Courses

Spring 2025

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.

Instructors
Caravaggio, Velázquez, Vermeer, Goya: Between Renaissance and Revolution (HA or LA)
Subject associations
ART 209

This course surveys European Art from c.1580 to c. 1800. Paintings, sculpture, prints, and drawings will be considered in their political, religious, and cultural context. Artists studied include Rembrandt, Rubens, Bernini, and Hogarth as well as Caravaggio, Velazquez, Vermeer, and Goya. Some study of works of art in the Princeton University Art Museum and New York.

Instructors
Contemporary Art: 1950 - 2000 (HA or 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
Art and Power in the Middle Ages (HA or LA)
Subject associations
ART 228 / HLS 228 / MED 228 / HUM 228

We explore art's roles in politics and religion from ca. 600-1300 CE in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The course introduces the arts of Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Judaism, and Islam; great courts and migratory societies; works made for private use and public display. Through narrative arc in lecture and precepts dedicated to artistic media, textual and material primary sources, and/or key intellectual themes, we consider how art participates in forming sacred and secular power. We explore how the work of 'art' in this period carries powers of its own, and how art shaped a multi-lingual, multi-confessional, multi-cultural medieval world.

Instructors
Introduction to Asian Art (CD or HA)
Subject associations
ART 240 / EAS 240

This course examines major themes in the visual cultures of China, Korea, and Japan from the Neolithic period to the present and provides a basic introduction to art historical methods. Through a series of case studies and the analysis of key artifacts and monuments, we will reflect on such central questions in East Asian art as: What are the cultural factors that give rise to iconographic and stylistic traditions? In what ways do objects and designs reflect religious and philosophical beliefs and ideas? How do structures of authority limit or further self-expression? Precepts will focus on key objects in the Princeton University Art Museum.

Instructors
Arts of the Medieval Book (HA or LA)
Subject associations
ART 311 / MED 311 / HUM 311

This course explores the technology and function of books in historical perspective, asking how illuminated manuscripts were designed to meet (and shape) cultural and intellectual demands in the medieval period. Surveying the major genres of European book arts between the 7th-15th centuries, we study varying approaches to pictorial space, page design, and information organization; relationships between text and image; and technical aspects of book production. We work primarily from Princeton's collection of original manuscripts and manuscript facsimiles. Assignments include the option to create an original artist's book for the final project.

Instructors
African Technologies and Technofutures (CD or HA)
Subject associations
AFS 331 / ART 314

Taking a cue from Afrofuturists, this interdisciplinary course frames Africa as a site of technological innovation. We will learn both about the historical context of major technological advancements in Africa and how literature and art have imagined the relationship between Blackness and technology. Drawing on cutting-edge findings in history, archaeology, and other fields, we will explore the development of major technologies in Africa's past, from metallurgy to urban engineering. We will also study how African societies have adopted new technologies in response to enslavement, environmental change, and colonial rule.

Instructors
Colin E. Bos
Modern Architectures in Context: Cities in Asia (HA)
Subject associations
ARC 346 / RES 346 / EAS 336 / ART 317

This course examines how politico-ideological and environmental discourses have shaped cities and their architectures in colonial and postcolonial Asia. Paying close attention to select cities including Almaty, Dhaka, Hanoi, Hong Kong, Islamabad, New Delhi, Pyongyang, Phnom Penh, Seoul, Singapore, Taipei, Tashkent and Tokyo, it aims to provide a preliminary answer to the increasingly urgent questions: what are the specificities of `Asian' modernity, and how was this modernity embraced and contested in urban contexts throughout Asia? For each city under study, a notable work of architecture will be singled out and subjected to close reading.

Instructors
Da Hyung Jeong
Anti-Colonial Practices in Latin American Contemporary Art (CD or LA)
Subject associations
ART 322 / LAS 313 / AAS 323

What is anti-colonial art? What Latin American artworks reflect the lasting impacts of colonialism? The cultural geographies of "Latin America" show there are no simple answers. Anti-colonial studies reveal that coloniality affects all aspects of life - subjectivity, race, gender, sexuality, language, and knowledge. This course examines artistic practices and their challenge to coloniality's ongoing effects. By exploring materials such as literary texts, visual artworks, and performances, students will engage in critical debates and develop methodological skills to analyze Latin America's cultural histories from the 1960s to the present.

Instructors
Handscroll to Anime: Visual Storytelling in Japanese Art (CD or HA)
Subject associations
ART 327 / EAS 327

The history of art making in Japan is populated with an enormous cast of characters who inhabit the lively moving surfaces of a wide variety of artistic media, from medieval handscroll format paintings to contemporary manga and anime. This class will take its own part in animating these stories by exploring the ways in which words and pictures are inextricably linked to create meaning in these artistic forms. We will analyze the formal characteristics of images and texts in these immersive narrative worlds, placing them in their contemporary contexts as we reflect on their ongoing lives in our own.

Instructors
Latinx Photography (CD or LA)
Subject associations
LAO 330 / ENG 329 / ART 336

This course looks closely at how contemporary Latinx artists are reimagining photographic encounters and arrangements. The longer history of photography is traditionally told in terms of documentation, truth claims, the democratization of art, and colonial surveillance regimes. This course gives pride of place to Latinx artists who use the medium and its iterations (e.g. video installations, cyanotypes, photo collage, repurposing archival prints) to figure unconventional notions of intimacy, diaspora, identity, archives, revolution, futures, and immediacy.

Instructors
Monica Huerta
Rethinking Modernity in a Century of Turmoil: Modern Chinese Art, ca. 1840s-1940s (CD or HA)
Subject associations
ART 356 / EAS 353

This course explores the visual and material culture during the century of turmoil in China (1840s to 1940s) while considering critically how modernity was defined and how it operated. In this class, we will examine a wide array of visual mediums, such as painting, calligraphy, prints, sculpture, photography, and cinema. While doing so, we will reflect upon issues crucial to our understandings of modern Chinese art in particular and "modernity" in general, such as globality, coloniality, nationalism, gender, popular culture, and cultural heritage among others.

Instructors
Yixu Eliza Chen
Urban Nature and Society, 1450-1800 (HA)
Subject associations
URB 345 / ARC 345 / ART 357

This interdisciplinary course explores the dynamic relationship between urban development and the natural environment between 1450 and 1800. Contrary to the common perception of nature as existing solely beyond urban boundaries, this course reveals how cities have always intertwined with natural elements that required protection, restoration, and even creation. Through engaging discussions and written assignments, students will gain a deeper understanding of the complex interplay between urban growth and environmental stewardship, and how these historical insights can inform contemporary urban and environmental practices.

Instructors
Jennifer Strtak
History of Comparative Architecture: What Color is the Modern? (HA or LA)
Subject associations
ARC 322 / ART 372

Color is the 'great repressed' of modern architecture. Rather than being concerned with how this chromophobia came about, this course explores the multiple ways it conditions our perception of works of architecture which exhibit a chromaticism, and even a chromophilia incompatible with the modernist ideology of whiteness. Starting from this premise we explore basic concerns of architectural modernism - the relation to nature and to materials, the affective impact of vision, the complex question of the relation of color and functionality, the mediation of color involving various forms of notation, coding and representation.

Instructors
Daniel Sherer
Getting the Picture: Photojournalism in the U.S. from the Printed Page to AI (LA)
Subject associations
ART 393 / AMS 392 / JRN 393

Just as the Internet does today, the picture press of the last century defined global visual knowledge of the world. The pictures gracing the pages of magazines and newspapers were often heavily edited, presented in carefully devised sequences, and printed alongside text. The picture press was as expansive as it was appealing, as informative as it was propagandistic, regularly delivered to newsstands and doorsteps for the everyday consumer of news, goods, celebrity, and politics. Through firsthand visual analysis of the picture presses of both the U.S. and Russia, this course will consider the ongoing meaning and power of images.

Instructors
Archaeological Methods and Theory (EC)
Subject associations
ART 401 / HLS 411

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
Borderlands: Art and Society Between Rome and Iran (CD or LA)
Subject associations
ART 416 / CLA 416 / NES 418

We tend to think of borders as hard lines on a map, yet in the ancient world things rarely operated so clearly. Borders instead formed regions of uncertain control, with their own authorities adept at playing both sides. This was especially true in the Classical and Late Antique Middle East, contested by the empires of Rome and Iran. This seminar explores the visual world of the ancient frontier (including sites such as Hatra, Palmyra, and Dura Europos) and examines the unique forms of cultural expression possible in these contested places, as well as their importance in forging an international visual language of prestige and sacrality.

Instructors
The Modern Art of Spectacle (HA or LA)
Subject associations
ART 434 / ECS 433

During the last century, spectacle became a key notion within the practice, criticism, theory and history of art. It posed a question that remains relevant: How could artists compete with the intensely visual entertainments that were flourishing on the stage, street and screen and attracting increasingly large audiences? This course explores how major artists approached this practical and intellectual challenge, as well as the ways that the theory was generalized and applied in important studies of fascist, capitalist and communist politics, the society at large and the history of 18th- and 19th-century French painting.

Instructors
Reparative Aesthetics: Art, Medicine and the Colonial Plantation (CD or LA)
Subject associations
AAS 404 / ART 436

This course focuses on the representation of slavery and unfree labor in historical and contemporary artistic production, in a global context. It follows the lead of contemporary artists who have 'returned' to the plantation, and whose work consequently compels us to explore more closely the implications and afterlives of the plantation in our contemporary moment. Like these artists, this course also uses the lens of repair to look back at the plantation's visual histories, and to track its legacies in the present, while also considering what a term like repair can look for us now, and in the future.

Instructors
Seminar. Renaissance Art: Courts of Europe (HA or LA)
Subject associations
ART 440

Culture, Society and the Arts at the courts of Europe c.1450-1620 are considered in relation to their predecessors and successors. Aspects of collecting, celebrations, patronages, and other forms of ideology and propaganda in Spain, France, Italy, England, and the German-speaking lands will be studied.

Instructors
Early Modern European Art: The Ecological History of Early Modern Prints (HA or LA)
Subject associations
ART 470 / ENV 470 / ECS 471

This seminar explores the history of early modern European printing and its materials, with a focus on Albrecht Dürer. An underlying assumption of the course is that art-making materials and practices are linked to contemporary conceptions and theories of nature. From 1450 to 1850, the natural resources most commonly deployed for printing were wood, metal, and stone. Their use was shaped by environmental conditions, and had an impact on the ecology of their places of origin. While the course will focus on European print culture, and Albrecht Dürer when possible, it also will refer to early modern print materials and practices from East Asia.

Instructors
Kongo Art (CD or LA)
Subject associations
ART 473 / AAS 473 / AFS 473

Easily recognized as among the most important examples of canonical African art, Kongo sculpture, textiles, and ritual design are famous for their conceptual density, stylistic variety and rigorous abstraction. The course examines the role of art in the life of the Kongo Kingdom and related peoples, from the arrival of Spanish explorers and missionaries in the 15th century, through the era of Belgian colonization from the late 19th to mid-20th centuries, to the period since political independence in 1960. The seminar coincides with and will explore the Kongo Across the Waters exhibition at the Princeton University Museum.

Instructors
Empathy and Alienation: Psychological Aesthetics and Cultural Politics (HA or LA)
Subject associations
HUM 450 / GER 407 / ART 482 / ARC 450

In 19- and 20-c. debates that crossed borders among disciplines including psychology, sociology, anthropology, art history, philosophy, and political theory, empathy and alienation emerged as key terms to describe relations among human beings, works of art, and commodities. This seminar addresses the dynamics of empathy and alienation across a range of discourses and artifacts. Our explorations of how empathy and alienation were variously conceptualized in psychological aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and critical theory will aim to open new perspectives on recent debates about identity, affect, and human-animal and human-AI relations.

Instructors
Spyros Papapetros
Beaux-Arts Architecture and Urbanism
Subject associations
ART 521 / ARC 520

Before establishing the first formal architectural school of North America at the MIT in 1866, William Ware toured Europe. He came back with one conclusion: The French courses of study are mainly artistic and the German scientific, and the English practical. Opting for the artistic path of the Parisian Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Ware opened the door to the international propagation of a term that has become associated with a period - the turn of the 20th century - and a style. This seminar examines the origins, developments, and ramifications of the global Beaux-Arts through texts, drawings, prints, and buildings in the New York area.

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 on Chinese Calligraphy
Subject associations
ART 525 / EAS 555

Calligraphy is one of the most highly regarded artistic accomplishments in China and is crucial to understanding Chinese art and culture in general. This course is a critical review of the studies of Chinese calligraphic paradigms, focusing on the period from the 7th to the 14th centuries.

Instructors
Hui-Wen Lu
Arts of Enlightenment: Buddhist Materialities in East Asia
Subject associations
ART 526 / EAS 566 / REL 540

How does stone become sacred, or lumber enlivened? Where is the Buddha Body in a decorated sutra? Why were so many ink paintings produced in the name of Zen, which declares images unnecessary? This seminar examines the history of Buddhist art-making and visualization practices from the earliest representations of the Buddha to the curatorial practices of modern museums. We foreground sensorial qualities and modes of making as we investigate the roles of aura, iconicity, and (in)visibility in the lives of efficacious objects. The class includes field trips to collections on campus and beyond to examine original works of art.

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
Seminar in American Art: Languages of Art and Science
Subject associations
ART 562

This seminar explores the intersection of the subjects, methods, concepts, and terminologies of art and science in Europe and the United States circa 1750-1915. Each meeting focuses on a key concept, such as description, order, morphology, difference, diagnosis, observation, experiment, and speculation. We consider the manifestations of these concepts in a range of intriguing images, texts, and material practices from the realms of art making and scientific inquiry, focusing especially on ways of knowing in emerging and transforming disciplines, among them natural history, geology, ethnography, biology, astronomy, and psychology.

Instructors
Seminar in Contemporary Art and Theory: Sculpture & Scandal
Subject associations
ART 566

The history of modern sculpture is rife with controversy. Why do artistic ambitions and public expectations so often collide in this particular medium? We examine the scandals of sculpture through a series of case studies, from Rodin, Duchamp, and Brancusi to Hans Haacke, Richard Serra, and Sam Durant. We also delve into the status of monuments at times of upheaval, from the Russian Revolution to Black Lives Matter.

Instructors
Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities: Death
Subject associations
HUM 595 / ART 591 / HLS 590 / ANT 595

This interdisciplinary seminar examines death as a social process and a historical event. The first part focuses on death rituals in a variety of contexts: preparing and disposing of dead bodies, and mourning and commemorating the dead. Key texts address religion, rites of passage, symbolic efficacy, ontologies of personhood, and theologies of the soul. The second part explores the intersections of death with law, the state, and museums: forensic investigations, public commemorations, and curations of funerary objects and human remains, considered as means of public reckoning with death, especially in contexts of war and political violence.

Instructors
Elizabeth A. Davis
What Photography Can Do
Subject associations
FRE 536 / HUM 510 / MOD 512 / ART 592

This interdisciplinary course explores the wide range of ways photography has been used for aesthetic, scientific, documentary, political, and surveillance purposes. Particular attention is given to the rich history of photography in France, beginning with the work of early inventors (Niépce's héliographie, Daguerre's daguerréotype, the Lumière brothers' vues photographiques animées) and practitioners (Atget, Nadar). We explore aerial & biometric photography, landscape, still life, portraiture, photo novels & photo essays, photojournalism, and photography's use as a tool of social control in the colonial context.

Instructors
Christy N. Wampole

Fall 2024

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
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
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
History and Theories of Architecture: 20th Century
Subject associations
ARC 549 / ART 586

An overview of the major themes running through the various strands of architecture and environmental politics in the twentieth century. While overarching in scope, the seminar is based on a close reading of selected texts, drawings and research projects by prominent environmental engineers, designers and anthropologists. Special emphasis is given to the history of climate control, ventilation and theories of contamination as they manifest in built environments. During the course, we reflect on how these theories are rendered in the idealization of comfort and universal notions of well-being in modern architecture.

PhD Proseminar: Nuclear Architectures
Subject associations
ARC 571 / ART 581 / MOD 573 / LAS 571

From secret laboratories to monumental infrastructures and the many landscapes of war, energy, and waste in between, nuclear power is at the core of a vast and radically understudied array of 20th c. architectures. Central to the most iconic architectural images of the post-war era while also rendered invisible in apparently unseen wastelands, atomic weapons, nuclear reactors, and atmospheric fallout eventually attracted intense architectural attention. Drawing on multiple literatures, the seminar explores how the nuclear penetrated beyond warscapes to enter even the private spaces of the domestic realm and the human body.

Instructors
Beatriz Colomina
Sylvia Lavin
Advanced Topics in Modern Architecture: Intestinal Architecture
Subject associations
ARC 576 / MOD 502 / ART 598

Buildings routinely simulate stability and immobility yet operate as porous membranes suspended within vast pulsating material, economic, social, energetic, bacteriological, and informational circuits. Architecture is an effect that is inseparable from what it represses, the vast networks trafficking between ever-increasing holes and mounds across the planet devoted to extraction and waste. This seminar pays attention to the strange entangled complexities of both architecture and extraction, and rethinks the ethics, psychopathologies, and beauties of architecture embedded in its relationships to extraction.

Instructors
Mark Wigley
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
The Art and Archaeology of the Ancient Near East and Egypt (LA)
Subject associations
ART 200 / NES 205 / AFS 202

The focus will be on the rise of complex societies and the attendant development of architectural and artistic forms that express the needs and aspirations of these societies. Occasional readings in original texts in translation will supplement the study of art and architecture.

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.

Instructors
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
The Arts of Japan (LA)
Subject associations
ART 217 / EAS 217

This course surveys the history of art-making in Japan, from prehistory to the present. We will explore a broad range of media, including paintings, sculpture, architecture, prints, ceramics, and photography by focusing on the life stories of individual things. Over the semester we will strengthen and refine our ability to translate what we see into a language of form, and to give form meaning through awareness of methods of making, and by interrogating historical and contemporary contexts. The course includes study of original works of art in campus collections.

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
Introduction to African Art (CD or LA)
Subject associations
ART 260 / AAS 260 / AFS 260

An introduction to African art and architecture from prehistory to the 20th century. Beginning with Paleolithic rock art of northern and southern Africa, we will cover ancient Nubia and Meroe; Neolithic cultures such as Nok, Djenne and Ife; African kingdoms, including Benin, Asante, Bamun, Kongo, Kuba, Great Zimbabwe, and the Zulu; Christian Ethiopia and the Islamic Swahili coast; and other societies, such as the Sherbro, Igbo, and the Maasai. By combining Africa's cultural history and developments in artistic forms we establish a long historical view of the stunning diversity of the continent's indigenous arts and architecture.

Instructors
Competing Professions (LA)
Subject associations
ART 291 / URB 291 / ARC 291

Vitruvius, the author of the only surviving architectural treatise from Antiquity has been called alternatively an architect or an engineer. Architects and engineers started to organize themselves as professions in the early modern period and to compete to secure commissions. This course addresses the story of how two professions came to define themselves against each other. Students will first review the different actors of the European early modern building world, before focusing on the fields of contest between architects and engineers and how this battle ultimately defined the nature of each profession, between art and science.

Instructors
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
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
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
Drawing Archaeology (HA or LA)
Subject associations
ART 407 / CLA 407 / VIS 408 / HLS 408

Archaeology is a visual discipline: it searches for material evidence of the human past and presents its discoveries with an array of graphic media. This hybrid studio/seminar combines training in drawing as an observational tool for excavation with critical analysis of visual media based on archaeological and art historical theory. Build your drawing portfolio with hands-on study of artifacts from the University's collections, delve into archives, and learn digital recording tools. What are the challenges of reconstructing fragmentary evidence? Do drawings shape our perception of the past?

Instructors
Song Dynasty Painting (LA)
Subject associations
ART 428 / EAS 428

The Song Dynasty has long been considered the high point of Chinese painting, representing a classical period to which later artists consistently looked back. This seminar will explore the artistic qualities and development of landscape, figure, and flower-and-bird painting and will consider main issues concerning these genres. Such issues include the relative importance of different genres, the relationship between the natural and the human world, the roles of the court and literati in producing art, and the materiality and visuality of Song painting.

Instructors
Seminar. Medieval Art: Genesis: Cosmos and Ethos in Late Antique Art (EM or LA)
Subject associations
ART 430 / MED 430 / HLS 430

This course examines the representation of the Cosmos and of Creation narratives in the arts of Late Antiquity. While its focus will be the illumination of manuscripts of the Book of Genesis, attention will also be paid to competing Late Antique cosmologies, particularly the revival of interest in Plato's Timaeus. In addition to considering the implications of the varied manners in which the Genesis narrative is visualized, the course will investigate how the Jewish-Christian definition of a created cosmos conditioned understanding of one's being in the world and the ethical life.

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

How and why was Impressionism invented in Paris in the early 1870s, and why does it still matter today? This year marks the 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist exhibition, celebrated by a new exhibition, Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism at the Musée d' Orsay and the National Gallery of Art. A trip to see this show in Washington will ground our investigation into the social conditions, geographies, and ideologies that informed this radical new way of painting. Readings will include primary sources alongside brand new and classic scholarship on the Impressionist avant-garde.

Instructors
Seminar in Modernist Art & Theory: Alienation in Modern Art & Literature (HA or LA)
Subject associations
ART 455 / VIS 455 / ECS 456

"Alienation" is a primary concern of modern art and literature. This seminar explores some of its principal formulations by artists, writers, and philosophers over the last two centuries.

Instructors
Seminar. Contemporary Art: The World Picture (LA)
Subject associations
ART 456

The World Picture investigates the global turn in contemporary art with a focus on international mega-exhibitions as a form of worldmaking. Case studies of key exhibitions and debates within the broader history, ranging from 19th century worlds fairs and the earliest biennales to the explosion of recurring mega-exhibitions in the 1990s and recent traveling biennales. How do such exhibitions both reproduce and resist the economic and political logic of globalization? What are the particular urgencies of constructing or negating a world picture from the perspective of "the global south"? Field trip to Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy.

Instructors
Pathologies of Difference: Art, Medicine and Race in the British Empire (CD or EC)
Subject associations
ART 483 / AAS 483 / HUM 483

This course examines the relationship of art and medicine in the construction and production of race in the British Empire from the early modern period until the beginning of the twentieth century. We will analyze how image-making has been used in the development of medical knowledge and how scientific concepts of vision and natural history have been incorporated into art making. We will then examine how these intersections were deployed to visualize and, sometimes, challenge continually changing meanings about human and geographical difference across Britain and its colonies.

Instructors
Collecting and Exhibiting Art of the Ancient Americas (HA)
Subject associations
ART 485 / LAS 485

How have collecting practices shaped the perception of Indigenous cultures in the Americas? The recognition and reception of native art and architecture reflects the evolving intellectual preoccupations of collectors over 500 years. Charting this history, topics will include the role of archaeological illustrations; the invocation of national identities; issues of appropriation in modern and contemporary art; the faking and restoration of objects; the ethical considerations of museum display; the reconstruction of ruins into tourist destinations; and misrepresentations in New Age religiosity, conspiracy theories, and popular entertainment.

Instructors
Rembrandt (LA)
Subject associations
ART 487

Rembrandt (1606-1669) is an artist we feel we know, perhaps because he painted, etched and drew so many self-portraits. His art is characterized by an intense intimacy and humanity. Even in his own day, he was lauded for his ability to depict emotions in his narrative scenes, which elicit our empathy. We will study all aspects of Rembrandt's art and examine firsthand some of his works held by the Princeton University Art Museum and museums in New York City in order to help us understand his universal appeal.

Instructors
Proseminar in the History of Art
Subject associations
ART 500

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

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
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
Seminar in Modernist Art and Theory: Modernism and Socialism
Subject associations
ART 565 / MOD 565 / ARC 585

This seminar explores various connections between modernist art and socialist politics from the 1848 revolutions to the present. How were these links forged, and why were they broken? What (if anything) can we deduce about the relationship between vanguard aesthetics and politics then and now?

Instructors
Photography Theory
Subject associations
ART 593 / MOD 593

What modes of thought does photography produce, reproduce, and make possible? In turn, what has been thought, speculated about, and contributed to photographic discourse since (before) its inception in 1839? This graduate seminar moves thematically and roughly chronologically through photography theory, with an emphasis on those texts most influential to an art historical canon/interpretation of the medium. Graduate students from all departments are welcome.

Instructors
Graduate Research Internship
Subject associations
ART 597

This course is designed for post-generals students in the Department of Art & Archaeology who are currently conducting research for their dissertation under the supervision of a dissertation adviser of record in the department. This course provides a platform for students who have been nominated for/awarded an internship that is relevant to the student's dissertation research topic from a research institute, private foundation, outside organization, or another university. Enrollment in this course requires written approval, in advance, from the dissertation adviser and the Director of Graduate Studies.

Instructors
Problems in Ancient History: The Senses in the Ancient Mediterranean
Subject associations
CLA 547 / PAW 503 / HLS 547 / HIS 557 / ART 527

An interdisciplinary, diachronic, and critical study of the senses in the ancient world. Explores how a variety of senses might be recovered from the past and assesses the possibilities and limitations of sensory approaches. Surveys the types of primary evidence that might be used, weighs the possibilities for objective interpretation, and considers the reasons for regional and chronological variation. Senses examined in their social, political, and cultural contexts and with attention to conceptions of bodies, perception, and ontology. Strengths and weaknesses of the secondary literature on the topic evaluated.

Instructors
Michael A. Flower
Publishing Articles in Literature, Art, and Music Studies Journals
Subject associations
COM 532 / ART 531 / ENG 591 / MUS 533

In this class, students of literature, art, and music read deeply and broadly in peer-reviewed journals in their disciplines and fields as a way of learning current scholarly debates and placing their scholarship in relationship to them. Students report each week on the trends in the last five years of any journal of their choice, writing up the articles' arguments and debates, while also revising a paper in relationship to those debates and preparing it for publication. This course enables students to leap forward in their scholarly writing through a better understanding of their fields and the significance of their work to them.

Instructors
Wendy Laura Belcher
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
Writing About Art (Rilke and Freud) (EC or LA)
Subject associations
GER 372 / ART 342 / ECS 384

Can experiences of looking at works of art shape not only how we think and feel and see, but also what we understand ourselves to be, as human beings? Two great 20-c. writers, poet Rainer Maria Rilke and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, believed they could. How did Freud's inquiries into aesthetic experience and the ways artists perceive the world inform the development of psychoanalysis? What moved Rilke to transform his writing in light of what he saw in modern art? Course focuses on the significance of art, and of practices of writing about art, in lyric poetry, experimental prose, psychoanalytic theory, and cultural analysis.

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

This course investigates ancient architecture beyond the disciplinary boundaries of Art History and Civil Engineering. Students will master relevant elements of structural engineering to solve problems underlying the realization of large structures, including their design, materials, and construction. Students will also historically contextualize architecture, including the technological developments, sociological aspects, and aesthetic underlying these monuments. Course projects are based on collaborative group work. In fall 2024, this course will focus on the architecture of ancient Greece, including a planned trip to Athens.

Seminar in Modern Spanish-American Literature: Documenting the Real: Truth, Representation, and the Latin American
Subject associations
SPA 548 / ART 549 / LAS 548

This course focuses on documentation and the returns of the real in Latin American fiction, art, photography, theater, and film that seek to represent, record, or enact the real, social life,and/or the natural world in an accurate, truthful way, and that claim to embody some kind of epistemological or evidentiary truth. We cover a wide range of debates about representation and realism, from nineteenth century non-fiction and the real maravilloso to more recent developments in documentary photography, theater, and film. Readings include texts by Arias, Barthes, Borges, Brecht, Bellatin, Carpentier, Foster, Jaar, Cabrera Infante, and Coutinho.

Instructors
Gabriela Nouzeilles
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 Minor 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

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
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 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
Adv Readings in Arch Method and Theory
Subject associations
ART 725

No description available


 

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
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
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

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 C. 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
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