An introduction to the use of digital media in the context of contemporary art practice. Students explore content development and design principles through a series of projects involving text, still image and moving image. This class involves critical discussions of studio projects in relation to contemporary art and theory. A required fee of $25 to cover group-supplied materials is charged at the time of registration. Enrollment limited to 14.

The meanings we ascribe to art works of any culture or time period are a direct result of our own preoccupations and methods. This colloquium gives a broad overview of contemporary debates in the history of art and locates these methods within art history’s own intellectual history. Among the topics we consider: technologies of vision; histories of interpreting art across cultural boundaries; colonialism and the history of art and globalism. The course consists of wide-ranging weekly readings and discussion, giving special attention to the intersection of art history and museum exhibitions.

Topics course. Students may take up to four semesters of ARH 280 Art Historical Studies, as long as the topics are different.: A major artistic genre, portraiture invites us to examine historically changing notions of identity, personal and collective, private and public. Within a broad time span (antiquity to contemporary practices), the main focus is on Western paintings created between 1400 and 1900.

Topics course. Students may take up to four semesters of ARH 280 Art Historical Studies, as long as the topics are different.: This class explores the genesis and development of manga, situating manga in its historical context, appreciating it as an integral part of Japanese art and culture that is as complex and compelling as it is popular. Dealing with a range of genres of manga and manga-related media—illustrated narrative scrolls, woodblock prints, popular picture books, strip comics, and animated cartoons—we revisit traditional notions of what the popular visual form has been and can be.

This course explores how art and architecture have profoundly shaped visual experiences and shifting understandings of the past and present. Featuring different case studies, each section includes work with original objects, site visits and writings about art.

This course explores how art and architecture have profoundly shaped visual experiences and shifting understandings of the past and present. Featuring different case studies, each section includes work with original objects, site visits and writings about art.

We examine how the iconic status of woman as moral redeemer and social pathbreaker is shadowed by a darker view of female self and sexuality in some representative works by male authors of the Russian 19th century. The primary texts are Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Turgenev’s On The Eve, Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done?, Dostoevsky’s A Gentle Spirit and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and the Kreutzer Sonata. These novelistic narratives are supplemented with theoretical essays by Belinsky, J.S. Mill, Schopenhauer and Vladimir Soloviev.

A close reading of all the major literary works by Dostoevsky, with special attention to the philosophical, religious and political issues that inform Dostoevsky’s search for a definition of Russia’s spiritual and cultural identity. In translation.

Topics course.: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–15) is allegedly the first and most influential modern novel. We approach this hilarious masterpiece by Cervantes through a “queering” focus, i.e., as a text that exposes binary oppositions (literary, sexual, social, religious and ethnic) such as: high-low, tradition vs. individual creativity, historical vs. literary truth, man vs. woman, authenticity vs. performance, Moor vs. Christian, humorous vs. tragic.

This course presents a variety of practices and positions within the field of literary theory. Approaches include structuralism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, gender and queer studies, cultural studies and postcolonial studies. Emphasis on the theory as well as the practice of these methods: their assumptions about writing and reading and about literature as a cultural formation. Readings include Freud, Lacan, Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Bakhtin, Gramsci, Bhabba, Butler, Said, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Žižek.