Courses

Spring 2024

An Introduction to the History of Architecture (LA)
Subject associations
ART 102 / ARC 102

A survey of architectural history, from ancient Egypt to contemporary America, that includes comparative material from around the world. This course stresses a critical approach to architecture through the analysis of context, expressive content, function, structure, style, building technology, and theory. Discussion will focus on key monuments and readings that have shaped the history of architecture.

Ten Essential Topics in Chinese Art and Culture (HA)
Subject associations
ART 218 / EAS 238

What was the role of women in Chinese art? How did Chinese people think about this life and the afterlife? Why and how is calligraphy considered an art form in China? These are but three of the questions this course asks and endeavors to explore. Focusing on ten important and provocative topics, this course aims to provide a comprehensive but spotlighted picture of Chinese art and culture. Together the ten point to the interrelated nature of the visual and Chinese philosophical thought, aesthetic values, religious beliefs, social life, political expression and commercial practices.

Instructors
Art and Power in the Middle Ages (HA or LA)
Subject associations
ART 228 / HLS 228 / MED 228 / HUM 228

The course explores how art worked in politics and religion from ca. 300-1200 CE in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Students encounter the arts of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, Judaism and Islam, great courts and migratory societies; dynamics of word and image, multilingualism, intercultural connection, and local identity. We examine how art can represent and shape notions of sacred and secular power. We consider how the work of 'art' in this period is itself powerful and, sometimes, dangerous. Course format combines lecture on various cultural contexts with workshop discussion focused on specific media and materials, or individual examples.

Instructors
Nomi Schneck
Mexican Modernism (LA)
Subject associations
ART 273 / LAS 217

This course will appeal to those interested in Mexican culture and politicized art practices. It will cover major events in Mexican art from approximately 1910 to 1970, ending with the struggles around Mexico '68. Mexican modernism circulated worldwide, and cultural pilgrims rushed to Mexico to learn from their example. For them, the Mexican Revolution was just beginning, having migrated from the political to the cultural realm. Throughout this course, we will consider the relationship of art to revolution and how history works to make meaning from the past.

Instructors
Surrealism at One Hundred (LA)
Subject associations
FRE 358 / ECS 358 / ART 358 / COM 365

This course explores the basic ideas, works, and principles of Surrealism as it developed in France and around the world from the early 1920s into the present. A very wide array of material will cover diverse literary genres and media to show how the Surrealists wanted to revolutionize both art and life in its political and ethical dimensions, as well as the movement's ongoing impact. The course is highly interactive, built around two digital creative and critical projects, which will constitute the students' assignments throughout the semester.

Instructors
Efthymia Rentzou
The Art & Archaeology of Plague (HA or SEN)
Subject associations
ART 361 / HIS 355 / MED 361 / HUM 361

This seminar will examine the historical concept of 'plague' from antiquity to the present using works of art, archaeological contexts, and bioarchaeology. Students will also learn the scientific principles behind each disease outbreak, including how the pathogen was first discovered; how it is currently understood by modern infectious disease experts; and how it functions within the human body and as part of ecosystems. The course will explore in particular the three pandemics of Y. pestis, malaria, and smallpox; the social impact of plagues during the ancient, medieval, early modern, and modern periods; and the history of medicine.

Instructors
Medicine, Literature, and the Visual Arts (EM or LA)
Subject associations
HUM 360 / SLA 362 / ART 363 / AAS 333

This course explores the different ways that medicine is represented in the fields of literature and the visual arts, using the concept of storytelling to examine themes that are at once medical and existential, and that are part of everybody's lives, such as death and dying, epidemics, caregiving, disability, and public health. Focusing on literary texts and art, we'll analyze how these themes are staged in the different sources. We'll develop a toolbox of concepts and techniques by which to investigate the narrative structures used to convey meanings about medicine, be it as a field of knowledge, a set of practices, or a mode of experience.

Enter the New Negro: Black Atlantic Aesthetics (LA)
Subject associations
AAS 341 / ART 375

Born in the late 1800s, the New Negro movement demanded political equality, desegregation, and an end to lynching, while also launching new forms of international Black cultural expression. The visionary modernity of its artists not only reimagined the history of the Black diaspora by developing new artistic languages through travel, music, religion and poetry, but also shaped modernism as a whole in the 20th century. There are required museum trips, mostly to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's new Harlem Renaissance exhibition and to museums in Philadelphia. These trips will take place in lieu of a class meeting.

Instructors
Photography and Fact (EC or LA)
Subject associations
ART 380 / JRN 380

Belief in photography's indexicality has haunted the medium since its inception. Once understood to offer proof of something real, the idea that we might trust a photograph to relay anything genuine now feels absurd. Looking to shifting discourses regarding photography's relationship with objectivity, authenticity, and fact, this course examines the origins and evolution of our understanding of the medium's duplicity. Over the course of the semester, we will trace the historically erratic belief in photography's ability to document and attempt to think critically about the medium's capacity to create, reveal, and critique the real.

Topics in German Film History and Theory: Regimes of Spectacle in Weimar Cinema (EC or LA)
Subject associations
GER 308 / ECS 308 / ART 383 / VIS 317

How do films structure values and desires? What is propaganda? Is there a politics of narration? These and other deeply contemporary questions of media history and theory will be explored through an interdisciplinary interrogation of key works of expressionist, documentary, proletarian, avant-garde, queer, horror, and paranoid-thriller cinema (both silent and sound) produced in Germany during the Weimar Republic (1918-1933). Films and texts will be subjected to close readings, situated in their socio-political, media-historical and cultural context, and examined in light of the reigning debates in film criticism and aesthetics.

Instructors
Thomas Y. Levin
The Body in Space: Art, Architecture, and Performance (LA)
Subject associations
ECS 376 / ARC 376 / ART 386

An interdisciplinary investigation of the status of the human body in the modern reinvention of space within the overlapping frames of art, architecture, and the performing arts from the 1890s to the present. Works by artists, architects, theater designers, and filmmakers will be supplemented by readings on architectural theory, intellectual and cultural history, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and aesthetics.

Instructors
Spyros Papapetros
Language to Be Looked At (LA)
Subject associations
HUM 328 / ENG 270 / ART 396

What does it mean to look at language? What does it mean to read art? Focusing on the intersection of language and visual art in modernist and avant-garde experiments of the 20th and 21st centuries, we study such phenomena as the global rise of concrete and visual poetry, language-based conceptual art, and score-based performances. Utilizing methods drawn from art history, literary studies, history, and philosophy, students explore close looking and reading in relation to such topics as medium, representation, abstraction, networks. Students also as engage material practices by realizing instruction pieces, assembling magazines, etc.

Instructors
Archaeological Methods and Theory (EC)
Subject associations
ART 401

An introduction to the history, methodologies, and theories of archaeology. The seminar discusses topics and problems drawn from a wide range of cultures and periods. Issues include trade and exchange; the origins of agriculture; cognitive archaeology (the study of the mind); biblical archaeology (the use of texts); artifacts in their cultural contexts; and the politics of the past. Emphasis on what constitutes archaeological evidence, how it may be used, and how archaeologists think.

Instructors
Ethics in Archaeology (EM)
Subject associations
ART 402 / HUM 406 / MED 402 / HLS 401

This seminar will explore ethical issues in the study and practice of archaeology, cultural resource management, museum studies, and bioarchaeology. Students are expected to substantively contribute to class discussions on a weekly basis, as well as to lead the discussion of one set of readings. Weekly seminars will be accompanied by a group midterm debate on an assigned ethical issue and an individual final research project (with a class presentation and 20-minute final conversation with Prof. Kay).

Instructors
Advanced Seminar in American Studies: Art, Media & Environmental Justice (CD or LA)
Subject associations
AMS 403 / ENV 403 / ART 406

Connect contemporary American art and visual culture with environmental justice movements. Examines photographers, performers, filmmakers, writers, and other artists, with a focus on Indigenous and other BIPOC artists and media makers. Examines how artists engage with environmental justice movements around climate change and energy transitions, food and water security, land use and land back, biodiversity loss, and allied issues. What roles do the arts play in such movements?

Instructors
Allison Carruth
Antioch through the Ages - Archaeology and History (LA)
Subject associations
ART 418 / HLS 418 / CLA 418 / PAW 418

Antioch was unique among the great cities of the classical world for its position at the crossroads between the Mediterranean and Asia. Students in this course will get exclusive access to the archives and artifacts from Princeton's mostly unpublished Antioch excavations of the 1930s. The focus of the 2024 course will be death and its aftermath in the Greek, Roman, and Islamic worlds, based on excavations in an area just outside the ancient walls of Antioch, which revealed burial remains and the famous and unparalleled Mnemoysne mosaic, which depicts a symposium of women participants.

Instructors
Alan M. Stahl
Nahua Women (LA)
Subject associations
ART 419 / GSS 468 / LAS 414

This course considers the intersecting roles of gender and power, labor and knowledge, sacrifice and sustenance in the conception of Nahua femininity. Students who complete this course will gain familiarity with the culture of Nahuatl-speaking people of central Mexico and the representation of Nahua women. Special attention will be given to the changing perception of Aztec goddesses under colonialism and their Chicanx reclamation, as well as to historical figures such as Malinche, the "tongue" of Hernán Cortés, and Doña Luz Jiménez, muse to the Mexican Muralists following the Revolution.

Instructors
Europe in the Making of Early Modern Chinese Art (HA)
Subject associations
ART 421 / ECS 421 / EAS 421

Direct and regular contact between China and Europe in the early modern period brought new artistic forms and expressions to China and reconfigured the entire picture of Chinese art. Even though China appeared to have been the recipient of European art, it did not play a passive role; in fact, Chinese agents, including emperors, artists, literati, and merchants, appropriated European artistic resources according to their own agendas. This seminar will tackle the multiple dimensions of how European art worked at the Chinese imperial court and in local societies from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century.

Instructors
The Japanese Print (LA)
Subject associations
ART 425 / EAS 425

ART 425 examines Japanese woodblock prints from the 17th - 19th century. We will consider the following: formal and technical aspects of prints; varied subject matter, including the "floating world" of the brothel districts and theatre; Japanese landscape and urban centers; and links between literature and prints, especially the re-working of classical literary themes in popular prints. The seminar will emphasize the study of prints in the university's Art Museum. Students will research Japanese prints from an art gallery in New York and recommend one for purchase for the Museum's collection.

Instructors
Black: The Chromapolitics of Darkness, Shadow, and Light/Life (LA)
Subject associations
VIS 423 / ART 426

"Chromapolitics" challenges us to consider color as neither arbitrary nor neutral, but instead deeply enmeshed in powerful social and cultural dynamics. Structured around creative and collaborative student responses to the work of Black, Latinx and Indigenous artists and thinkers this seminar asks students to reexamine their own use and understanding of color by focusing on the resonances and intensities of the color black and adjacent dark tonalities such as browns, blues, and violets, as well as how shadow, night, and negative space register both in the work of artists and theorists of visual culture and in their experience as makers.

Instructors
Re-Reading American Photographs (LA)
Subject associations
ART 465 / AMS 466

Photography was invented simultaneously in England and France, but so complete was the US intervention in photographic history that by the late 1980s, it was possible to claim that 'even though Americans did not invent photography they should have.' Photography is as much a technological as a discursive invention, and the subject of American photographs have been continuously reinvented throughout the medium's history. This course frequently convenes around Princeton's holdings at Firestone Library.

Instructors
Sicily: An Architectural History (LA)
Subject associations
ART 466 / ARC 466 / URB 466

Despite its position at the center of the Mediterranean, Sicily has long been misunderstood. This seminar intends to provide a survey of the island's rich architectural history from Antiquity to present. Ravaged by volcanic eruptions, seismic activities, and droughts, Sicily has been forced to rebuild itself in the wake of devastation. Through close examination of building projects, visits to Firestone's Special Collections, and guest lecturers, the seminar seeks to provide a fresh look at a vibrant and diverse architectural center. To study the architecture of Sicily is to study architecture in and of the Mediterranean.

Instructors
Sofia A. Hernandez
Art, Apartheid, and South Africa (CD or LA)
Subject associations
AAS 411 / ART 471 / AFS 411

Apartheid, the political doctrine of separation of races in South Africa (1948-1990), dominated the (South) African political discourse in the second half of the 20th century. While it lasted, art and visual cultures were marshaled in the defense and contestation of its ideologies. Since the end of Apartheid, artists, filmmakers, dramatists, and scholars continue to reexamine the legacies of Apartheid and the social, philosophical, and political conditions of non-racialized South Africa. Course readings examine issues of race, nationalism and politics, art and visual culture, and social memory in South Africa.

Instructors
Art and Politics in Postcolonial Africa (LA)
Subject associations
ART 474 / AAS 474 / AFS 474

This seminar examines the impact of the International Monetary Fund's Structural Adjustment Program, military dictatorships, and political crises on artistic production in the 1980s, and the dramatic movement of African artists from the margins of the international art world to its very center since the 1990s. How familiar or different are the works and concerns of African artists? What are the consequences, in Africa and the West, of the international success of a few African artists? And what does the work of these Africans at home and in the West tell us about the sociopolitical conditions of our world today?

Instructors
Elemental Ecologies in Early Modern Art (LA)
Subject associations
ART 484 / ENV 484 / ECS 484

This seminar focuses on the Netherlands in the late sixteenth early seventeenth centuries, when new scientific discoveries and geographical expansion challenged established worldviews. We examine how Netherlandish artists used elemental imagery to draw attention to the hidden forces of nature, the beginning and end of the world, the boundaries between the natural and the artificial, and the transformative powers of their own craft. How did they imagine and represent the elements and other ultimate particles of the material world at a time when the intersections of life and art were being redefined?

Instructors
Christine Eva Göttler
The Graduate Seminar
Subject associations
ART 502D

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.

Instructors
Mapping the City: Cities and Cinema
Subject associations
ARC 525 / ART 524

This course on cartographic cinema explores the digital film archive as a trove of images that can be re-appropriated, re-mixed, re-assembled into new ways of thinking about and imagining cities. Cutting a horizontal trajectory across cities --- New York, Tokyo, Vienna, Paris, Hong Kong, Lagos, Calcutta --- the cinema has captured the dynamic force of urban mutations and disruptions. It has also imposed a vertical axis of memories, allowing time to pile up and overlap, confounding meaning and points of view, especially in cities of trauma.

Instructors
M. Christine Boyer
Seminar in Modernist Art and Theory: Banal Aesthetics
Subject associations
ART 565 / MOD 565 / ARC 585

What is 'banality', and why have so many artists, authors, architects, and others been drawn to it? How can we distinguish the banal from the commonplace, the everyday, the trivial, the vulgar, the vernacular, and related terms - and why do so? What aesthetics can be discovered in the banal? What politics?

Instructors
Seminar in Contemporary Art and Theory: The Global Contemporary
Subject associations
ART 566

This seminar probes the notion of 'the global contemporary' as an art historical, exhibitionary, and market phenomenon. Although widely critiqued from across a spectrum of political and methodological positions, the category has become firmly entrenched within vocabularies and institutional frameworks of art history and curation. How do we decenter Eurocentric formations of modern and contemporary art without reinscribing contemporary articulations of power that may be equally suspect? Conceived as a laboratory for teaching global contemporary art, particular attention is given to resources available at Princeton.

Instructors
The Chromapolitics of Visuality
Subject associations
ART 573 / HUM 537

This seminar explores the politics of color in the work of artists, writers, and thinkers who create or engage images in ways that challenge us to see color as neither arbitrary nor neutral, but instead as portals that allow us access to powerful social and cultural dynamics. Our emphasis is on the resonances of dark color, specifically the varying intensities of blacks, browns, blues, and violets. We consider their extended manifestation in shadow, night and negative space, blind fields and color adjustments.

Instructors
Graduate Research Internship
Subject associations
ART 597

The course is designed for post-generals students who are currently working with their academic adviser on developing research for their dissertation. This course provides a platform for students who have been nominated/awarded an internship from another university, research institute, private foundation, or outside organization that is relative to the student's dissertation research topic. A summary of the research and its relevance to the student's dissertation is required no later than one week after the completion of the internship.

Instructors
Advanced Topics in Modern Architecture: Collaborations: The Secret Lives of Architecture
Subject associations
ARC 576 / MOD 502 / ART 598

Architecture has always been deeply collaborative, like moviemaking or opera where the credits are long and layered. But in architecture there is a huge effort to credit a single figure. Why this pathological need to keep collaboration secret? What is so threatening about the collaborators? What are we afraid of? What is at stake? This seminar explores questions of authorship, the signature, copyright, the anonymous, networks, labor, etc. It also thinks through the ideological implications of this narrative and the implications of its undoing. What would a post-author discourse look like?

Instructors
Beatriz Colomina

 

Fall 2023

An Introduction to the History of Art: Meanings in the Visual Arts (LA)
Subject associations
ART 100

Introduction to the histories of art and the practice of art history. You will encounter a range of arts (including painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, prints) and artistic practices from diverse historical periods, regions, and cultures. Faculty members of the Department of Art and Archaeology lecture in their fields of expertise; precepts balance hands-on work, readings, and student projects.

Instructors
Looking Lab: Experiments in Visual Thinking and Thinking about Visuals (EC or LA)
Subject associations
ART 106 / VIS 106 / ENT 106 / EGR 107

It can be remarkably easy to take the process of looking for granted. Each day, humans contend with an onslaught of visual information. Education primarily focuses on teaching people how to read, write, and deal with numbers. But what about learning how to look closely and critically at images, at the world around us, and at ourselves? In this transdisciplinary course, we will question common assumptions and our own about looking; interrogate the anatomy and physiology of vision; develop our looking muscles; practice visual problem-solving strategies; and together design new tools to help people engage with the visual world.

Instructors
Roman Art (LA)
Subject associations
ART 203

The course provides a general introduction to Roman art. It discusses various artistic media--portraiture, historical relief, etc.--and highlights important works. The goal is an attempt to understand the significance of the imagery that the Romans produced, which embellished all aspects of their world - that is, to understand the role of artworks in the Romans' lived experience.

Instructors
Modernist Art: 1900 to 1950 (LA)
Subject associations
ART 213

A critical study of the major movements, paradigms, and documents of modernist art from Post-Impressionism to the "Degenerate" art show. Among our topics: primitivism, abstraction, collage, the readymade, machine aesthetics, photographic reproduction, the art of the insane, artists in political revolution, anti-modernism. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

Instructors
Renaissance Art and Architecture (LA)
Subject associations
ART 233 / ARC 233

What was the Renaissance, and why has it occupied a central place in art history? Major artistic currents swept Europe during the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, an age that saw the rise of global trade, the development of the nation state, and the onset of mass armed conflict. To explore the art of this period, we consider themes including religious devotion, encounters with foreign peoples and goods, the status of women, and the revival of antiquity. We study artists including Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci as well as some who may be less familiar. Precepts visit campus collections of paintings, prints, drawings, and maps.

Introduction to 20th-Century African American Art (LA)
Subject associations
AAS 245 / ART 245

This course surveys history of African American art during the long 20th-century, from the individual striving of late 19th century to the unprecedented efflorescence of art and culture in 1920s Harlem; from the retrenchment in black artistic production during the era of the Great Depression, to the rise of racially conscious art inspired by the Civil Rights Movement; from black feminist art in the 1970s, to the age of American multiculturalism in the 1980s and 1990s; and finally to the turn of the present century when ambitious "postblack" artists challenge received notions of black art and racial subjectivity.

Instructors
Photography and the Making of the Modern World (LA)
Subject associations
ART 248

This course explores key moments in the history of photography from its inventions in the early nineteenth century to its omnipresence in the twenty-first. We will approach photography as a relational history: the product of collaborations, networks, and systems rather than select privileged makers. The course traces a loose chronology and examines case studies of and by practitioners on six continents, with attention to underrepresented groups and unknown makers. The course will culminate with students making unique contributions to a public-facing group project, enacting the individual-collective dynamic the course explores.

Instructors
Introduction to Pre-20th Century Black Diaspora Art (CD or LA)
Subject associations
AAS 244 / ART 262 / LAS 244

This course focuses on the networks, the imaginaries and the lives inhabited by Black artists, makers, and subjects from the 18th through 19th centuries. It revolves around the Caribbean (particularly the Anglophone Caribbean), North America and Europe. We will reflect on how pre-twentieth century Black artists are written into history or written out of it. We will explore the aesthetic innovation of these artists and the visionary worlds they created, and examine their travels, their writings, along with the social worlds and communities they formed. The course incorporates lectures and readings and, if possible, museum visits.

Instructors
Death in Greece (EM)
Subject associations
ART 313 / HLS 313 / CLA 313

How did ancient Greeks respond to the trauma of death? In this class, we will look at the material culture from ancient Greek burials to discover what it can tell us about ancient Greek death, life, society, and beliefs. The rich and sometimes startling material includes grave markers, containers for the deceased, tomb offerings, and images. We will complement the material record with close reading of primary sources.

Instructors
The Formation of Christian Art (HA or LA)
Subject associations
ART 316 / HLS 316 / CLA 213

Art in late antiquity has often been characterized as an art in decline, but this judgment is relative, relying on standards formulated for art of other periods. Challenging this assumption, we will examine the distinct and powerful transformations within the visual culture of the period between the third and sixth centuries AD. This period witnesses the mutation of the institutions of the Roman Empire into those of the Christian Byzantine Empire. The fundamental change in religious identity that was the basis for this development directly impacted the art from that era that will be the focus of this course.

Instructors
Topics in German Culture and Society: Taste (LA or SA)
Subject associations
GER 307 / COM 307 / ART 317

What does it mean to have taste? How is it formed? How does it relate to fashion? How dependent is it on money and education? What are the connections between the aesthetic and moral parts of so-called "good taste"? Can there be a pure judgment of taste free from questions of social positioning? Is taste regarding design different from taste regarding art? Is there such a thing as a taste that turns against the logic of taste? What does taste as a social and aesthetic category have to do with taste as a gustatory sense? This seminar will explore these and other aspects of the multi-facetted phenomenon of taste from a variety of perspectives.

Instructors
Juliane Rebentisch
World Art History (HA)
Subject associations
ART 323

The class surveys connections in art of different cultures and continents throughout the world from the first civilizations to the present. Attention will be paid to distinctive and related forms of culture and their expression in art and architecture that includes trade, migration, gift exchanges, war and economics.

Instructors
History of Architectural Theory (HA)
Subject associations
ARC 308 / ART 328

This course introduces a history of architectural theory by way of architectural production in the "western" world from antiquity through 20th century modernism. While we will examine an evolution of architectural thought through architectural developments that occurred primarily in Europe and the Americas, those architectures will be contextualized within a broader global history of built environment traditions and practices, and framed around recurring themes in the history of architectural production.

Instructors
Jay Cephas
Neo Architectures, from the Renaissance to Postmodernism (LA)
Subject associations
ART 341 / ARC 341

Was Clio Hall built by the Ancient Greeks? Princeton Chapel by English masons of the Middle Ages? Some of the most recognizable architectural landmarks of Princeton's campus were built in reference to past architectural styles. This class will focus on the concept of "neo-styles" in the history of Western architecture, decoration and furniture, from the Renaissance to Postmodernism, interrogating the complex relationships between present needs and past dreams. Each week, students will confront the theoretical context of neo-styles with a series of American architectural case studies, mostly located on campus and in New Jersey.

Instructors
Women and Gender in Chinese Art (LA)
Subject associations
ART 389 / GSS 390 / EAS 389

Women and their associated symbolism are a perpetual presence across a wide range of mediums throughout Chinese art history. Spanning the longue durée from 1200 BCE to the twentieth century, this course focuses on how the production, mediation, and reception of gendered artistic symbols operate in various contexts. It proceeds chronologically and thematically. The instructors intend to incorporate novel formats, such as classroom interviews and VR headsets, in investigating Chinese artworks concerning women and their relevant discourses from the angles of gender politics and identity construction, with a special emphasis on women's agency.

Instructors
Yutong Li
Artist and Studio (LA)
Subject associations
VIS 392 / ART 392

A required seminar for Art and Archaeology Practice of Art majors and Program in Visual Arts certificate students emphasizing contemporary art practices and ideas. The course addresses current issues in painting, drawing, sculpture, film, video, photography, performance and installation. It includes readings and discussions of current contemporary art topics, a visiting artist lecture series, critiques of students' work, and an artist book project.

Instructors
Martha Friedman
Junior Seminar (LA)
Subject associations
ART 400

The Junior Seminar is an introduction to the myriad subjects, methods, and strategies of art history. The course examines the different kinds of evidence and methodological tools that have been used to identify, explain, and contextualize works of art as well as other kinds of objects, artifacts, and cultural phenomena. In other words, this seminar considers what art historians do, and how and why they do it. In addition, majors will learn how to use resources such as the library and the museum, and how to undertake substantive written research projects. Students begin their Junior Independent Work in this seminar.

Instructors
Greek and Roman Portraits (LA)
Subject associations
ART 411 / CLA 413 / HLS 413

This seminar is devoted to this history of portraiture in the Greek and Roman world. Emphasis will be given to artistic matters as opposed to issues of identity. Many of the seminar's sessions will be held in the Princeton University Art Museum, which holds a wide variety of examples. Course will also include a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to study additional works.

Instructors
Rachel C. Patt
Ancient Greek Pottery (LA)
Subject associations
ART 412 / CLA 412 / HLS 407

Pottery is the most common discovery on a Greek archaeological site. What can it tell us about the ancient Greeks, their lives, and their arts? This class offers an in depth exploration of the major pottery shapes and styles produced in Greece, studying how and why vases were made and used. Most seminars will involve hands-on work with objects from the Princeton University Art Museum collection. In addition, the class will visit the ceramics studio and learn the principal techniques of pottery manufacture.

Instructors
The Renaissance Art of the Unfinished (HA)
Subject associations
ART 444

Unfinished art captivates by revealing its maker's creative processes, by leaving its subject matter open and unresolved, and by inviting its viewers to imagine its completion. This seminar examines the rise of unfinishedness as a central, and disruptive, new category of Renaissance art, and probes its meanings and implications. Incomplete paintings, statues, prints, and architecture by Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Titian, and others, will be brought into dialogue with incompleteness in art-theoretical, religious, literary, scientific, political, and theatrical contexts. This class will coincide with a major conference on the topic.

Instructors
Seminar in Modernist Art & Theory: What was Postmodernism? What is Modernism? (HA or LA)
Subject associations
ART 455 / VIS 455 / ECS 456

A century has passed since the term 'modernism' became current, and the argument about 'postmodernism' is now four decades old. What did these categories of art and culture mean then, and how do they signify today? Has modernism become 'our antiquity' as some have claimed, or has a global perspective renewed it as a framework for contemporary art and criticism? Is postmodernism a 'thing of the past', or might it too possess an unexpected afterlife? We will take up such questions with some of the crucial actors' artists, critics, historians, museum directors and curators in these debates.

Additional description

A century has passed since the term “modernism” became current, and the argument about “postmodernism” is now four decades old. What did these categories of art and culture mean then, and how do they signify today? Has modernism become “our antiquity,” as some have claimed, or has a global perspective renewed it as a framework for contemporary art and criticism? Is postmodernism a “thing of the past,” or might it too possess an unexpected afterlife? We will take up such questions with some of the crucial actors—artists, critics, historians, museum directors and curators—in these debates.

Instructors
Samuel J. Shapiro
The Vikings: History and Archaeology (HA)
Subject associations
ART 478 / HIS 476 / HUM 476 / MED 476

Who were the Vikings, at home or abroad? How did their raiding and settlement change the history of the British Isles and western Europe? This course will study the political, cultural, and economic impact that Norse expansion and raiding had on early medieval Europe. It will also look at the changes in Scandinavia that inspired and resulted from this expansion. Sources will include contemporary texts, sagas and epic poetry, material culture, and archaeological excavations.

Instructors
The Feminist Critique, Fifty Years Later (CD or LA)
Subject associations
ART 490 / GSS 490 / VIS 490

This course examines feminist critiques of art history and contemporary art. What challenges did they pose to the fields of art history and contemporary art? Drawing on artworks by Rosa Bonheur, Georgia O'Keeffe, Adrian Piper, Cindy Sherman, Shahzia Sikander, Andy Warhol and others from the Princeton University Art Museum, as well as readings in art history, art criticism, cultural criticism, literature and philosophy, we will see how the feminist critique transformed art history and contemporary art, and was itself transformed in the process.

Instructors
The Aesthetics of Hunger (LA)
Subject associations
ART 491 / SPA 491

What kinds of art issues forth from need? Taking its name from Brazilian film director Glauber Rocha's 1965 manifesto, this course investigates how artists, writers, and theorists have sought to understand political, social, economic, and material limitations as generative conditions for aesthetic form. Moving between Latin American debates of the 1960s and 70s and the contemporary global moment, we examine such concepts as hunger, scarcity, imperfection, reproduction, and ecological justice though works by Cecilia Vicuña, Steve McQueen, Maria Thereza Alves, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Jumana Mana and others.

Proseminar in the History of Art
Subject associations
ART 500

A course concerned both with the theoretical foundations of Western art history as a modern discipline and with the methodological innovations of the last few decades.

Literature of Art
Subject associations
ART 501

The literature of art, architecture, and archaeology until the institutionalization of art history in universities and museums in Europe and the United States. The historiography of the field, including recent interpretations and analyses. Depending on student interest attention is given to modern, contemporary, Islamicate, and Chinese traditions.

Instructors
The Graduate Seminar
Subject associations
ART 502C

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.

Instructors
Worlds of Form: Russian Formalism and Constructivism
Subject associations
SLA 547 / ART 511

The seminar explores key texts of the Russian avant-garde, looking specifically at the ways Russian Formalists and Constructivists theorized the importance of form for their art and scholarship. Essays written by Shklovsky, Jakobson, Rodchenko, Vertov, Lissitzky, and Tatlin are contextualized within the field of contemporary critical theory. This is an interdisciplinary seminar, and during the semester, we oscillate between literature and cinema, linguistics and photography, architecture and painting. No Russian language skills are required.

Instructors
Serguei A. Oushakine
Problems in Ancient History: Introduction to Ancient and Medieval Numismatics
Subject associations
CLA 548 / HLS 548 / PAW 548 / ART 532

A seminar covering the basic methodology of numismatics, including die, hoard and archaeological analysis as well as a survey of pre-modern coinages. The Western coinage tradition is covered, from its origins in the Greco-Persian world through classical and Hellenistic Greek coinage, Roman imperial and provincial issues, Parthian and Sasanian issues, the coinage of Byzantium, the Islamic world, and medieval and renaissance Europe. Students research and report on problems involving coinages related to their own areas of specialization. Open to undergraduates by permission of the instructor.

Instructors
Alan M. Stahl
Byzantine Art: Phantasia: Dreams, Visions, and the Byzantine Imaginary
Subject associations
ART 535 / HLS 535

This seminar focuses upon the visual imagination in Byzantium. Dreams and visions serve as subjects and models for our enquiry into this topic. The imagination is distinct from perception or intellection. As such, it need not adhere to the expectations of representation. Phantasia tests our common expectations of Byzantine image making, and so merits analysis. Primary sources (texts and images) from the third to the sixteenth century are discussed.

Instructors
Holistic Analysis of Heritage Structures
Subject associations
CEE 538 / ART 538

Heritage structures represent an important cultural legacy. First, this course identifies particularities relative to structural analysis of heritage structures; it correlates the space and time (where and when the structure was built, used, upgraded, damaged, repaired), with construction materials, techniques, and contemporary architectural forms. Second, the course presents the methods of structural analysis that take into account the identified particularities, that are efficient in finding solutions, and that are simple and intuitive in terms of application and interpretation.

Instructors
From Above: European Maps and Architectural Plans before Aerial Observation
Subject associations
ART 551 / ARC 557

This course focuses on European maps, globes, and architectural drawings and prints produced in the period before aerial cartography and puts into dialogue cartography and architecture by interrogating their respective solutions to figuring space. Students interrogate the ways these graphic objects render complex and invisible realities through a mix of natural and conventional signs. Most of the sessions take place in the Special Collections classroom in Firestone Library in front of historical maps, atlases, globes, books, and architectural drawings and prints.

Instructors
State of the Field: Historiography of Chinese Painting
Subject associations
ART 569 / EAS 569

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.

Instructors

Spring 2023

Advanced Topics in Modern Architecture: Environments of Governance: Architecture, Media, Development
Subject associations
ARC 576 / MOD 502 / ART 598

This seminar investigates discourses and techniques of environmental governance addressed to the so-called "Third World," those seeking to regulate not only economic production but spatial arrangements, social reproduction, and forms of subjectivity in the decades after World War II. It does so by interrogating the intersection and co-constitutive realms of architecture, media, and development aid. To this end, an important task of the course is to ask how to identify, recognize, and attend to the many techno-social forms of designing and managing environments, with their distinctly northern epistemologies and imperial dispositions.

Instructors
Felicity Scott
Aesthetics and Politics of Chinese Painting (LA)
Subject associations
ART 216 / EAS 213

In this thematic introduction to the role of painting in Chinese cultural history, we will attend to the critical questions discussed within the field of Chinese painting in particular and art history in general. These questions, revolving around the dynamic between aesthetics and politics, include the influence of class, gender, political changes, and social behavior on painting; the formation of painting canons and lineages; and how local and global elements interacted in early modern, modern and contemporary Chinese painting. Students will have the opportunity to study Chinese painting first hand.

Instructors
An Introduction to the History of Architecture (LA)
Subject associations
ART 102 / ARC 102

A survey of architectural history, from ancient Egypt to contemporary America, that includes comparative material from around the world. This course stresses a critical approach to architecture through the analysis of context, expressive content, function, structure, style, building technology, and theory. Discussion will focus on key monuments and readings that have shaped the history of architecture.

Art and Power in the Middle Ages (HA or LA)
Subject associations
ART 228 / HLS 228 / MED 228 / HUM 228

The course explores how art worked in politics and religion from ca. 300-1200 CE in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Students encounter the arts of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, Judaism and Islam, great courts and migratory societies; dynamics of word and image, multilingualism, intercultural connection, and local identity. We examine how art can represent and shape notions of sacred and secular power. We consider how the work of 'art' in this period is itself powerful and, sometimes, dangerous. Course format combines lecture on various cultural contexts with workshop discussion focused on specific media and materials, or individual examples.

Instructors
Mathilde Sauquet
Art, Culture, and Identity in Medieval Spain (CD or LA)
Subject associations
ART 431 / MED 431

Before the suppression of non-Christians in Spain and Portugal after 1492, three vibrant medieval cultures inhabited the peninsula: Muslims based in Al-Andalus, Christians based in the northern Spanish kingdoms, and Sephardic Jews throughout both realms. Their coexistence transformed their visual culture in ways that resonated well beyond Iberian borders, from Atlantic colonialism to modern identity politics. This course asks how the contacts, conflicts and compromises provoked by "living with" each other shaped artistic traditions and cultural identity in a land both enriched and destabilized by its own diversity.

Instructors
Bernini's Women (LA)
Subject associations
ART 435

The emphatic sensuality of Bernini's women--sculptures of historical, allegorical, biblical and mythological females--has endured from their 17th-c creation through their reception in the Me Too era. This course explores Bernini's transformation of insensate stone into seemingly carnal existence and its controversial impact on viewers. We will situate the interplay of touch, desire, erotics, and violence that animates his female bodies in early modern contexts, including notions of gender. Moving into modernity, we will study the imitations his women inspired and the critiques that revisit them from aesthetic, theoretical and feminist lenses.

Instructors
Between Renaissance and Revolution: Baroque Art in Europe (LA)
Subject associations
ART 209

This course surveys major changes in European Art from the end of the Renaissance until the Age of Revolution c. 1800. Paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, and architecture by such artists as Caravaggio, Rubens, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Velazquez, and Bernini will be considered in their political, religious, social and intellectual context. Extensive study of works of art at first hand in the Princeton University Art Museum, and possibly in New York.

Instructors
Byzantine Art: Mimesis, Participation, and Performance
Subject associations
ART 535 / HLS 535

This seminar focuses upon two aspects of mimesis, relational likeness and the participation in forms, that have shaped quite different ways of understanding the implications of artistic representation in Byzantium. As well as considering "naturalism" and "abstraction" in the visual arts of the Medieval period, the course examines rhetoric, theater, and liturgy as performative sites for an animated and ethical visual culture.

Instructors
Chinese Painting in the Collection of PUAM
Subject associations
ART 572 / EAS 573

This seminar teaches PhD students how to develop research topics and exhibition themes from their first hand experiences with actual art objects. It makes extensive use of PUAM's excellent collection of Chinese art, which includes diverse genres and categories of paintings that span more than one thousand years. The course also incorporates new scholarly trends that tackle how to interact with art objects and contemplate their visuality and materiality.

Instructors
Contemporary Art: 1950 - 2000 (LA)
Subject associations
ART 214

A survey of postwar art from an international perspective, focusing on the major artistic movements in their historical contexts, including the Second World War, the Cold War, decolonization, the civil rights movement, feminism, globalization, and economic boom and recession. Lectures explore several themes including art's relationship to popular culture, the mass media, consumer society, historical memory, and political and social activism. Throughout, we account for the startling formal metamorphoses of art itself, as it is transformed from traditional painting and sculpture into new forms that challenged the very nature and limits of art.

Instructors
Fascist Aesthetics: Women & Photography between the World Wars (HA or LA)
Subject associations
ART 388 / GSS 300

Using the 1920s as its starting point, this course explores how women photographers have variously responded to the political upheavals of their times. How have female practitioners challenged and/or contributed to the rise of fascist regimes in their respective contexts? What can examining and reevaluating their work teach us about the aesthetic force of complacency, complicity, and resistance? Alongside key texts on race, gender, colonialism, and exile we will consider a diverse range of work by women and attempt to think critically about the unique roles they played in crafting and critiquing fascist visual culture in Europe and abroad.

Frequencies of Black Life
Subject associations
ART 571 / ENG 590 / AAS 571

The seminar takes as its starting point that Black life consists of among other things a series of discontinuous frequencies. Understanding Black life's frequencies as both complexly material and deeply abstract, we ask: What can frequency offer us as a way of understanding Black life? What insights does it provide for responding to anti-Blackness? How might it help us to see, hear, and feel the power of Black life's irrepressible desire and drive toward creating a different kind of present and future? Lastly, how might attending to Black frequencies offer us new sites of possibility?

Instructors
Hellenistic Art: Visual Cultures of the Greater Greek World, East and West, 330-30 BCE (HA)
Subject associations
ART 414 / CLA 414 / HLS 414

The conquest of Asia from Anatolia to Afghanistan by Alexander the Great brought far-reaching changes in both the East and the West of the ancient world. Powerful new visual styles and techniques interacted with local ideas and visual cultures in complicated and unpredictable ways. The seminar aims to describe this vital period of ancient visual history and its complex, multi-stranded artistic cultures. It also aims to embody a method of investigating cultural history through material and visual evidence. The classes follow the material on the ground and its archaeological and historical contexts closely.

Instructors
Introduction to Archaeology (EC)
Subject associations
ART 401 / HLS 405

An introduction to the history, methodologies, and theories of archaeology. The seminar discusses topics and problems drawn from a wide range of cultures and periods. Issues include trade and exchange; the origins of agriculture; cognitive archaeology (the study of the mind); biblical archaeology (the use of texts); artifacts in their cultural contexts; and the politics of the past. Emphasis on what constitutes archaeological evidence, how it may be used, and how archaeologists think.

Instructors
Manga: Visual Culture in Modern Japan (LA)
Subject associations
EAS 211 / COM 213 / ART 225

This course examines the comic book as an expressive medium in Japan. Reading a range of works, classic and contemporary, in a variety of genres, we consider: How has the particular history of Japan shaped cartooning as an art form there? What critical approaches can help us think productively about comics (and other popular culture)? How can we translate the effects of a visual medium into written scholarly language? What do changes in media technology, literacy, and distribution mean for comics today? Coursework will combine readings, written analysis, and technical exercises. All readings in English. No fine arts experience required.

Instructors
Olmec Art (LA)
Subject associations
ART 365 / LAS 370 / ANT 365

This course surveys Olmec and related material culture spanning roughly 2000-500 B.C., including architecture and monumental sculpture, ceramic vessels and figurines, and exquisite small-scale sculpture in jade and other precious materials. Of central theoretical importance is the question of how we understand and interpret art from a distant past, especially without the aid of contemporaneous written records. We will focus on original works of art, including works in the Princeton University Art Museum and in regional collections. Issues of authenticity, quality, and provenance related to these works will also be considered.

Instructors
Radical Composition (LA)
Subject associations
VIS 424 / AAS 424 / ART 479

This seminar examines the radical possibilities of collaboration as fundamentally a process of radical composition through which collaborators bridge different modalities of creative expression - textual composition, artistic composition, speculative composition, among others - that span multiple media, forms and practices. By modeling and exploring collaboration as radical composition, this course seeks to reframe it as more than a dynamic of participation and coordination, and to recognize it as a generative methodology for producing critical scholarly and creative work.

Instructors
Seminar in Central European Art
Subject associations
ART 553 / GER 553

This year the seminar studies art and architecture in what are now the Czech Republic and Austria from c. 1340-1918. Depending on student interests, emphases are placed on particular periods and places.

Instructors
Seminar in Modernist Art and Theory: Before and After Gender
Subject associations
ART 565 / GSS 566

If the future is, or was, female, whither feminist art history? Taking its name from the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern's 1974 book, this seminar revisits major approaches to feminist art history from the 19th century to the present while considering how queer, trans, masculinity, and decolonial studies have transformed the landscape of art historical analysis. What does it mean, now, to write art history under the sign of gender? How is gender assigned to works of art? How have art historians applied contemporary thinking about gender to the art of the past, and how might historical works and archives inform art history in the present?

Siegecraft: Architecture, Warfare, and Media (LA)
Subject associations
ART 447 / HLS 445 / ARC 440

Siegecraft was an art more complex than painting, more powerful than sculpture, and more monumental than any building in the early modern world. This seminar confronts the discomfiting reality that the period long known as the Renaissance was defined as much, if not more, by brutal and collective warfare than it was by the rise of the individual. The class has no prerequisites and is open to all, including students of architecture, engineering, art, history, media, and literature. Seminar sessions will include hands-on study of original artworks in campus collections.

Instructors
The Graduate Seminar
Subject associations
ART 502B

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.

Instructors
The Modern Museum: Between Preservation & Action (LA)
Subject associations
ART 488

The museum traces its origins to the cabinet of curiosities and to princely collecting, and took form during the European Enlightenment as a way of ordering knowledge, often advancing nationalistic purposes. Today's museums draw deeply on these traditions while facing essential challenges: How must it respond to the digital age and to a world of increasingly porous borders? What must it do to assure its continuing relevance and survival? Through a series of case studies, this course will grapple with the ways in which museums look to the past and posit new, more "activist" ways of being.

Instructors
The Roman Villa
Subject associations
ART 518 / CLA 531 / HLS 539

A seminar on the phenomenon of the Roman villa, its archaeology, history, decoration, and the social practices that arose from this aspect of aristocratic life.

Instructors
The Romans' Painted World (LA)
Subject associations
ART 309 / CLA 309

The course will focus on the Romans' development of painted decoration for architectural spaces - and how they employed such painted forms to aggrandize those spaces illusionistically, so as to produce a visual world for the imagination.

Instructors
Topics in 19th-Century Art: Artists and Their Subjects (LA)
Subject associations
ART 343

This seminar explores the relationships between artists and their subjects in European art of the long nineteenth century. How were these relationships visualized artistically? How did they change over the course of the century with the rise of Neoclassicism, Realism, Impressionism, and Post-Impressionism? We will examine a diverse group of artists and sitters (ranging from professional models to patrons to close relations) to consider questions of intersubjectivity and the representation of identity. Artists include Ingres, Courbet, Manet, Cézanne, Valadon, and Seurat. The seminar includes two field trips to museums in New York.

Topics in Architecture: The Total Corporation: The Design of Everything In a Global Context
Subject associations
ARC 594 / MOD 504 / HUM 593 / ART 584 / SPA 559

To distance architecture from the "war machine," architects called for the reintegration of the arts after WW2. The resulting post-war Gesamtkunstwerk accompanied the development of ever larger corporations and corporate architectural practices integrating new kinds of agents into their increasingly complex wholes, from women designers and computing services to global environmental and economic models. By exploring how corporations--Olivetti in Ivrea, Hilton in Havana, JUMEX in Mexico City--operated architecture across all scales and mediums, students in this seminar will uncover the questions post-war integration was designed to answer.

Instructors
Rubén Gallo
Sylvia Lavin

Fall 2022

An Introduction to the History of Art: Meanings in the Visual Arts (LA)
Subject associations
ART 100

Introduction to the histories of art and the practice of art history. You will encounter a range of arts (including painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, prints) and artistic practices from diverse historical periods, regions, and cultures. Faculty members of the Department of Art and Archaeology lecture in their fields of expertise; precepts balance hands-on work, readings, and student projects. Coursework is designed to encourage students to apply the methods and questions of art history to explore the Princeton community. We pay particular attention to the various forms of art and engagement.

Instructors
Architectural Colonialities: Building European Power across the Globe (HA or LA)
Subject associations
ECS 405 / ARC 410 / ART 405

Entwined with power and capital, architecture is inseparable from coloniality. In colonized lands, architecture concretized the European claim and facilitated systems of domination. But coloniality also influenced architecture of the metropole and catalyzed the international expansion of modernization. Tracing various phases of coloniality--from bureaucratic colonialism to postcolonial recovery--and scales of architectural design--climate, city, monument, and ornament--the course interrogates sites where European architecture colluded with colonial power, and reflects on the resistances that condition its legacy in colonialist expansion.

Instructors
Spyros Papapetros
Art Archives in Latin America (CD or HA)
Subject associations
LAS 339 / ART 336 / VIS 329

This course aims to help students elaborate a critical and historical perspective on transformations, taking Latin American art as its case of study. Considering the archive as a historical apparatus, it focuses on understanding the complexity of archives in the contemporary art world. The course will provide students with a knowledge that will help them in their own use of archives. This course is developed for students interested in the Latin American region including those focusing on art history, literature, politics, and students from additional fields interested in pursuing comparative perspectives to conduct their research.

Instructors
Agustin R. Diez
Artist and Studio (LA)
Subject associations
VIS 392 / ART 392

A required seminar for Art and Archaeology Practice of Art majors and Program in Visual Arts certificate students emphasizing contemporary art practices and ideas. The course addresses current issues in painting, drawing, sculpture, film, video, photography, performance and installation. It includes readings and discussions of current contemporary art topics, a visiting artist lecture series, critiques of students' work, and an artist book project.

Instructors
Martha Friedman
Byzantine Art (HA or LA)
Subject associations
ART 335 / HLS 336 / MED 335

This course introduces the student to the art of the Byzantine Empire from ca. 800 to ca. 1200. Byzantine art has often been opposed to the traditions of western naturalism, and as such has been an undervalued or little-known adjunct to the story of medieval art. In order to develop a more sophisticated understanding of our visual evidence, this course will stress the function of this art within the broader setting of this society. Art theory, the notions of empire and holiness, the burdens of the past and the realities of contemporary praxis will be brought to bear upon our various analyses of material from all media.

Instructors
Counterworlds: Innovation and Rupture in Communities of Artistic Practice (LA)
Subject associations
HUM 434 / VIS 434 / ECS 434 / ART 404

Co-taught with renowned artist Josephine Meckseper, this seminar will explore the dynamics of creative collaboration through case studies of utopian communities of artistic practice in 20-c. Europe and the US (Worpswede, Bauhaus, Black Mountain) and the architecture of modern cities planned and imagined. We'll consider how utopian and dystopian ideas emerged historically, and bring critical perspectives to bear on concepts of utopia in relation to colonialism and capitalism. We'll not only study but also practice collaborations across disciplines and media. Seminar guests will include artists and writers. Enrollment by application; see below.

Instructors
Josephine J. Meckseper
Creative Ecologies: American Environmental Narrative and Art, 1980-2020 (SA)
Subject associations
AMS 354 / ART 355 / ENV 373

This seminar explores how writers and artists--alongside scientists and activists--have shaped American environmental thought from 1980 to today. The seminar asks: How do different media convey the causes and potential solutions to environmental challenges, ranging from biodiversity loss and food insecurity to pollution and climate change? What new art forms are needed to envision sustainable and just futures? Course materials include popular science writing, graphic narrative, speculative fiction, animation art, documentary film, and data visualization along with research from anthropology, ecology, history, literary studies, and philosophy.

Instructors
Allison Carruth
Egyptian Architecture: The Monumental Landscape (LA)
Subject associations
ART 481

In this seminar we will examine a variety of forms of ancient Egyptian architecture, primarily from the pharaonic period, through the lense of landscape. We will examine god's temples, funerary temples, and burial monuments within the larger context of their settings, including the surrounding landscape and their relationships to other monuments. A number of themes will be addressed, including the sacred landscape, architecture as microcosm, architecture and performance, ancestry and memory, the temporality of landscape and monument, and locality and community.

Instructors
Ethics in Archaeology (EM)
Subject associations
ART 402 / HUM 406 / MED 402 / HLS 401

This seminar will explore ethical issues in the study and practice of archaeology, cultural resource management, museum studies, and bioarchaeology. Students are expected to substantively contribute to class discussions on a weekly basis, as well as to lead the discussion of one set of readings. Weekly seminars will be accompanied by a group midterm debate on an assigned ethical issue and an individual final research project (with a class presentation and 20-minute final conversation with Prof. Kay).

Instructors
European Art: Revolutions and Avant-Gardes (HA or LA)
Subject associations
ART 212

A broad study of European painting and sculpture from the French Revolution to 1900 with special attention to social, political, and cultural shifts. Themes include art and political turmoil, imperial conquest, the rise of landscape painting, the politics of the nude, and the birth of modernism. Emphasis on major movements, including Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, and Post-Impressionism, and artists including David, Canova, Goya, Vigée-Lebrun, Turner, Courbet, Manet, Monet, Degas, Rodin, Van Gogh, and Cézanne. This class was formerly known as "Neoclassicism through Impressionism."

Instructors
Historical Structures: Ancient Architecture's Materials, Construction and Engineering (HA or SEN)
Subject associations
HUM 417 / ART 408 / CEE 415 / HLS 417

The students will pursue inquiry beyond the conventional boundaries of the two respective disciplines (ART and CEE): to learn and master relevant elements of structural engineering and to understand, appreciate, and solve myriad problems of realization of large structural works, including their design, structural analysis, and construction; and, concomitantly, to pursue a fully historical contextualization of architectural structures, including the technological developments, sociological aspects, and aesthetic traditions in which these monuments find their place. Students will work in mixed groups and collaborate on their course projects.

History of Architectural Theory (HA)
Subject associations
ARC 308 / ART 328

This course introduces a history of architectural theory by way of architectural production in the "western" world from antiquity through 20th century modernism. While we will examine an evolution of architectural thought through architectural developments that occurred primarily in Europe and the Americas, those architectures will be contextualized within a broader global history of built environment traditions and practices, and framed around recurring themes in the history of architectural production.

Instructors
Jay Cephas
Introduction to Pre-20th Century Black Diaspora Art (CD or LA)
Subject associations
AAS 244 / ART 262 / LAS 244

This course focuses on the networks, the imaginaries and the lives inhabited by Black artists, makers, and subjects from the 18th through 19th centuries. It revolves around the Caribbean (particularly the Anglophone Caribbean), North America and Europe. We will reflect on how pre-twentieth century Black artists are written into history or written out of it. We will explore the aesthetic innovation of these artists and the visionary worlds they created, and examine their travels, their writings, along with the social worlds and communities they formed. The course incorporates lectures and readings and, if possible, museum visits.

Instructors
Junior Seminar (LA)
Subject associations
ART 400

The Junior Seminar is an introduction to the myriad subjects, methods, and strategies of art history. The course examines the different kinds of evidence and methodological tools that have been used to identify, explain, and contextualize works of art as well as other kinds of objects, artifacts, and cultural phenomena. In other words, this seminar considers what art historians do, and how and why they do it. In addition, majors will learn how to use resources such as the library and the museum, and how to undertake substantive written research projects. Students begin their Junior Independent Work in this seminar.

Instructors
Looking Lab: Experiments in Visual Thinking and Thinking about Visuals (EC or LA)
Subject associations
ART 106 / VIS 106 / ENT 106

It can be remarkably easy to take the process of looking for granted. Each day, humans contend with an onslaught of visual information. Education primarily focuses on teaching people how to read, write, and deal with numbers. But what about learning how to look closely and critically at images, at the world around us, and at ourselves? In this transdisciplinary course, we will question common assumptions and our own about looking; interrogate the anatomy and physiology of vision; develop our looking muscles; practice visual problem-solving strategies; and together design new tools to help people engage with the visual world.

Instructors
Making Exhibitions: 17th-Century Flemish Paintings at Princeton (LA)
Subject associations
ART 485

The goal of this class is to develop focus exhibitions that might be mounted in the new Princeton University Art Museum, slated to open in 2024. Taking the 17th-century Flemish paintings in the collection as our point of departure, we will examine and research the works selected for exhibition; discuss the types of exhibitions we want to pursue; meet with PUAM colleagues to glean information and guidance in our planning; and write loan letters, wall texts and label copy. By the end of the semester, we should have viable projects to present for consideration to the Museum's administration.

Instructors
Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art (SA)
Subject associations
ART 220 / LAS 230

This course focuses on key issues of 20th and 21st c. Latin American art. A thematic survey and general methodological introduction, we will treat emblematic works and movements, from Mexican muralism and Indigenism to experiments with abstraction, pop, conceptualism, and performance. Questions discussed include: What is Latin American art? What is modernism in Latin America? What is the legacy of colonialism? How do Latin American artists engage transnational networks of solidarity under conditions of repression? How can postcolonial, decolonial, and feminist theory illuminate the art and criticism produced in and about Latin America?

Instructors
Monsters Beware! Otherness and Order in Premodern Art and Literature (LA)
Subject associations
ART 387 / ITA 330

Monsters, imagined as occupying the margins of reality and patrolling its borders, teach us about the cultures that engendered them. This seminar investigates the kinds of monsters represented in premodern art and literature and asks what these texts and objects do, how they work, and what relationships they generate with their readers and beholder. It considers how different societies aligned monstrosity with excessive creatures, unwanted persons, and aberrant behaviors to establish order: natural, social, religious and political. By examining the historical formation of cultural categories, it probes the mechanisms that define otherness.

Instructors
Simone Marchesi
Narrative and Visuality in China (LA)
Subject associations
ART 493 / EAS 493

This class explores the relationship between visual and verbal media. How is poetic vision not only given shape in words, but also in painting? Conversely, how is the beauty of women, a staple of portraiture, captured in words? How can a still picture express narrative in a medium that develops over time, and conversely how can words capture the spectacle of a martial arts action scene? We will answer these questions by investigating some of the most famous novels, paintings, poems, and prints, beginning with didactic paintings preaching Confucian values and ending with the birth of modern media such as animation and computer graphics.

Instructors
Paize Keulemans
Photography of Violence and the Violence of Photography (LA)
Subject associations
ART 338 / VIS 338

Photography and violence have been entwined for as long as there have been photos. These images pose questions about the past and present: What are the ethics of global representations of war, so-called natural disasters, and other atrocities? How have violent pictures particularly shaped US culture? What does it mean to bear witness through photographs? Grounded in visual analysis of complex and disturbing images such as photographs of enslaved people and photographs of victims of the Holocaust, this class will engage in rigorous conversations about the meaning, circulation, and power of photos.

Instructors
Postblack - Contemporary African American Art (CD or LA)
Subject associations
AAS 372 / ART 374 / AMS 372

As articulated by Thelma Golden, postblack refers to the work of African American artists who emerged in the 1990s with ambitious, irreverent, and sassy work. Postblack suggests the emergence of a generation of artists removed from the long tradition of Black affirmation of the Harlem Renaissance, Black empowerment of the Black Arts movement, and identity politics of the 1980s and early 90s. This seminar involves critical and theoretical readings on multiculturalism, race, identity, and contemporary art, and will provide an opportunity for a deep engagement with the work of African American artists of the past decade.

Instructors
Problems in Ancient History: Introduction to Ancient and Medieval Numismatics
Subject associations
CLA 548 / HLS 548 / PAW 548 / ART 532

A seminar covering the basic methodology of numismatics, including die, hoard and archaeological analysis as well as a survey of pre-modern coinages. The Western coinage tradition is covered, from its origins in the Greco-Persian world through classical and Hellenistic Greek coinage, Roman imperial and provincial issues, Parthian and Sasanian issues, the coinage of Byzantium, the Islamic world, and medieval and renaissance Europe. Students research and report on problems involving coinages related to their own areas of specialization. Open to undergraduates by permission of the instructor.

Instructors
Alan M. Stahl
Proseminar in the History of Art
Subject associations
ART 500

A course concerned both with the theoretical foundations of Western art history as a modern discipline and with the methodological innovations of the last few decades.

Renaissance Art and Architecture (LA)
Subject associations
ART 233 / ARC 233

What was the Renaissance, and why has it occupied a central place in art history? Major artistic currents swept Europe during the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, an age that saw the rise of global trade, the development of the nation state, and the onset of mass armed conflict. To explore the art of this period, we consider themes including religious devotion, encounters with foreign peoples and goods, the status of women, and the revival of antiquity. We study artists including Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci as well as some who may be less familiar. Precepts visit campus collections of paintings, prints, drawings, and maps.

Research in Architecture: The Bachelor Home as Living Machine
Subject associations
ARC 571 / ART 581 / MOD 573 / LAS 571

Bachelorhood is at the center of diverse forms of architectural programs, assuming massive connotations and demographic significance. It has shaped much of what we know about dormitories, boardinghouses, hostels, studios, garçonnières, penthouse apartments and minimum housing experiments. Despite its pivotal role in the history of domestic architecture, it has been neglected as an exceptional or temporary status. The seminar explores multiple meanings of singleness and its typological responses as a key for understanding and rethinking modern household paradigms, housing policies and residential design in Latin America and elsewhere.

Instructors
Beatriz Colomina
José Lira
Roman Architecture (LA)
Subject associations
ART 201 / ARC 209

An introduction to the architecture of the Romans from the 8th century BCE through the 4th century CE. This course will provide an historical overview of the subject, analyzing how new building designs and technologies became, over time, standard Roman practice, alongside close studies of exceptional monuments in the city of Rome. Topics will include: city planning; engineering technique; acquisition of building materials; the transformation of the building trades; and the full breadth of Roman structures from houses to temples.

Instructors
Seminar in American Art: Science and Its Fictions in the Long Nineteenth Century
Subject associations
ART 562

This seminar explores the intersection of scientific inquiry and fiction manifested in image-making within the arts and sciences in Europe and North America, ca. 1750-1915. This includes fictions to which science or pseudo-science gave rise, such as the fantasy of polygenesis or the hollow earth theory; fictionalized accounts of scientific practice, such as exploration narratives or the genre of science fiction; and fiction as an essential mode of knowledge within scientific inquiry and visualization, as with natural history illustration or scientific models. Visits to area collections and institutions will be an integral part of the seminar

Instructors
Seminar in Japanese Art and Archaeology: Painting Painting, Japan
Subject associations
ART 574

Historically Japanese painters worked in modes based on previous paintings: idioms associated with subject matter, national source, and formal qualities. Yamatoe, or "Japanese painting," first identified paintings depicting indigenous landscapes and came to be associated with an array of formal characteristics and native subjects. Karae, or "Tang painting," indicated styles and subjects associated with China. A mode often endured for centuries, even as new ones appeared (such as Yoga, or "Western painting"). This longevity and concurrence had many consequences, including the creation of hybrids that remade meaning.

Instructors
Seminar. 19th-Century European Art: Impressionism and Post-Impressionism: New Approaches (LA)
Subject associations
ART 450 / FRE 408

Course examines recent scholarship and exhibitions that have shifted understandings of French impressionist and post-impressionist art. Artists include Monet, Manet, Degas, Cassatt, Morisot, Van Gogh, Seurat, Cézanne, and Valadon. Topics include the global diffusion of impressionism, intersubjectivity and collaboration, women artists, pop culture spectacles, technical analysis of materials, the blockbuster, and revisionary approaches to museum displays. Students have the opportunity to converse with scholars and curators whose work is breaking new ground in this field. Course includes two field trips to museums in New York.

Instructors
Seminar. Medieval Art: The Icon (HA or LA)
Subject associations
ART 430 / MED 430 / HLS 430

The topic for this class will be the icon, a medium that developed in Late Antiquity and that continues to be a major and influential form of painting. Although, in theory, the term is broad, we will understand it to mean the panel painting of a religious subject. In this class we will examine the history, function, theory and meaning of the icon. We will also examine the icon's influence upon the discourses of Modernism. A more practical aspect of this class is that participants in the course will work with icons and drawings in the Princeton University Art Museum and with the Sinai Archive.

Instructors
Studies in Greek Architecture: Pytheos and His World
Subject associations
ART 504 / HLS 534 / CLA 536 / ARC 565

This seminar searches for a pivotal figure in the history of Greek architecture, Pytheos, designer of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus and the temple of Athena at Priene. This sculptor turned architect, theorist and critic offers a foothold for exploring trends of the late classical and early hellenistic world, including revivals and canons, grid-designed Rasterarchitektur, and colossal sepulchers in an age of emergent kingship. This course also reflects on the afterlife of Pytheos' theories on architectural education and the reception of the Mausoleum from early modern Europe to post-Civil War America.

Instructors
The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Art of the Golden Age (LA)
Subject associations
ART 321

This class surveys painting, sculpture, architecture and the graphic arts of the Low Countries (Belgium and Holland) from 1580-1750 in relation to art elsewhere in Europe and the world. Dutch art is seen in relation to its historical circumstances, including cross-cultural developments in Europe, Asia and Americas. Use of the Princeton University Art Museum with visits to New York.

Instructors
The Art and Archaeology of Ancient Egypt (HA)
Subject associations
ART 290

Behind the awe-inspiring monuments, the complex religious cults, and the intimations of wealth and a taste for the good life found in the surviving remnants of ancient Egypt lie real people concerned with spirituality, economics, politics, the arts, and the pleasures and pains of daily life. In this course, we will examine the art and architecture created in the ancient Egyptian landscape over 4 millennia, as well as the work of archaeologists in the field, including up-to-the-minute finds from on-going excavations.

Instructors
The Arts and Archaeology of the Chinese Court (LA)
Subject associations
ART 369 / EAS 386

In China, denizens of the imperial court--emperors and entertainers, mighty and low-class, and the ministers who administered the realm in the middle--populated the court praxis of the arts. This course studies the courtly arts, from the rule of the first emperor Qin Shi Huang to the Empress Dowager Cixi in the early 20th century. It will show how these artworks were made and used in changing historical contexts and became an important legacy of Chinese culture. It particularly emphasizes the archaeology of early imperial tombs.

The Geography of Art: World Art History
Subject associations
ART 545

This seminar considers the possibilities of global art history: theory, method, and practice. Issues are treated in relation to the historiography and geography of art.

Instructors
The Graduate Seminar
Subject associations
ART 502A

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.

Instructors
Topics in Literary and Cultural Theory: 'Psychoanalytic Turns'
Subject associations
GER 520 / ART 588 / MOD 521

This seminar explores turns to psychoanalysis in the history, theory, and criticism of art and literature. In reading psychoanalytic writings by Freud, Lacan, Klein, Laplanche, and others, paths and detours lead to problems of terminology, translation, mediation. In addressing works of art and literature, questions arise about how some might be understood as instances of psychoanalytic criticism and/or critiques of psychoanalysis. A need for critical reflection on the meaningfulness of psychoanalytic theories for current scholarship in the humanities is a guiding concern of this seminar. Seminar guests include practicing psychoanalysts.

Instructors