Cosponsor(s): Department of Art & Archaeology and Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies

The sanctuary of the Great Gods on the Greek island of Samothrace was home to one of the ancient world’s most renowned mystery cults. The kings and queens who vied to succeed Alexander the Great funded lavish building projects at the…

Organized by Suzie Hermán, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Art & Archaeology, Princeton University, and Alexander Collin, Ph.D. Candidate, Amsterdam School of Historical Studies, University of Amsterdam

Thursday 12 May & Friday 13 May, 9 AM - 5 PM CET and 3 AM - 11 AM EST

Hansards in the World gathers and promotes new…

Sponsor(s): Department of Art and Archaeology

‘Quality’ is one of those words that implicitly underpins a canon or canons of art history. Mosaics – of any period - are rarely included in the canons of art history, and mosaic as a medium is perceived as lurking somewhere between ‘art’ and ‘craft’. These two sentences are…

Organized by Suzie Hermán, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Art & Archaeology, Princeton University, and Alexander Collin, Ph.D. Candidate, Amsterdam School of Historical Studies, University of Amsterdam

Thursday 12 May & Friday 13 May, 9 AM - 5 PM CET and 3 AM - 11 AM EST

Hansards in the World gathers and promotes new…

Cosponsor(s): Princeton University Art Museum and Department of Art & Archaeology

In February 1917, the American photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn staged a modest show of eighteen photographs and thirteen watercolors at the London Camera Club. By looking at the context of this exhibition of what his friend Ezra Pound…

Cosponsor(s): Princeton University’s Humanities Council Exploratory Grant in Collaborative Humanities, Center for Digital Humanities, Department of Art & Archaeology, Lewis Center for the Arts, and School of Architecture; 2021-24 Public Humanistic Inquiry Lab, Colby College; Confabulations: Durham University Institute for Medical Humanities…

Cosponsor(s):This series of events is co-organized by Dumbarton Oaks in collaboration with North of Byzantium and Connected Central European Worlds, 1500–1700. Sponsors and Endorsers: Dumbarton Oaks | Princeton University (Art & Archaeology) | Boise State University | Tufts University College Art Association (CAA) | Byzantine Studies…

Cosponsor(s): Organized by the P.Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Center for East Asian Art and cosponsored by the Princeton University Art Museum, the Department of Art and Archaeology, the East Asian Studies Program, and the Buddhist Studies Workshop.

Strategically located on the edge of the Taklamakan desert in…

Sponsor(s): Department of Art and Archaeology

This lecture investigates the images and inscriptions at the Monastery of St. Catherine at Sinai, Egypt, to demonstrate that vision and voice are decisively dispersed at each of the Monastery’s major thresholds and in the framework of the theophanies it offers. In doing so,…

Philip IV of Spain (1605–1665) began his reign in 1621, at the age of sixteen, with the intent of restoring Spanish might and reputation internationally, in response to a period of perceived erosion and decline. The near-simultaneous end of a twelve-year truce with the Dutch Republic, which resulted in the resumption of warfare,…

Cosponsor(s): Department of African American Studies, Department of Art & Archaeology, Center for Collaborative History, Center for Health and Wellbeing, Humanities Council, Princeton Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities, Prison Teaching Initiative, Program for Community-Engaged Scholarship, School of Architecture…

Cosponsor(s): Department of Art & Archaeology, Department of Near Eastern Studies, and The Program in Medieval Studies

Cairo is a city with many superlative epithets. To the Egyptians, it is Misr (Egypt), Umm al-Dunya (Mother of the World), and the “City of Thousand Minarets,” for its unparalleled concentration of…

Cosponsor(s): Program in Visual Arts and Department of Art and Archaeology. The Black Earth series is supported through the John Sacret Young ’69 Lecture Series fund.

Filmmaker John Akomfrah screens two of his films. The Call of Mist (Redux), set on a remote Scottish island, is an elegy to his late mother and a vivid…

Cosponsor(s): Program in Visual Arts and Department of Art and Archaeology. The Black Earth series is supported through the John Sacret Young ’69 Lecture Series fund.

Conceived by Kahlil Joseph and fugitive broadcasting since 2019, BLKNWS presents an uninterrupted stream of highly-curated found footage, originally…

Cosponsor(s): Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) and the Program in Archaeology | Ettinghausen Lecture

Akkadian art is heralded as an innovative breakthrough in large part due to its ostensibly naturalistic renderings, such as the sculptural plasticity of figural forms and the appearance of landscape-like elements…

The inventive work of the artisans who dressed the court of Philip IV has always been visible in Diego Velázquez’s court portraits, yet the tailors, embroiderers, farthingale-makers, shoemakers, and their colleagues have long been forgotten, largely ignored by historians and art historians. None of the garments that they made have…

Cosponsor(s): The Graduate School and Center for Collaborative History

Join us for the second event in the series “Art and Empires: New World Views.” Speakers Zirwat Chowdhury and Kailani Polzak will present their recent work on empire and enlightenment in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Both scholars work between…

Cosponsor(s): The Humanities Council Exploratory Grant in Collaborative Humanities, the Center for Digital Humanities, and the Department of Art & Archaeology

British-Bahamian curator and cultural worker Natalie Willis will discuss her curatorial practice, how it is shaped by a motivation to care for people…

Cosponsor(s): The Graduate School and the Center for Collaborative History

Empires put pressure on our capacities to perceive them, and empire is a theoretical object that demands perspectival multiplicity. This is the first event in a series that brings into conversation artists and scholars whose work articulates, complicates and…

Postponed till Fall '22. Please check website for updates.

Cosponsor(s): Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) and the Program in Archaeology | Clayburgh Lecture

Roman cities present a patchwork of socio-economic contrast, with enormous civic monuments mixed among more modest spaces from shops to sewers, not…

Using works like John Bell’s Octoroon (1868) and Robert Gavin’s Quadroon Girl (ca. 1872) as case studies, this talk explores Britons’ pronounced and continued fascination with the figure of the enslaved American mixed-race beauty—even and especially after the abolition of slavery in the United States rendered the potential of such…

Cosponsor(s): The Index of Medieval Art, Department of Art & Archaeology, the Center for Culture, Society and Religion, the Program in Medieval Studies, the German Department, Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS), Humanities Council, Delaware Valley Medieval Association and The Morgan Library and Museum

Generally speaking, in art period names have been of three kinds: political-dynastic (i.e., Periklean, Augustan or Carolingian), cultural (i.e., Medieval or Renaissance) and aesthetic (Classic, Mannerist, Baroque, for instance). The chronology of art history has tended to associate stylistic and formal terminology with historical…

Seven speakers will consider the role played by fragments and fragmentation in the medieval and modern understanding of works of art. Their half-hour papers will address such topics as the use or reuse of fragments in the creation of new works; quotation and replication as a kind of fragmentation; fragmentation of the perceptual or conceptual…

Cosponsor(s): Department of Art & Archaeology and Tang Center for East Asian Art

From tilling and planting to food preparation, shop-tending, and drawing water, representations of physical labor have a long history of depiction within East Asian art. The reasons behind their appearance are familiar: they underscore…

Cosponsor(s): Labyrinth Books, Department of African American Studies, Department of Art and Archaeology, the Humanities Council and the Princeton Public Library.

In Black Bodies, White Gold, Anna Arabindan-Kesson uses cotton, a commodity central to the slave trade and colonialism, as a focus for new…

Cosponsor(s): Labyrinth Books, Humanities Council, and Department of Art & Archaeology

Eating and drinking can be aesthetic as well as sensory experiences. The Hungry Eye takes readers from antiquity to the Renaissance to explore the central role of food and drink in literature, art, philosophy, religion, and…

Cosponsor(s): This event is sponsored by The Humanities Council Exploratory Grant in Collaborative Humanities, the Center for Digital Humanities, and the Department of Art & Archaeology

What do the pregnancy test, the pessary, the at-home abortion kit, the state of family leave, midwifery care, and postpartum practices…

Cosponsor(s): German Department, Program in European Cultural Studies, Department of Classics, Department of Art and Archaeology, Department of Comparative Literature, and the Program in Media and Modernity

Idyll and utopia both refer to depictions of the satisfaction of needs in a temporal and spatial…

Cosponsor(s): Program in American Studies; Program in Asian American Studies; Department of Art and Archaeology; and Lewis Center for the Arts

Following a walk-through of the exhibition, Nadal will facilitate discussion between curator and professor Patrick Flores of the University of the Philippines and the NExSE …

The color field abstraction Frank Bowling produced during his time in New York from 1966 to 1975 was made possible by transatlantic journeys that cast the narrative of late modernism in an altered light. By looking closely at Bowling’s improvisational approach to the materiality of paint, this lecture examines cross-cultural…

Cosponsor(s):Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) and the Program in Archaeology | Thompson Lecture

In 1923, in the heart of the Minoan settlement of Knossos, in the outskirts of the immense Palace, Arthur Evans and Duncan Mackenzie unearthed the remains of a small but imposing building. The rich deposit of…

Cosponsor(s): The Humanities Council Exploratory Grant in Collaborative Humanities, the Center for Digital Humanities, and the Departments of African American Studies and Art & Archaeology

Building off the new emphasis on black women’s intellectual history, Deirdre Cooper Owens probes Harriet Tubman's intellectual…

Against the narrative of a global crisis of art criticism that has emerged almost exclusively from debates in Europe and America, this lecture considers alternative procedures of thought and modes of art writing that have their historical emergence in the global south. It will focus, in particular, on the figure of the art critic in…

Cosponsors: The Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity and the Center for Collaborative History

Monastery wall paintings in Syria and Egypt, the illuminations of the Rabbula Gospels, and the architecture and decorations of churches in regions as diverse as Turkey and India are just some of the rich visual culture extant from the…

Cosponsor(s): This event is sponsored by The Humanities Council Exploratory Grant in Collaborative Humanities, the Center for Digital Humanities, and the Departments of African American Studies, Art & Archaeology, and Religion

In 1967 a government inspector reported that conditions for Black patients in psychiatric…