part of the class. The seminar includes excursions to the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Sardis Archive at Harvard University.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2021, Spring 2018  
ARTH 6354 - Byzantine Archaeology (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with CLASS 6754, ARKEO 6354, NES 6354  
A seminar on the archaeology of the Byzantine Empire, from the late Roman through to the early modern periods. Topics to be covered include: long-term changes in settlement patterns and urban development; the material traces of state and monastic control over productive landscapes; the idea of the border and the nature of its defense; and the fraught relationship between Byzantine and classical archaeologies.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2019  
ARTH 6361 - Staffage: Figures for Scale, 1500-1850 (3 Credits)  
“Staffage” is a term in the history of landscape painting. It refers to little figures who populate the scene, invariably dwarfed by their surroundings. The few critics who noticed them assigned them various roles: to illustrate “the benefits which nature affords to creatures living in the region” (Goethe, 1800); or, alternatively, “to lend the landscape its specific poetic character” (Fernow, 1806). From landscape, staffage migrated into archaeological documentation and architectural illustration. Here, tiny figures gain additional roles: to convey the scale of the monuments depicted, and the societies that inhabit them. Our study of staffage alternates between close looking at a wide range of pictures, and readings from the historical and theoretical literature on the aesthetics and politics of landscape painting.
ARTH 6400 - Art, Identity, and the Human Body in Early Modern Europe (3 Credits)  
This lecture introduces students to the multivalent attitudes towards and understandings of the body in early modern Europe, and how artmakers contributed and responded to these forces between 1400 and 1650. Bringing together the histories of art, science, and philosophy, as well as social, cultural, medical, and global history methodologies, this course explores how artworks and objects reveal the fluid cultural practices and societal norms of early modern Europe. Lecture topics will include the rediscovery of the classical bodily ideal; the influence of humoral theory and anatomical studies on artmaking; the interactions of art and the bodily senses; global encounters with non-European monstrous bodies, and the gendered, racialized, eroticized, divine, aging, and/or disabled body. Students will gain a nuanced comprehension of how early modern people saw and understood themselves and their bodies, in life, and in art.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025  
ARTH 6465 - Early Modern Materialities, 1400-1700 (3 Credits)  
This seminar analyzes the contours of early modern Europe's material landscape and the ways in which global exchanges and technological advancements impacted material production and consumption. Working within an interdisciplinary framework, we will explore the dynamic material, global, and social dimensions of objects, and the meanings that different materials could generate in art production. Each week we will investigate an early modern art material - from ivory, to amber, shells, and pearls - and its use and/or representation in a range of artworks. Students will learn to think materially; they will be introduced to multiple techniques of production, harvesting, and fashioning of materials, and will consider the broader social, economic, political, and environmental factors that shaped material culture.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024  
ARTH 6511 - Blackness, Gender and Representation (3 Credits)  
This interdisciplinary seminar explores the conceptual challenge that racial blackness poses for representation, with a particular focus on black women’s aporic positionality. Black feminist art and theory forces us to contend with the limits of representation and forms a throughline to engage dominant practices and theories of representation that frame it variously as a shared commons for politics, aesthetics, and the mind itself. Given histories of slavery and racial violence, how is gendered blackness positioned in relation to this alleged commonality? We will utilize close textual analysis and visual analysis to interrogate the ways that black female artists illuminate, critique, and intervene on hegemonic constructions of blackness, gender, and the human that undergird modern frameworks of representation.
ARTH 6520 - Reading Race Early Modern Art (3 Credits)  
This seminar explores the ways in which artists and craftspeople created representations of non-Europeans that shaped, negotiated, and challenged pluralistic biological and symbolic conceptions of race between 1450 and 1700. Against the backdrop of increasing global contact, European colonial enterprises, and the explosion of the Atlantic slave trade, this seminar will critically explore constructions of Blackness, whiteness, and racialized otherness and will consider the roles played by art and material culture in practices of race-making. Thinking materially, students will assess the impact of different artistic media on understandings of racialized difference. Considering race at its intersections with gender, class, religion, science, and disability, this seminar will analyze how artworks reveal and obscure the real, complex experiences of non-Europeans in Europe.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024  
ARTH 6540 - Film History for Art Historians (3 Credits)  
This seminar will offer a survey of film theory and history tailored for art historians, especially but not exclusively for modernists. The influence of cinema on twentieth-century aesthetics cannot be overstated, yet art historians routinely work without enough knowledge about the history of cinema or the grammar and rhetoric of its techniques. The history of montage, continuity editing, cinematography, and narrative form will be covered as we encounter major works from world cinema in dialogue with significant movements in modern art. German Expressionism, Surrealism, Italian Neorealism, Documentary Film, Film Noir, Hollywood Auteurism, East Asian Auteurism, and Bollywood Cinema will be among the major movements covered, as will the late entry into the fine art world of moving image media.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2020, Spring 2019  
ARTH 6545 - The Photobook (3 Credits)  
Topic 2024: Tutorial. The history of photography as an art has been mostly on the page, not on the wall. This course refocuses the standard museum and gallery history of photography back to the book. Significantly, it takes advantage, through field trips, of the proximity of Cornell to the George Eastman House in Rochester, whose library houses the most important photobooks from around the world, including the best creations from Russia, Japan, and the United States. Students will learn the basics of photographic printing, book construction, the role of the photobook in the rise of the artist's book in the twentieth century, as well as advanced skills in analysis of the photographic picture and sequencing. Major themes will include the scientific photobook of the nineteenth century, the documentary photobook of the 1930s, the propaganda photobook of the communist era, the postwar photobooks of Japan, the personal/domestic turn of the 1970s, and the present state of the photobook in the digital era.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2020  
ARTH 6550 - Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art (3 Credits)  
This course concerns a selection of influential artistic movements in Latin American from the early twentieth century to the present. Attention is given to issues such as the effects of colonialism and imperialism on Latin America's visual arts, the creation of national art, the relation of Latin American art and artists to cultural centers in Europe, The United States and other regions of the globe, the interaction of high art and popular culture, and the role of gender and race in various aspects of artistic practice. Students will also become acquainted with Latin American and Latinx artists working with new technologies.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024  
ARTH 6556 - Decolonial Poetics and Aesthetics: Arts of Resistance in the Americas (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ENGL 6565, LSP 6565, VISST 6556  
Exploring a genealogy of Latinx, Afro-Latinx, Black, Indigenous, and Chicana/o/x theorizations of modernity and identity, the course asks, what is the decolonial? Is it a space between the colonial and post-colonial? Is it a creative process, an intellectual theorization, or a historical period? Is it a performance, intervention, or embodied experience? Tracing a historical trajectory of the decolonial in poetry, performance, installation, and visual art, the course examines decolonial modes of making and being from the sixteenth to the twenty first century.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2022, Spring 2020, Spring 2017  
ARTH 6560 - Aesthetic Theory: The End of Art (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with GERST 6560, PHIL 6951  
Exploratory Studies: (EUAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2016, Fall 2012, Spring 2009  
ARTH 6563 - Art and Architecture of Colonial Latin America (4 Credits)  
This course surveys the artistic and architectural traditions of Latin America during the period of Spanish colonial rule (ca. 1520s-1820s). It will center primarily on visual cultures of the viceroyalties of New Spain (Mexico) and Peru, but will also cover works of art and architecture from the Caribbean and the northern Andes. The course explores the legacy of pre-Columbian visual traditions in the colonial era as well as the lasting impact of colonial artistic practices in modern and contemporary Latin America. It will also examine colonial Latin America as the crossroads of dynamic artistic and cultural interaction between Indigenous, European, and Afrodescendant groups. Topics to be explored include issues of visual translation and transmission, art and agency, and the creation of new colonial artistic practices and idioms.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2022  
ARTH 6566 - Art and Architecture of the Pre-Columbian Americas (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with MEDVL 6566  
This course introduces students to the arts of the ancient Americas from circa 2000 BC to the Spanish invasions of the 15th and 16th centuries. The term pre-Columbian refers to the span of time during which indigenous cultures flourished before Christopher Columbus’ voyage of 1492. This course covers the arts of indigenous Mesoamerica (Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras), the Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and the Greater and Lesser Antilles), and Andean South America (Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile). Students will become familiar with the history, archaeology, and visual arts of the earliest cultures that populated these regions up through the Inca, Aztec, and Maya cultures that encountered the Spaniards. This course also explores the legacies of pre-Columbian cultures among contemporary Chicana/o/x and Latina/o/x artists in the United States.
Exploratory Studies: (LAAREA)
ARTH 6595 - Heritage, History, and Identity in Cambodia (3 Credits)  
This winter course on site in Cambodia will focus on Cambodian heritage past and present - how it's been created in the past, including the city of Angkor, and how that heritage and history is understood and engaged today. We will visit historical sites as well as museums and other relevant sites, including performances, where history is remembered and engaged. There will be lectures, including by Cambodian experts, as well as film showings. The course will be based in Siem Reap, in collaboration with the Center for Khmer Studies, and there will also be excursions to Phnom Penh, the capital.
Prerequisites: KHMER 1100.  
Course Fee: Course Fee, TBA. Fee varies based on year.  
Exploratory Studies: (CU-ITL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Winter 2025, Winter 2023  
ARTH 6600 - Contemporary Art: 1960-Present (3 Credits)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025  
ARTH 6611 - Art of South Asia, 1200-present (4 Credits)  
This course surveys the art and architecture of South Asia since 1200 CE. We cover major developments over the last eight centuries, including the architecture of the Sultanate Period, Vijaynagar, painting and architecture in the Deccan and South India, Mughal art and architecture, and Rajput painting. We look at British period colonial art and architecture, the rise of nationalism and modernism in Indian art and the circulation of vernacular images, including posters and bazaar prints in the twentieth century. The recent globalization of South Asian contemporary art is also examined. Artistic movements are situated with reference to social, economic, and political developments.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023  
ARTH 6620 - Art and the Remapping of the World (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with SHUM 6680, VISST 6680  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023  
ARTH 6621 - Art and Empire in Britain and France (3 Credits)  
This seminar explores the images and objects produced, collected, and displayed in the context of the British and French empires of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Drawing on a range of perspectives-including postcolonial studies, critical race studies, and indigenous studies-we will develop a critical vocabulary for addressing the history of colonialism and the ongoing process of decolonization, asking what particular problems and opportunities art history presents for the study of empire. In what ways were aesthetics entangled with imperial ideology? How did works of art support or challenge dominant political, social, and cultural narratives? And what does a study of historic empires have to offer to our understanding of globalization today? We will also engage with the ways in which the legacy of empire is treated in contemporary museology. Readings on France and Britain will be combined with theoretical texts that have informed scholarship on the history of imperialism more broadly. Participants in the seminar are encouraged to apply the themes covered to a geographical area and time period of their choice in their final paper.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2021  
ARTH 6622 - Liquidities: Seascapes in Art and as History (3 Credits)  
This seminar explores readings in the blue humanities as they relate to art history, with a particular focus on the genre of the seascape as a means of framing human-oceanic, interspecies, and cross-cultural encounters. After establishing a theoretical basis in oceanic thought, we will explore the methodological potential such watery thinking offers for an art history attuned to cross currents, fluid interactions, and unsettled narratives. Though anchored in the Western perspective of the seascape, course readings will also be attentive to the long history of fluid models of identity and objecthood in diverse Indigenous cultures, and to the limitations inherent in the terrestrial bias of much Western scholarship.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024  
ARTH 6624 - After Nature: Art and Environmental Imagination (4 Credits)  
This course looks at what it means to make art in, of, and after nature, and asks how that art might contribute to shaping the world we live in. Tracing a trajectory from the collection and display of natural history specimens to views of European and American landscapes to contemporary artists who address ecological crises, the course offers both a history of landscape in western art and a study of environmental imagination. We will further explore how nature is represented on Cornell's campus, including in the Johnson Museum, the Lab of Ornithology and the Botanic Gardens. This course includes opportunities to creatively reflect on our personal relationship to nature through hands-on activities. Students from all disciplines are welcome to engage with themes including natural curiosities, parks and gardens, ideas of wilderness, the picturesque, environmental preservation, earth works, and the post-natural.
Exploratory Studies: (CU-SBY)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024  
ARTH 6625 - Paris, Capital of Modernity? (4 Credits)  
This course takes a critical perspective on the centrality of Paris to canonical narratives of modernity and modern art and architecture. We will look both at some of the defining art movements of the 19th century and at the influx of people and objects from other cultures-many of whom and which arrived in Paris via colonialist violence and imperialist plunder- that contributed to those movements. Beginning with the French and Haitian Revolutions, moving through Impressionist travels in North Africa and the export of Haussmanization to South America, and ending with Le Corbusier's plan for redesigning Algiers, the course aims to redress some of the silences and oversights written into the history of modern art.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022  
ARTH 6630 - Museum Histories (4 Credits)  
Museum Histories considers current and ongoing crises in arts institutions (COVID, labor issues, underrepresentation of minorities, calls for restitution of wrongfully-acquired objects) in relation to both the history of museums and collections and the kinds of histories they are able to tell. Readings will focus particularly on the 18th and 19th centuries and the ways in which museums developed alongside and in support of nationalist and imperialist agendas, asking to what extent present problems are informed by choices and alignments made in the past. We will also invite curators to discuss how museums can best address the issues covered and how curatorial strategies might address inherent inequalities within our institutions. Students are welcome to do their final projects on an aspect of contemporary museum practice as informed by the history discussed in the seminar.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022  
ARTH 6653 - History and Theory of Digital Art (3 Credits)  
In this course, we will examine the role of electronic and digital technologies in the arts of the late 20th and 21st centuries with emphasis on Europe and North America. Beginning with the cybernetically and systems-inspired work of the late sixties, we will explore early uses of computer technology, including early experiments in synthetic video in the 1970s. An overview of pre-internet telematic experiments will lead to an investigation of net art and later currents of digital art. The ongoing development of behavioral art forms will be a central theme. Critical evaluation of various attitudes concerning technology will be encouraged.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2022  
ARTH 6664 - Death in the City: Funerary Architecture in Muslim South Asia (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with SHUM 6664, ASIAN 6641  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021  
ARTH 6673 - The Kinship of Repair: Asian and Asian American Artists in Collaboration (3 Credits)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2022  
ARTH 6684 - The Labor of Images: Encountering the Collective in Visual Cultures (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with SHUM 6684, COML 6684, PMA 6684, VISST 6684  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023  
ARTH 6706 - The Poetics of Embodiment: Figurines in the Early Middle Ages (3 Credits)  
How can a small sculpture produce monumental effects? Recent shifts in metal-detecting and excavation practices have transformed our understanding of the scope of figural art after the Roman empire's collapse; the field is newly flooded with evidence of toys, puppets, and other tiny bodies. Working across the disciplines of anthropology, archaeology, art history, philosophy, and gender studies, this course investigates how figurines shaped space, ritual, and concepts of personhood in the early medieval world.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: graduate students.  
ARTH 6716 - Classicism and Contemporary Art (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with CLASS 7716  
This course will explore how contemporary artists and designers borrow, replicate, challenge, play with, and subvert the arts of Greco-Roman antiquity. We will survey the influence of classical multiples - from bronze series and plaster casts to digital imaging and 3-D printing; the use of classical objects in critiques of art-world institutions, especially by female photographers such as Louise Lawler and Sara VanDerBeek; subversions of classical monumentality by Black artists such as Kehinde Wiley and Kara Walker; and the influence of classicism upon constructions of European heritage in contemporary fashion and interior design. As a form of critical reception studies, this course also examines the complex political legacy of classicism and the role it plays in contemporary discussions of race, from debates over the whiteness of classical sculpture to the relationship between state power and monumentality.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2021  
ARTH 6720 - Curating the British Empire (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with STS 6634, HIST 6634  
During Europe's colonial era, the modern museum emerged as a site of cultural and scientific authority. This course investigates the history of imperial collections and collectors, with a focus on Britain and the East India Company in the nineteenth century. Examples of topics include: the supply chain for artifacts and knowledge resources; changing conceptions of intellectual property, ownership and access; household versus public versus for-profit collections; museums and the narration of social values and cultural identities; debates over the function or aims of museums and related institutions; the collections and the administration of the empire; the collections and the growth of the sciences; the postcolonial legacies of colonial collections.
Exploratory Studies: (SAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2022, Spring 2022, Spring 2019  
ARTH 6754 - Themes in Mediterranean Archaeology (3 Credits)  
This seminar provides a higher-level general introduction to, and survey of, contemporary theories, methods, and approaches in the archaeology of the Mediterranean world. Rather than focusing on a specific geographical sub-region or chronological period, this course examines and critically assesses the practice and distinctive character of Mediterranean archaeology more broadly.
Prerequisites: some previous background in archaeology, material culture studies, ancient history, or related fields.  
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: graduate students.  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021, Spring 2016  
ARTH 6774 - Indigenous Spaces and Materiality (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ANTHR 7774  
The materiality of art as willful agents will be considered from ontology to an Indigenous expression of more than human relations. Located at the intersection of multiple modernities, art and science; the shift from art historical framings of form over matter and connoisseurship to viewing materiality as an active process that continues to map larger social processes and transformation will be discussed. Archives will be sites of investigation across varied Indigenous geographies marking place, space, bodies and land. This class is designed to introduce the latest methodologies in the field of art history, material culture and Indigenous Studies. Students will consult the archive, do hands-on evaluation of art, material culture, and expand their historic and theoretical knowledge about materiality. Beyond the theoretically and historically grounded critique this class provides, it will also introduce students to working with original documents and / or conduct on-site research. Students will consult the Cornell University library holdings of the Huntington Free Library's Native American Collection and conduct original archival research with historic and contemporary art and material culture at Haudenosaunee cultural centers, museums and exhibitions spaces through a class trip or individual visits (TBD).
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2017  
ARTH 6780 - Persecution and the Art of Writing (3 Credits)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2017, Spring 2012  
ARTH 6803 - Urban Interfaces: Art, Architecture, and Urbanism in China at the turn of the 21st Century (3 Credits)  
How does art, architecture, and urban space interface with one another and what is the role of art in public space and public life? This course considers these questions within the context of China's unprecedented urban transformation at the turn of the 21st century, paying attention to the ways in which art and architecture are at once resistant to and at the same time entangled with capitalist and governmental forces. From Beijing's Tiananmen Square to Guangzhou's skyscraper construction sites; from virtual cities to New York City-a center of the Chinese diaspora-we will look transregionally at how different types of urban spaces prompted new aesthetic forms and how such creative acts contributed, in turn, to the transformation of these very spaces.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023  
ARTH 6816 - Modern Chinese Art (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ASIAN 6673  
China, a cultural giant of East Asia, made a passive entrance into modernity. With the advent of Western and American colonialism and imperialism, coupled with recent successes in westernization by the Japanese, Chinese artists had to redefine their roles as well as their visions. This turmoil bore witness to a vibrant beginning in modern Chinese art. Interactions between the Chinese themselves, and Chinese interactions with foreigners in the major cities of Shanghai and Beijing, fostered new directions in Chinese art and helped shape western visions of Chinese art history. Issues covered include: Chinese debates on western influence--their theoretical foundations and rationales; New visions for the future of Chinese art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; Pluralistic approaches and arguments on Chinese identity in the modern era; Collecting art and the vision of history; The identity of traditional literati painters in the modern era-their roles, artworks, and deeds; Foreigners in China-the formation of major European collections of Chinese art, and the formation of Chinese art history in the West.
Exploratory Studies: (EAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2021  
ARTH 6822 - Objects, Rituals, and Tea (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ASIAN 6624  
Tea is a ubiquitous commodity across time and cultures. The craze for tea has become a global phenomenon. The goal of this course is not only to elucidate the exchanges and transmissions that gave rise to the phenomenon, but also to unpack the definition of tea culture through the exploration of objects and rituals. How are tea objects related to rituals, etiquette, and movement? What do tea objects reveal about craftsmen/craftswomen and collectors? How are the objects related to religious, political, social, and economic environments of their times? Lastly, what is the importance of tea culture in shaping national and cultural identity in modern East Asia?
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2023, Fall 2021  
ARTH 6844 - The Rise of Contemporary Chinese Art: Narratives in the Making of New Art (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ASIAN 6844  
An explosive period of artistic experimentation occurred in China following the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). The new artistic practices that were developed from the late 1970s onwards-from painting to sculpture, installation, performance, video-quickly came to be known as contemporary Chinese art. This course charts its development with a historiographic attention to the ways in which it has been narrativized by domestic and international critics, curators, and art historians. Analyzing artworks, exhibitions, and translated texts, we will explore major trends and discursive issues to reflect on how we tell the story of this art in its domestic and global contexts.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025  
ARTH 6850 - The Arts of Southeast Asia (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with MEDVL 6850  
The arts of Southeast Asia are studied in their social context, since in traditional societies creative processes are often mapped on the sequence of events that compose human lives. We will be looking particularly at the gendered ways in which bodies are mapped on the land, and how these various framings are often reflected in the unique relationships that emerge between works of art and textual sources. The South Asian epics of the Ramayana (Story of Rama) and the Mahabharata will be explored during the semester as infinitely renewable sources of inspiration. Special emphasis will be devoted to localized encounters in Indonesia, Cambodia, Burma/Myanmar, Vietnam, and Thailand.
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2022, Spring 2022  
ARTH 6852 - Shadowplay: Asian Art and Performance (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ASIAN 6646  
Shadowplay is a superb medium for storytelling. As with many performing arts in Asia, neither the highly stylized images of puppets, nor its musical, or linguistic complexity detract from its wide popularity. Why does an art that appears so obscure exercise such broad appeal? This seminar explores the playful and politically adept fluctuations of shadows across screens from India to Mainland and Island Southeast Asia. We will also briefly examine East Asian developments, particularly in China and Japan. In each of the countries where shadow theatre exists it has acquired its own repertory and a distinct technique and style of its own. This aesthetic has translated locally into paint, sculpture, architecture, cinema, and modern and contemporary installation art. Classes will meet regularly in the Herbert F. Johnson Museum.
Exploratory Studies: (EAAREA, SAAREA, SEAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2021, Fall 2019, Spring 2012  
ARTH 6855 - Threads of Consequence: Textiles in South and Southeast Asia (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with VISST 6855, ASIAN 6644  
This seminar explores how patterned cloths serve as a symbolic medium, functioning on multiple levels of understanding and communication. As spun, dyed, and woven threads of consequence, textiles can be seen to enter into all phases of social, economic, political, religious, and performance processes, often assuming unusual properties and attributes. As bearers of talismanic messages, signifiers of rank, and as the recipients of influences from maritime trade and touristic demand, textiles are read between the folds of complex exchange mechanisms in South and Southeast Asia.
Exploratory Studies: (SAAREA, SEAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Fall 2020, Spring 2019  
ARTH 6856 - Producing Cloth Cultures (4 Credits)  
It is a fundamental part of human activity to dress or cover one's body and environment. While the symbolic significance of such clothing has long been recognized, the activity of producing fabric itself deserves more attention. By this we do not only mean the various techniques and technological devices involved in spinning, weaving, stitching, or sewing, but also the analogical activities and metaphors they entailed. What stories did they tell? How did their connection to writing, remembering, lovemaking, or ruling one's kingdom, to name but a few examples, play out metaphorically in cloth? And how did fabrics depend on or transform the transmission of techniques, fashions and motives, but also gender, concepts of the body or the built environment?This team-taught seminar explores the presence, production, function and meaning of fabric in the built and lived environment. In a comparative approach we will explore evidence from Greco-Roman and Asian Art from the distant past to the contemporary moment.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2015  
ARTH 6858 - Dancing the Stone: Body, Memory, and Architecture (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ASIAN 6656, MEDVL 6858  
This course examines the role of temples and their sculptural programs in South and Southeast Asia as creative stimuli for performative reenactments. Choreographic encounters between imagination and memory will be mapped as they occur at various points historically and politically in Java, Bali, Cambodia and India. Since architectural choreography implies the human body's inhabitation and experience of place, the nature of ritualized behavior and its relationship to performance and politics will be explored spatially, both in organizing experience and defining or redefining identity on colonial, national, and diasporic margins. Bringing back the haptic sense (i.e. of feeling and doing at the same time) students will have the unique opportunity to balance the demands of learning a Balinese traditional dance while exploring performance traditions in historical perspective.
Exploratory Studies: (SEAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2014, Spring 2009  
ARTH 6920 - Hegel’s Aesthetics: On the Ideal, History, and System of the Arts (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with GERST 6920, COML 6922