Topics course.: A consideration of the ancient city: architecture, painting, sculpture and objects of everyday life. Women and freed people as patrons of the arts are emphasized. The impact of the rediscovery of Pompeii and its role as a source of inspiration in 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century art is discussed. No prerequisite.Group A

Topics course. Students may take up to four semesters of ARH 280 Art Historical Studies, as long as the topics are different.: This class will take an interdisciplinary look at cultural production in the United States during the Depression years between the stock market crash (1929) and the nation’s entry into WWII (1941). We will examine primary and secondary texts and look closely at visual forms across media (film, painting, photography, graphic arts, muralism) in our focus on cultural democracy—its sites, definitions, and practices.

Topics course. Students may take up to four semesters of ARH 280 Art Historical Studies, as long as the topics are different.: This courses focuses on Persian ceramics and paintings. We critically consider the Islamic art discipline, develop an in-depth knowledge of Persian art, and curate a public exhibition at the Smith College Museum of Art. This exhibit centers on a new collection of Persian art at the SCMA and students have the unique opportunity to be the first scholar-curators to research these unpublished artworks.

Topics course. Students may take up to four semesters of ARH 280 Art Historical Studies, as long as the topics are different.: An interdisciplinary study of the cult of relics—one of the most distinctive and complex phenomena in the social, religious and artistic life of the Middle Ages. Using both primary texts and the rich body of scholarly literature, we examine a broad range of reliquaries—whether abstract or shaped into a body part; purely ornamental or enhanced with narrative scenes; made of humble or of luxury materials.

Topics course. Students may take up to four semesters of ARH 280 Art Historical Studies, as long as the topics are different.: Since its inception, photography has been discussed as a medium uniquely tethered to reality. This course examines the theoretical underpinnings of this link alongside case studies that put pressure on this assumption. In this course, we will track the following questions: What motivates the desire to make and view images that typically reside outside of a normative field of vision?

This course surveys the major trends in European art and visual culture of the century following the French Revolution of 1789. From prints ridiculing the French king to photographic reports of military conflicts in the British empire, stylistic innovations introduced by avant-garde painters to the demise of state-sponsored art institutions, this course explores how change happens in art, in society, and their relationship to one another.

A survey of the genre from its beginnings in the political and artistic avant-garde movements of Europe at the turn of the 20th century through contemporary American conceptual bookworks. In particular, the course examines the varieties of form and expression used by book artists and the relationships between these artists and the sociocultural, literary and graphic environments from which they emerged.

Topics course.: This seminar asks what medical anthropology can contribute to the study and practice of medical ethics. We begin with a historical overview and introduce the field’s core vocabulary and theoretical paradigms. We then turn to the role of the social sciences in the evolving discussion of medical ethics, noting the late engagement of medical anthropology. A core question is whether there is a meaningful distinction between an anthropology of medical ethics and an anthropology in medical ethics.

Topics course.: Anthropological writing must convey the life-worlds of people and the textures of ethnographic encounters and fieldwork, and engage with and refine anthropological theories. How can writing do all of this at once? And as we craft a narrative, what do we leave out? Do we really describe ethnographic “reality” or do we create anthropological fictions? Why then do we look to ethnographic accounts to understand societies and cultures? Anthropological writing has dealt with these questions and more since its inception but most profoundly since the 1980s.

What can anthropologists teach us about religion as a social phenomenon? This course traces significant anthropological approaches to the study of religion, asking what these approaches contribute to our understanding of religion in the contemporary world. Topics include religious experience and rationality; myth, ritual and magic; rites of passage; function and meaning; power and alienation; religion and politics. Readings are drawn from important texts in the history of anthropology and from contemporary ethnographies of religion.