(Offered as ARHA 359, ARCH, 359, BLST 359) This upper-level seminar is a global investigation of the urban built environments of black wealth and prosperity. Beginning with an investigation of the architecture of West African

(Offered as ARHA 347, FAMS 347, and THDA 147) What makes a creative gesture feel unmistakably one’s own? How do artists across disciplines—for example, visual artists, filmmakers, writers, musicians, designers, and performers—develop a perceptual “fingerprint,” a recognizable presence that carries across form, medium, and process? In this intermediate-level studio course, students will explore these questions through weekly experiments, critique, and reflection.

(Offered at ARHA 340 and FAMS 340) This class is an introduction to key concepts in sound design, with a primary (but not exclusive) focus on sound in relation to moving images. Students will gain significant technical training in sound recording, editing, and mixing. In addition, this class will use the act of listening as a point of departure to think about histories, theories, politics, and poetics of sound.

(Offered as ARHA 338 and EUST 338) What is the “work” of an artwork? What roles do labor and materials play in the meaning and aesthetics of art objects? This course will consider these questions in the art history of early modern Europe, Britain, and their burgeoning empires in the Americas and South Asia. From the harvesting and mining of raw materials to manufacturing by hand and machine, we will unpack examples of architecture, ceramics, furniture, paintings, sculptures, textiles, and works on paper.

Symbiosis is a close biological interaction between living organisms. It can be temporary or permanent; positive, neutral, or parasitic; and involve two or thousands of individuals. In this class we will explore a variety of relationships with and within nature through sculpture. Conceptual prompts will be accompanied by material experimentation with “biomaterials”: materials that are grown, cooked, or processed through collaborations with fungi, plants, and bacteria.

Requisite: ARHA 214 or consent of the instructor. Limited to 12 students. Spring 2026: Assistant Professor Monge.

This course will focus on drawing and printmaking as a means of building visual stories through serial description and expression. Studio work will include drawings, watercolor, collage and printmaking techniques with a range of approaches to subject matter based on each student’s individual interests and choices. These include representational, narrative, abstract, and symbol-based imagery, among others. Relief printmaking techniques using wood and synthetic blocks will be taught, as well as the intaglio techniques of monotype and drypoint.

In this intermediate/advanced level course students will explore the practice of documentary photography. This course is structured around individual projects of the student’s own design and is informed by weekly group critiques and in-class visual exercises. We will examine the history, theory and ideological questions and complications of working with those outside of or within one’s own circle of experience.

This course will focus on expanding the definition and activity of drawing to incorporate time-based methods. Students will home in on drawing as an exploratory practice through assignments and activities that shy away from static images and embrace more expansive temporal possibilities. Studio work will engage with various drawing methods, including drawing as performance, silhouettes and stop motion, analog and digital animation tools, automatic drawings, and time-sensitive media such as reactive dyes.

(Offered as ARHA 279 and EUST 279) In this course we will explore Dada and Surrealism as twentieth-century movements in the visual arts, performance, and film. We will place the emergence of Dada and Surrealism into the European context of war and revolution and discuss major artists of the 1910s to 1930s, including Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Hannah Höch, George Grosz, Salvador Dali, René Magritte, and others.

(Offered as ARHA 276 and BLST 276) Can art achieve political change? This course investigates that question in relation to transatlantic campaigns to end chattel slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We will begin by developing familiarity with critical approaches to slavery, visual culture, and the archive, before tracing abolitionist activism across artistic media. We will consider paintings, sculptures, photographs, and decorative arts, as well as imagery that circulated in newspapers and books.