This course is intended to ensure a continuing breadth of exposure to contemporary art-historical discourse and practices. It requires attendance and participation in the department lecture/seminar series. Students must take the course sequentially in each of their first four semesters and take the appropriate letter version of the course (A,B,C,or D) based on their semester of study. The course is taken in addition to the normal load of three courses per semester and is for first- and second-year graduate students only. Topics discussed cover all fields of Art History and address current questions and practices.

The seminar focuses on Roman historical representations - an innovation of the Romans - and addresses not only the problem of their historical reference but, in many cases, their reconstruction from the fragmentary remains.

Course addresses relationship between color and technology in the arts. It questions the proprieties of color materiality, nature of pigments and their usage. Quest for natural and synthetic colors emerging from laboratory research by alchemists and chemists. Hazardous scientific discoveries impacting the artistic field. Economic implications of color discovery and patenting. Color trends indicating social changes. Links between light and vision theory and applications in the arts. Recreation of artistic technology as a community self identification. Global exchange of color technology. Problems in conservation and display of colored objects.

During the Renaissance, printmaking emerged as a powerful and pervasive mode of artistic expression that redefined originality and transformed visual communication. Variously experimental, documentary, propagandistic, proto-scientific, and illustrational objects, prints were market-sensitive as well as aesthetically adventurous and often elitist in their content. Centered as much as possible on prints from the collection, this course considers material and technical issues as well as broader historical and interpretive topics. Artists include Schongauer, Dürer, Lucas van Leyden, Bruegel, Mantegna, and Raphael.

In this seminar we investigate the interpenetration of aesthetics and politics in the interwar period, structuring our conversation around particular debates, such as the question of violence in Sorel and Marinetti, the problem of sovereignty in Schmitt and Benjamin, the polemics about modernism and realism around Lukacs, the base materialism of the Collège de Sociologie, the rise of factography in the USSR, and the return to dis/order in France and Italy.

The undressed human form has been a major subject in Western art since the classical period, but presented particular challenges to photographers, who depicted "real" rather than idealized bodies. This course explores the practices of fine arts, pornographic, medical, and ethnographic representations of the body, with particular emphasis on artists' responses to nude photographs; photography's contribution to new "scientific" typologies of race, criminality, and health; and ongoing debates over censorship, pornographic, and privacy.

Scholars have long recognized the importance of the theme of antiquarianism in Chinese art. However, recent scholarly interest in the issues associated with copying, replication and multiple temporalities in art provides new perspectives on and approaches to this old theme and greatly enriches related discussions on it. This seminar takes a new look at the recurring tendency of antiquarianism in Chinese art by engaging with four important mediums (painting, calligraphy, bronzes and ceramics) and their frequent incidents of transmediality.