Art History and Archaeology

The first half of the Introduction to Art History explores premodern art and architecture around the world, from cave paintings to Song dynasty landscapes and Renaissance sculpture. Lectures and discussion sections are organized around themes, including nature and naturalism, death and the afterlife, ornament and abstraction, gender and sexuality, colonialism and conversion, and ritual and divinity. Visits to museums across New York are also an integral component to the course.

The first half of the Introduction to Art History explores premodern art and architecture around the world, from cave paintings to Song dynasty landscapes and Renaissance sculpture. Lectures and discussion sections are organized around themes, including nature and naturalism, death and the afterlife, ornament and abstraction, gender and sexuality, colonialism and conversion, and ritual and divinity. Visits to museums across New York are also an integral component to the course.

Discussion Section for Course: AHIS BC1590 NYC

Discussion Section for Course: AHIS BC1590 NYC

Discussion Section for Course: AHIS BC1590 NYC

Discussion Section for Course: AHIS BC1590 NYC

Discussion Section for Course: AHIS BC1590 NYC

Discussion Section for Course: AHIS BC1590 NYC

Discussion Section for Course: AHIS BC1590 NYC

Discussion Section for Course: AHIS BC1590 NYC

New York City is our greatest metropolitan legend.  Capital of dreams, it soars to the skies, gathers immigrants from around the globe, and governs world finance. The scale of its swagger is matched only by the misery of its mistakes.  Here is your chance to get to know the epic place you chose for college.

The course is team-taught, by professors, teaching assistants, and all its students.  Lectures are held twice a week. A third weekly session is devoted to small-group forums in which students present to each other on assigned field work themes. The first half of the course studies the relationships between urban design, immigration, and finance in three-lecture units; the second half of the course explores a variety of municipal subjects.  

The course presents New York City--historically and today-- through a variety of perspectives, and asks students to exercise fundamental intellectual skills of comparative reading and writing, presenting competing points of view and reporting on local facts, and public speaking in real time.

This course delves into drawing as an expansive, exploratory practice that underpins all forms of visual art. Designed primarily as a hands-on workshop, the class is enriched with slide lectures, video presentations, and field trips. Throughout the semester, students will engage in individual and group critiques, fostering dialogue about their work. Beginning with still life and progressing to drawings of artworks, artifacts, and figure studies, the course investigates drawing as a dynamic practice connected to a wide array of visual cultures.

Today’s cell phones are equipped with cameras that far surpass those used by the pioneers of digital photography, offering superior resolution and multi-sensor capabilities that revolutionize how we capture and process images. This course explores the creative and technical potential of smartphone photography, focusing on accessible tools and workflows that empower students to produce compelling digital works. The curriculum emphasizes post-production and digital media techniques over traditional camera mastery. Students will develop foundational skills in Adobe Suite applications, including Lightroom and Photoshop for photo editing and After Effects and Premiere for video production. We will also discuss the integration of artificial intelligence in modern photography, examining how AI enhances editing processes and opens new creative possibilities. A significant part of the course will address fundamental questions of light in photography, the use of RAW formats—offered by many smartphones but seldom understood—and the structure of digital image files. Students will also learn about post-production techniques for preparing images for print, as well as for projection or display on digital screens, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of the end-to-end digital photography workflow. Thinking Locally: Street photography serves as a central theme in this course, encouraging students to document the vibrant life of New York City through weekly assignments. A guided photo walk in Harlem will provide hands-on experience in capturing unique, candid moments. Ethical considerations will be a key focus, addressing topics like consent, privacy, and best practices for interacting with subjects. Discussions will be complemented by readings, critiques, and a guest lecture from a professional street photographer. By the end of the course, students will have transformed their understanding of smartphone photography, creating works that push the boundaries of accessible technology while building a strong foundation in contemporary digital media.

The monuments selected belong to a period that starts when architecture moved away from Roman antique models and ends just before the re-adoption of Classical standards and forms in the Renaissance. In this course the originality of medieval architecture, its relationship with earlier and later monuments, and the dramatic effort involved in building before the introduction of power tools will be discussed. In the first weeks, important concepts of medieval society and its architecture will be presented in combination with a number of new technologies recently adopted in the field. These introductory classes will offer the foundations needed to understand artistic and architectural developments in the Middle Ages. During the course of the semester, the latest methods of research will be introduced, including new digital technologies. These technologies have created new approaches and are steadily transforming the field.

Discussion Section for 'Medieval Architecture in Europe'

Discussion Section for 'Medieval Architecture in Europe'

Discussion Section for 'Medieval Architecture in Europe'

The course will examine a variety of figures, movements, and practices within the entire range of 20th-century art—from Expressionism to Abstract Expressionism, Constructivism to Pop Art, Surrealism to Minimalism, and beyond–situating them within the social, political, economic, and historical contexts in which they arose. The history of these artistic developments will be traced through the development and mutual interaction of two predominant strains of artistic culture: the modernist and the avant-garde, examining in particular their confrontation with and development of the particular vicissitudes of the century’s ongoing modernization. Discussion section complement class lectures. Course is a prerequisite for certain upper-level art history courses.

Required discussion section for UN2405 Twentieth Century Art.

Required discussion section for UN2405 Twentieth Century Art.

Required discussion section for UN2405 Twentieth Century Art.

Required discussion section for UN2405 Twentieth Century Art.

Required discussion section for UN2405 Twentieth Century Art.

Required discussion section for UN2405 Twentieth Century Art.

Required discussion section for UN2405 Twentieth Century Art.

Required discussion section for UN2405 Twentieth Century Art.

Required discussion section for UN2405 Twentieth Century Art.

Required discussion section for UN2405 Twentieth Century Art.

This course will examine the history of art in Europe from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. This was a period of dramatic cultural change, marked by, among other things, the challenging of traditional artistic hierarchies; increased opportunities for travel, trade, and exchange; and the emergence of “the public” as a critical new audience for art. Students will be introduced to major artists, works, and media, as well as to key themes in the art historical scholarship. Topics will include: the birth of art criticism; the development of the art market; domesticity and the cult of sensibility; the ascension of women artists and patrons; and the visual culture of empire, slavery, and revolution. The emphasis will be on France and Britain, with forays to Italy, Spain, Germany, India, America, and elsewhere.

This course will study the problematic persistence of history painting as a cultural practice in nineteenth century Europe, well after its intellectual and aesthetic justifications had become obsolete. Nonetheless, academic prescriptions and expectations endured in diluted or fragmentary form. We will examine the transformations of this once privileged category and look at how the representation of exemplary deeds and action becomes increasingly problematic in the context of social modernization and the many global challenges to Eurocentrism. Selected topics explore how image making was shaped by new models of historical and geological time, by the invention of national traditions, and by the emergence of new publics and visual technologies. The relocation of historical imagery from earlier elite milieus into mass culture forms of early cinema and popular illustration will also be addressed.

This is an introductory course in time-based arts: video, sound, and performance, understood through the language of both short and long cinematic forms. We'll start with an in-depth study of the life and work of Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986), whose art has a unique sense of time, driven by the unknown, the immaterial, and the spiritual.

This class is for artists who want to construct their own sense of time, punctuation, and duration, as well as those looking to discover the visual and audio aesthetics of their generation. How does a feeling become an image, and what sound does it make? What are our media aesthetics and skins? Is there a way to address the optical beyond the eye and engage what we currently consider secondary senses, take our bodies back? Our collective task is to construct a camera (both a room and an apparatus) that captures both aural and visual images, creating a sonorous space where we can encounter ourselves in our own time. No prior knowledge of any medium is required. Not for the faint of heart.

Required course for department majors. Not open to Barnard or Continuing Education students. Students must receive instructors permission. Introduction to different methodological approaches to the study of art and visual culture. Majors are encouraged to take the colloquium during their junior year.

In this course, you will conduct independent projects in photography in a structured setting under faculty supervision.  You are responsible for arranging for your photographic equipment in consultation with the instructor.

This course will afford you a framework in which to intensively develop a coherent body of photographs, critique this work with your classmates, and correlate your goals with recent issues in contemporary photography.  

Students are required to enroll in an additional fifteen contact hours of instruction at the International Center for Photography. Courses range from one-day workshops to full-semester courses. 

Permission of instructor only.  The class will be limited to 20 students.

WEEKLY DISCUSSION SECTION FOR CLOTHING AHIS BC3667

WEEKLY DISCUSSION SECTION FOR CLOTHING AHIS BC3667

WEEKLY DISCUSSION SECTION FOR CLOTHING AHIS BC3667

WEEKLY DISCUSSION SECTION FOR CLOTHING AHIS BC3667

WEEKLY DISCUSSION SECTION FOR CLOTHING AHIS BC3667

WEEKLY DISCUSSION SECTION FOR CLOTHING AHIS BC3667

WEEKLY DISCUSSION SECTION FOR CLOTHING AHIS BC3667

WEEKLY DISCUSSION SECTION FOR CLOTHING AHIS BC3667

WEEKLY DISCUSSION SECTION FOR CLOTHING AHIS BC3667

WEEKLY DISCUSSION SECTION FOR CLOTHING AHIS BC3667

WEEKLY DISCUSSION SECTION FOR CLOTHING AHIS BC3667

WEEKLY DISCUSSION SECTION FOR CLOTHING AHIS BC3667

WEEKLY DISCUSSION SECTION FOR CLOTHING AHIS BC3667

WEEKLY DISCUSSION SECTION FOR CLOTHING AHIS BC3667

This year the eyes of the Catholic world will once again turn to Rome as the city celebrates the Jubilee—a tradition that has occurred every twenty-five years since the fifteenth century. In this seminar, we will investigate the architectural and urban history of Rome, stressing projects (both realized and ideal) conceived during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The city will be analyzed as the product of successive interventions that have created a deeply layered topography. How Rome has continued to build upon its past, both literally through physical reuse and figuratively through symbolic appropriation, from the time of Pope Martin V to Pope Sixtus V, will thus serve as a key theme. Working within this overarching framework, each class session focuses on a thematic group of projects that will be studied in relationship to one another rather than as independent monuments. We will examine churches, palaces, villas, public amenities, streets, and piazzas through the functional demands that shaped them and the life that went on in and around them. Topics under discussion include architectural and urban palimpsest; the resurgence of interest in antiquity; building typologies; self-aggrandizement by means of architectural patronage; the reverberations of the Counter-Reformation in architecture; the role of urban rituals and spectacles; and the representation of the city and its buildings in drawings, maps, and prints.

This course examines a diverse selection of social and aesthetic responses to the impacts of modernization and industrialization in nineteenth-century Europe. Using works of art criticism, fiction, poetry, and social critique, the seminar will trace the emergence of new understandings of collective and individual experience and their relation to cultural and historical transformations. Readings are drawn from Friedrich Schiller's Letters On Aesthetic Education, Mary Shelley's The Last Man, Thomas Carlyle's "Signs of the Time," poetry and prose by Charles Baudelaire, John Ruskin's writings on art and political economy, Flora Tristan's travel journals, J.-K. Huysmans's Against Nature, essays of Walter Pater, Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy and other texts.

This lecture class introduces the notion of global contemporary art through the history of exhibitions, chiefly biennials and other large-scale endeavors, and principal agents behind them. On the one hand, the course considers exhibitions as a crucial tool of cultural diplomacy, which seek to position and/or reposition cities, regions, and even entire nations or “peoples” on the international scene. Thus, we will explore how the artistic interests vested in exhibition-making intersect with other—political, economic, ideological, and cultural—interests. We will consider those intersections paying special attention to the shifts in political relations and tensions during and after the Cold War, including the moment of decolonization in Africa; the moment commonly understood as “globalization” and associated with the expansion of the neoliberal capitalism after 1989; and, finally, the current moment of the planetary crisis. This expansive view of the “global contemporary art” will allow us to distinguish different impetuses behind internationalism and globalism that not only seek to establish hegemony, artistic or otherwise, but also look for the means to forge transnational dialogues and solidarities. On the other hand, this class seeks to illuminate how certain artistic idioms and approaches developed after World War II achieved primacy that influences artistic production to this day. To this end, we will examine the rise of a “visionary curator” as a theorist and tastemaker. We will also explore how more recent exhibitions have sought to expand the geography of the “canonized” post-WWII art movements and valorize artistic production conceived outside of the so-called “West.”

In addition to weekly brief writing assignments (150–300 words each), both in and outside of class, the students in the course will reconceive the installation of one of MoMA’s permanent collection galleries (1940s-70s or 1970s-present) and produce a podcast that provides the rationale for the reinstallation in form of dialogue.

This seminar examines two intertwined propositions. One is the undisputable fact that the global HIV/AIDS pandemic is ongoing and that the disease continues to shape the way artists and activists grapple with public health, national policy, and medical injustice.  The other is my own polemic-in-formation, which is that the eruption of AIDS in the 1980s was the threshold event that inaugurated what is now understood to be “the contemporary” within the art world.  Rather than periodize the start of “the contemporary” with the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, as has become conventional, we will investigate how the AIDS crisis precipitated a sudden urgency that more decisively marks this transition, in particular around the promiscuous inclusion of non-fine art forms such as demonstration posters, zines, and handmade quilts.  We will read foundational texts on HIV/AIDS organizing and look at interventions with graphic design, wheat-pasting, ashes action protests, body maps, embroidery, performance-based die-ins, voguing, film/video, and photography.

We will consider: the inextricability of queer grief, anger, love, and loss; lesbian care; the trap of visibility; spirituality and death; activist exhaustion; the role played by artists of color within ACT-UP; and dis/affinities across the US, Latin America, and South Africa. Our investigations will be bookended by two critical exhibitions, Witness: Against Our Vanishing (Artists Space, 1989) and Exposé-es (Palais de Tokyo, 2023). Authors and artists/collectives include: Aziz + Cuchar, Bambanani Women’s Group, Felicano Centurion, Douglas Crimp, Ben Cuevas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Darrel Ellis, fierce pussy, Elisabeth Lebovici, José Leonilson, Nicolas Moufarrege, Marlon Riggs, Matthew Wong, and the Visual AIDS archive. We will conclude with feminist, queer, and collaborative artistic work made during the (also ongoing) Covid-19 pandemic.  In small groups, students will lead discussions of our texts and the final project will be a collectively curated virtual exhibition.

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 15 students. Permission of the instructor. An interpretive study of the theoretical and critical issues in visual art. Projects that are modeled after major movements in contemporary art will be executed in the studio. Each student develops an original body of artwork and participates in group discussions of the assigned readings. For further info visit: https://arthistory.barnard.edu/senior-thesis-project-art-history-and-visual-arts-majors

Perhaps no other single institution has played a more crucial role in the development and preservation of Japanese art and other forms of visual culture than the Buddhist temple, itself an entity that has undergone significant change, particularly in the modern period. This seminar will examine Buddhist temples in the city of Kyoto, Japan’s imperial capital from 794-1867 from their beginnings in the late eighth century into the early modern period. Although painting, sculpture, and architecture will be our primary focus, the course will provide students with multiple, interdisciplinary perspectives on the diverse forms of institutional organization, architecture, art, and liturgy that comprise Buddhist houses of worship, with particular attention to their development in the city of Kyoto. We will take a site-specific approach, attending to the following general issues: the legacy of continental practices in such early monasteries as Hōryūji and Tōdaiji in Nara; adaptations to Japanese urban space and landscape at Tōji and Enryakuji; physical changes in temples with the introduction of new sects such as Zen and Pure Land Buddhism; and the transformation of temples in the early modern period. Coinciding with the course will be a series of five guest lectures in February and March on the topic of medieval Japanese sculpture.

This seminar introduces the murals and screen paintings of pre-modern China, both functioned as “painted walls.” Besides examining the visual attributes of these wall paintings, it attends to their special materiality and spatiality rooted in their media—the wall and the screen—to explore their original functions and interactions with the audience. Special attention will be given to the wall paintings’ themes, motifs, spatial representations, styles, scale, media, placement, contexts of display, and audience. Students will take turns leading seminar discussions to analyze the readings for each week. Every week students will read the assigned essays and write a one or two page, double-space reflection on the content and argument. You will post your reflection with questions on Canvas the night before the seminar.

Human beings create second, social, skins for themselves. Everyone designs interfaces between their bodies and the world around them. From pre-historic ornaments to global industry, clothing has always been a crucial feature of people’s survival, desires, and identity. This course studies clothing from the perspectives of anthropology, architecture, art, craft, economics, labor, law, psychology, semiotics, sociology, and sustainability. Issues include gender roles, local traditions, world-wide trade patterns, dress codes, the history of European fashion, dissident or disruptive styles, and the environmental consequences of what we wear today. 

AHIS3682OC. Issues in Nineteenth Century Art. 3 points. Taught in English.

Instructor Nicolas Baudouin, Instructor in Art History. 

We will  focus on a key artistic period that is full of upheavals. We will particularly consider the affirmation of the individuality of the artist in relation to the institutions and great pictorial movements that have marked the history of French painting of that time.

To enroll in this course, you must apply to the Columbia Summer in Paris program through the Center for Undergraduate Global Engagement (UGE).  Global Learning Scholarships available.  Tuition charges apply. 

Please note the program dates are different from the Summer Session Terms. Visit the UGE website for the start and end dates for the Columbia in Summer in Paris program.

Please email uge@columbia.edu with any questions you may have.

This seminar explores the history and evolution of conceptual art and conceptualism across four major cities in the Americas: New York, Buenos Aires, Rosario, and Santiago de Chile. Between 1966 and 1975, artists and curators working in distinct geographical and political landscapes simultaneously foregrounded the notion that the “work” of art was an “idea” rather than an act of object-making. Together, they expanded this concept, producing innovative dematerialized, ephemeral, installation, site-specific, and participatory artworks and exhibitions. Instead of viewing U.S. conceptual art as contemporaneous but ultimately distinct from Latin American conceptualism (as is often assumed), this seminar adopts a trans-hemispheric approach. 

Our focus will be on the alternative circuits formed by artists, curators, and critics, as well as the dynamic movement of ideas and the distinct local imperatives that have shaped these global connections. Our investigation will be limited to a critical decade, allowing us to develop a depth of context while underscoring the porosity of dematerialized art across borders. We will examine how mistranslations of art terminology, such as “conceptual art”, “Conceptual Art,” and “conceptualism,” can expand or evade rigid institutional categorizations. We will engage with archival materials and listen to the voices of prominent and outlier artists and curators, including Oscar Masotta, Lucy Lippard, Seith Siegelaub, Nemesio Antúnez, Jorge Glusberg, Catalina Parra, Cecilia Vicuña, Juan Pablo Langlois, Art & Language, the Art Workers’ Coalition, and the Rosario Group, to trace the contours of post-1960s conceptualism anew.

Everything we contact has been designed. Design makes and unmakes desires on a global scale. It organizes our lives—from the way we move to the interface that tracks our movements. We’ve trained for the end for a while now, apocalypse is announced on every image channel. In a world, soon impossible to physically inhabit, the things we consume now consume us. The stakes have never been higher. To make a new world, we must use design.

Our planet need not be disposed. It is an infrastructure for another one. To make contact with it we need to understand design as a value system for propelling possibility, not possession. The designed world requires new relation to things and fullness of use. As we read, write, experience and make our own projects, Designing Design helps us: acquire intimate knowledge of how we got here, recognize our historical allies and foes, and foster imagination and intelligence to live and make responsibly.

This course requires no prior design experience.

Prerequisites: Barnard Art History Major Requirement. Enrollment limited only to Barnard Art History majors. Introduction to critical writings that have shaped histories of art, including texts on iconography and iconology, the psychology of perception, psychoanalysis, social history, feminism and gender studies, structuralism, semiotics, and post-structuralism.

Prerequisites: Barnard Art History Major Requirement. Enrollment limited only to Barnard Art History majors. Introduction to critical writings that have shaped histories of art, including texts on iconography and iconology, the psychology of perception, psychoanalysis, social history, feminism and gender studies, structuralism, semiotics, and post-structuralism.

This course introduces you to the rich and diverse tradition of Chinese art by focusing on materials and techniques. We will discuss a wide array of artistic media situated in distinct cultural contexts, examining bronzes, jade, ceramics, paintings, sculptures, and textiles in the imperial, aristocratic, literary, religious, and commercial milieus in which they were produced. In addition to developing your skills in visual-material analysis, this course will also acquaint you with the diverse cultures that developed in China’s center and periphery during its five thousand (plus) years of history. Emphasis will be placed on understanding how native artistic traditions in China interacted with those in regions such as the Mongolian steppe, Tibetan plateau, and Central Asia.

“Sacred” space in the Indian subcontinent was at the epicenter of human experience. This course presents Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, and Jain spaces and the variety of ways in which people experienced them. Moving from the monumental stone pillars of the early centuries BCE to nineteenth century colonial India, we learn how the organization and imagery of these spaces supported devotional activity and piety. We discuss too how temples, monasteries, tombs, and shrines supported the pursuit of pleasure, amusement, sociability, and other worldly interests. We also explore the symbiotic relationship between Indic religions and kingship, and the complex ways in which politics and court culture shaped sacred environments. The course concludes with European representations of South Asia’s religions and religious places.

This bridge seminar investigates the history of science through the study of artworks and monuments and the materials and techniques of their manufacture. Because the course’s method hinges on the marriage of theory and practice, in addition to discussions in the seminar room, several sessions will take the form of workshops with artisans and conservators (e.g. stonemasons, illuminators, gardeners), or “laboratory meetings” where students will conduct their own hands-on experiments with materials as part of Professor Pamela Smith’s Making and Knowing Project. Topics to be explored include but are not limited to: metallurgy and cosmogeny, paint pigments and pharmacology, microarchitecture and agriculture, masonry and geology, manuscripts and husbandry, and gynecology and Mariology. Discussion and lab experiments enhanced thanks to the service and experience of Naomi Rosenkranz, Associate Director, The Center for Science and Society, The Making and Knowing Project.

This seminar examines the art and archaeology of immigrants and immigrant communities in pre-modern China. Since the beginning of China’s dynastic history around the first millennium BCE, people from surrounding regions and even further afield have consistently moved into the Chinese heartland. These groups include not only nomads from the Mongolian steppes and the Tibetan Plateau, but also merchants, missionaries, and Muslims arriving via the so-called “Silk Roads”—a network of land and sea routes connecting China to the rest of the Eurasian continent (India, Persia, Central Asia, etc.). In certain periods, descendants of the Chinese diaspora and refugees in frontier regions also played significant roles in Chinese history. This seminar focuses on the archaeological remains and artistic expressions of these immigrants, as well as their interactions with native Chinese art and culture. Topics covered range from painting, sculpture, and calligraphy to crafts and architecture.

This course focuses on buildings and design theories from the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States that were responding to industrialization and rapid urbanization. Based on the premise that modernism in architecture has as much to with attitudes toward change as it does a particular set of formal traits, this class will examine those works that responded to significant technological and social upheaval in an effort to welcome, forestall, or otherwise guide change. We will look at broad themes of the period, including national character, rapid economic growth, the quickened pace of urban life, and shrinking distances due to emerging forms of transportation and communication, all in the light of new methods and materials of construction, new functional programs, and the growing metropolis.

Independent Study section for PhD students

Independent Study section for PhD students

Required course for first-year PhD Students in the Art History Department.

This graduate seminar will interrogate intersections in artificial intelligence, machine vision, neural networks, visual culture, imaging, and art. Students will gain a foundation in the histories and technologies underlying the recent rise of neural networks and machine vision, as well as the more recent rise of generative AI, especially image generation. With this foundation, we will investigate a range of artistic, technological, mass-media, and legal developments in visual culture and AI. In addition to readings and seminar meetings, we will take advantage of the ample public and private AI-related programming at Columbia and in New York: lectures, exhibitions, screenings, studio visits with artists, etc. Students will also have the opportunity to work with custom generative AI models.

Admission by application only. Priority will be given to PhD students with backgrounds in art history, visual culture, and/or computer and data science. All students are expected to complete the readings and tutorials for the first class prior to the start of the semester.

How shall we approach the vast collection of artifacts left by Americans in the eighteenth through twentieth centuries?  What can silver tea services, Amish quilts, rubber telephone receivers or ebony Art Deco coffee tables tell us about the people who designed, produced and used them?  How can we understand the sourcing and transformation of raw materials as culturally embedded practices that reinforce, contest or evolve power dynamics between members of different human communities? What role have everyday objects played in mediating Americans’ relationships to the natural world?  How can the study of material culture deepen our understanding of U.S. entanglements with global history?

In this graduate seminar we will explore the methods used by art historians and others to explore the meanings of material culture.  The class will involve several visits to local collections and each student is expected to produce an 18-20 page research paper on a single object or class of objects.

This course examines the impact of the display of different photographic practices around the world beginning in the 1990s on the heretofore universalizing discourse around photography and modernism. It will read certain canonical texts of photo criticism in counterpoint with research on African photography. We will also consider how the display of these photographs has heightened ethical questions around the competing rights of photographers and their subjects. Who has influenced whom?

Japan’s brief Momoyama period (1573-1615) is often characterized as an “age of gold,” an era in which politically powerful warlords commissioned lavish works of art. During the 150 years between the Ōnin War and establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate in the early 17th century, a series of military rulers unified the warring Japanese states, and for the first time in Japan’s history engaged briefly with the world beyond China through contact with European missionaries and merchants. The same warlords participated in every sphere of cultural life, sponsoring the construction of lavish fortresses and temples, contributing to the development of the arts of Tea and Noh drama, and encouraging the importation of printed books from China and Korea. This course will explore the art of painting in the Japan’s “era of unification.” We will concentrate on the gilded screens and panel paintings that temples, castles, and palaces, but will also study fan paintings, portraiture, and genre painting in order to comprehend the profound impact that this pivotal era would have on all succeeding periods of Japanese art.

In this course, graduate students from different disciplines will explore the ‘Orient’ in Manhattan. The course involves the active search for and analysis of Manhattan's urban space to survey its ‘Oriental’ buildings, monuments, parks, public inscriptions, and even ephemeral, everyday spaces that carry the sense of the ‘Orient’ to the city. Cities are physical places, yet, they are also assemblages of different layers of time, and geographies. These layers are designed to create communal identities and evoke recollections of past memories. Focus will be put on the written history of these spaces by searching in archives (in the City of New York) and digging out written and oral information about the histories of the formation of these spaces and their interactions with their surroundings.

The course will cover many monuments, like the famous obelisk in Central Park or the lessknown Jordanian column in Flushing Meadows Park in Queens; public buildings like Central Synagogue on Lexington, the Islamic Cultural Center on Upper East Side Mosque, or Olana State Historic Site in Hudson, NY; but also, the inner decorations of restaurants, bars (the Carlyle Bar) and even oriental Halal shops, as well as ephemeral spaces like international fairs, and Cairene grill boots.

Traditionally, Islamic art and Islamic architecture have been studied separately within art history and architecture history disciplines. The purpose of this course is, in the first place, to bridge the gap between the two disciplines while working across theories of visual culture and critically revisiting urban studies. A further aspect evolves the discourse about architectural ornament as part of the entire approach to ornament as an ‘Oriental’ trope. Thus, canonical discussions about Orientalism will form part of the course’s readings and will contribute to understanding how the architectural ornament of Manhattan forms identities. The course will introduce and discuss theoretical issues concerning urban architecture and ‘Orientalism’ and the making of the image of ‘Others’ in NYC public spaces. It will also provide a historical survey of these spaces and aim to create a novel comprehensive map for ‘Orientalized’ New York.