Art History and Archaeology

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.

This course will explore the intersections between visual and intellectual culture in Northern Europe during the long seventeenth century. Sessions will examine outstanding productions by such figures as Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Peter Paul Rubens, Maria Sibylla Merian, Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Charles le Brun, and others. In addition, we will study visual and material culture, from philosophical prints to anatomical models of eyes, produced by less well-known artists and artisans. The themes and topics we will discuss include the redefinition of the aims and nature of art and knowledge; collecting; competing theories of vision, attention and discernment; and the shifting interrelations of art, religion, philosophy, and science in this period in Northern Europe. We will consider a broad range of objects, including paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, architecture, gardens, shells, and flowers. The course is suitable for students from all disciplines and all years.

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.

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

What does the end of time look like? How have still and moving images made the Apocalypse available for intellectual exploration, explanation, and even play? Why is the End so important in Western European and American culture and what role does it play in our imaginations? In this seminar we will explore the fascination with the end of time as articulated in a broad range of artworks from medieval illuminated manuscripts to Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957) and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979). We will examine diverse proposals for the expected end of time, proposals often given urgency by the imminence of the Apocalypse (an anticipation sustained even in the face of constant deferrals).

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.

How have women turned combinations of creatives roles into artistic success?  At once daughters, fashion icons, models, mothers, muses, painters, print-makers, sisters, sculptors, and wives, great women artists have brilliantly understood the conditions of creativity in their times. This seminar studies how Impressionist Paris launched the modern woman artist, then traces a history of women’s tactics through mid-twentieth century New York Abstract Expressionism.  The seminar takes advantage of: a major 2026 exhibition about Mary Cassatt at the Musée d’Orsay; a burst of 2025-26 scholarship about the women Impressionists; 2025 and 2026 exhibitions about Ruth Asawa and Frida Kahlo; a major 2026 exhibition about Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the creative ecologies of two cultural capitals: Paris and New York.

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

Holland in the seventeenth century was home to some of the most innovative and influential printmakers in the history of art, most important among them, Rembrandt van Rijn. In addition, known for producing the most professional engravers, it became the main center for the issuing and distribution of prints in Europe. Held primarily in The Met’s Drawings and Prints Study Room, this class examines printmaking from this period in its many forms – from masterworks of Dutch landscape to political broadsheets. Reproductive printmakers and peintres-graveur, professional printmakers and amateurs will be considered. How prints were made, published, and sold will be explored. Students will learn how to identify techniques as well as quality of impression by examining original works in the collection of The Met’s Department of Drawings and Prints. We will also look at the subject from the point of view of the museum curator – how works are collected and exhibitions created. 

Prerequisites: Course open to Barnard Art History majors only. Independent research for the senior thesis. Students develop and write their senior thesis in consultation with an individual faculty adviser in art history and participate in group meetings scheduled throughout the senior year.

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.

The fourth millennium BC was a time of tremendous innovation in monumental architecture, the organization of urban space and developments in the visual arts in southern Mesopotamia. As settlements grew into city-states, monumental architectural works transformed the landscape. New technologies of metallurgy, casting, the mechanical reproduction of images, stone sculpture and seal carvings emerged alongside the invention of writing, a technology first documented in the city of Uruk, the place of the setting of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Sculpted images and monuments began to be inscribed with texts that reveal a great deal about the ontological and agentive, the aesthetic and the order of the divine. The lecture introduces students to these extraordinary developments in early art and architecture of ancient Sumer (southern Iraq). Lectures will discuss votive statues, portraiture, image rituals, and the visual manifestation of the gods. The lectures also introduce the extraordinary developments in architecture and monuments.

The course looks at works produced in the more than 20 countries that make up Latin America. Our investigations will take us from the Southern Cone nations of South America, up through Central American and the Caribbean, to Mexico to the north. We will cover styles from the colonial influences present in post-independence art of the early 19th century, to installation art found at the beginning of the 21st century. Along the way we will consider such topics as, the relationship of colonial style and academic training to forging an independent artistic identity; the emergence and establishment of a modern canon; experimentations in surrealism, neo-concretism, conceptual art, and performance. We will end the course with a consideration of Latinx artists working in the U.S.

This bridge seminar welcomes graduate and advanced undergraduate students with backgrounds in art history or computer science (and related fields). We 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. All students are expected to complete the readings and tutorials for the first class prior to the start of the semester.

In the early 15th century, technical refinements in glazing allowed oil painting in the Netherlands to achieve its characteristic transparency and brilliance, while technical advances in glass tinning enhanced the reflectivity of convex mirrors in Northern Europe, and the new steel quenching technique, developed by Milanese armorers,made armor as reflective as a mirror. These reflective mirrors and pieces of armors became quintessential pictorial objects and contributed to the specular metaphor that underpins Renaissance painting. The seminar will explore how the “mise en abyme” operated by the reflection reveals the reverse side of painting, in terms of pictorial composition, mediality and artistic conception within a specific cultural context. Addressing materials from the early 15th to the early 17th century, the seminar will analyze how the detail of the reflection offers a specific lens through which to understand the challenges and transformations of painting in early modern Europe.

The course will be run as a seminar, with meetings devoted to discussions. Students will be responsible for introducing and commen]ng on the weekly readings. They will also be asked to carry out a research project, culminating in a class presentation and a final paper.

Prerequisites: The seminar is open to graduate students and upper-level art history major undergraduates.

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.

An introduction to timber-frame architecture, the primary method of construction prior to the 19th century, focusing on its use in Japanese Buddhist temples. While the course should serve as an introduction, it assumes a basic knowledge of the broad outlines of the history of Japan and its art. Weekly lectures will cover major monuments, beginning with Ise Shrine and the introduction of continental timber-frame architecture at Hōryūji, and extending to the early 19th century. Special attention will be devoted to defining the three major rubrics of the wayō (“Japanese” style), “Zen-style,” and “Great Buddha Hall” modes that were refined and standardized by the 13th century, along with their infinite variations and recombinations. Topics to be explored throughout the course will include: wood joinery techniques and bracket technology; the development of indigenous shoin architecture and its impact on residential architecture; the role of varied Buddhist doctrines in developments of liturgical space; builders’ responses to local environmental and seismic conditions; and the impact of sumptuary laws in the early modern period.

The course will be taught as a series of weekly lectures, and students will be expected to complete and respond to weekly reading assignments. The syllabus focuses primarily on readings available in English, but supplemental reading assignments will also be included for students with a reading knowledge of Japanese.

This course considers visual culture in Britain in the context of Black European studies. The discipline of cultural studies, which evolved in postwar Birmingham, intersected with the rise of black consciousness throughout Britain in the 1980s. How did the interactions of intellectuals and artists at this moment in the late 20th century lead to the creation of strong postcolonial theory and practice? We will consider the role of medium (particularly film and video), feminism, issues of diaspora, migration, and globalization, and the emergence of Black European Studies. Readings include texts by Hazel Carby, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, and Kobena Mercer. We will look at visual production and film by artists such as Sonia Boyce, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Ingrid Pollard, Chris Ofili, Isaac Julien, and Khadija Saye among others.

This seminar will examine Chinese paintings primarily in Japanese and American collections. The aim of the course is to become familiar with the major painters of the seventeen century from Dong Qichang, whose history of Chinese painting still influences how we view paintings today, to his followers and imitators, and further to the scholar-painters who found ways to express resistance to the Manchu conquest at the middle of the century, and finally to imperial court painters. We will look at a wide variety of painting genres and formats. Special attention will be given to the way paintings are presented, from the outside title slip to the inner title sheet to seals and colophons. We will also consider the artists’ intended audience.