Art has the power to drive as well as reflect history. This course explores artists, images, objects, and buildings that have defined identity, sparked revolution, and changed how people think and act over the last seven centuries. Case studies include works that define the western tradition and others that interrogate its complicated legacy. We will see the rise of the very concept of Art along with the heightened status of the artist in society, the origins of the art museum and of the commercial art market.

This course covers the arts in Northern Europe during a time of upheaval. We will look at developments in panel painting, manuscript illumination, printmaking, and sculpture from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries -- examining shifting patterns of patronage and production along with shifting styles, techniques, and media. We will consider major artists like Jan van Eyck, Albrecht Durer, and Pieter Bruegel, as well as seismic cultural shifts such as the print revolution, the emergence of the woman artist, the Reformation, and the origins of the art market.

This course examines the great ruptures in late 19th and early 20th century art that today we call modernist. It relates aspects of that art to the equally great transformations outside the studio: political revolution, the rise and consolidation of industrial capitalism, colonization and its discontents, and world war. It compares different kinds of modernisms, including those in Austria, France, Germany, Mexico, Spain and Russia.

This course traces the different paths of painting, sculpture, and mixed media in the United States and, to a lesser extent, Western and Eastern Europe between 1945 and 1989. It begins with both the "climax" and "crisis" of modernism in midcentury and the movements and works that the crisis spawned. In the second half of the course, it follows art's relationship with a variety of postmodern subjects and debates. Throughout, it measures the effects of geopolitical tensions on the visual arts.

A survey of painting and sculpture, this course introduces students to the work of individual artists. Classes also develop ways of looking at and thinking about art as the material expression of American social, political, and cultural ideas, including the depictions of nature, race, revolution, and country life. The course focuses on "American Masters": Copley, Stuart, Cole, Church, Eakins, Homer, Sargent, Whistler, and Cassatt are some of the key artists.

Indian popular cinema, known commonly as Bollywood, is usually understood to have weak storylines, interrupted by overblown spectacles and distracting dance numbers. The course explores the narrative structure of Bollywood as what scholar Lalitha Gopalan calls a "constellation of interruptions". We will learn to see Bollywood historically, as a cultural form that brings India's visual and performative traditions into a unique cinematic configuration.

This course surveys major developments in the history of modern architecture from 1850 to the present. We will look at how new materials and emerging technologies changed the underlying possibilities of architectural form, with deliberate focus on how political changes at a global scale -- from world war conflagrations to anticolonial independence movements -- shifted the social stakes of modern architecture.

Geared toward new and prospective majors, this course covers art historical research, writing, critical methods, and career options. Students gain research proficiency in digital and analog library resources. They practice a wide range of scholarly and professional writing types. Readings and discussions highlight theories, methods, and urgent questions facing the field today, while invited speakers give an overview of the professional possibilities. Assignments include oral presentations and exhibition designs as well as frequent written work.

This course will seek to learn where femme creators, across the centuries and around the globe, lived, worked, and exhibited their art. It will ask students to research academic texts, museum exhibition catalogues, auction house sales, and other archival materials to find and make space for women creators who have remained unacknowledged or underappreciated. We will look at traditional objects such as paintings and sculptures as well as performance art, video art, film, fiber arts, decorative arts, handiwork, craftwork, and others to reimagine who and what works belong in a new history of art.

The course explores small objects that allude to large spaces in different periods and regions of Asia. Portable objects represent real and imaginary buildings in Buddhist Central Asia, Islamic West Asia, and Chinese tombs. Persian miniature paintings are sectioned into architectural enclosures. Chinese landscape paintings and Japanese "dry" gardens compress the natural environment itself. In an active learning environment, we will experience the pleasure of scale-shift in small things.