Graduate Course Descriptions - Recent Years
Courses by Subject Area
Medieval Art
Medieval Architecture,
A Seminar on Canterbury Cathedral in the 12th-Century, Medieval Painting, Cathedral of Chartres, Medieval Manuscripts
Renaissance Art
Programs and Audience, Painting in Venice 1500-1530 and the Invention of Art
Baroque Art
Thinking on Paper,
Poussin, Claude, and the Classical Landscape Tradition
Modern Art
Architecture by the Book: The Production and Use of Texts, 18th - 20th c., Socialism and Post-Socialism in the Arts and Art History, Nationalism, Postnationalism, and the Arts, Modernism, Art and Humanism in World War II, Architecture and Historicism in 19th-century France and Britain, War in Visual Culture
Contemporary Art
The Post-Colonial Constellation: Contemporary Art and the Global Stage, Theory and Practices of Production, Modernities and Modernisms: Times, Values, Worlds, Exhibition Systems, Contemporary Visual Cultures: Modernity & Contemporaneity, World Picturing and Worldmaking in Contemporary Visual Cultures, Time, Space, and Being in Contemporary Art, Architecture, and Everyday Life
American Art
The Washington, D.C. Mall: Landscape and Power
Chinese Art
Building a Chinese World: Cities, Offices, and Homes, East Asian Research, Warring States, Qin & Han Art, China/Japan Silk Road
Japanese Art
Japanese Landscape Painting, Objects and Image in Japanese Rituals, East Asian Research, The State of the Field in Pre-modern Japanese Art History, Representations of Death, China/Japan Silk Road
Other Courses
Research and Thesis MA, Methods of Research, Art History Writing Practicum, Directed Study, Comprehensive Exam Preparation, Teaching Art History, Dissertation Prospectus, Research and Dissertation PhD
HAA 2000 Research and Thesis MA
Independent research for M.A. paper
HAA 2005 Methods of Research
This seminar is designed to introduce graduate students to various ways of explaining works of art. In the process students will become familiar with the historiography of the art-historical discipline and with the range of current approaches to art-historical problems. We will work through the course material by a combination of close reading, written exercises, and class discussion. This course is open to graduate students in art history and to students from Culture Studies who have a strong interest in visual representation.
HAA 2006 Art History Writing Practicum
In this one-credit graduate seminar, students will work intensively on grant proposal writing, and, if time permits, on paper proposals (otherwise known as abstracts). Class will be conducted in a workshop format, with students reading and commenting on each other's work. We will focus class discussion on how to communicate the essential elements of a successful proposal, how to clarify and abbreviate one's argument, and how to write with authority. The course is strongly recommended for students who will be applying for fellowships during this academic year.
HAA 2105 Medieval Architecture
Frank Toker
The seminar topic this term concentrates on the objectives, methods, and results of one of Europe's most ambitious archaeological excavations. Between 1965 and 1980 these excavations--mainly under the direction of the course instructor--located the remains of the Early Christian cathedral of Santa Reparata (ca. 500 AD) buried below the successor cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, Italy. The total scope of what was found involved sixteen centuries (1st-century BC through 15th-century AD) at the heart of one of Europe's great cities, from a Roman house through three stages of a church, to the building of the existing cathedral. The seminar will work in four main disciplines: liturgy (church ritual both inside the building and in the streets of medieval Florence); scientific archaeology; art history and social and political history. The liturgircal documents and the archaeolgocial evidence provide the "text" of the course; the art-historical and historical interpretations are the "context." Text and context together offer findings not only rich to look at but significant enough to modify or revise much of the history of Florence between the eras of Augustus and Dante.
HAA 2200 Special Topics (Medieval) - A Seminar on Canterbury Cathedral in the 12th Century
Fil Hearn
This Graduate seminar, cross-listed as HAA 1235 for HONORS credit, focuses on the portion of Canterbury Cathedral that was built in the early years of the pilgrimage cult of St. Thomas Becket, itself the context for Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Constructed between 1174 and 1184, the Early Gothic choir of Canterbury is held to be the earliest Gothic structure in England and the one there that most nearly resembles the French originators of this style. The history of this choir is informed by the most varied array of primary documents that exists for any medieval structure and the changes in the design that still can be seen in the building demonstrate that the history of its construction was unusually complex. Both the documents and the archaeology of the structure offer an unrivaled opportunity for detective work in the exploration of a building and it dramatic story.
HAA 2200 Special Topics (Medieval) - Medieval Painting
Alison Stones
This course will focus on painting and two-dimensional media in the medieval period. Students will conduct research projects on the techniques, iconography, and styles or medieval painting and will present the results of their work on a regular basis in class and as written assignments.
HAA 2200 Special Topics (Medieval) - Cathedral of Chartres
Alison Stones
This seminar will focus on the Cathedral of Chartres, making use of the new website developed in conjunction with the Digital Research Library of Hillman Library. Students will work on the architecture, glass, and sculpture of the cathedral and on its liturgy. They will make oral presentations and will prepare an extended research paper in several parts to be handed in by the end of the semester. There are plans for an extra-credit site visit to take place in May.
HAA 2200 Special Topics (Medieval) - Medieval Manuscripts
Alison Stones
The seminar will address problems in manuscript illumination ranging from a study of liturgical books to first-hand work on the Lancelot-Grail project and on secular manuscripts in American collections. Students will prepare independent projects and present them in class. A substantial piece of written work is required. Field trips are envisaged.
HAA 2300 Special Topics (Renaissance) - Programs and Audience
David Wilkins
This course will investigate the notion of what might be called the “large program” in painting, sculpture, and/or architecture. While the initial presentations will deal with three Italian Renaissance pictorial programs—Giotto’s Arena Chapel, the altarpiece cycle for Siena Cathedral, and the walls and ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—the scope of the seminar will be expanded as students are invited to do intensive research into a large program in any area of art history. Possible areas of investigation could include such historically and aesthetically diverse topics as the stained glass program at a Gothic Cathedral or at Heinz Chapel, a mural program in a Baroque church or Carnegie Museum of Art, a set of medieval tapestries for a castle or as reinstalled in a robber baron’s estate, the sculptural program at a Romanesque church or at Carnegie Institute, or the complex of architecture at the Acropolis, at the Forbidden City in Beijing, at the new set of hotels near the Great Wall, at Pitt (the abandoned Hornbostel “Acropolis” plan), or at CMU. The focus will be on examining how the individual works of an ensemble were designed to create an iconographic and aesthetic totality for the original audience and on understanding the intended impact of the ensemble on the original audience and, if relevant, on the modern audience as well.
HAA 2300 Special Topics (Renaissance) - Painting in Venice 1500-1530 and the Invention of Art
Kathleen Christian
This class is a graduate seminar held to coincide with a major international exhibition of Venetian Renaissance painting at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. Students would visit the exhibition during its last weekend (September 16-17), attend a scholars symposium, and accompany the curator on a private viewing of the exhibition. A grant proposal to fund this trip for students is now pending. Instead of focusing solely on questions of attribution that have dominated past scholarly discussion, the seminar will focus on the issue of invention. It will examine how major artists (especially Bellini, Titian, and Giorgione) struggled for dominance within a cultural climate that had recently begun to prize invention and its visibility in works of art. The result was the utter transformation of traditional genres of painting and the creation of new ones, with profound implications for Italian painting and Western art in general. We will investigate changes within existing varieties of painting (altarpieces, portraits, and devotional works) and map the creation of new varieties (mythological "painted poetries" and dramatic portraits).
HAA 2301 Special Topics (Baroque) - Thinking on Paper
Ann Sutherland Harris
Drawings offer us many ways of learning about artists' approaches to their work: preparatory studies for commissioned; studies for works they would like to carry out; sketches after other artists' work; even doodles - all contain clues about artists' intentions, their roles as teachers, their relations with patrons, their character and methods. Using the many excellent published catalogues of works by artists such as Annibale Carracci, Rubens, Rembrandt, Claude Lorrain and Poussin, the seminar will give students a chance to think about drawings and process in the 17th century. There will be an exhibition of Old Master Drawings in Pittsburgh Collections at the Frick Museum in Point Breeze during the semester allowing us some access to original material. No prior experience with drawings is necessary.
HAA 2301 Special Topics (Baroque) - Poussin, Claude, and the Classical Landscape Tradition
Ann Sutherland Harris
This seminar is planned to take advantage of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York next spring devoted to the landscape painting of Nicolas Poussin curated by Pierre Rosenberg [former Director of the Louvre] and with essays by other scholars, including Claire Pace, who has written eloquently about the literary sources of the landscapes of Poussin, Claude and others. There will be a scholarly symposium at the Met. during the run of the show, which I hope the seminar can attend. Students will be encouraged to develop topics that explore the changing status of this genre in Rome (and/or Italy) during the 17th and 18th centuries, its various functions from purely decorative to more serious content, and the differing patronage and reception of the work of Poussin, Claude, Salvator Rosa and Gaspard Dughet during their lifetimes and afterwards in Europe.
HAA 2400 Speical Topics (Modern) - Architecture by the Book: The Production and Use of Texts, 18th-20th c.
Drew Armstrong
In the wake of the Scientific Revolution, the central tenets of classical aesthetics that underpinned Western architectural theory since antiquity--assumptions about universality and beauty--dissolved in the face of empirical science and cultural relativism. Having always been a hybrid type, architectural writing fragmented into a plethora of divergent approaches, borrowing from any number of scientific disciplines and literary genres, including fiction, autobiography, history, travel writing, linguistic theory, and archaeology. Architectural writing became a forum for new speculative and utopian discourses that responded to social and political change, and was transformed by the emergence of critics, new publics (including children) and institutional frameworks such as academies, technical schools and professional organizations. Architectural writing in the early modern period is a mirror for the processes of modernization and industrialization, reflecting contemporary historical and scientific enquiries as well as economic and nationalist ideologies. This seminar course will be built around the exceptionally rich architectural holdings of the Bernd Collection at the Carnegie Library and the rare book collections at the Hillman and Frick libraries. The objective of this course is to examine individual texts and groups of texts that can be considered as forming distinct discourses within 18th- and 19th-century architectural thought, and to place these texts within the cultural, institutional, and intellectual milieu in which they were produced. Issues such as genre, format, the relationship of texts and images, printing techniques, the publishing industry, patronage networks and collecting will also be considered as part of a comprehensive analysis of architectural writing in the early modern period.
Prerequisite(s): A good reading knowledge of French will be an asset.
HAA 2400 Special Topics (Modern) - Socialism and Post-Socialism in the Arts and Art History
Barbara McCloskey
Recent years have witnessed a boom in exhibits, publications, symposia, and product placement strategies designed to commemorate/capitalize on the legacy of socialism. The socialist project is now declared--in some quarters--to be as moribund as East Germany, the Soviet Union, and other failed states that claimed socialism as their source of political legitimacy. This course will take as its starting point current writing on this phenomenon (Buck-Morss, Scribner, et al), including its relationship to collective memory, nostalgia, globalization, and its implications for Cold War notions of ‘east’ and ‘west.’ We will consider how our particular historical moment has recently shaped and reshaped art historical analyses of Socialist Realism and avant-garde art of the past (Clark, Groys, Bürger, and others); and conduct our own archeology of the socialist imaginary in the relevant writings and arts of those (Morris, Benjamin, Lukacs, to name but a few possibilities) who ventured to think through questions of art, politics, alienation, and emancipation from the 19th century through World War II and beyond. Participants will engage in weekly discussion of assigned texts, occasional seminar presentations, and the writing of a research paper on some aspect of the relationship between art, art history, and socialism in the modern and contemporary periods.
HAA 2400 Special Topics (Modern) - Nationalism, Postnationalism, and the Arts
Barbara McCloskey
This reading course is designed to explore the changing nature of visual culture studies on Central Europe and Russia since the breakup of the USSR and the formation of the European Union in the 1980s and 1990s. The reconfiguration of geo-political boundaries, opening of archives, and recent staging of major and revisionist exhibitions have prompted a new look at nationalist and internationalist tendencies in the arts of 20th century Europe and Russia. Weekly readings will include a survey of theoretical literature pertaining to the issue of nation and culture (Anderson, Hobsbawm, Mosse, et. al) as well as more focused studies that have begun to take up these issues with respect to the arts of Europe and Russia. Students concentrating on area studies outside of 20th century Europe and Russia are also welcome and will have the opportunity to consider their own research areas in light of the theories and issues we will take up in weekly discussion. Course requirements include occasional class presentations and a final research paper.
HAA 2400 Special Topics (Modern) - Modernism
Joshua Ellenbogen
This course examines the key theories, debates, concepts, and critical discussions that accompanied the development of modernist practice between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. The course aims to provide in-depth scrutiny of certain crucial discourses that informed the visual arts during one of their most revolutionary periods, and to conceptualize the often complex relations between such theories and material practices in art. Among the concerns on which the course focuses will be definitions of modernity, the concept of the avant-garde, understandings of spectatorship, theories of perception, and forms of interaction between artistic and extra-artistic cultural formations. Although its primary focus will be the visual arts, those aspects of modernist theory on which the course concentrates will also hold interest for students of literature and music, as well as for students of intellectual and cultural history more generally.
HAA 2400 Special Topics (Modern) - Art and Humanism in World War II
Barbara McCloskey
This seminar will explore the intersection between art, German exile, and the crisis of humanistic thought in the World War II era. We will begin with an analysis of the 'origins'of this crisis in the 1920s (precipitated by the events of World War I, the post-war rise of industrial technocracy, and the emergence of mass politics and culture) and its impact on German art and architecture of that era. We will also consider the famous Expressionism debates between Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, Brecht, and Lukacs of the mid-1930s that assessed the relationship between art, (Marxist) humanism, rationality, and the rise of fascism. Our attention will then turn to the works of German exile artists and intellectuals in the United States, including Thomas Mann, George Grosz, Erwin Panofsky, Max Ernst, Siegfried Kracauer, Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Hannah Arendt, and others, as they reflected in word and image on the humanistic tradition they felt themselves to represent and the fate of that tradition in a world transformed by the realities of dictatorship and war. In his recent call for the revival of a critical humanism (Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 2003), Edward Said drew attention to the changing character of humanistic thought, study, and practice in the post-World War II era. His writing also underscored the evermore urgent need for a recovery of humanism's pre-World War II critical potential, as well as its promise of a non-hegemonic universalism appropriate to our current global crisis. The writings and works to be considered in this course will be evaluated in light of Said's observations while providing us with a vivid archeology of humanistic thought before, during, and after World War II. In particular, our readings and discussions will also prompt us to consider humanism's relationship to the claims and purposes of art then and now. Participants will engage in weekly discussion of assigned readings, produce a research paper relevant to the course theme, and present the results of that research in a formal class presentation at the end of the term.
HAA 2400 Special Topics (Modern) - Architecture and Historicism in 19th-century France and Britain
Drew Armstrong
This course will investigate two dominant strands of architectural writing in nineteenth-century France and Britain that contributed to the development of historicism, the first being texts on architectural history and theory that formed the basis of the French Beaux-Arts design curriculum, the second being works on medieval architecture that were part of revivalist discourses in both France and Britain. In addition to examining canonical works by major theorists such as Quatremere de Quincy, Pugin, Ruskin, and Viollet-le-Duc, a range of texts such as archaeological monographs and professional periodical literature will also be discussed. This seminar course will be built around the exceptionally rich architectural holdings of the Bernd Collection at the Carnegie Library and the rare book collections at the Hillman and Frick libraries. The objective of this course is to examine the language and ideas of various authors whose thinking contributed significantly to the development of historicist discourse, and to place their texts within the cultural, institutional, and intellectual milieu in which they were produced. Issues such as genre, format, the relationship of texts and images, printing techniques, the publishing industry, patronage networks and collecting will also be considered as part of a comprehensive analysis of architectural writing in nineteenth-century. A good reading knowledge of French will be an asset.
HAA 2400 Special Topics (Modern) - War in Visual Culture
Kirk Savage
This seminar explores the role of war in art, architecture, and visual culture from the Revolutionary period to the present. Readings will range from now classic texts on the theory of war, battle history, and war's aftermath (e.g. Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Keegan, Fussell) to recent scholarship on the dilemmas of visual representation (Sontag, Eisenman). Possible topics include the culture of militarism, commemoration, propaganda and "psy ops," security architecture, the valorization and abuse of the body. Students from a broad range of fields are encouraged to attend; research topics may be adapted to the student's field.
HAA 2401 Special Topics (Contemporary) - The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art and the Global Stage
Okwuie Enwezor
In the last few decades debates centered around the analysis of contemporary art and its relationship to art historical canons have tended to depend on a singularized reading of modernity as bounded by Western/European experience. However, on another level, a different discourse has critiqued the dependency on the Western/European model of modernity as limited and outmoded, especially when seen through the lens of the radical historical changes wrought by processes of decolonization, the end of imperialism and the collapse of communism and apartheid. The critical challenges posed by this tension in the interpretation of modernity is what is referred to in this seminar as the postcolonial constellation: as the nexus of interaction between artistic practices and cultural procedures.
In this seminar we will address questions posed for contemporary art by the historical changes enumerated above. There are two focal points of critical appraisal: the first is on art, artists, and events shaped outside the Western/European context in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. The second concerns how the rise of diasporic communities have exacerbated the discourse of national cultures creating a radical inversion of questions of identity while redefining the discourse of contemporary art within the global stage.
HAA 2401 Special Topics ( Contemporary) - Theory and Practices of Production
Terry Smith
Two major sets of questions and practice will be explored: a. The theorization of the following concepts: modernity, modern art, modernism; postmodernity and postmodernism; contemporary art and theory in the conditions of contemporaneity. b. Specific practices of production as well as modes of consumption, including their interplay, in the visual arts and related cultural forms, such as contemporary art, architecture, new media, design, print media, film and television. Some of the issues to be addressed: the changing theorizations of modernity and postmodernity, the persistence of the past, the resilience of the institutions, the impact of new technologies, the nature of contemporaneity, cultural difference and différance, communication between cultures, the theory of iconomy, and questions of cultural value formation including cultural economics. Terry Smith will present work in progress. Seminar participants are invited to develop papers that approach the above issues in relation to their own research interests. The course should be of interest to students in history of art and architecture, cultural studies, film studies, philosophy, communication, anthropology and sociology.
HAA 2401 Special Topics (Contemporary) - Modernities and Modernisms: Times, Values, Worlds
Terry Smith
The main aim of the seminar will be to explore historical and current understandings of modernity in relation to modern social formations and modernism within visual cultures, especially those of the visual arts, architecture, film and mass media. Drawing on a number of classic, recent and new texts we will focus on the ways in which a number of artists, critics and theorists have identified the key constituents of modernity and modernism, and contrast them to other explanations of similar and related phenomena. While the initial focus will be on the etymology of the concept "modern", we will develop a sense of the history of its having been experienced and thought, noting differences in approach in different parts of the world. Finally, we will explore how modernity and modernism look today, from within their aftermath.
HAA 2401 Special Topics (Contemporary) - Exhibition Systems
Okwui Enwezor
The topic will be approached from within three distinct but related frameworks: historical, theoretical and practical. 1) an archaeology of exhibitions; 2) framing the institution, questions of reception, the subject of curating and its transcultural and contemporary implications. (This part will be augmented with readings in cultural studies, art history, philosophy (Kant, Benjamin, Adorno, Hall, Said, Appadurai, Krauss, and others); 3) the question of space and time in the making of an exhibition, etc. (The construction of an imaginary exhibition which will be the final project.)
HAA 2401 Special Topics (Contemporary) - Contemporary Visual Cultures: Modernity & Contemporaneity
Terry Smith
A number of issues concerning the visual arts in modernity and in the conditions of contemporaneity will be addressed. These include the changing theorizations of modernity and postmodernity, the multiplicity of temporalities, the persistence of the past, the resilience of the institutions, the impact of new technologies, the nature of contemporaneity, cultural difference and différance, communicated between cultures, the theory of iconomy, and questions of cultural value formation including cultural economics Outcomes from the 2004 Symposium on Modernity & Contemporaneity: Antinomies of Art & Culture after the 20th Century. The scope includes all visual arts and related cultural forms and theoretical practice, such as contemporary art, architecture, new media, design, print media, film and television. Terry Smith will present work in progress. Seminar participants are invited to develop papers that approach the above issues in relation to their own research interests. The course should be of interest to students in history of art and architecture, cultural studies, film studies, philosophy, communication, anthropology and sociology.
HAA 2401 Special Topics (Contemporary) - World Picturing and Worldmaking in Contemporary Visual Cultures
Terry Smith
This seminar will explore the connections and disjunctions, in the conditions of contemporaneity, between two kinds of cultural imagining. First, efforts to understand, through various kinds of projective picturing, the interaction of political, economic and cultural forces around and across the globe. Second, smaller acts of worldmaking - constant or occasional, and conventional or exceptional - in local, specific, concentrated situations. Much current thinking in art history, art criticism and cultural studies deploys these two senses of "world," and understands that it is the recent, and growing, contestation between South and North (itself better understood, perhaps, as the fallout of processes of decolonisation and globalization, as a postcolonial constellation) that has posed "world art history" as a problem for the discipline of art history, "world art" as a problem for art practice, criticism and curatorship, and the contemporaneousness of difference as a problem for cultural studies. The seminar will examine certain key texts (by authors such as Heidegger, Mitchell, Appadurai, Zizek, Agamben and Ranciere), the output of influential critics, curators and historians, and the practices of a number of visual artists working in a variety of media that engage directly or indirectly with these questions.
HAA 2401 Special Topics (Contemporary) - Time, Space, and Being in Contemporary Art, Architecture, and Everyday Life
Terry Smith
Taking advantage of the 55th Carnegie International, which is devoted to the theme "Life on Mars," the seminar will explore the ways in which contemporary artists are exploring the widespread sense of the ever-increasing strangeness of everyday life. In parallel, it will also explore the ways in which architects are responding to the challenges to their practice posed by contemporary conditions. Both topics will be considered in the light of methodological questions concerning the nature of the (incomplete) transitions from late modern to contemporary art and architecture. Key texts that treat these topics will be reviewed. The seminar will pay special regard to the ways in which artists and architects are imagining place within larger world pictures, time within asynchronous temporalities, and space as zones of mobility and fixity between both. The 55th Carnegie International is showing at the Carnegie Museum of Art throughout the semester. Its curators will participate in the seminar.
HAA 2500 Special Topics (American) - The Washington, D.C. Mall: Landscape and Power
Kirk Savage
The Mall in Washington, D.C. – the unified symbolic center of the world’s most powerful nation – is a relatively recent invention. Before the 1930s the area was a highly diversified landscape (racially, ecologically, aesthetically). How and why this landscape metamorphosed into a unified “monumental core” for the nation will occupy the attention of our seminar. For theoretical underpinnings we will read around in cultural geography, landscape aesthetics, and urban planning, while staying grounded in the historical specificity of this transformation. Student research projects may focus on Mall-related topics or on other landscapes that raise similar issues (cross-cultural perspectives are welcome).
HAA 2600 Special Topics (Chinese) - Building a Chinese World: Cities, Offices and Homes
Kathy Linduff
The design of Chinese cities, offices and homes follow principles that reflect the Chinese worldview. This system, or outlook, was already established in the early Dynastic period when imperial cities followed a regular grid pattern that faced south, and included an inner city, open only to the imperial leaders and aristocrats, and an outer city in which the business was carried out. The design and use of the city is guided by Confucian and Daoist ideals and embodied socio-political aspirations. Religious centers followed these Palace designs, but were tied to Buddhist, Confucian and Daoist practice. Village centers are arranged according to Daoist ideas about nature called fengshui. Homes had to accommodate status, ethnic background, gender, age and size of the family, among other things. We will analyze the spatial organization of these places as well as the buildings, relate that to their function, and interpret these settings in the context of time and place of their creation.
HAA 2601 Special Topics (Japanese) - Japanese Landscape Painting
Karen Gerhart
The course is designed to investigate landscape traditions in Japan from their beginnings in pre-history to their florescence in the Edo period (1603-1867). We will examine native yamato-e conventions, as well as various styles imported and adapted from China. Other topics of interest will be the relationship of landscapes to gardens and to architecture and the symbolic and religious meanings of landscape in Japanese culture.
HAA 2601 Special Topics (Japanese) - Objects & Images in Japanese Rituals
Karen Gerhart
Although many of the objects and images we encounter in museum settings today were originally made for mortuary or other types of rituals in Japan, we generally treat them as "art" and have forgotten why they were made or how they were used. In this course, we will study objects and images from a wide range of historical periods and seek to reconstruct their meaning, function, and ritual context.
HAA 2601 Special Topics (Japanese) - The State of the Field in Pre-modern Japanese Art History
Karen Gerhart
This course is designed to examine current research methods and "problems" in the study of pre-modern Japanese art history. We will read and discuss books, articles, and exhibition catalogs published within the last decade and explore how these materials have influenced and shaped the field.
HAA 2601 Special Topics (Japanese) - Representations of Death
Karen Gerhart
Paintings and other types of ritual objects associated with death are well collected in museums and valued for their aesthetic appeal. Most are displayed in isolation and discussed without context. In this seminar, we will examine a broad range of images that are the focus of death rituals or are in some way related to the experience. Topics include objects found in and around early graves, paintings and ritual implements used for Buddhist funerals and mortuary services, and objects used to placate ghosts.
HAA 2602 Special Topics (Asian) - Warring States, Qin & Han Art
Anthony Barbieri-Low
This seminar will look at themes and problems addressed in recent scholarship on the art history and archaeology of the Warring States (453-222 BCE), Qin (221 BC-207 BC), and Han (206 BCE - 220 CE) periods in China. Topics to be addressed include: 1) City sites, palaces, and urbanism 2) Elite tombs and their furnishings 3) Representational and decorative art.
HAA 2602 Special Topics (Asian) - China/Japan Silk Road
Karen Gerhart and Kathy Linduff
This course focuses on the visual arts that were seen, traded, and produced along the Silk Road, that vast network of paths that connected goods, peoples and ideas from East Asia (including China, Japan and Korea) with Eurasia, West Asia and eastern Europe. Recent excavations as well as studies of materials from these trade routes have located all sorts of artifacts and material evidence dating from at least as early as the fourth millennium BCE. We can now document contact among the peoples from this early period through the 8th century. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Jainism, and a great many other religions along with Buddhism and Daoism were practiced in various locations for thousands of years and affected the arts, as did the political and economic aspirations of their patrons. The goal of this course is to understand cultural interaction and exchange, to develop skills in critical reading, writing, and thinking, and to explore visual cultures that developed in a rich context of the Silk Road.
HAA 2901 and HAA 2902 Directed Study
Directed study for History of Art and Architecture graduate students.
HAA 2905 Comprehensive Exam Preparation
This course is an independent study for Ph.D. students who are actively preparing for their comprehensive exams. The student works under the supervision of a dissertation advisor, with the assistance of other members of the dissertation committee. Committee and student agree on bibliographies in advance, and the student is encouraged to discuss the readings on a regular basis with his or her advisor and other members of the committee if necessary.
HAA 2906 Dissertation Prospectus
This course is an independent study for Ph.D. students who are preparing their dissertation prospectus. Working under the supervision of a dissertation advisor, the student writes a prospectus that summarizes the dissertation topic, its original contribution to the field, and its methodology. The prospectus should also include a brief chapter outline, a research plan, and a bibliography-the whole document totaling approximately 10 to 20 pages.
HAA 2970 Teaching of Art History
Kirk Savage
Through a combination of peer instruction, faculty guidance, and class discussion/feedback, we will examine and practice some of the core skills of good teaching in art history. The course will consist of a series of bi-weekly meetings (3 hours each) each focusing on a core issue of pedagogy; in each meeting student-teachers will prepare lessons and/or exercises and use the class as a teaching laboratory. The final written product will be a teaching statement and sample syllabus for inclusion in a teaching portfolio.
HAA 3000 Research and Dissertation PhD
Ph.D. dissertation research and writing
HAA East Asian Research
Prof. Evelyn Rawski
Combined with EAS2005, HIST2402
The successful researcher must be able to tap the many resources available on the web and in conventional print media with disciplinary perspectives and knowledge of the secondary literature. This graduate seminar is intended to provide students with a forum in which to develop the conceptual and other skills necessary for the writing of research papers. East Asian Library professionals will introduce a variety of electronic and printed bibliographic and reference tools in Japanese and Chinese and assist individuals on their specific research topics. Each student will present his research project to the class and turn in a written research paper or draft. The seminar is open to students in the IDMA program as well as others in the disciplinary M.A. and Ph.D. programs.