Art History and Archaeology

This course explores the rich artistic traditions of the peoples living in Italy—the Etruscans, Italics, Greeks, Celts—from their emergence in the early first millennium BCE to their eventual absorption within the system of “Roman” art. While the arts of Etruria will form the backbone of the course, its conceptual focus will be on the densely entangled web that connected the diverse visual landscapes and creative practices of the Italian peninsula both to each other and to external centers of artistic production, from Cyprus and Carthage to Syria and the cultures of northern Europe. In addition to intercultural connectivity— imports and exports, convergences and divergences, parallels and unique features—special attention will be paid to the socio-political and religious dimensions of art and architecture. Both iconic and non-canonical objects will be examined, ranging from furniture and weaponry to anatomical votives and mythological paintings. This lecture is the first in a three-year cycle that also includes “Roman Art and Architecture” and “Rome Beyond Rome.”

This lecture course explores how art and architecture responded to changing attitudes toward death, the afterlife, and the end of the world over the course of the European Middle Ages, from early Christian Rome to the dawn of the Protestant Reformation in Germany. Medieval illustrations of the Book of Revelation in New York collections will play a central role in discussions of plague, rapture, and “eschatology”—or concerns over the fate of the soul at the end of time. We will analyze the visual culture associated with ordinary people preparing for their own death and the deaths of loved ones, saints and Biblical figures whose triumph in death served as exemplars for the living, and institutional and individual anxieties over humankind’s destiny on Judgment Day. Artworks under consideration will encompass various media and contexts, including monumental architecture and architectural relief sculpture, tomb sculpture, wall painting, manuscript painting, reliquaries, and altarpieces. The course satisfies the major requirement's historical period of 400-1400. Note course requires 1 hour weekly TA discussion sections to be arranged.

This course revisits some of the key moments in the architecture of the nineteenth century with the goal of understanding the relationship between these developments and a global modernity shaped by old and new empires. In doing so, it assumes a particular methodological stance. Rather than attempting to be geographically comprehensive, it focusses on the interdependencies between Europe and its colonies; instead of being strictly chronological, it is arranged around a constellation of themes that are explored through a handful of projects and texts. Reading of primary sources from the period under examination is a crucial part of the course. Students will have the opportunity to hone their critical skills by reading, writing, and conducting research toward a final paper. Discussion section required.

How has visual culture played a role within the social movements of the last several decades, such as #BlackLivesMatter and Extinction Rebellion? How, we might ask, is activism made visible; how does it erupt (or disappear) with collective fields of vision?  Drawing upon Black South African queer photographer Zanele Muholi’s term “visual activism” as a flexible rubric that encompasses both formal practices and political strategies, this lecture class interrogates contemporary visual cultures of dissent, resistance, and protest as they span a range of ideological positions.

We will examine recent developments in and around recent intersections of art and politics from around the world, looking closely at performances, photographs, feminist dances, graffiti, murals, street art, posters, pussy hats, and graphic interventions, with a special focus on tactics of illegibility and encodedness. Topics include visual responses to structural racisms, global climate change, indigenous land rights, state violence, gentrification, forced migration, and queer/trans issues.

Transcultural studies are, today, part of any undergraduate curriculum in the field of humanities. In our contemporary mobile society, transculturality becomes a major phenomenon for understanding the driving power behind the creation of art, style, fashion and social behavior. The Medieval world was no less mobile, and the idea of the ‘Global’ has its roots in ancient times. In this course the medieval Mediterranean basin as space of interactions and the port/trade cities around it will serve as the exemplary arena, in which the constant interactions between Asia, Europe and Africa contributed to the mobility of aesthetic notions and novel ideas.

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.

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.

This seminar will explore the profound transformation of art and architecture connected to the religious practices of both polytheists and monotheists that occurred across the Middle East when much of the region was under Roman rule. Sacred spaces we will focus on include the Temples of Bel and Baalshamin at Palmyra (destroyed in 2015) and Jupiter Heliopolitanus at Baalbek, the recently discovered synagogues at Migdal (Magdala), and the temples, housechurch, and synagogue at Dura-Europos. We will delve into topics such as possible cult continuity between the Iron Age and the Hellenistic and Roman periods, the creation of new deities, the roles of priests, aniconism and figural sculpture, and the construction and adornment of buildings to meet the specific needs of the cults of various deities, Judaism, and Christianity. We will explore and challenge traditional categories such as “Roman” and “provincial” art/architecture. Key questions to consider include the following: how were individuals/communities’ personal, civic, and religious identities expressed in art/architecture that was influenced by interaction with Roman culture broadly, but also highly localized?

The approach is interdisciplinary: we will study architecture, sculpture, mosaics, wall paintings, votive dedications, and inscriptions, and read Jane Lightfoot’s 2003 translation of Lucian’s De Dea Syria (On the Syrian Goddess). Discussion of current and future responses to the destruction of archaeological sites and monuments and looting, as well as the intertwining of cultural and humanitarian crises, will also form an important part of the course and prepare students to engage in contemporary debates. Our visit to the Yale University Art Gallery will provide students with the outstanding opportunity to examine sculptures and wall paintings from Dura-Europos first-hand and give presentations in the gallery.

DISCUSSION SECTION FOR AHIS BC3673

DISCUSSION SECTION FOR AHIS BC3673

DISCUSSION SECTION FOR AHIS BC3673

DISCUSSION SECTION FOR AHIS BC3673

This course offers an introduction to the history of design from the eighteenth century through the twenty-first century, with emphasis placed on the twentieth century. Attention will be paid to a wide range of design specializations, including industrial design and product design, fashion and textile design, automotive design, and graphic design. Proceeding in roughly chronological order, it will explore key themes in the history of design, including matters of taste and etiquette, social reform, the production of value, design education, branding and marketing, and recent trends in sustainable, speculative, and digital design. The course also considers the relationship between design and other modes of material production, including architecture, fine art, and craft.

This course will examine the distinctly American invention of the building type the “skyscraper” and its evolution and impact from the 1870s to today. We will approach the subject through a range of lenses – historiographical, critical, and methodological – exploring tall buildings and their history as objects of design, products of technology, sites of construction, investments in real estate, and places of work and residence. Throughout, the urban dimension will be key in our critical analysis. 

Classroom sessions, for the most part, will be organized as lectures and discussions of assigned readings. There will also be sessions outside the classroom, including a visit to the drawing collection of Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library and to The Skyscraper Museum, as well as a walking tour of Midtown Manhattan.

How did land—a primary source of economic value—become separated from landscape—an object of aesthetic enjoyment—in Enlightenment Europe and its colonies? This course examines the moment between the mid eighteenth and the mid nineteenth centuries when the physical and conceptual demarcations of land from landscape coincided with the emergence of political economic discourses, on the one hand, and the formulation of aesthetics as a separate branch of philosophical inquiry, on the other. Re-examining well-known moments in landscape history, the course aims to ask: What does a global modernity fueled as much by agriculturalization as by industrialization look like? How can this theoretical recalibration help construct new historical ontologies of such key concepts as nature, culture, and environment? What might this examination reveal about the vexed relationship between politics and aesthetics? And what are the historical interdependencies between economic value and aesthetic value?

Advanced Senior Studio II is a critique class that serves as a forum for senior Visual Arts majors to develop and complete one-semester studio theses.  The priorities are producing a coherent body of studio work and understanding this work in terms of critical discourse.  The class will comprise group critiques and small group meetings with the instructor. Field trips and visiting artist lectures will augment our critiques. Please visit: https://arthistory.barnard.edu/senior-thesis-project-art-history-and-visual-arts-majors

This course will survey selected social, cultural and aesthetic or technical developments in the history of photography, from the emergence of the medium in the 1820s and 30s through to the present day. Rather than attempt comprehensively to review every aspect of photography and its legacies in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the course will instead trace significant developments through a series of case studies. Some of the latter will focus on individuals, genres or movements, and others on various discourses of the photographic image.  Particular attention will be placed on methodological and theoretical concerns pertaining to the medium.

AHIS3682OC. Issues in Nineteenth Century Art. 3 points.

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.

AHIS3682OC. Issues in Nineteenth Century Art. 3 points.

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.

The epic story of Rama (Ramayana) is one of the most influential tales of the Indian subcontinent. It has been told and experienced in a stunning range of media across time and space: from epic verse and lyric poetry to painting, narrative sculpture, film, graphic novels, and puppet theater. While Valmiki’s Sanskrit Ramayana of ca. 500 BCE is acknowledged as the first, writers have recounted the tale in the polyglot array of Indic languages, from Kashmiri to Telugu, and infused it with the values and interests of their own time and place. The story’s flexibility and capaciousness has encouraged social contestation and given voice to the concerns of disenfranchised social groups, including women and Dalits. This seminar will examine a generous array of South Asia’s visual Ramayana traditions from the ancient to the modern, encompassing temple relief sculpture, painted courtly manuscripts, and comic book and film Ramayanas. Reading a selection of primary texts alongside we consider this tale’s immense capacity to represent the gamut of human experience, both private and public, and its continued resonance for artists, writers, performers, and their publics.

This course examines the roles of various forms of artistic production in the ongoing struggles over historical memory and constitution (or reconstitution) of democracy in Latin America in the wake of brutal dictatorships and internal conflicts of the last 60 years, as well as the most recent authoritarian turns in the region. Through a country-based selections of case studies—from Mexico, through Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, to Peru and Colombia—we will examine practices that range from grassroots “artivism” and public-site interventions, through sanctioned and unsanctioned memorials and monuments, to official memory museums and “places of reconciliation.” We will consider how different artistic practices engage and mobilize different modes of memory—collective, official, public, counter, and living—and to what ends, and why. We will also think about longue dureé (that is, “long duration” as per the French historian Fernand Braudel) effects of the Spanish conquest, European colonialism, and elite nation-state formation, and their impacts on the contemporary battles over human rights, social justice, belonging, and citizenship. In addition to readings, class materials will include film, both documentary and fictional, providing an expanded insight into how different cultural forms shape and intervene into memory and history formation, and how those, in turn, constitute the imaginary and limits of “democracy.” 

This visual arts seminar explores the pirating, transformation, and circulation of media from the 1960s to the present. It examines the ways that media artists question public participation, democratic commitment, and collective memory. During the 1960s in the United States and abroad, the promise of networked communication prompted a consideration of global connectivity that brought artists and artworks outside of the gallery into the public sphere. Artist, often activists, explored the dissemination of information, and they commandeered messaging. Many of these artists positioned their output against mainstream media, while other artists seized existing media streams with the aim, optimistically, to alter them. Case studies include Stan VanDerBeek, Dara Birnbaum, Black Audio Collective, Tiffany Sia, Sondra Perry, and CAMP.  This course brings together seminar discussions, the practice of making, and the hosting of practitioners; it is designed to offer students an introduction to various aspects of media as it is crafted and curated within and without museum environments. 

Contemporary practitioners of photography often treat photos as not just images to look at but materials to manipulate. They create objects that echo the basic elements of the medium—light and lens—and use altered or expired photo paper. They assemble physical albums, fictional archives, and sculptural installations. They play with the circulation of images online, or share virtual experiences of spaces via printed images.

In this course, we will look projects from recent decades that examine and expand the parameters of photography, including works by Liz Deschenes, David Horvitz, Zoe Leonard, Allison Rossiter, Stephanie Syjuco, and Wolfgang Tillmans. Via writing exercises, material experiments, and generative prompts, students will create their own research-informed projects that push photography beyond the screen or frame and into the material world.

This course explores the making, cultural significance, and display of British portraiture from the end of the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. It explores how portraits engaged with questions of class, race, gender, and empire during an era of rapid historical and cultural transformation, as well as the subsequent collecting and exhibition of British portraits within the post-colonial context of American museums. Taught through a combination of seminar discussions and excursions to New York museums, this course is also designed to give students an introduction to various aspects of curatorial practice and to professional writing within a museum setting.

This course looks closely at objects and images produced by Native North Americans across history. Grounding our study in essays and guest lectures from Native scholars, we will investigate the significance of the works and how and to whom meaning is communicated.  Beginning with an introduction that links aesthetics and worldview using the conventional organizing principle of the culture area, we quickly move on to case studies that take up key issues that persist for Native people living under settler colonialism today, including questions of sovereignty, self-expression, transformation and representation. Along the way, we will also tackle historiographic questions about how knowledge about Native art has been produced in universities and museums and how Indigenous people have worked to counter those discourses.

In every culture there exist highly specific features, which, in their interplay, create its quintessence. In terms of Greek antiquity, temples are generally considered one of these significant cultural parameters. One easily tends, however, to forget that temples are simply a small part – and not even an essential one – of so-called sacred or religious spaces. It is the sanctuary with its precinct wall, temples, sacred groves, divine images, offerings, and – above all – the altar or altars that constitutes the central and transcendent spatial element of ancient Greek religion. Nevertheless, despite their primarily religious function, Greek sanctuaries were never simply cultic spaces; every single one of them was to various degrees an integral part of its social, political, and economic context. The occasionally problematic interpretive model of the “polis religion” makes it absolutely clear that Greek sanctuaries cannot be studied and properly understood, if they are not examined beyond the constraints of religion. Aim of the seminar is to understand the forms and functions of architecture and dedicatory objects in Greek sanctuaries while analyzing these religious, social and political spaces as the centers in which Greek aesthetics, Greek identity, and ultimately Greek culture were shaped.

This seminar takes as its hypothesis that pastel, an artistic medium whose rise to prominence in eighteenth-century Europe was as spectacular as it was short-lived, offers a particularly productive lens through which to consider some of the fundamental aesthetic, social, and cultural debates that helped shape Enlightenment thought. To test this hypothesis, we will study the work of celebrated pastel practitioners such as Rosalba Carriera, Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Jean-Étienne Liotard, and John Russell, in dialogue with primary sources authored by artists, art critics, art theoreticians, and philosophers, whose thought found provocative responses in the luminous, fragile, and ultimately modern surfaces of pastels. Topics of discussion will include: color in the discourse on art; craft in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie; pastel, cosmetics, and identity; the art market and the debate on luxury; and new understandings of the self. These discussions will be informed by recent scholarship on eighteenth-century art engaging with questions of materiality, identity, and consumption, among others.

What is “globalization”? How does it change the way we think about or show art today? What role does film and media play in it? How has critical theory itself assumed new forms in this configuration moving outside post-war Europe and America? How have these processes helped change with the very idea of ‘contemporary art’? What then might a transnational critical theory in art and in thinking look like today or in the 21st century? In this course we will examine this cluster of questions from a number of different angles, starting with new questions about borders, displacements, translations and minorities, and the ways they have cut across and figured in different regions, in Europe or America, as elsewhere. In the course of our investigations, we will look in particular at two areas in which these questions are being raised today -- in Asia and in Africa and its diasporas. The course is thus inter-disciplinary in nature and is open to students in different fields and areas where these issues are now being discussed.

A colloquium devoted to reading illustrated books from Edo-period Japan. Texts to be covered will include Saga-bon illustrated tales, illustrated guidebooks and gazetteers (meisho zue), painting manuals, and poetry, such as Ehon Tōshi-sen, illustrated by Katsushika Hokusai. Reading and translating passages written in premodern Japanese scripts variously called hentaigana, kuzushiji, and sōsho will be the central activity of the course, but we will also consider such themes as the development of woodblock printing, the book as a format, and how the content both reflects and shapes knowledge of the subjects and themes with which they are concerned. If possible we will examine firsthand printed books in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Freer Gallery, and New York Public Library but will also take advantage of ample hi-res interactive resources available through each of these institutions.

Familiarity with Classical Japanese will be useful.

The aim of this seminar is to explore the relationship between changing theories of historical change and the practice of architecture in the long nineteenth century from the ideas of progress that animated architectural theory and design in the European Enlightenment to the critiques of historicism and of revivalism in the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century.  It is the hypothesis of this seminar that during the period one of the dominant themes of architectural form making  was the notion that all understanding is historically conditioned, that an understanding of the past evolution of architectural form was necessary to defining current practices and preparing for the future, increasingly a subject of anxiety in this crucial period industrializing modernity.  This relationship between theory and practice will not be considered uniquely in the realm of the history of ideas, however.  Rather we will strive to “historicize historicism,” and to examine the political, social and economic stakes and settings of historicist architectural practices primarily in France, Britain, and Germany.  Issues of nationalism, colonialism, the discourses of progress, of natural science, and of evolution must necessarily overlap with our joint research.  A key theme that runs throughout the course is the relationship between ideas of defining an appropriate historically based style for modern practice and the rise of a culture of restoration (rather than repair) of the newly defined category of the historical monument.  As a result the course will be punctuated by a series of pairs that look at a single practitioner’s practices between newly conceived construction and restoration.   

AHAR MA/MODA STUDENTS ONLY. INSTRUCTOR PERMISSION REQUIRED.

AHAR MA/MODA STUDENTS ONLY. INSTRUCTOR PERMISSION REQUIRED.

AHAR MA/MODA STUDENTS ONLY. INSTRUCTOR PERMISSION REQUIRED.

The master discipline for organizing the history of Western art can be said to be  Renaissance art, and within that art, the two master tropes are perspective and workshop. The status of perspective has come into serious dispute both as a historical and a philosophical question. Michael Baxandahl has searched  for the historically grounded  patronage of Renaissance artistic production, only to explain why he has searched in vain. Heidegger has excavated for grounds of the subject onto which technology opens.

Minimalism, which developed in the 1960s, has been widely recognized as one of the most important aesthetic movements, styles, or tendencies of the later half of the twentieth century.  More than simply of interest for itself, minimalism has served as a pivotal reference or turning point for nearly all the developments in the visual arts that have come after it (including postminimal sculpture, conceptual art, performance art, process art, and institutional critique) and remains a major touchstone for contemporary artistic practices.  This course considers minimalism within a historical and interdisciplinary perspective (including related developments in music, dance, and film) and follows its development into postminimalism.  In addition to providing important historical information, the course and topic allow for important investigations into questions of artistic formalism and its challengers and notions of art’s critical and political role within the pivotal moment of the 1960s.

This seminar introduces the sculpture of ancient Sumer (south Iraq), with a focus on ancient practices and ontologies of art, the related processes of making and technological innovations, as well as image rituals and the visual manifestation of the divine. Seminar topics include historical monuments, statues of the gods, architectural sculpture and foundation images placed in the ground, and votive portrait statues dedicated in temples. In the fourth millennium BC new technologies of metallurgy, casting, the mechanical reproduction of images, and seal carvings emerged alongside the invention of writing, a technology first documented in the city-state of Uruk, Iraq. Sculpted images and monuments were inscribed with texts that reveal a great deal about the ontological and agentive, the aesthetic and the order of the divine. The seminar will study the genres of Sumerian sculpture alongside their ancient texts. It also explores an important era in the historiography of ancient art and archaeology in the first half of the twentieth century. At the time when Sumerian sculpture was first unearthed and collected, antiquity and ethnography, ruins and ancient statues became subjects of interest for Modern artists and art movements, not only for their aesthetic forms but also as areas of scholarly investigation. Archaeologies of ritual and the sacred, Sumerian and Pre- Columbian antiquity, were topics of great interest in the first half of the twentieth century, among European artists and art movements, but also for Iraqi Modernist groups such as the Baghdad Group of Modern Art and the Ruwad.

Prerequisites: Students will be expected to have previous coursework in art history, archaeology or anthropology. Reading knowledge of French preferred. Applications required. Permission of the instructor is needed for registration.

In this graduate seminar, we will examine how medieval literary and visual culture shaped and reflected people’s understanding of God’s Creation—animals, plants, rocks, planets—and humanity’s place within it. Nature was seen both as a hostile environment, a place of temporary exile after humankind’s banishment from Paradise, and as a machine, bearing the divine blueprint to be decoded and utilized for nourishment, medicine, and amusement. The Church, in a careful balancing act, had to reconcile the disdain for nature mandated in Genesis with the material world it relied upon for its own survival. To explore these tensions, we will engage with recent ecocritical methods, drawing on the approaches in light of the so-called material and cultural turns, and examine historical texts and images related to Neo-Platonic cosmology, the wood of the cross, agriculture and cultural techniques, folkloric traditions, stones and sedimentation, stargazing, architecture, herbal medicine, indigeneity, and natural theology, among other topics. A key theme throughout the semester will be the extent to which ideas and ideals rooted in the Middle Ages continue to shape the ways we interact with the natural world. Museum visits to the New York Botanical Garden’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Library and The Cloisters’ gardens are mandatory.

This seminar takes the recent explosion in spolia scholarship as a point of departure to analyze how artists and builders transformed ancient and foreign artifacts and incorporated them into new settings. It also seeks to understand the ways in which reuse has been interpreted and theorized retrospectively by historians, from Vasari who saw spoliation as a pragmatic phenomenon indicative of artistic decline to modern scholars who have argued for a wide range of interpretations—these include, but are not limited to, spolia as aesthetic choice, political gesture, revivalist impulse, religious symbol, triumphalist sign, and apotropaic talisman. While the course will focus primarily on monuments produced Italy and the wider Mediterranean world from late-antiquity to the Renaissance, students will be encouraged to think broadly about reuse as a theoretical problem across art-historical disciplines.

The graduate seminar "Strokes & Lines: On expressive Mediality in Early Modern Art" investigates how the brush stroke and drawn line gained emphasis in art practice in Early Modern Europe and were conceptualized as artistic gesture in art theory. We will discuss how the visibility of the stroke challenged the primary task of mimesis to modify perception and how the artists walked a fine line to express artistic bravura. The seminar will present the many voices that constitute Early modern aesthetic theory and consider the different artistic positions that form the floor for that discourse. The seminar will be held in two groups, on at Columbia University, leaded by Diane Bodart, the other at Yale University, leaded by Nicola Suthor. We will join forces during the semester for the close-looking sessions at the Morgan Library, the Metropolitan Museum, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Yale Center for British Art, and a three-day fieldtrip/ workshop at Casa Muraro in Venice.

This seminar will look carefully at masterpieces of Chinese painting in Japanese and American collections. The aim of the course is to develop an intuitive sense of the quality appropriate for different genres, formats, and periods. Special attention will be given to the way paintings are presented from the outside title slip to inner title sheet (yin shou) to seals and colophons. We will also consider, or at least speculate on, the artist’s intended audience.

This graduate level seminar focuses on specific medieval and early modern objects from the lands of Islam while turning our attention to the making of these artifacts. It will cover issues concerning the mining and producing substances and their taming with the help of specific tools, like for example the making and shaping of precious stones and precious materials into objects of art, the working with particular materials such as glass and rock crystals, the carving of ivory and wood, the casting of metals and ceramics, and even the making of copies and forgeries. Yet, this seminar explores also our interactions with art objects in the museum. It does so by studying the object as the subject of our inquiring gaze, while paying attention to its material, production techniques, shape and formation as related to time/science/technology/and style. An emphasis is put on the agency of substances as a no-less important tool than ‘the image’ for producing meanings. Beside the first three meetings, in which theoretical aspects concerning the ‘Material Turn’ in art history are discussed, each of the meetings takes place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the new gallery for the arts of Islam as well as in the Medieval/European show rooms. Each meeting will be devoted to one single object. Discussion about the museum exhibition context as the interactive-educational space, in which art objects are deliberately reinvented to speak (or rather answer) particular cultural demands and narrate stories and histories, will be critically discussed too. Histories of extraction of substance, real or contrived, as well as traces of the ‘hand’ of the maker while taming materials into a masterpieces and marvels will be addressed while observing objects.

This seminar explores questions, approaches, and emerging directions in the study of the premodern South Asian temple and its related cultures. A freshly published monograph with a specific regional and temporal orientation will direct our focus each week. Our in-depth explorations will consider the particularities of the scholar’s project, their analytical framework and methods, their book’s organization and writing choices, and the ways in which they have expanded the boundaries of the discipline. What can we learn from each approach to the temple, both in terms of scholarly approach and writing? Studies span the medieval and early modern periods and cover the Tamil south, the Deccan Plateau, Central India, Bengal, the Indo-Gangetic plain, and Himalayan lands. We will consider new approaches to such art-historical mainstays as style, landscape, and temple sculpture and painting as well as more contemporary trends such as eco art history, sensory studies, and the digital humanities.