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.

Art history's disciplinary origins are inextricable from European colonialism and imperialism, and often work to uphold racialized concepts of development, civilization, style. The contemporary practice of art history demands that we acknowledge these origins while imagining a decolonized art history for the present. Drawing from decolonial paradigms, recent scholarship, and foundational texts of critical race studies, we work to analyze and actively reconfigure conventions of field formation, research, and format. In keeping with the political imperative of praxis, students workshop research topics and problems individually and collectively.

A study of the nature and impact of Greek contact with the Near East in the Early Iron Age to unpack and critically assess the concept of an "Orientalizing" style and phenomenon. Course examines chronology; trade; technology and innovation; communication and exchange; consumption and display; and the "exotic." Emphasis placed on material culture, analyzed with a view to developments in settlement and society, e.g. migration, colonization, social stratification, and the rise of the polis. Reading knowledge of German and French required.

What possibilities have emerged for psychoanalytic studies in the 21st cent.? Seminar addresses recent turns to psychoanalysis in history and criticism of art and literature. In reading psychoanalytic theories and critical writings, paths and detours lead to questions and problems of terminology, translation, representation, and mediation, and to explorations of works of art and literature that might be understood as instances of psychoanalytic criticism and/or critiques of psychoanalysis. Need for critical reflection on the meaningfulness of psychoanalytic theories for current scholarship in the humanities is a guiding concern of seminar.

This seminar explores how the subjects, concepts, and methods of natural history manifested in image-making within the arts and sciences in Europe and America, ca. 1750-1900. Visualization as a strategy of knowing is a central concern, as are the particular forms that the chief operations of natural history -- description, classification, and the delineation of difference -- took within the domain of images. Topics include early modern images of the Americas and indigenous civilizations, the visual culture of "race science," visualizations of deep time, picturing nature after Darwin, and the human and the animal.

The course focuses on the intellectual stock of the field of Chinese painting. It offers an opportunity to rethink the topics and issues that important studies in the field have addressed. The goal of the seminar is to guide the Ph.D. students on how to tackle these topics and issues raised by previous scholarship.