Department website: http://arthist.jhu.edu/
Supporting a proud tradition of excellence in humanities scholarship and teaching, Johns Hopkins University offers students a diverse range of resources and opportunities for the study of art history. Courses are taught by an international faculty of respected research scholars, covering a broad temporal scope of the art and architecture of the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Islamic world. Participating in small classes with opportunities for close study of art in local and regional collections, students integrate their direct experience of works of art with the knowledge and critical perspective gained through historical research, discussion, and debate.
Programs leading to the BA, BA/MA, and PhD degrees emphasize the value of investigating works of art in their historical, intellectual, and social contexts, and enable students to deepen their understanding of cultural history in conjunction with courses in other departments and programs.
Art Collections and Resources
Located in a metropolitan region of unsurpassed museum collections and research institutions, Johns Hopkins is well situated for the study of art history. The Baltimore Museum of Art, with its rich holdings in modern and contemporary art, African art, and the history of prints (to name just a few of its strengths), is directly adjacent to the Homewood campus. Downtown, and only a short shuttle ride away, is the renowned Walters Art Museum. It houses art from Asia, the Americas, Europe, and the Islamic world from the pre-historic era to the nineteenth century.
Easily accessible from Baltimore are the museums and galleries of Washington D.C., a short train ride to the south. The National Gallery of Art houses a world-class collection of European and American painting, sculpture, photography, and graphic arts from the Renaissance to the present day. Important collections of Byzantine art and the art of the ancient Americas are maintained at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, and collections of Islamic, Asian, Ancient Near Eastern, and African art are housed in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art and National Museum of African Art. Works of modern and contemporary art are presented in the permanent collections and exhibitions of the Hirshhorn Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), and the Phillips Collection. The collections at the National Museum for Women in the Arts, the Library of Congress, and the Textile Museum (at George Washington University) add to the richness of materials available for study.
Meanwhile, the Sheridan Libraries of Johns Hopkins maintains its own extensive art library on the Homewood Campus, alongside a Special Collections department which includes a strong collection of illustrated books, facsimiles, and artists’ publications, and illustrated manuscripts, photography, and object collections housed at the Homewood Museums. The Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum, which neighbors the History of Art department in Gilman Hall, houses objects from the ancient Mediterranean, Near East, and Americas, as well as some medieval Islamic works.
For current course information and registration go to https://sis.jhu.edu/classes/
Courses
AS.010.101. Introduction to Art History, Pre-1400. 4 Credits.
This course explores world art and architecture before c. 1400 and introduces art historical concepts and approaches. Works of art from local collections, such as the Walters Art Museum and the Baltimore Museum of Art, as well as local monuments and architecture may be incorporated into the course. Lectures will be supported by weekly sections that will include museum visits, discussion of scholarly readings and primary sources, and exam reviews.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.102. Introduction to Art History, 1400 to the Present. 4 Credits.
This course introduces world art and architecture from the late fourteenth century to the present, inclusive of Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Islamic world. We will engage with three primary thematic threads throughout, exploring landscape and the changing environment; portraiture, self-representation, and the body; and the circulation of artists, materials, and ideas around the globe. Wherever they are located, students will be asked to visit monuments, architecture, and/or museums to engage with art in person. Recorded lectures by the professor, scholarly readings, digital resources, films, and the textbook material will serve as the foundation for the course. Assignments will include close-looking annotations, short writing assignments often keyed to museum contexts (like label writing, image description for the blind and partially sighted), video tours, and peer-to-peer presentations. Students will have the opportunity to check-in weekly with the professor via synchronous office hours. Expect a fast pace—this is a full semester course in four weeks. Plan to spend 3 hours each weekday working through the materials (“contact hours”) and another 1-3 hours per day working on assignments, including visiting museums or sites in your area.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.010.205. Art and Architecture of Mesoamerica. 3 Credits.
This course surveys the art and architecture of Mesoamerica, from the ancestral Puebloans in what is today the Southwestern United States, through the homelands of the Mexica, Maya, and Zapotec in Central America, to the Taíno and Chiriquí in the Circum-Caribbean. After first discussing the concept of “Mesoamerica,” we will then explore the material and spatial productions of these Indigenous groups. Each week we will focus on a different urban setting, examining the works communities made and used there, which included sculpture, ceramics, murals, manuscripts, textiles, metalwork, and earthen architecture. Course themes will include—but are not limited to—the portrayal of humans, animals, and sacred figures; urban design, construction, and monumentality; as well as how materials and spaces were used for religious and political purposes.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.010.222. Modern Art in the Arab World. 3 Credits.
This class provides an introduction to the art of Arabic-speaking societies in the Middle East and North Africa over the course of the twentieth century. This era saw a dramatic series of sociopolitical shifts unfold throughout the region: colonial governments collapsed or changed hands, new regimes rose and fell, populations scattered in the wake of war and occupation or rebuilt their countries in the spirit of independence. Alongside these developments, art practices and exhibition cultures assumed new roles as well as new forms, playing an integral part in decolonial nation-building and networks of transnational solidarity. This course will explore stylistic and thematic developments that arose during this tumultuous period, focusing most closely on the visual cultures of Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq and Morocco.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.010.235. Art, Medicine, and the Body: Middle Ages to Modernity. 3 Credits.
This course explores seven centuries of fruitful collaboration between physicians and artists, uncovering the shared discourses and therapeutic agendas that united the art of picture-making with the art of healing. Topics include understandings of the gendered body in ancient natural philosophy and Christian theology; astrological medicine; physiognomics and the visual diagnosis of mental and physical disease; medieval medical diagrams; the anatomical investigations of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo; depictions of pain and suffering in the art of Matthias Grünewald, melancholy in the prints of Albrecht Dürer, and the cross-cultural history of the therapeutic artefact; the spectacularization of the body in Enlightenment science, and the ethics of medical specimen display today -- all bringing into view the dynamic intersections of the history of medicine and the history of art.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.010.238. The Painting of Modern Life: From the Avant-garde to the Everyday. 3 Credits.
This course offers an introduction to modern European painting. Our point of departure will be Charles Baudelaire’s famous essay, “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863) in which he suggests that painting must engage the tensions that inform everyday life, in all its novelty and banality. We will put this claim to the test by approaching a constellation of key works that unlock different aspects of modern life: freedom and alienation, labor and leisure, metropole and colony, art and life, and the troubled intersections of class, race, and gender. Rather than treating the works we look at as “masterpieces” emblematic of European modernity, we will consider how they contribute to a critique of the idea of Europe and the modern project. Works studied will range from Francisco Goya’s “The Third of May 1808, or ‘The Executions’” to Hannah Höch’s “Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany,” from Édouard Manet’s “Olympia” to Carolee Schneemann’s “Up to and Including Her Limits.”
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.239. Art in Motion: The Interconnected Mediterranean in the 1st mill. BCE. 3 Credits.
The Mediterranean Sea has long connected the lands that surround it, from western Asia to North Africa, southern Europe and Iberia. The first millennium BCE, from the collapse of the Bronze Age (1200/1100 BCE) to the conquests of Alexander the Great (334-323 BCE), witnessed an especially vibrant period of interactions and exchanges that led to dramatic local developments. This class examines artworks that moved around the Mediterranean during this time, as well as those that arose from these interactions. Impacted by the large, emerging empires of Assyria, Persia, and Macedonia, and inheritors of older traditions such as Egypt, the arts of the 1st millennium BCE Mediterranean encourage us to ask questions about cultural interactions, mobile technologies, and the effect of globalizing forces on local regions. No previous experience in art history, archaeology, or the ancient Mediterranean is required.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.240. Art and the Environment in the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean. 3 Credits.
What is the relationship between art and the environment? What are “geoaesthetics?” This course explores the interrelationships between ecosystem and creative responses and practices in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean. Specifically, the class will examine the intersections between artistic and architectural practices and the natural environment during the New Kingdom in ancient Egypt, the Neo-Assyrian period in ancient Mesopotamia, and the Minoan Bronze Age in the ancient Aegean.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.010.242. Place and Power in the Ancient Americas. 3 Credits.
This course considers how people envision, construct, and negotiate place in cultures throughout the Ancient Americas. From the dark galleries of the Old Temple at Chavín de Huantar to the towering twin Templo Mayor in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, we will consider how Indigenous makers created powerful places, and how those places would have been experienced and understood by ancient communities. Considering art and architecture in a variety of media, we will study places where gods live; places where important things happened; places that ordered the world; and places where humans access and negotiate power.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.010.245. Netherlandish Painting in the Fifteenth Century: Broederlam to Bosch. 3 Credits.
This course explores the achievements and impact of the major painters working in the Burgundian Netherlands, especially the cities of Flanders, during the fifteenth century: Melchior Broederlam, Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden; the Master of Flémalle, Hans Memling, Hugo van der Goes, Hieronymus Bosch, and others.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.010.246. Indigenous Architectures, Sites, and Environments. 3 Credits.
An introduction to the Indigenous architectural sites and engineered spaces of the Western Hemisphere prior to European contact. At the core of our inquiry will be critiquing the naming of those spaces, and how these naming conventions have created modern understandings of those sites. In the modern United States, are Indigenous architectures considered American “antiquity?” In Latin America, are those spaces considered “Indigenous?” As many of these architectural sites were constructed by Indigenous communities who did not practice writing—and thus did not “write down” their titles—where (and from whom) did these sites get their names? Taking a hemispheric approach, class lectures will move from South to North America, covering Machu Picchu (Perú), Ciudad Perdida (Colombia), Teotihuacan (Mexico), the Hopewell Mound Group (United States), and Chaco Canyon (United States) among other Indigenous architectures, sites, and environments.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
AS.010.255. Introduction to Performance Art. 3 Credits.
Performance art is provocative and often controversial because it troubles, without dissolving, the distinction between art and life. Not just a matter of activating bodies or spurring participation, performance art asks what kinds of actions count as worthy of attention in contemporary culture. Studying performance art provides a unique introduction to art history because it allows us to rethink established art historical concerns with representation, form, perspective, and materiality, while at the same time offering critical insight into the forms of attention that structure everyday life. In this introduction to performance art and its history, we will explore how performance art addresses ingrained assumptions about action and passivity, success and failure, embodiment and mediation, “good” and “bad” feelings, emancipation and dependency. The study of performance art invites transdisciplinary approaches. Students from across the university are welcome. Our attention to a wide array of artists and practices will be supplemented by readings in art history and art criticism as well as diverse theoretical approaches.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.010.290. Women, Gender, and Sexuality: An Introduction to the History of Chinese Art. 3 Credits.
An introduction to Chinese Art, with a focus on the (often absence of) women, through the lens of gender and sexuality.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.010.291. The Art of Ancient Greek Medicine. 3 Credits.
This course analyzes the role of artists and the visual arts in shaping ancient Greek medicine and the afterlife of these ideas. Grounded in the visual arts, we will explore class, gender, race, ethnicity, disability, and sexuality as they intersect with developments in ancient medicine and later interpretations of this history. Includes excursions to local museums.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.010.292. Greek Tragedy and the Visual Arts. 3 Credits.
We will read a selection of Greek tragedies in translation and explore the visual arts that appear in, shaped, and respond to them.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.010.301. Michelangelo: Religion, Sexuality, and the Crisis of Renaissance Art. 3 Credits.
The course will focus on the controversies surrounding the representation of the body in the writings and figurative art of Michelangelo and his contemporaries, the historical circumstances under which the most admired artist in Europe was attacked as a blasphemer and an idolator, and the effect of widespread calls for censorship on his later production. The writings of Michelangelo, Pietro Aretino, Benvenuto Cellini and own writings will be considered with a focus on their staging of an ambivalent and transgressive eroticism.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.307. Diplomats, Dealers, and Diggers: The Birth of Archaeology and the Rise of Collecting from the 19th c. to Today. 3 Credits.
This course investigates the confluence of archaeology as a discipline, collecting of cultural heritage, and their ongoing roles in the socio-politics of the Western world and Middle East. It focuses primarily on the Middle East, first tracing a narrative history of archaeology in the region during the 19th and early 20th centuries, with its explorers, diplomats, missionaries and gentlemen-scholars. It then examines the relationship of archaeology to the creation of the encyclopedic museum and collecting practices more generally, considering how these activities profoundly shaped the modern world, including the antiquities market and looting. A central theme is the production of knowledge through these activities and how this contributes to aspects of power and (self-)representation.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.010.314. The Art and Architecture of the Gods in Ancient Greece. 3 Credits.
In ancient Greece, the visual arts were at the heart of human relations with the divine. Images of gods in various media were everywhere, from marketplaces to sanctuaries, from private homes to the coins in people’s pockets. Temples sacred to deities punctuated the landscape, from city-centers to remote mountain peaks. Alongside poets, artists were hugely influential in shaping ideas about gods. And by making objects for dedication, artists also provided worshippers with an essential means of divine veneration. In fact, much of what we call Greek art was made to honour deities.This course explores the relationship between the gods and the visual arts in ancient Greece, with a particular focus on the Archaic and Classical periods (ca. 700–300 BCE). What can art and architecture tell us about Greek attitudes to the gods? How and why were art and architecture important in divine worship? How did the visual arts contribute to human (mis)understanding of the divine? And what happened to the Greek gods in art after antiquity? The course tackles these questions by examining a wide range of primary material, including Greek architecture, sculpture, and painting, as well as relevant textual sources (in translation).Each week will focus on a different theme or case study, giving students the opportunity to investigate the many ways in which art’s interconnection with the gods featured in Greek culture. Topics include: the portrayal of divine myths in Greek sculpture and painting; the art and architecture of Greek sanctuaries, such as Delphi, Olympia, and the Athenian acropolis; Dionysos and the art of the symposium; Aphrodite and the emergence of the female nude in Greek art; the relationship between gods, art, and the natural landscape; and the artistic afterlives of the Greek gods, from the Renaissance to today. The course will include visits to the John Hopkins Archaeological Museum and the Walters Art Museum.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.010.315. Art of the Assyrian Empire, 1000-600 BCE. 3 Credits.
From 900 to 609 BCE, the Assyrian Empire dominated the ancient Near Eastern world, stretching from western Iran to the Mediterranean and Egypt. In concert with imperial expansion came an explosion of artistic production ranging from palace wall reliefs to small-scale luxury objects. This course provides an integrated picture of the imperial arts of this first world empire, situating it within the broader social and political contexts of the first millennium BCE. In its conquest of foreign lands, this powerful state came in contact with and appropriated a diversity of cultures, such as Phoenicia, Egypt, and Greece, which we will also study.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.010.316. Touching Waves: Textiles and Architecture in the Islamic World. 3 Credits.
Textiles and architecture have played vital roles in the visual and material cultures of the Islamic world. However, the buildings have received far more attention from historians of art than textiles have. But what if we shift our lens and consider these two mediums together? Integrating these two subfields of Islamic art sheds light on several artistic, cultural, social, and economic aspects of the Islamic world. In this course, through such an integrative approach, we will have the opportunity to learn about a range of spaces, senses, objects, architecture, and human activities experienced in Islamic lands from the medieval period, starting in the ninth century, to the modern era of the nineteenth century. We will also become acquainted with the interplay of various artistic traditions and mediums such as carpets, manuscripts, paintings, tilework, and photography. What if we imagine the Alhambra Palace with its original textiles and curtains moving with the wind, creating a rhythm with the sound of its fountains and garden? What does the global trade of Persian, Ottoman, and Indian textiles reveal about our interconnected past? Why did European painters depict “Oriental” carpets in their work? Through this course, students will have a hands-on experience by studying textiles and other artworks in local collections such as the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum, the Walters Art Museum, and the Textile Museum, as well as publications and photographic albums of world’s fairs in Johns Hopkins’ own Special Collections.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.010.322. Knowledge, Holiness, and Pleasure: The Illustrated Book in the Medieval World. 3 Credits.
The book was the primary source for the collection of knowledge in the Middle Ages. It was also the medium for the preservation and proliferation of the texts that underlay the three monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam). It served as a source for elite entertainment, perhaps most importantly in Late Antiquity and the later Middle Ages. This course investigates the role of the illustrated book within the political, religious, and artistic developments that took place after the rise of Christianity from the end of the Roman Empire until the early modern period. We will examine how the different types of books, such as horizontal and vertical scrolls, large and miniature size codices influenced the placement, conception, and style of the illustrations. The class also addresses processes of manufacture, issues of materiality (i.e. precious multi-media book covers, papyrus, parchment, paper), and the relationship between text and image. The course will be taught exclusively with facsimiles of medieval manuscripts from Special Collections at Eisenhower Library and original manuscripts in the Walters Art Museum and other collections.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.010.327. Asia America: Art and Architecture. 3 Credits.
This course examines a set of case studies spanning the last century that will enable us to explore the shifting landscape of Asian transnational art and architecture. Each week will focus on a different artist, group, exhibition, architect, urban space, or site to unpack artists' and architects' engagements with the changing landscape of immigration policies, movements to build solidarity with other artists of color, and campaigns for gender and sexual equality. The course will situate these artists within American art, and build an expansive idea of AsiaAmerica to include the discussion of artists whose work directly addresses fluidity of location and transnational studio practice.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.330. Art of the Caliphates: Visual Culture and Competition in the Medieval Islamic World. 3 Credits.
Despite its modern-day association with a fringe extremist movement, the term “caliphate” was traditionally used to describe the Muslim world at large, the political and spiritual ruler of which bore the title of caliph. The original Islamic caliphate was established in the seventh century as a vast empire centered on the Middle East and extending deep into Africa, Asia, and Europe. It soon broke apart into a series of competing powers, until in the tenth century, three rival dynasties—the Baghdad-based Abbasids, the Spanish Umayyads, and the Fatimids of North Africa—each claimed to be the rightful caliphate. This course will examine how these fascinating political developments and conflicts played out in the realm of art and architecture between the seventh and thirteenth centuries. As well as palaces, mosques, and commemorative buildings, the course will look at media ranging from ceramics and metalwork to textiles and illustrated manuscripts, with many of the artifacts being viewed firsthand in local museum collections. These works will be considered in relation to such themes as patronage, audience, ceremony, and meaning. Particular attention will be paid to how the various caliphates—both in emulation of and competition with one another—used visual culture as a powerful tool to assert their legitimacy.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.010.336. Männer und Meister: Artistry and Masculinity in Sixteenth-Century Germany. 3 Credits.
Since the publication of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives (1550), in which the history of art was first conceived as the successive accomplishment of a select group of great men, the discipline of Art History has had a gender problem. Today, feminist scholars continue to grapple with this troubled legacy, working to redress the masculinist biases inherent in disciplinary methods and assumptions while at the same time fighting to recover the value of traditionally overlooked subjects and genres. In the early 1990s, the history of masculinity emerged as an adjunct to traditional feminist history. Aimed at addressing misconceptions about the nature and naturalness of male identity, this subfield has helped open masculinity to critical reevaluation. Drawing on the contributions of contemporary feminist scholarship as well as those of the history of masculinity, this course explores the ways in which a reconsideration of the nature of male identity in the historical past might help us rethink key art historical issues, for example, paradigmatic notions of the Renaissance artist, the nature of copying and competition, and the concepts of creativity, invention, and genius. The course will focus on developments in the German speaking world in the late fifteenth and sixteenth-centuries; as numerous historians have noted, the German speaking lands underwent a crisis of masculinity during this period, in part precipitated by the events of the Protestant Reformation. At the same time, the region witnessed profound changes in the status of the arts and of the artist. In this course, we will explore the ways in which these phenomena were related, and how they contributed to culturally specific notions of the relationship between masculinity and artistry. We will also consider the ways in which a close examination of masculinity in the German Renaissance opens up new avenues of art historical and cultural historical investigation with relevance beyond the period itself.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.010.339. Sex, Death, and Gender: The Body in Premodern Art, Medicine, and Culture, c. 1300-1600. 3 Credits.
To what extent was the body and its depiction a site of contestation, identification, or desire in the Middle Ages and Renaissance? If the body in the West since the 1800s is seen to have been shaped by the rise of photography and film, the institutionalization of biomedicine, and the establishment of techniques of surveyance and mechanization, then how was the body represented, disciplined, and experienced in the preceding centuries? In an age of unprecedented encounter with non-European bodies, what did it mean to describe and categorize bodies by race, region, or religion? These are some of the major questions this class seeks to answer, which is fundamentally interdisciplinary as it draws upon insights and methods from anthropology and the history of medicine and history of science to investigate how the body has been represented and imagined in the visual arts. The bodies of the suffering Christ, the female mystic, the dissected cadaver, the punished criminal, and the non-European ‘Other’ will loom large as we work to problematize notions of a normative body, whether in the premodern world or in the contemporary one. While most readings and lectures will concern the body and its representation in the Christian West during the later Middle Ages and Renaissance, students are encouraged to work on a topic of their choosing from any geographical area 1000-1800 CE for their research papers.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.341. Asian Modernisms. 3 Credits.
This course aims to introduce students to the multiple modalities of modernism in Asia. We will acquire the critical tools to understand the complex and rich discussions surrounding “modernism” in the art traditions in Asia, and challenge a few fraught preconceptions: Firstly, instead of treating “Asia” as the monolithic “other” to the West, we acknowledge the plurality and multiculturality in Asian art that are eclipsed in the term “Asia” and learn the many different traditions and norms that the practitioners and theorists of modern art grappled with. Secondly, we examine how Asian artists dynamically engage with issues and ideas of modernisms that are circulated in global modern art. Thirdly, we discuss the interstitial spaces created by Asian modern artists in their engagements with both traditions and the modern art world. Last but most importantly, we challenge the notion that modernism is a Euro-American invention and exclusively in the Western art historical context. Instead, we locate these practices of modernism in Asia in each of their own histories, and understand how they try to reconfigure modern art in their contexts. The period we cover is what is considered modern and contemporary, ranging from the late 19th Century to present, but with a focus on the 20th Century. We study movements, artworks, artists, concepts changes in China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, and the Asian diaspora in the world (the list of countries are in alphabetic order). Students are also encouraged in this course to explore areas and topics that the course does not explicitly cover but need innovative research in.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.010.342. Projecting Power: Monarchs, Movies, and the Masses. 3 Credits.
Faced with the apparent intractability of British rule during much of the colonial period, Indians were often forced to look outside institutional politics in order to imagine the Indian nation and their place within it. Many turned to bazaar art, films, photographs, maps, and other media that allowed them to gesture toward ideas not permitted in state-sanctioned discourse and to circumvent hurdles of multilingualism and illiteracy. We will consider, among other topics, how and why images of precolonial Indian monarchs became standardized during this time, the ability of mass-produced religious and devotional art to link households and communities, the rise and marketability of Indian maps, the role cinema hall in building and projecting national and communal bonds, and the power of iconography featuring Indians executed by the colonial state. In prioritizing the visual realm as a space wherein the Indian nation was imagined and disseminated, this course subverts classic theories of the modern nation-state that attribute its rise to literacy and language. It also seeks, as a corollary, to move the study of Indian nationalism away from the writings of the Indian elite and toward the contributions of everyday Indians whose projects were often unwritten but were no less influential.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.010.346. Art of the Cold War Era. 3 Credits.
The Cold War years bore witness to some of the most radical developments in modern art. An abiding question for artists, writers, and political figures too during this period was what role—if any—could art perform in social and political life, and in the struggle between capitalism and communism in particular. This course examines the political viability of art as this concern was taken up by groups and individuals throughout the world in response to rapidly shifting geopolitical circumstances. Beginning with the visual cultures of the United States and Soviet Union, the course will also examine artistic responses to the conditions of Cold War existence in and beyond countries of NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Proceeding roughly chronologically, the course is divided into twelve units following the art of the US, USSR, Western and Eastern Europe, China, and Japan, among others. It treats a wide variety of media as painting and sculpture, canonically privileged in the history of Western art, ceded ground to new forms of practice such as performance, film, and a deep, critical engagement with mass culture. In so doing, this course provides at once a global history of modern art and visual culture and a critical interrogation of their relationships to social change and political life during the 20th century and beyond.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.350. Body and Soul: Medicine in the Ancient Americas. 3 Credits.
This course examines curative medicine in the Americas through its visual culture and oral histories. Philosophies about the body, health, and causes of illness are considered, as are representations of practitioners and their pharmacology. Case studies are drawn from cross the Americas (Aztec, Moche, Aymara, Paracas, American SW). Collections study in museums, Special Collections.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
AS.010.354. Performance, Ritual, and Drama in Medieval Art and Architecture. 3 Credits.
This writing-intensive (W) seminar investigates the role of performance and ritual in the conceptualization, production, and reception of medieval European art and architecture (ca. 500-1500). Utilizing an achronological, interdisciplinary framework formed around thematic sessions, students will engage with primary texts and secondary scholarship from the fields of art history, architecture, sociology, and performance studies. Using these sources, as well as the art objects and architectural spaces themselves, students will evaluate a key concept for the study of medieval objects and sites: the relationship between art and function.Students will be required to apply readings and seminar discussions to artworks in museum and university collections located in Baltimore, working directly with manuscripts, paintings, liturgical furnishings, and sculptures in the Johns Hopkins University Rare Books Library and the Walters Art Museum. This will allow students to make claims and conclusions about the involvement of medieval cultural artifacts in rituals and performances, from official liturgical rites to daily personal prayer. Throughout this course, students will also be asked to critically evaluate the role of objects, spaces, and performances in their own life, serving to reduce the temporal gaps between the Middle Ages and the contemporary world. Using current, broad conceptualizations of ritual and performance, students will explore the powerful potential of art objects and sites in shaping, framing, and recontextualizing communal and individual identities.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.355. Exhibiting Picasso: Modern Painting Now. 3 Credits.
This course offers a critical introduction to modernist painting and its eurocentric art history by focusing on the work and reception of Pablo Picasso. At the center of the course is Picasso’s celebrated yet controversial painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon of 1907. Our point of departure is the recent rehang of the New York MoMA’s historical Cubism gallery. For decades, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was positioned there as the prescient “masterwork,” surrounded by other cubist paintings. In 2019, however, the painting was thought-provokingly juxtaposed with Faith Ringgold’s work American People Series #20: Die of 1967, a figurative painting responding to civil rights struggles in the United States. What occasioned this curatorial intervention? Why does Picasso’s painting remain such a point of contention in exhibiting modern and contemporary art today? And what other curatorial and art historical strategies might be used to continue to decenter the canon? We will deepen our discussions with close-looking and collaborative visual analysis of paintings in the Phillips Collection and the National Gallery in Washington D.C. as well as local collections. We will also consult online collections and, in our course readings, consider formalist, social, feminist, and decolonial approaches to modern art. No prior familiarity with Picasso or modern art is necessary. Students from all fields are welcome.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.010.356. Landscape in World Cinema. 3 Credits.
Landscape in narrative cinema has silent enunciating power. The choice of location shots alone constitutes a set of complex considerations. We may wonder, why was Monument Valley featured in so many westerns? Is it only because of the site’s marvelous photogenicity, or its geographic location, or its social and historical significance? The formal and stylistic choices filmmakers made regarding how landscape is represented on screen, whether as a real or a fictional site, also reveal critical engagements with both social reality and the pictorial conventions of landscape art. Does it look barren or lush? sublime or banal? What is the concept of nature, what is a “view,” or picturesque, and how are these critical questions in representations of landscape framed and mediated in cinema? Does the representation of landscape work for or against the storyline unfolding on screen? What does it tell us about social reality, ecological concerns, and political commentary?This course examines landscape in narrative cinema not only as subject or part of the mise-en-scene but also as a way of seeing, a site of expression, and locus of social, historical, and political meaning. Each week we explore a film genre or a film movement, for example, Western, or Japanese New Wave, and study how landscape functions in that genre. Students are expected to watch films, read, and analyze both the readings and films carefully prior to coming to class. As a term project, each student selects a particular site (any site of their choice) for the focus of their study and research of cinematic landscape in the course. These sites can be a place personal to you, or a place you think is interesting or important in cinema. There will be workshops during the course of the semester to help complete the final project.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.010.358. The Art of Celebration in Early Modern Northern Europe. 3 Credits.
The lavish feasts and dynamic jousts associated with medieval and Renaissance celebrations have long been subjects of fascination in popular culture and will be familiar to anyone who has watched House of the Dragon or attended a modern “Renaissance” fair. But what did these celebrations mean in their original context? This course aims to take “play” seriously by examining the wide-ranging material culture of courtly and civic festivities in Germany and the Netherlands from 1400 to 1600. The art created for festive events ranges from panel paintings and tapestries to table fountains and drinking vessels made of expensive and “exotic” materials. Artists were also responsible for the design and construction of ephemeral architecture for triumphal entries as well as the festival books that commemorated them. But these works did more than just facilitate fun; they were tools of communication that made arguments about issues such as social class, identity, and power. They also engaged with the geopolitical and intellectual developments of the period. There are drinking vessels, for instance, made of nautilus shells, Seychelles nuts, or bezoars, whose materials and construction offer insight into global exploration and European colonialism as well as medicinal practices. Automata, machines akin to premodern “robots,” frequently provided entertainment for guests at aristocratic banquets by showing off the latest technological developments. While the study of any historical event faces the daunting task of recuperating what has been lost to time, this rings especially true for the study of festivities. In this course, we turn to these celebrations’ artistic and material traces to illuminate the past. As object-based learning is an important component of this course, we will visit several local collections including the Walters Art Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the National Gallery in Washington, and Johns Hopkins’ Special Collections.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.010.359. The Symbolic Mosque: A Political History of Islamic Architecture. 3 Credits.
From the 2008 Swiss referendum banning minarets and the opposition of the 2010 proposed construction of a mosque near the site of the September 11 attacks in New York City to the more recent reconversion of the Hagia Sophia in 2020, the mosque in modern times has incited significant controversy and sentiments of hostility among various political and religious groups. The mosque as a political battleground, however, has a much longer history, and the coopting of religious buildings and architectural elements as visual symbols deserves a more comprehensive historical analysis. With a focus on the Ottoman context, this seminar will explore the political dimensions of mosque architecture since the fifteenth century and will examine its transformations both visually and symbolically across spatiotemporal contexts. The historical investigation into the symbolic significance of the mosque and Islamic architecture in the first half of this course will lead to a broader discussion in the second half about the role of architectures of nationalism in politics and diplomacy starting from the nineteenth century until today. By focusing on the mosque itself as a symbol, this course aims to spark dialogue and reflection on the role of religious monuments in contemporary political encounters across different geographic contexts. This course encourages a multi- and inter-disciplinary approach to Islamic art and architecture by incorporating readings and topics from a variety of fields, such as cultural theory, political history, anthropology, and heritage studies. Case studies covered by this course include the Persianate and Byzantine influences in early Ottoman mosques, the establishment and continuation of the classical Ottoman architectural style of the sixteenth century, neo-Mamluk mosques in Egypt and the creation of architectural identities in Ottoman Arab lands, architectural afterlives of Ottoman heritage in modern Greece, and the use of neo-Ottoman architecture by the Turkish Justice and Development Party (AKP) today.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.364. Babylon: Myth and Reality. 3 Credits.
Babylon – the name resonates even today, from the biblical whore of Revelation to sci-fi. It evokes exotic places and time long past. But what do we really know about the ancient city and the civilization that flourished there thousands of years ago? This course examines the archaeological city of Babylon, located in the modern state of Iraq, and considers its artistic and architectural achievements in the context of Mesopotamian history. The class will also survey the legacy of Babylon and its continuing relevance in contemporary society.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.010.365. Art of the Ancient Andes. 3 Credits.
The visual arts of Andean South America and their respective cultural contexts form the basis of our study. Collections study in local and regional museums.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
AS.010.366. Native American Art. 3 Credits.
Visual arts are examined and discussed in their respective social and historical contexts.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.010.369. The American Art Museum: Origins, Mission, and Civic Purpose. 3 Credits.
This course will explore the American art museum as a distinctive cultural and political idea. Tracing its origins to the ancient world, the American art museum was descended more immediately from institutions created during the European Enlightenment, but differing with regard to overall mission and civic purpose. This course will explore the various roles played by museums in American society, focusing on programmatic content, organizational design, funding and operating practices, and the particular issues that have arisen in recent years in the areas of cultural property restitution, collection development, special exhibitions, governance and funding, and the larger question of civic purpose.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.010.373. Art and Politics in Modern China. 3 Credits.
Art has always been intertwined with politics; one can even say art is always political. In modern China, this statement is especially poignant. The relationship between art and politics has been at the core of art production in China in the past century, and a perennial preoccupation of those in power, including now. This course will therefore examine three major threads: the documents, dictums, and decrees by the artists and by the regimes concerning the nature, function, and practice of art and artists in the 20th century, for example, Mao’s famous Yan’an talk in 1942; artists’ response to and art’s participation in the important political events and historical moments, for example, the 1989 democracy movement; we will also examine the space of resistance, intervention, and alterity that art created in modern China, concerning topics of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, ecocriticism, privacy, and questions of historiography. The period we examine will begin at the end of the 19th century when artists struggled with a crumbling empire facing the onslaught of modernity, to the present.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.010.377. Modern Palestinian Art & Its Contexts. 3 Credits.
Modern Palestinian art took shape in the bourgeois salons of nineteenth-century Cairo, the Ottoman-era workshops of Jerusalem’s icon painters, the militant presses of revolutionary Beirut, and the sewing circles of Amman’s refugee camps. It emerged from the state-sponsored art schools of the Communist Bloc, in conversation with the Black Panther Party, through crowds of curious exhibition-goers in Tokyo and Oslo and Tehran and, of course, in defiance of the ongoing Israeli occupation. This class introduces students to art made in and around Palestine between 1880 and today, focusing on its engagement with the myriad worlds in which it has always participated. How can visual culture mediate relationships to local heritage across space and time, or negotiate nationalism in the absence of a nation? What tensions arise around the circulation of artwork inexorably linked to a liberation struggle? How have artists navigated questions of the “postcolonial” as the subjects of a contemporary colonial regime? This class will explore modern Palestinian visual art from a transnational perspective, paying particular attention to the roles of women and gender in its creation, content, and display.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.386. Modern Art in a Global Frame. 3 Credits.
This course will grapple with modern art as it emerges in critically important locations around the world over the course of the twentieth century, with an emphasis on Asia, Africa, and South America. Anti-colonial movements, national formations, geopolitical alliances, institution-building, exhibition, fair, and biennial histories, art group manifestos, and the intertwined relations of race, ethnicity, Indigeneity, gender, class, and sexuality. Museum visits to view works of art in person will be incorporated into the course.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.388. Afro Asia. 3 Credits.
This course follows twentieth and twenty-first century artistic projects that imagine, propose, or navigate Afro Asian pasts and futures. We will follow artists of African and Asian descent, several of them diasporic, in considering imaginaries of the world that precede our present. We will also engage, collaboratively, in a speculative exercise: what happens when we are given the material grounds to think the world differently? Covering significant epistemic passages in world history—the Afro Asian conference in Bandung, the origins of modernism, Négritude, comparative studies in caste, and the art history of race—and a variety of parallel primary sources (maps, music, cinema, and archival journals), we will think Afro Asia to speculate art history and think art history to speculate Afro Asia. Our work together draws heavily on local collections and specifically the Baltimore Museum of Art.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.398. Tombs for the Living. 3 Credits.
Drawing on case studies from North America, Mesoamerica, and the Andes this course considers various approaches to entombment and funerary ritual. Our analyses bear upon beliefs about death and the afterlife, ancestor veneration, fear of the dead, and the body as a site of embodied values. Tombs provide a specific context for interpreting object offerings and their attendant meanings. Collections study in regional museums.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
AS.010.401. A Republic in Crisis: Florence 1490-1530. 3 Credits.
The era identified as the “High Renaissance” in Florence was one of the most dystopian in the history of the city, a period of terror and explosive political crisis beginning with the expulsion of the Medici, followed by the theocratic Savonarolan regime in 1494, the repressive Medici restoration of 1513 and concluding with the fall of the “Last Republic” in 1530. Much of the most distinctive cultural production associated with this period - the sermons of Savonarola, the writings of Machiavelli, and major works of art by Michelangelo and others, is concerned with the relocation of Florentine identity following an experience of rupture with history and tradition, leading to a fundamental revaluation of the past and of the significance of history and memory. We will examine cultural transformation under a succession of Republican and autocratic regimes, with a particular attention to the process of “image-making” on the part of the state, of factions within it, of writers and ideologues, and - not least - of artists.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.010.402. Mobility & Migration of the Artist in Early Modern Europe. 3 Credits.
How did artists define their identity in the era before fixed “nationalities” and setgeographies? This course investigates the art and personalities of the many Netherlandishpainters, sculptors, printmakers, and craftsmen who moved and migrated across early modern Europe, finding work and fortune in cities from Rome to London, and Madrid to Stockholm. Their mobility, as the Florentine merchant Lodovico Guicciardini remarked in1567, was “something no less wonderful than honorable.” But the reasons behind the unprecedented migrations of Dutch and Flemish artists from the Low Countries from c.1550 to 1700 were complex and varied. Many artists were driven by the political andreligious turmoil of the Eighty Years’ War with Spain, while others sought economic and professional opportunities abroad. While some artists undertook short-term migrations, others left their native soil permanently. How did artists adjust to new cultures, languages,and religious traditions? What strategies did they use to succeed in their new homes? And how did their mobility ultimately affect their artistic practice? Taking a wide and critical view, the course provides a framework for examining the full range of motivations, how artists navigated new artistic, cultural, social, and religious contexts, and how artistic identity itself emerges from a relationship to place beyond one’s own.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.010.407. Ancient Americas Metallurgy. 3 Credits.
This course addresses the technology, iconography and social significance of metals and draws on case studies from the Americas. Collections study in museums.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
AS.010.413. Historical and Conceptual Bases of Art History. 3 Credits.
This course introduces students to the principal methods and theories of art history. Students will work through readings foundational for the discipline, texts that define key methodological consolidations in the twentieth century, and more recent (e.g. feminist, visual studies, global, post-colonial, and/or ecological) critiques and rethinking. Specific texts will vary by instructor, but the course seeks—in any instantiation—to include a plurality of perspectives.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.010.416. Leonardo da Vinci: Lives and Afterlives of a Premodern Artist. 3 Credits.
Beginning in the present, the course will examine how popular constructions of “Da Vinci” are used to legitimate contemporary obsessions with art, genius, and technological innovation. We will examine how, since the 1500s, the biography and “character” of Leonardo has been produced, often in the absence of historical evidence, and the cultural and political interests that these productions serve. The primary focus of the course will be a revisionist approach to the writings and imagery of Leonardo, to be considered with regard to questions of artistic selfhood in the Renaissance, and of the artisan as author figure.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.010.418. On Weaving: Feminism, Ecology, Care. 3 Credits.
How might a critical and material art history contribute to contemporary debates in theory? Feminist and queer theories, on the one hand, and ecological thought, on the other, have often turned to metaphors of weaving in their attempt to think antihierarchical forms of relationality. Against models of autonomous selfhood, weaving is evoked to foreground the material fact of our interdependence with human and other forms of life, and to articulate relations that are all too often discounted in western liberal cultures – along with the care work that goes into maintaining them. This seminar lends texture to metaphors of weaving by looking at material practices. We consider how the study of textile and fiber arts informs theoretical concerns, while also attending to the ways in which our reading of theory impacts our appreciation of artistic techniques and practices. The course will include two group excursions on Saturdays to the exhibition “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, sponsored by the Faculty-Student Engagement and Enrichment Fund.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.010.419. The Passion and Resurrection from Middle Ages to Modernity: Image, Narrative, Drama, Film. 3 Credits.
What makes the Gospel story of Jesus of Nazareth’s arrest, trial, execution, burial, and resurrection not only Christianity's defining narrative but one of the enduring “root paradigms” of western culture? This seminar takes a long-range look at the transformations in European religious consciousness surrounding the Passion narratives, and explores the myriad developments in story-telling, image-making, and play-acting they urged forward. Our historical survey moves from the earliest icons associated with the Holy Places in Jerusalem, through the artful fictions conjured in the realist tradition by painters such as Hieronymus Bosch and Peter Paul Rubens, to late medieval Passion plays, Passion meditation and cult-forms, and finally to the silver-screen phenomenon that includes Paolo Pasolini's "The Gospel According to St. Matthew" (1964), Martin Scorcese's "The Last Temptation of Christ" (1988), and Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" (2004).
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.421. An Empire’s Diversity: Ottoman Art and Architecture beyond the Imperial Court. 3 Credits.
The established historiography of Ottoman architecture is dominated by the patronage of the sultans and their elites, particularly as it shaped the empire’s third and final capital, Istanbul. While this focus on the “center” and its leadership reflects the Ottoman state’s own hierarchical structure, it also obscures the larger network of places and people that enabled the imperial system to develop and acquire meaning in the first place. This course will explore Ottoman architecture and its patronage from the perspective of these neglected regions and actors, covering such examples as Christian vassal states along the empire’s European borders, Arab lands with existing traditions of Islamic art, the curious persistence of Gothic models in the former Crusader kingdom of Cyprus, and the distinctive architectural practices of non-Muslim minorities within Istanbul itself. Drawn primarily from the early modern and modern periods, our case studies will be treated not as imitations of or deviations from the metropolitan mainstream, but as vital expressions of Ottoman culture that assertively engaged with, and themselves contributed to, the better-known strategies of the sultan’s court. We will also go beyond issues of architecture and patronage and consider these buildings as lived spaces whose associated objects, furnishings, and social and ceremonial activities were no less constitutive of the empire’s diverse architectural landscape.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.010.426. Sacred Connections: The Arts of Pilgrimage in the Islamic World, c. 1500–1900. 3 Credits.
As a central practice of the Muslim faith, pilgrimage has long animated the arts of the Islamic world, not only by generating countless monuments and objects, but also by facilitating the movement of artists, artifacts, and ideas across vast distances. This course explores the rich visual and material products of the Islamic pilgrimage tradition during the early modern and modern periods, including the architecture of the sacred sites themselves, the processions and ceremonies enacted by those who journeyed to these destinations, and proxy monuments and artworks created for those unable to perform the pilgrimage in person. Although our focus will be on the Hajj—the main annual pilgrimage to Islam’s holiest city, Mecca—we will also consider the arts associated with other pilgrimage sites, in particular the Shi‘i shrines of Iraq and Iran, as well as the pilgrimage practices of non-Muslim communities in the Middle East. We will bridge the gap between these geographies and our own vantage point in Baltimore through locally housed artworks, among them a seventeenth-century Ottoman tile at the Walters Art Museum that shows the Great Mosque of Mecca and a printed Hajj certificate—probably designed by an Indian artist but published in Istanbul in 1895—recently acquired for Hopkins’ own Special Collections. Through close engagement with these objects and other materials, the course will address such themes as sacred spectacle and ritual, pilgrimage as a locus of female patronage, and the impact of modernity on the Hajj and its traditions.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken or are enrolled in AS.010.626 are not eligible to take AS.010.426.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.010.427. Catharsis: Creating (with) Greek Tragedy. 3 Credits.
This seminar considers the mutual imbrication of Greek tragedy and the visual arts, from descriptions of art in the plays to inspiration drawn by artists from ancient performances. We will read extant plays in translation (those with knowledge of ancient Greek may translate key passages in addition) and trace the materialities of their performances, textual transmissions, and receptions, with particular attention to the ways in which the visual arts inspire and draw inspiration from this body of work. We will visit relevant museum collections in the region and, where possible, see live performances.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.428. Art & Culture in the Crusader Near East, ca 1000-1300. 3 Credits.
From the late eleventh century to the close of the thirteenth, European pilgrims, knights, foot soldiers, merchants, and travelers, visited, fought, colonized, and settled in the Holy Land, that is along the Mediterranean coast stretching from modern Turkey to Egypt, creating a principality known as the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem or what scholars have called the Crusader Near East. This territory became the location of fiercely contested borders, religious identities, and political alliances, but it was also the site of vibrant artistic and cultural production. This course will interrogate what scholars mean by crusader culture. We will analyze different types of sources and materials including texts, textiles, architecture, manuscript illumination, sculpture, metalworks, and ivory. The course takes an interdisciplinary approach – with the goal of coordinating the lives and experiences of people living in the Crusader Near East, with the documents, and visual and material culture they produced, consumed, and exchanged with western Europe, Byzantium, and the Islamic world. One of the goals is to gain a deeper understanding and appreciation for the context of cultural production and to consider and critique the terminologies and narratives about crusading, including concepts of acculturation, translation, and hybridity.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.010.431. Obsessed with the Past: the Art and Architecture of Medieval Rome. 3 Credits.
In antiquity, Rome became the capital of an empire, its growing status reflected in its sophisticated urban planning, its architecture, and the arts. While an abundance of studies explores the revival of this glorious past in the Renaissance, this seminar discusses various ways of the reception of antiquity during the medieval period. We address the practice of using spolia in medieval architecture, the appropriation of ancient pagan buildings for the performance of Christian cult practices, the continuation of making (cult)images and their veneration, the meaning and specific visuality of Latin script (paleography and epigraphy) in later medieval art. We discuss the revival and systematic study of ancient knowledge (f. ex. medicine, astronomy, and the liberal arts), in complex allegorical murals. As we aim to reconstruct the art and architecture of medieval Rome, this course discusses ideas and concepts behind different forms of re-building and picturing the past, as they intersect with the self-referential character of a city that is obsessed with its own history.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.444. Classics/History of Art Research Lab. 3 Credits.
This research-driven course focuses on joining together and mapping the largest known corpus of mosaic fragments (1st-6th centuries CE) from the heterogenous ancient city of Antioch at the mouth of the Orontes river (modern Antakya, Turkey). These mosaic fragments have been dispersed to institutions and museums across the globe, and their reunifications tell a series of stories about ancient Mediterranean diversity, early 20th century archaeology, and contemporary collection histories. Building from work completed in Phase I (Spring 2020) and Phase II (Fall 2021) and in conversation with a global network of Antioch researchers, students in this course will continue to research and digitally reunite mosaic fragments, including those in the collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art, delve deeper into the archival record associated with the early 20th century excavations, of which Baltimore was among the sponsors, and explore contemporary object biographies of the corpus, part of which remains in the region devastated by the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria in Spring 2023. Our research will center questions of craft, trade, materials and labor in ancient Antioch, modern archaeological practice, and contemporary museums. No prerequisites required and students from all majors welcome.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.010.445. Picturing Power across the Ancient Americas. 3 Credits.
In the ancient Americas, power was told through objects and objects told of power. Portraits rendered a king’s visage in stone while mural programs depicted formidable deities. Towering pyramids were climbed by rulers and the open plazas below were structured spaces for spectacles. Hieroglyphic texts could picture authoritative narratives. Literacy was controlled by those who wielded power, yet pictographic literacy could place power in the hands of the viewer. But how did powerful images or places of power come into being? And how were these works of art received, and challenged, by those not in power? Extending geographically from North to South America, this course explores how power was imaged during the ancient period (beginning in the 2nd millennium BCE). The last third of the course will be devoted to exploring not only how powerful images were received by Spanish invaders but also how the Indigenous elite continued to garner power through art under the rulings of New Spain.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.446. Philoctetes and the Art of Medicine. 3 Credits.
Through the prism of the Greek tragedy Philoctetes by Sophocles, this course explore the history of ancient Greek medicine as it intersects with the history of art. We will cover themes of war, wounds, isolation, incarceration, pain, pharmaka, and friendship through a close-reading of the text in translation, close looking at associated images, and attention to the play's many receptions.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have already taken, or are currently enrolled in AS.010.646, are not eligible to take AS.010.446.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.447. Art and the Body in the Ancient Americas. 3 Credits.
What is a body, and how do bodies make meaning in art? This course investigates the concept of the body and its expression in Indigenous art from the Ancient Americas. As a site of human experience, a node of relational exchanges, and an expressive and constructive force, the body offers us a window into ways of being and understanding in the Americas. What can the way the body is created, represented, and manipulated tell us about attitudes toward power, religion, and the structure of the world? We will consider case studies from three cultural groups: the Moche, the Maya, and the Aztec. Our investigation is focused on the human body, and explores bodies that are living, dead, gendered, fragmented, multiple, and divine.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have already taken, or are already enrolled in AS.010.647, are not eligible to take AS.010.447.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.451. Script, Character, Scribble: Writing and Pseudo-Writing in Modern and Contemporary Art. 3 Credits.
Almost readable, but not quite: artists in the twentieth and twenty-first century played with script of all kinds, from ancient glyphs and Persian script to Roman typefaces and Korean Hangul. Artists also scribbled in ways that evoke writing without script or meaning. This course takes on the question of meaning-making in art through the form of script—flirting with that tantalizing feeling that we can almost read the work of art through the marks on its surface. We will engage with artists from around the world whose work grapples with knowledge, meaning, and script, and discuss the limits and possibilities of legibility, knowing, and language. In addition to painting and drawing, we will also discuss conceptual art, installation, video, architecture, tapestry, ceramics, graphic novel forms, book arts, and sculpture. We will have opportunities to situate these works within longer histories of script and pseudo-script and image-text relations. Our discussion-driven seminars will be guided by readings in art history and theory. The course carries no expectation that you are multi-lingual or have experience with multiple scripts. Central to our semester will be group trips to see art in person in DC and Baltimore. Assignments include an option for short, focused writing with feedback and opportunities to experiment with genre and to rewrite, or a longer seminar paper, chosen in consultation with the professor.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.458. Visualizing Travel, Movement, and Interaction in the Ancient Americas. 3 Credits.
In photographs and museum displays, the visual culture of the ancient Americas is made static. Pyramids stand vacant, sculptures appear frozen, and once portable objects remain stationary. But ancient American small-scale objects were designed to be set in motion for ritual and pilgrimage, free-standing stelae and altars were meant to be circumambulated and engaged with directly, and architecture (and spaces bound by architecture) influenced the shape of bodily movement. Notably absent from a twenty-first century vantage point are the ways that these spaces, and the spaces around art, were interacted with and how objects such as polychromed ceramics and carved pieces of precious stone were moved from place to place by the region’s ancient Indigenous residents. Exploring a rich visual and material record and considering the movement of both people and objects, this course asks how works of art influenced the ways ancient peoples physically interacted with and moved throughout the three-dimensional world. By considering a series of case studies from the ancient Americas, this course seeks to better understand the full aesthetic dimensions of this visual culture in the context of its rich social use. Additionally, we will also engage with issues related to contemporary travel, tourism, and migration that crosses through these places and materials. No prior knowledge of the field is required.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.459. The illuminated charter: visual splendor, performance, and authenticity of medieval legal documents. 3 Credits.
This course investigates the complexities of medieval legal documents, their specific visuality and materiality, as well as practices of copying and forgery. We will address the aesthetics of legal documents, their graphic signs, seals, and paleography and the authenticating strategies used to corroborate their legitimacy. Another emphasis is set on the performative aspects of the medieval charters in court and church rituals. Comparison with contemporary illuminated sacred books will reveal the tight connections of monastic scriptoria and royal/imperial chanceries. The geographic focus is set wide, ranging from medieval Spain, to Carolingian and Ottonian chanceries in France and Germany, to the papal court in Rome and the imperial and monastic scriptoria in Byzantium.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.465. Renew, Reuse, Recycle: Afterlives of Architecture in the Ottoman Empire. 3 Credits.
Designed from the outset to be inhabited and used, works of architecture are inherently susceptible to changes in purpose, appearance, and meaning over time. This was particularly so in the Ottoman Empire (c. 1299–1922), a multiethnic and multireligious transcontinental polity whose territories were already marked by long and eventful architectural histories. Through such case studies as the Parthenon in Athens, the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople/Istanbul, the Citadel of Cairo, and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, this course investigates the ways in which buildings and sites have been appropriated, repurposed, transformed, and/or reconceptualized in response to changing sociopolitical and artistic conditions. Topics to be addressed include the conversion of places of worship, (re)decoration as a vehicle of ideology, and the phenomenon of spoliation—the recycling, whether for practical or symbolic reasons, of existing building materials. In addition to the monuments themselves, we will address the objects that filled them and the human activities they hosted. While our focus will be on the Ottoman context and its relationship to the past, the course will also consider comparable examples in other geographies as well as developments in the post-Ottoman era, including the current debate over the Parthenon marbles and the recent reconversion of the Hagia Sophia into a mosque.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.467. The Renaissance in its Global Dimensions 1450-1650. 3 Credits.
A seminar focusing on recent scholarship that seeks to conceptualize a “global Renaissance,” beginning with Italy and the Mediterranean and then addressing exchanges between Europe and Southern/Eastern Asia. Case studies of the mobility of artists and artifacts, artistic adaptation and translation, materials as commodities and bearers of meaning.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.010.468. What is in a Landscape. 3 Credits.
This is a seminar on the histories and theories of the art of landscape as knowledge, medium, and contesting field of power and identity.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.469. Quarried, Sculpted, Carved: Lifecycles of Mesoamerican Sculpture. 3 Credits.
Stelae, altars, colossal heads, thrones, figures, lintels. This course considers how artists created these stone monuments in Mesoamerica, the historical region that encompasses Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras, and El Salvador. Sculptors meticulously carved stone blocks to shape and then scribes expertly incised their surfaces with hieroglyphic text or iconography. These stone monuments were then transported and moved into position, their physical placements structuring social hierarchy and mediating interactions with the divine. In reviewing recent literature within the fields of art history and material studies, we will explore the full cycle of production for monumental works of art.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.471. Duchamp Effects: From the Ready-Made to Being Given. 3 Credits.
Painter and provocateur, quitter-of-art and player-of-chess, Marcel Duchamp aka Rrose Sélavy has long been recognized for redefining what counts as a work of art. His most prodigious legacy are the ready-mades of the 1910s, everyday objects – from bottle rack to urinal – that he nominated as art and signed. The influence of this gesture on pop art, conceptual art, minimalism, and happenings has since been called “the Duchamp effect.” But what happens for the history of art when the logic of cause and effect is undone? Duchamp too was interested in this question. His last work, Étant donnés (1946-1966), was made in complete secrecy in the very decades that inaugurated the clichés of his reception. Unveiled at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1969, the year after his death, Étant donnés seems to repudiate all that the ready-mades had come to stand for – and, at the same time, to register the effects of diverse postwar practices on Duchamp’s understanding of art. This seminar takes Étant donnés as point of departure for studying the long and multidirectional history of modernism. Artists under discussion include: Joseph Beuys, Scott Burton, Vaginal Davis, Richard Hamilton, Eva Hesse, Yayoi Kusama, Senga Nengudi, Dieter Roth, Alina Szapocznikow, Hannah Wilke. Readings span Duchamp’s writings and reception, the historiography of the avant-garde and modernism, aesthetics and affect theory, feminist and queer thought. The seminar will include at least one group excursion to visit the Arensberg Collection in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Undergraduates enrolling should be aware that this is an upper-level reading and writing intensive seminar and be prepared to read and discuss upwards of 100-pages per week. There are no exams. Assignments include regular written reflections based on the course readings and short critical essays.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.472. Pictura/Scriptura: Visual and Literary Culture 1400-1600. 3 Credits.
The seminar explores common ground between literary and art historical scholarship on Early Modern Europe and beyond; it seeks to further conversation between art historical and literary critical methodologies as well as media theory, and is designed to appeal to students of literature and of art history. Seeking to move beyond the mid-20th century discourses of iconology, it will re-consider the potential of Aby Warburg’s psychological and anthropological approach to the trans-cultural and trans-historical migration of symbols, and its implications for a “global Renaissance.” We will focus on antiquarian scholarship with its considerations of visual and material evidence, ekphrasis and the picturing functions of language, inscription and the legibility of images, the printed book as sylloge and “collection,” the dynamic interrelation of writing and drawing, Renaissance controversies about theater and epic and their implication in debates about art. In addition to Warburg and more recent writing on Warburg and the Renaissance, readings will be drawn from an array of interdisciplinary inquiry in Classics, Medieval and East Asian fields.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.010.474. Picturing Performance. 3 Credits.
Picturing Performance takes up the material traces of ancient Greek performance—the remains of theaters, paintings, masks, and musical instruments, as well as epigraphic, papyrological, and other textual transmissions of these works—alongside contemporary receptions of these performances, which have been such a rich site of reworking. Examples include: the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and Anäis Mitchell’s Hadestown, Euripides’ The Bacchae and Hope Mohr Dance’s Before Bacchae, and Sophocles’ Antigone and Theater of War’s Antigone in Ferguson. These ancient performances engage questions of gender and sexuality, constructions of race, migration, citizenship, and belonging, power, governance, and resistance, disease and collective healing, among the subjects that have also inspired contemporary interpretations. All texts will be read in translation. We will visit museum collections in the region and, where possible, see live performances of these works.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.480. Indigenous Materialities of the Americas. 3 Credits.
The American continent and its islands are home to a diverse and delicate ecosystem, and for millennia, Indigenous communities have tended to and shaped these rich landscapes. This seminar journeys across the Americas to understand how Indigenous makers cultivated materials from these ecologies and transformed them into impressive arrays of art and architecture. Each week, students will explore a different medium—bark, shell, rubber, feathers, reed, stone, clay, etc.—that makers shaped into visual and spatial forms. Although this course focuses on the ancestral and early modern periods, it will also explore continued and shifting practices with these materials among contemporary artists. Readings will include material analyses, art historical and archaeological interpretations, as well as early colonial writings by Indigenous authors. There will also be opportunities for students to engage with materials in class. Course material will cover issues of technical skill and ecological knowledge; ephemerality and (im)permanence; animacy and relationality as it pertains to the relationships formed between makers and their works; and the role of Indigenous materialities in reconfiguring canons and categories that continue to scaffold the field of art history. For their final assignment, students will select a multimedia work from the Indigenous Americas and unpack its materiality in both presentation and essay format.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.010.481. Figuration after Formlessness. 3 Credits.
What would an art history of modernism look like that sought not to overcome or eliminate painterly figuration, but to attend to displaced and disparaged figures in it? At least since Benjamin Buchloh’s important 1981 warning about a “return to figuration” in European painting, figuration has been linked with questionable, if not highly suspect, aesthetic and political values – from nostalgia to repression. Buchloh inherits this this view from the historical avantgardes, which sought to counter conventions of figuration by developing disparate strategies of abstraction. And it is this view of figuration that guides both formalist and social art histories: For both share an anxiety about the authoritative figure of the human form.This seminar invites an alternative perspective on the artistic project of figuration. We look at modern and contemporary practices of figuration that cannot so easily be dismissed as retrogressive or authoritarian. These practices suggest ways of thinking the figure without an appeal to its coherent visibility or sovereign standing. We will read broadly in the contemporary critical theory, feminist and queer theory, Black thought, and critical disability studies that share this investment (e.g. Butler, Cavarero, Garland-Thomson, Halberstam, Hartman, Honig, Sharpe, Wynter). We will critically reconsider Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois’ project Formless: A User’s Guide, along with the turn of the twenty-first century debates about abjection, feminism, and “body art” it engaged. Artists under discussion include Maria Lassnig, Ana Mendieta, Alina Szapocznikow, Kara Walker, and Hannah Wilke, amongst others. For the final research paper, graduate students are encouraged to bring their own archives to the questions addressed in the seminar.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.483. Three Artists (Three Sick Women): Art, Illness, Death. 3 Credits.
What happens when the artist becomes sick? How does illness become the subject of artistic practice? And what does art concerned with sickness tell us about the entanglement of gender and medicine in contemporary life?This course draws inspiration from Anne Wagner’s book, Three Artists, Three Women (1996), in which she explores an expectation that undergirds modernist art history: that the work of artists who are also women must reveal their femininity. We take up the challenge to this normative expectation with the work of three artists (who happened also to be three sick women) active in the post Second World War period. A German-Jewish immigrant to the US, Eva Hesse is known today for the fragile latex sculptures she made before dying from a brain tumor. Alina Szapocznikow, a Polish concentration camp survivor, employed her sculptural practice of body casting to index the symptoms and effects of her metastatic breast cancer. Hannah Wilke, an American feminist performance artist, painstakingly documented her treatments for terminal lymphoma. These artists’ careful explorations of their bodies and their illnesses trouble assumptions about femininity and feminism in the late twentieth century. They also afford an introduction to post-minimalism in the US, nouveau réalisme is Europe, and international conceptual and performance art. We constellate their interconnected work with that of others whose practices are infused in diverse ways by illness and its permeable definition: Indira Allegra, Cassils, Bob Flanagan, Yayoi Kusama, Wangechi Mutu, David Wojnarowicz, Florentina Holzinger.Readings in art history will be complemented with historical and contemporary approaches in feminist theory and critical disability studies, as well as a selection of literary and hybrid-form writings on art, illness, and death, including: Ingeborg Bachmann, Johanna Hedva, Audre Lorde, Paul Preciado, Gillian Rose.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have already taken, or are currently enrolled in AS.010.683, are not eligible to take AS.010.483
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
AS.010.497. Reply-All: Letter-Writing in Art and History. 3 Credits.
From embellished silver pens and abolitionist secretary desks to contemporary artists manipulating historical postcards and making fax collages, this course will explore the materiality, technologies, and aesthetics of written communications from the 18th century to the present. This research-centered course will engage directly with objects in the Baltimore Museum of Art collection, in preparation for an upcoming exhibition. Topics include the development of specific decorative arts and designs in conjunction with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century postal and bureaucratic history, letter-writing as a mode of resistance, strategic illegibility and asemic writing as a form of critical artistic practice, and the importance of mail art as conceptual and institutional critique. Includes hands-on work in the museum and class visits with BMA curator Dr. Leslie Cozzi.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.010.501. Independent Study. 1 - 3 Credits.
Independent work
Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
AS.010.502. Independent Study. 1 - 3 Credits.
Independent work
Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
AS.010.521. Honors Thesis. 1 - 3 Credits.
Open to students by arrangement with a faculty advisor in the History of Art Department. Interested students should review the program description available in the department office.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.522. Honors Thesis. 3 Credits.
You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.603. A Republic in Crisis: Florence 1490-1530. 3 Credits.
The era identified as the “High Renaissance” in Florence was one of the most dystopian in the history of the city, a period of terror and explosive political crisis beginning with the expulsion of the Medici, followed by the theocratic Savonarolan regime in 1494, the repressive Medici restoration of 1513 and concluding with the fall of the “Last Republic” in 1530. Much of the most distinctive cultural production associated with this period - the sermons of Savonarola, the writings of Machiavelli, and major works of art by Michelangelo and others, is concerned with the relocation of Florentine identity following an experience of rupture with history and tradition, leading to a fundamental revaluation of the past and of the significance of history and memory. We will examine cultural transformation under a succession of Republican and autocratic regimes, with a particular attention to the process of “image-making” on the part of the state, of factions within it, of writers and ideologues, and - not least - of artists.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.010.604. Contested Patterns: Islamic Art History and Its Challenges. 3 Credits.
Formed against the backdrop of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Orientalism and colonialism, the field of Islamic art history continues to grapple with the overwhelmingly Eurocentric assumptions, narratives, and approaches that shaped its emergence and development. These inherited perspectives and the debates they have sparked are the focus of this seminar, which critically examines the foundational characterizations of Islamic art—as ornamental, iconophobic, and timelessly other—together with the exhibitory, commercial, and scholarly contexts in which such ideas took root. Adopting a simultaneously thematic and chronological approach, the seminar will trace the ways in which diverse constellations of actors—including those from within the Islamic world itself—have variously established, consolidated, or challenged the field’s underlying concepts. We will explore how this discursive process has intensified in our own time, in which a spate of scholarly and popular treatments have laid bare the tension between calls to reevaluate the field and an enduring impulse to reinscribe its established contours. Alois Riegl, Oleg Grabar, Gülru Necipoglu, Yasser Tabbaa, and Wendy Shaw are among the authors whose writings will be assessed and compared. Throughout the seminar, we will ground our historiographical inquiry in discussions of specific works and categories of Islamic art—particularly those like carpets that traditional frameworks have fetishized as decorative—and consider more fruitful avenues for addressing such material, making use of local collections to the extent that we can.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.010.606. The Translingual Historiography of Art. 3 Credits.
This seminar takes on the task of tracing the translingual histories of key terms in Art History studies. How did phrases as fundamental as "art," that we take for granted in our writings in English, find its equivalents in different languages? And how did this translational process, often happened in the nineteenth century, engender and shape a translingual renegotiation with each culture's existent traditions and discourses on art? While interrogating the historiography of art through these translingual practices, we will also compile the resources for future communal use.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.010.610. History of Art: Methods and Theories. 3 Credits.
Via readings from philosophy, theory, and art historiography, this seminar will explore the methods and theories of the History of Art, critically engaging with debates across the discipline’s history up to the present. Students will work with art from local collections throughout the semester, and have the opportunity to practice multiple modes of art historical writing.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.010.616. Leonardo da Vinci: Lives and Afterlives of a Premodern Artist. 3 Credits.
Beginning in the present, the course will examine how popular constructions of “Da Vinci” are used to legitimate contemporary obsessions with art, genius, and technological innovation. We will examine how, since the 1500s, the biography and “character” of Leonardo has been produced, often in the absence of historical evidence, and the cultural and political interests that these productions serve. The primary focus of the course will be a revisionist approach to the writings and imagery of Leonardo, to be considered with regard to questions of artistic selfhood in the Renaissance, and of the artisan as author figure.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.010.618. On Weaving: Feminism, Ecology, Care. 3 Credits.
How might a critical and material art history contribute to contemporary debates in theory? Feminist and queer theories, on the one hand, and ecological thought, on the other, have often turned to metaphors of weaving in their attempt to think antihierarchical forms of relationality. Against models of autonomous selfhood, weaving is evoked to foreground the material fact of our interdependence with human and other forms of life, and to articulate relations that are all too often discounted in western liberal cultures – along with the care work that goes into maintaining them. This seminar lends texture to metaphors of weaving by looking at material practices. We consider how the study of textile and fiber arts informs theoretical concerns, while also attending to the ways in which our reading of theory impacts our appreciation of artistic techniques and practices. The course will include two group excursions on Saturdays to the exhibition “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, sponsored by the Faculty-Student Engagement and Enrichment Fund..
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.010.621. An Empire’s Diversity: Ottoman Architecture and Patronage beyond the Imperial Court. 3 Credits.
The established historiography of Ottoman architecture is dominated by the patronage of the sultans and their elites, particularly as it shaped the empire’s third and final capital, Istanbul. While this focus on the “center” and its leadership reflects the Ottoman state’s own hierarchical structure, it also obscures the larger network of places and people that enabled the imperial system to develop and acquire meaning in the first place. This course will explore Ottoman architecture and its patronage from the perspective of these neglected regions and actors, covering such examples as Christian vassal states along the empire’s European borders, Arab lands with existing traditions of Islamic art, the curious persistence of Gothic models in the former Crusader kingdom of Cyprus, and the distinctive architectural practices of non-Muslim minorities within Istanbul itself. Drawn primarily from the early modern and modern periods, our case studies will be treated not as imitations of or deviations from the metropolitan mainstream, but as vital expressions of Ottoman culture that assertively engaged with, and themselves contributed to, the better-known strategies of the sultan’s court. We will also go beyond issues of architecture and patronage and consider these buildings as lived spaces whose associated objects, furnishings, and social and ceremonial activities were no less constitutive of the empire’s diverse architectural landscape.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.010.626. Sacred Connections: The Arts of Pilgrimage in the Islamic World, c. 1500–1900. 3 Credits.
As a central practice of the Muslim faith, pilgrimage has long animated the arts of the Islamic world, not only by generating countless monuments and objects, but also by facilitating the movement of artists, artifacts, and ideas across vast distances. This course explores the rich visual and material products of the Islamic pilgrimage tradition during the early modern and modern periods, including the architecture of the sacred sites themselves, the processions and ceremonies enacted by those who journeyed to these destinations, and proxy monuments and artworks created for those unable to perform the pilgrimage in person. Although our focus will be on the Hajj—the main annual pilgrimage to Islam’s holiest city, Mecca—we will also consider the arts associated with other pilgrimage sites, in particular the Shi‘i shrines of Iraq and Iran, as well as the pilgrimage practices of non-Muslim communities in the Middle East. We will bridge the gap between these geographies and our own vantage point in Baltimore through locally housed artworks, among them a seventeenth-century Ottoman tile at the Walters Art Museum that shows the Great Mosque of Mecca and a printed Hajj certificate—probably designed by an Indian artist but published in Istanbul in 1895—recently acquired for Hopkins’ own Special Collections. Through close engagement with these objects and other materials, the course will address such themes as sacred spectacle and ritual, pilgrimage as a locus of female patronage, and the impact of modernity on the Hajj and its traditions.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken or are enrolled in AS.010.426 are not eligible to take AS.010.626.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.010.627. Catharsis: Creating (with) Greek Tragedy. 3 Credits.
This seminar considers the mutual imbrication of Greek tragedy and the visual arts, from descriptions of art in the plays to inspiration drawn by artists from ancient performances. We will read extant plays in translation (those with knowledge of ancient Greek may translate key passages in addition) and trace the materialities of their performances, textual transmissions, and receptions, with particular attention to the ways in which the visual arts inspire and draw inspiration from this body of work. We will visit relevant museum collections in the region and, where possible, see live performances.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
AS.010.646. Philoctetes and the Art of Medicine. 3 Credits.
Through the prism of the Greek tragedy Philoctetes by Sophocles, this course explore the history of ancient Greek medicine as it intersects with the history of art. We will cover themes of war, wounds, isolation, incarceration, pain, pharmaka, and friendship through a close-reading of the text in translation, close looking at associated images, and attention to the play's many receptions.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have already taken, or are currently enrolled in AS.010.446, are not eligible to take AS.010.646.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
AS.010.647. Art and the Body in the Ancient Americas. 3 Credits.
What is a body, and how do bodies make meaning in art? This course investigates the concept of the body and its expression in Indigenous art from the Ancient Americas. As a site of human experience, a node of relational exchanges, and an expressive and constructive force, the body offers us a window into ways of being and understanding in the Americas. What can the way the body is created, represented, and manipulated tell us about attitudes toward power, religion, and the structure of the world? We will consider case studies from three cultural groups: the Moche, the Maya, and the Aztec. Our investigation is focused on the human body, and explores bodies that are living, dead, gendered, fragmented, multiple, and divine.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have already taken, or are currently enrolled in AS.010.447, are not eligible to take AS.010.647.
Writing Intensive
AS.010.659. The Passion and Resurrection from Middle Ages to Modernity: Image, Narrative, Drama, Film. 3 Credits.
What makes the Gospel story of Jesus of Nazareth’s arrest, trial, execution, burial, and resurrection not only Christianity's defining narrative but one of the enduring “root paradigms” of western culture? This seminar takes a long-range look at the transformations in European religious consciousness surrounding the Passion narratives, and explores the myriad developments in story-telling, image-making, and play-acting they urged forward. Our historical survey moves from the earliest icons associated with the Holy Places in Jerusalem, through the artful fictions conjured in the realist tradition by painters such as Hieronymus Bosch and Peter Paul Rubens, to late medieval Passion plays, Passion meditation and cult-forms, and finally to the silver-screen phenomenon that includes Paolo Pasolini's "The Gospel According to St. Matthew" (1964), Martin Scorcese's "The Last Temptation of Christ" (1988), and Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" (2004).
AS.010.662. Script, Character, Scribble: Writing and Pseudo-Writing in Modern and Contemporary Art. 3 Credits.
Almost readable, but not quite: artists in the twentieth and twenty-first century played with script of all kinds, from ancient glyphs and Persian script to Roman typefaces and Korean Hangul. Artists also scribbled in ways that evoke writing without script or meaning. This course takes on the question of meaning-making in art through the form of script—flirting with that tantalizing feeling that we can almost read the work of art through the marks on its surface. We will engage with artists from around the world whose work grapples with knowledge, meaning, and script, and discuss the limits and possibilities of legibility, knowing, and language. In addition to painting and drawing, we will also discuss conceptual art, installation, video, architecture, tapestry, ceramics, graphic novel forms, book arts, and sculpture. We will have opportunities to situate these works within longer histories of script and pseudo-script and image-text relations. Our discussion-driven seminars will be guided by readings in art history and theory. The course carries no expectation that you are multi-lingual or have experience with multiple scripts. Central to our semester will be group trips to see art in person in DC and Baltimore. Assignments include an option for short, focused writing with feedback and opportunities to experiment with genre and to rewrite, or a longer seminar paper, chosen in consultation with the professor.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
AS.010.664. Classics/History of Art Research Lab. 3 Credits.
This research-driven course focuses on joining together and mapping the largest known corpus of mosaic fragments (1st-6th centuries CE) from the heterogenous ancient city of Antioch at the mouth of the Orontes river (modern Antakya, Turkey). These mosaic fragments have been dispersed to institutions and museums across the globe, and their reunifications tell a series of stories about ancient Mediterranean diversity, early 20th century archaeology, and contemporary collection histories. Building from work completed in Phase I (Spring 2020) and Phase II (Fall 2021) and in conversation with a global network of Antioch researchers, students in this course will continue to research and digitally reunite mosaic fragments, including those in the collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art, delve deeper into the archival record associated with the early 20th century excavations, of which Baltimore was among the sponsors, and explore contemporary object biographies of the corpus, part of which remains in the region devastated by the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria in Spring 2023. Our research will center questions of craft, trade, materials and labor in ancient Antioch, modern archaeological practice, and contemporary museums. No prerequisites required and students from all majors welcome.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.010.665. Renew, Reuse, Recycle: Afterlives of Architecture in the Ottoman Empire. 3 Credits.
Designed from the outset to be inhabited and used, works of architecture are inherently susceptible to changes in purpose, appearance, and meaning over time. This was particularly so in the Ottoman Empire (c. 1299–1922), a multiethnic and multireligious transcontinental polity whose territories were already marked by long and eventful architectural histories. Through such case studies as the Parthenon in Athens, the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople/Istanbul, the Citadel of Cairo, and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, this course investigates the ways in which buildings and sites have been appropriated, repurposed, transformed, and/or reconceptualized in response to changing sociopolitical and artistic conditions. Topics to be addressed include the conversion of places of worship, (re)decoration as a vehicle of ideology, and the phenomenon of spoliation—the recycling, whether for practical or symbolic reasons, of existing building materials. In addition to the monuments themselves, we will address the objects that filled them and the human activities they hosted. While our focus will be on the Ottoman context and its relationship to the past, the course will also consider comparable examples in other geographies as well as developments in the post-Ottoman era, including the current debate over the Parthenon marbles and the recent reconversion of the Hagia Sophia into a mosque.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.010.667. The Renaissance in its Global Dimensions 1450-1650. 3 Credits.
A seminar focusing on recent scholarship that seeks to conceptualize a “global Renaissance,” beginning with Italy and the Mediterranean and then addressing exchanges between Europe and Southern/Eastern Asia. Case studies of the mobility of artists and artifacts, artistic adaptation and translation, materials as commodities and bearers of meaning.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.010.668. What is in a Landscape. 3 Credits.
This is a graduate seminar on the histories and theories of the art of landscape as knowledge, medium, and contesting field of power and identity.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
AS.010.669. Duchamp Effects: From the Ready-Made to Being Given. 3 Credits.
Painter and provocateur, quitter-of-art and player-of-chess, Marcel Duchamp aka Rrose Sélavy has long been recognized for redefining what counts as a work of art. His most prodigious legacy are the ready-mades of the 1910s, everyday objects – from bottle rack to urinal – that he nominated as art and signed. The influence of this gesture on pop art, conceptual art, minimalism, and happenings has since been called “the Duchamp effect.” But what happens for the history of art when the logic of cause and effect is undone? Duchamp too was interested in this question. His last work, Étant donnés (1946-1966), was made in complete secrecy in the very decades that inaugurated the clichés of his reception. Unveiled at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1969, the year after his death, Étant donnés seems to repudiate all that the ready-mades had come to stand for – and, at the same time, to register the effects of diverse postwar practices on Duchamp’s understanding of art. This seminar takes Étant donnés as point of departure for studying the long and multidirectional history of modernism. Artists under discussion include: Joseph Beuys, Scott Burton, Vaginal Davis, Richard Hamilton, Eva Hesse, Yayoi Kusama, Senga Nengudi, Dieter Roth, Alina Szapocznikow, Hannah Wilke. Readings span Duchamp’s writings and reception, the historiography of the avant-garde and modernism, aesthetics and affect theory, feminist and queer thought. The seminar will include at least one group excursion to visit the Arensberg Collection in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
AS.010.671. The illuminated charter: visual splendor, performance, and authenticity of medieval legal documents. 3 Credits.
This course investigates the complexities of medieval legal documents, their specific visuality and materiality, as well as practices of copying and forgery. We will address the aesthetics of legal documents, their graphic signs, seals, and paleography and the authenticating strategies used to corroborate their legitimacy. Another emphasis is set on the performative aspects of the medieval charters in court and church rituals. Comparison with contemporary illuminated sacred books will reveal the tight connections of monastic scriptoria and royal/imperial chanceries. The geographic focus is set wide, ranging from medieval Spain, to Carolingian and Ottonian chanceries in France and Germany, to the papal court in Rome and the imperial and monastic scriptoria in Byzantium.
Writing Intensive
AS.010.672. Pictura/Scriptura: Visual and Literary Culture 1400-1600. 3 Credits.
The seminar explores common ground between literary and art historical scholarship on Early Modern Europe and beyond; it seeks to further conversation between art historical and literary critical methodologies as well as media theory, and is designed to appeal to students of literature and of art history. Seeking to move beyond the mid-20th century discourses of iconology, it will re-consider the potential of Aby Warburg’s psychological and anthropological approach to the trans-cultural and trans-historical migration of symbols, and its implications for a “global Renaissance.” We will focus on antiquarian scholarship with its considerations of visual and material evidence, ekphrasis and the picturing functions of language, inscription and the legibility of images, the printed book as sylloge and “collection,” the dynamic interrelation of writing and drawing, Renaissance controversies about theater and epic and their implication in debates about art. In addition to Warburg and more recent writing on Warburg and the Renaissance, readings will be drawn from an array of interdisciplinary inquiry in Classics, Medieval and East Asian fields.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.010.674. Picturing Performance. 3 Credits.
Picturing Performance takes up the material traces of ancient Greek performance—the remains of theaters, paintings, masks, and musical instruments, as well as epigraphic, papyrological, and other textual transmissions of these works—alongside contemporary receptions of these performances, which have been such a rich site of reworking. Examples include: the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and Anäis Mitchell’s Hadestown, Euripides’ The Bacchae and Hope Mohr Dance’s Before Bacchae, and Sophocles’ Antigone and Theater of War’s Antigone in Ferguson. These ancient performances engage questions of gender and sexuality, constructions of race, migration, citizenship, and belonging, power, governance, and resistance, disease and collective healing, among the subjects that have also inspired contemporary interpretations. All texts will be read in translation. We will visit museum collections in the region and, where possible, see live performances of these works.
Writing Intensive
AS.010.675. Transnational Asian Art: Modernism in Motion. 3 Credits.
This seminar will examine a constellation of readings and moments in the history of Asian art since c. 1900 through the lens of the transnational. We’ll unpack this term and some of its relations including cosmopolitan, diaspora, and global, and then turn to several case studies of exchange, contact, engagement across geographies in the long 20th century. These include: pan-Asian aesthetics as discussed in India-Japan exchanges in the 1910s, Chinese artists who study and live in Paris in the 1920s and (sometimes) return to China, the concept of “international contemporaneity” as articulated in 1960s Japanese art, India’s engagement with internationalism and “indigenism” in the 1960s, Japan–US interfaces in the 1960s and 1970s, Marxist art and art histories in India in the 1970s and 1980s, the “East Village” in Beijing and NYC in the 1980s and 1990s, and the Chinese avant-garde in a post-Maoist context.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.010.677. Inscription Description. 3 Credits.
This seminar explores two intertwining threads: the materiality of texts and the visuality of the textual, with a particular emphasis on the art and literature of the ancient Mediterranean world. We will focus on inscriptions carved on monuments, painted onto ceramics, and tessellated into floors alongside imagined images, literary ekphrasis, and the visuality of performance. In analyzing these together, we will explore, critique, and experiment with the role of writing in the History of Art. Students from all sub-fields and disciplines warmly welcome. No prerequisites.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.010.680. Craft and Interaction in the Near East and Aegean during the Bronze and Iron Ages. 3 Credits.
This graduate seminar investigates the intersection of crafting and cultural interaction among the regions of the Aegean, eastern Mediterranean and Near East from 3000-500 BCE (Bronze and Iron Ages).
AS.010.681. Figuration after Formlessness. 3 Credits.
What would an art history of modernism look like that sought not to overcome or eliminate painterly figuration, but to attend to displaced and disparaged figures in it? At least since Benjamin Buchloh’s important 1981 warning about a “return to figuration” in European painting, figuration has been linked with questionable, if not highly suspect, aesthetic and political values – from nostalgia to repression. Buchloh inherits this this view from the historical avantgardes, which sought to counter conventions of figuration by developing disparate strategies of abstraction. And it is this view of figuration that guides both formalist and social art histories: For both share an anxiety about the authoritative figure of the human form.This seminar invites an alternative perspective on the artistic project of figuration. We look at modern and contemporary practices of figuration that cannot so easily be dismissed as retrogressive or authoritarian. These practices suggest ways of thinking the figure without an appeal to its coherent visibility or sovereign standing. We will read broadly in the contemporary critical theory, feminist and queer theory, Black thought, and critical disability studies that share this investment (e.g. Butler, Cavarero, Garland-Thomson, Halberstam, Hartman, Honig, Sharpe, Wynter). We will critically reconsider Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois’ project Formless: A User’s Guide, along with the turn of the twenty-first century debates about abjection, feminism, and “body art” it engaged. Artists under discussion include Maria Lassnig, Ana Mendieta, Alina Szapocznikow, Kara Walker, and Hannah Wilke, amongst others. For the final research paper, graduate students are encouraged to bring their own archives to the questions addressed in the seminar.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.010.683. Three Artists (Three Sick Women): Art, Illness, Death. 3 Credits.
What happens when the artist becomes sick? How does illness become the subject of artistic practice? And what does art concerned with sickness tell us about the entanglement of gender and medicine in contemporary life?This course draws inspiration from Anne Wagner’s book, Three Artists, Three Women (1996), in which she explores an expectation that undergirds modernist art history: that the work of artists who are also women must reveal their femininity. We take up the challenge to this normative expectation with the work of three artists (who happened also to be three sick women) active in the post Second World War period. A German-Jewish immigrant to the US, Eva Hesse is known today for the fragile latex sculptures she made before dying from a brain tumor. Alina Szapocznikow, a Polish concentration camp survivor, employed her sculptural practice of body casting to index the symptoms and effects of her metastatic breast cancer. Hannah Wilke, an American feminist performance artist, painstakingly documented her treatments for terminal lymphoma. These artists’ careful explorations of their bodies and their illnesses trouble assumptions about femininity and feminism in the late twentieth century. They also afford an introduction to post-minimalism in the US, nouveau réalisme is Europe, and international conceptual and performance art. We constellate their interconnected work with that of others whose practices are infused in diverse ways by illness and its permeable definition: Indira Allegra, Cassils, Bob Flanagan, Yayoi Kusama, Wangechi Mutu, David Wojnarowicz, Florentina Holzinger.Readings in art history will be complemented with historical and contemporary approaches in feminist theory and critical disability studies, as well as a selection of literary and hybrid-form writings on art, illness, and death, including: Ingeborg Bachmann, Johanna Hedva, Audre Lorde, Paul Preciado, Gillian Rose.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have already taken, or are currently enrolled in AS.010.483, are not eligible to take AS.010.683.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.010.685. Indigenous Materialities of the Americas. 3 Credits.
The American continent and its islands are home to a diverse and delicate ecosystem, and for millennia, Indigenous communities have tended to and shaped these rich landscapes. This seminar journeys across the Americas to understand how Indigenous makers cultivated materials from these ecologies and transformed them into impressive arrays of art and architecture. Each week, students will explore a different medium—bark, shell, rubber, feathers, reed, stone, clay, etc.—that makers shaped into visual and spatial forms. Although this course focuses on the ancestral and early modern periods, it will also explore continued and shifting practices with these materials among contemporary artists. Readings will include material analyses, art historical and archaeological interpretations, as well as early colonial writings by Indigenous authors. There will also be opportunities for students to engage with materials in class. Course material will cover issues of technical skill and ecological knowledge; ephemerality and (im)permanence; animacy and relationality as it pertains to the relationships formed between makers and their works; and the role of Indigenous materialities in reconfiguring canons and categories that continue to scaffold the field of art history. For their final assignment, students will select a multimedia work from the Indigenous Americas and unpack its materiality in both presentation and essay format.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.010.697. Reply-All: Letter-Writing in Art and History. 3 Credits.
From embellished silver pens and abolitionist secretary desks to contemporary artists manipulating historical postcards and making fax collages, this course will explore the materiality, technologies, and aesthetics of written communications from the 18th century to the present. This research-centered course will engage directly with objects in the Baltimore Museum of Art collection, in preparation for an upcoming exhibition. Topics include the development of specific decorative arts and designs in conjunction with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century postal and bureaucratic history, letter-writing as a mode of resistance, strategic illegibility and asemic writing as a form of critical artistic practice, and the importance of mail art as conceptual and institutional critique. Includes hands-on work in the museum and class visits with BMA curator Dr. Leslie Cozzi.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.010.706. The Double in Premodern Art. 3 Credits.
Inspired by the recent (2022) exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington, "The Double: Identity and Difference in Art Since 1900," this experimental seminar extends the conversation to selected manifestations of the double in European medieval and Renaissance culture: ancient archteypes such as Medusa and Narcissus, and their reinterpretation as philosophical images; post-mortem Doppelgängers glimpsed in the diverse genres of the macabre (memento mori, transi tombs, legendary encounters with the living dead); doublings of personhood in the identification portrait, mask imagery, portrait effigies, and allegorical personification. We will also examine a range of contexts and motifs that enabled double-vision and seeing-double: mirror-gazing, the Eucharist, double-sided panels and diptychs, anthropomophic landscapes, and more. Throughout we will keep up the dialogue with modern and modernist paradigms of the double.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
AS.010.708. Topics in Late Medieval Art. 3 Credits.
A critical interrogation of past and current interpretative approaches to the devotional arts of western Europe, c. 1300-1500.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
AS.010.709. Decadent Images: Excess, Promiscuity, Utopia. 3 Credits.
This co-taught graduate seminar explores two interconnected concepts of decadence across a wide range of artistic works and art historical contexts, pivoting around the fin-de-siècle to span the pre-modern to the contemporary. Decadence names, on the one hand, a cultural or historical condition summed up in the cliché of “decline and fall”: civilization stagnates, consumption turns obsessive, vulgarity subsumes aesthetic taste, and politics turn regressive in an irreversible slide toward ruin. Decadence in this sense is a term of radical negativity. On the other hand, as a mode of symbolic behavior, decadence is surprisingly ambivalent. It describes both the over-consumption associated with ruling elites and forms of popular festivity, such as masquerade and carnival, that license promiscuous proclivities otherwise meant to remain private. These two concepts of decadence, like their predominant iconography, are traversed by misogyny. They are also accompanied historically by the pursuit of utopia—and the expression of feminist and queer forms of life.We consider how a diverse range of artists—from Baldung and Bruegel to Goya and Moreau, from Sarah Bernhardt and Claude Cahun to Florentina Holzinger—have represented, enacted, and responded to the tensions inherent in cultural decadence and the peculiar forms of historical consciousness it awakens. What is at stake when artists mobilize a particular decadent image—consumptive, digestive, scatological, parodic, pathological, perverse, erotic—and what forms of interpretation do these gestures demand? To the degree that decadence engulfs us today, this seminar seeks to explore the capacities of the arts, past and present, to recalibrate culture, aesthetics, and the ethics of taste. Readings include: Proudhon, Sade, Baudelaire, Cesare Lombroso, Max Nordau, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Bataille, Bakhtin, Kristeva, Sianne Ngai, Elaine Showalter, Jack Halberstam, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Sarah Ahmed among others.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
AS.010.730. Vulnerable Images. 3 Credits.
What is a vulnerable image? The Latin vulnus points us in two directions: toward the relational vulnerability arising from the sight of wounds and the action of wounding; and toward the raw disclosure of the body's interior. This seminar, team-taught so as to bring the perspectives of the modern and the long premodern era into dialogue, attends to vulnerable images in both senses: we will consider not only works that picture vulnerable subjects, but images that, in their vibrant materiality or through their use and circulation, themselves become vulnerable. Across both domains we will examine what is arguably their shared capacity: to make viewers aware of their own vulnerability, and to provoke a range of responses, from the "tragic" emotions of pity and fear, to horror and disgust, compassion and care, pleasure and pain. Each week involves the critical juxtaposition of artworks and texts drawn from modern and contemporary culture with those from the long premodern past. Topics include pain as spectacle and perceptions of pain; care, attention, and maternal inclination; the vulnerability of gendered and racialized bodies; representations of torture, punishment, and war; laughter and grotesque humor; the subjects and objects of iconoclasm; material decompositions and forms of fragility. Readings run the gamut from Aristotle to Arendt, Freud to Butler, Warburg to Hartman, Sontag to Scarry.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
AS.010.801. Special Rsrch & Problems. 3 - 9 Credits.
This course is for students who wish or need special instruction in areas of art history not included in the currently offered courses.
AS.010.802. Spec Research/Problems. 3 - 9 Credits.
This course is for students who wish or need special instruction in areas of art history not included in the currently offered courses.
AS.010.803. Individual Work. 3 - 20 Credits.
Students preparing dissertations will enroll in this course with the permission of their doctoral advisers.
AS.010.804. Individual Work. 3 - 20 Credits.
Students preparing dissertations will enroll in this course with the permission of their doctoral advisers.
AS.010.807. Summer Research. 9 Credits.
Summer research for doctoral students
AS.010.815. History of Art Teaching Assistant. 3 Credits.
For History of Art PhD students that are actively participating as a TA as required by the program.
Cross Listed Courses
Classics
AS.040.137. Archaeology at the Crossroads: The Ancient Eastern Mediterranean through Objects in the JHU Archaeological Museum. 3 Credits.
This seminar investigates the Eastern Mediterranean as a space of intense cultural interaction in the Late Bronze Age, exploring how people, ideas, and things not only came into contact but deeply influenced one another through maritime trade, art, politics, etc. In addition to class discussion, we will work hands-on with artifacts from the JHU Archaeological Museum, focusing on material from Cyprus.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.040.631. Curating the Ancient in Baltimore. 3 Credits.
This collaborative seminar meets jointly with students from MICA to design an exhibition concerning a cast collection of ancient Mediterranean sculpture, founded in 1881, that resided at both institutions during different moments in its history (part of the collection is still located at MICA, where art students regularly engage with it). Participants will explore the dynamic position of the collection between these two urban institutions and its existence as part of the ongoing history of the city. This course is associated with the Baltimore ReCast Classics Research Lab. Advanced undergraduates can contact the instructor about joining the course.
Comparative Thought and Literature
AS.300.409. Modernist Animacies and the Politics of Wonder. 3 Credits.
From dancing skeletons and Mickey Mouse to nuclear-powered robots and Fritz the Cat, modernist visual culture is replete with iconic images of animated existence. This course surveys these diverse forms of "animatedness” emerging within the interconnected histories of special effects film and animated media, focusing on their entanglement with broader modernist practices, movements, and styles between the 1920s and the 1970s. Students will explore the shared origins of animation and special effects in the frame-by-frame manipulations of early trick film, the hopes and fears attached to machine aesthetics in German expressionism, French surrealism, and Soviet avant-garde cinema of the 1920s, and the ambivalent agency expressed by animated bodies in American and Japanese cartoons of the 1920s-40s. They will then assess the continuities and ruptures in the aesthetic and political commitments of interwar and postwar modernisms through case studies from North American, Central and Eastern European, and Japanese animation. By engaging with the diverse forms of “animatedness” and animated media presented in this course, students will develop critical theoretical, historical, and comparative frameworks for navigating the complex entanglements of organic life, emotional states, and machine technologies that increasingly define contemporary existence.
Prerequisite(s): Students may not have taken the AS.300.321 version of this course.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.300.621. Thinking with Accidents. 3 Credits.
When is an action or a work of art just an accident--and when should it be called intentional? This course explores the problems and complications of willed actions, accidents, and unintended consequences. We will follow (primarily but not exclusively) a range of different modernist writers, surrealist and dada artists, noir filmmakers, and twentieth-century philosophers as they contemplate what an intentional action is or is not. What can these works tell us about how we make meaning at the limits of our control? Includes literature of Wallace Stevens, Nathanael West, James Cain, Patricia Highsmith, and Ann Petry; films of Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, and Justine Triet; art of Marcel Duchamp and André Breton; and philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Philippa Foot.
First Year Seminars
AS.001.206. FYS: Wisdom: Global Perspectives and Practices. 3 Credits.
Where is wisdom to be found? And where is the place of understanding? These probing questions from the Hebrew bible's Book of Job arose from a wisdom tradition that was rooted in a particular time, place, and group identity. Yet versions of these same questions can be found the world over. Is true wisdom the exclusive power of a divine being in heaven, or can it found on earth, in human intelligence, learning, and virtue? Who is rightly considered a sage—the enlightened monk, the Stoic teacher, the ruler who dispenses justice, the hermit-saint communing with God? Is the perfection of wisdom an attainable goal or only an impossible ideal? Why do some cultures personify Wisdom as a female goddess, attributing to her voice, agency, and cosmic creative powers? This First-Year Seminar places these questions under a cross-cultural lens by visiting the wisdom traditions of ancient Israel, Greek and Roman philosophy, early Christianity, medieval mysticism, and Buddhism. Course materials are drawn from the Old and New Testaments, ancient dialogues, Buddhist sutras and Zen koans, and other sources. We will also look at a variety of visual images, from holy portraits and devotional icons to mystical diagrams and Tibetan mandalas. When existence is hard enough as it is, why do we seek wisdom? Can today's culture of fortune-cookie philosophy, meditation apps, and self-help accessories really help us attain it? We'll engage in a series of practical experiments in the "art of living," testing for ourselves the possibilities, challenges, and joys of living with wisdom.
AS.001.215. FYS: Mosques, Museums, and the Mind’s Eye - Discovering Islamic Art in Person. 3 Credits.
Despite its association with distant regions and time periods, Islamic art has a flourishing presence in today’s America, represented by rich museum collections, modern buildings designed in historical styles, and vibrant scholarly networks. This seminar explores how we, from the vantage point of twenty-first-century Baltimore, might experience works of Islamic art in ways that are informed by their own cultural contexts while also acknowledging the challenges involved in bridging this gap. We will spend much of the course engaging with objects and architecture in person, with visits planned to the recently reinstalled Islamic galleries at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, the Islamic Center of Washington, DC, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. You will be invited to handle artifacts in person and to try your hand at calligraphy, one of the most distinctive and esteemed Islamic artforms. In the classroom setting, we will read and discuss translations of primary sources written by historical practitioners and consumers of Islamic art, along with examples of modern scholarship that seek to understand the Islamic tradition from a variety of perspectives. As well as learning about such perspectives, you will be encouraged to develop and share—in presentations and written assignments—your own ideas about Islamic art, building on the close, firsthand encounters that run throughout the seminar.
AS.001.259. FYS: Global Nude - The Art of the Human Body in the World. 3 Credits.
We are all born nude, but most of us wear clothes, at least when facing the public in our adult life. We are told nude is not the same as just “naked”: it is an art form. However, in grand museums, we see plenty of representation of nudes in the European wings. We gaze at a marble statue of a classical nude there, and when we go watch a film with nude scenes in a cinema with friends and strangers, we respond very differently in these two spaces. In this First-Year Seminar, we will go to museums, watch movies, and take a global, historical, and multimedia perspective to approach nude as art in the world. How is nude defined? What are the philosophical and scientific ideas that find nude as an ideal vehicle? What are the historical and cultural particularities of classical nude that have been taken for centuries as universal? How do other art traditions approach the representation of an unclothed nude body? How are nudes gendered, sexualized, classed, and racialized? How do modern media transform nude? These are among the questions that this class explores. The Truth is naked, as the saying goes. Nude is therefore a mirror reflecting both the foundations and aspirations of humanity.
History
AS.100.144. Shopaholics: Consumer Revolution and the Material World, 1600-1850. 3 Credits.
We live in a world of global consumption. This course introduces students to the birth of global consumer culture in the period from the 1600s through to the American, French and Haitian revolutions. These revolutions were themselves sold to consumers through “revolutionary things”, and this period witnessed the first major consumer boycotts against slave-produced goods. Students will examine the histories of many key commodities involved in the “consumer revolution”, including fashion items such as shoes, wigs, clothing and accessories. A significant portion of the course will examine addictive stimulants like sugar, coffee, tea and tobacco, globalized and imperial goods which became common for the first time in this period. We shall see how production of these goods involved new forms of racialized exploitation; simultaneously, we shall explore the diversity of people involved in the consumer revolution, studying the consumption of important new goods by people living in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. By the end of the class, students will understand how the emergence of mass consumption affected the global politics of race, gender and class, with especially important consequences for women and non-elite men. Students will examine objects lauded for their politeness, decorative appeal, and cultural importance such as porcelain tea sets, snuffboxes, and fans. Students will choose their own objects for a student presentation and research project.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
Interdepartmental
AS.360.410. Humanities Research Lab: The Dutch Americas. 3 Credits.
The Dutch East India Company, or VOC, is historically and art historically well documented and firmly understood. But the Dutch also had significant holdings to the west via the Dutch West India Company, or WIC. They operated and held outposts in the present-day United States (New York/New Amsterdam), Caribbean (Surinam, Curaçao, Bonaire), Latin America (Brazil), and West Africa. Despite the abundance of materials associated with the WIC from this wide geography, these have been scarcely assessed by art historians, and a defined and comprehensive corpus has never been assembled. This class will act as a research lab in which to do so. In research teams, students will map artworks and objects created from that broad, transnational cultural ambit—categories that might include maps, landscape paintings, still life paintings featuring American flora and fauna, botanical illustrations, plantation architecture, luxury objects made from precious raw materials gathered in the Americas, the urban environment of slavery—and develop individual research questions around them.The class will run with a partner lab in the form of a course led by Professor Stephanie Porras at Tulane University. The course will feature speakers; and there is potential for funded travel to conduct research. We will start at the ground level; no previous knowledge about the field is required. Students from all disciplines are welcome.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.360.610. Humanitites Research Lab: The Dutch Americas. 3 Credits.
The Dutch East India Company, or VOC, is historically and art historically well documented and firmly understood. But the Dutch also had significant holdings to the west via the Dutch West India Company, or WIC. They operated and held outposts in the present-day United States (New York/New Amsterdam), Caribbean (Surinam, Curaçao, Bonaire), Latin America (Brazil), and West Africa. Despite the abundance of materials associated with the WIC from this wide geography, these have been scarcely assessed by art historians, and a defined and comprehensive corpus has never been assembled. This class will act as a research lab in which to do so. In research teams, students will map artworks and objects created from that broad, transnational cultural ambit—categories that might include maps, landscape paintings, still life paintings featuring American flora and fauna, botanical illustrations, plantation architecture, luxury objects made from precious raw materials gathered in the Americas, the urban environment of slavery—and develop individual research questions around them.The class will run with a partner lab in the form of a course led by Professor Stephanie Porras at Tulane University. The course will feature speakers; and there is potential for funded travel to conduct research. We will start at the ground level; no previous knowledge about the field is required. Students from all disciplines are welcome.
Writing Intensive
Islamic Studies
AS.194.256. Museums, Communities, and the Sacred. 3 Credits.
This community-engaged course is co-created by a scholar and curator with expertise in religion, art, and material culture, and taught in partnership with the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), and centers how museums engage with the sacred. Recognizing that museums have traditionally been under-equipped to respond to the social concerns that animate their local communities, the BMA is rethinking how a twenty-first century civic museum engages the city in which it is located. Understanding the museum as a public space in which contemporary civic and social issues can be engaged, we will explore such questions as: how can a museum represent devotional objects while honoring a diversity of religious and spiritual perspectives and avoiding homogenous narratives about belief? How can a museum create relationships with religious communities to understand and interpret the objects in its collection, and navigate differences in faith-based communities with ethical care? How can a museum engage local communities in the process of writing labels for objects and in other acts of interpretation in a way that is not extractive and is genuinely value-aligned? In short, how can a museum truly become public? As a community-engaged course, students will build practically on their learning about museums, religion and public pedagogy to create and facilitate community listening circles at the BMA. The course will include visits to the BMA and other sites, guest visits on focused topics from museum professionals in other institutions, and training in listening and facilitation.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Medicine, Science and the Humanities
AS.145.320. British Visual Culture and Medicine. 3 Credits.
In this class, we will reflect on the ethical, gendered, and societal implications of the creation and exchange of British medical imagery. What purpose did this visual culture serve for artists, practitioners, and patients? How are we meant to look at these images today, outside of their original contexts? We will examine a range of images and objects from Britain, expanding our definition of “art” and interrogating the colonialist roots and origins of artistic and medical material. Our objects of study will extend from oil paintings of renowned physicians to diagnostic photographs of unnamed patients and from prints of gynecological dissection to satirical cartoons of “quack” doctors. We will look not only at how practitioners have had their patients depicted, but also at how those with illnesses or with disabilities have taken back their bodily power to portray themselves. Questions of portraiture, likeness, and consent will be constant themes throughout this course, guiding students’ development of ways of thinking critically and writing thoughtfully about medical images.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1)
Writing Intensive
Modern Languages and Literatures
AS.211.224. Made in Italy: Italian style in context. 3 Credits.
Italy and the “Italian style” have become synonym of exquisite taste, class, and elegance thanks to the quality of Italian craftsmanship. This course will explore some of the major factors that contributed to the rise of Italian fashion and Italian industrial design as iconic all around the world. The classes will focus on the main protagonists and art movements that influenced the development of Italian style. We will analyze trends, clothing, and style not only in a historical context, but also through a critical apparatus that will include themes related to gender, culture, power, and politics.The course is taught in English. No knowledge of Italian is required, but those who can read in Italian will have an opportunity to do so. Everyone will learn some Italian words and expressions.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.211.315. The Meanings of Monuments: From the Tower of Babel to Robert E. Lee. 3 Credits.
As is clear from current events and debates surrounding monuments to the Confederacy, monuments play an outsize role in the public negotiation of history and identity and the creation of communal forms of memory. We will study the traditions of monuments and monumentality around the world – including statues and buildings along with alternative forms of monumentality – from antiquity to the present day. We will examine the ways that monuments have been favored methods for the powerful to signal identity and authorize history. This course will also explore the phenomenon of “counter-monumentality”, whereby monuments are transformed and infused with new meaning. These kinds of monuments can be mediums of expression and commemoration for minority and diaspora communities and other groups outside the economic and political systems that endow and erect traditional public monuments. The first half of the course will examine the theoretical framework of monumentality, with a focus on ancient monuments from the ancient Near East (e.g., Solomon’s temple). More contemporary examples will be explored in the second half of the course through lectures and also field trips. We will view contemporary debates around monuments in America in light of the long history of monuments and in comparison with global examples of monuments and counter-monuments. All readings in English.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.211.329. Museums and Identity. 3 Credits.
The museum boom of the last half-century has centered largely around museums dedicated to the culture and history of identity groups, including national, ethnic, religious, and minority groups. In this course we will examine such museums and consider their long history through a comparison of the theory and practice of Jewish museums with other identity museums. We will study the various museological traditions that engage identity, including the collection of art and antiquities, ethnographic exhibitions, history museums, heritage museums, art museums, and other museums of culture. Some of the questions we will ask include: what are museums for and who are they for? how do museums shape identity? and how do the various types of museums relate to one another? Our primary work will be to examine a variety of contemporary examples around the world with visits to local museums including the Jewish Museum of Maryland, the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the National Museum of the American Indian.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.211.399. Anonymity: The Art and Politics of Hidden Identity. 3 Credits.
Why do people choose to conceal their identities? This course investigates the multifaceted roles of anonymity and pseudonymity across literature, music, performance art, and activism. To be anonymous—literally “without a name”—can offer protection, enable more honest expression, serve as political resistance, function as deception, or arise from necessity. We will examine anonymity both as a strategy and as a performative act, considering how it challenges conventional notions of identity, authorship, and power. Key questions will include: How does anonymity function as a tool for resistance or control in different cultural and political contexts? How does it intersect with issues of race, gender, and sexuality? And how does it shape creative labor, from ghostwriting to collective production? Case studies span from Virginia Woolf’s modernist “philosophy of anonymity” and Italo Calvino’s postmodern desire for a literature beyond the self, to Elena Ferrante’s pseudonymous authorship. We will also investigate digital anonymity in the work of hacker collectives and artivists. By the end of the course, students will develop a critical understanding of how anonymity can both empower and erase, analyze the aesthetic and political possibilities it offers across media and cultural contexts, and apply these insights to their own research and experience.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.213.332. Literature and the Visual Arts. 3 Credits.
Literature and the Visual Arts is devoted to exploring the resonances between literary and visual forms of artistic expression and their enrichment of the modernist cultural landscape. We will aim to understand how the interest in visual art by modernist writers, and the impressions of literature on modernist and contemporary artworks newly illuminate or challenge traditional aesthetics of the temporality and spatiality of the work, aesthetic judgment, and the phenomenology of aesthetic attention. Readings may include works of literature or aesthetics by Immanuel Kant, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Klee, Stefan Zweig, Martin Heidegger, Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Siegfried Lenz, and Virginia Woolf, alongside work of many visual artists from van Gogh and Cézanne to German Expressionism and Anselm Kiefer. Taught in English.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
Near Eastern Studies
AS.130.153. A (Virtual) Visit to the Louvre Museum: Introduction to the Material Culture of Ancient Egypt. 3 Credits.
This course will present the Egyptological collections of the musée du Louvre in Paris, room by room, as in a real visit. From the Predynastic period, in the 4th millennium BC, to Roman time, the iconic “masterpieces” of this world-renowned art museum, as well as its little-known artifacts, will allow us to explore the history and material culture of ancient Egypt. We will also learn to observe, describe and analyze archaeological objects, in a global manner and without establishing a hierarchy between them, while questioning their place in the museum and its particular language. The objective will be to go beyond the objects themselves and answer, in fine, the following questions: What do these objects tell us about the men and women who produced them, exchanged them, used them, and lived among them in antiquity? What do they also reveal about those who discovered them in Egypt, several millennia later, about those who collected them and sometimes traded them, and what does this say about the relations between Egypt and the Western countries over time?
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.130.317. Akhenaten, Nefertiti and the Armana Period. 3 Credits.
This course examines the visual expressions of the revolutionary pharaoh Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti. The artistic changes that this reign introduced will be discussed through art historical, religious, political, and sociological lenses. Who was the king's sole god Aten and how did he and his visual appearance impact Egypt and the ancient world 1350 to 1330 BCE?
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.130.420. Research Methods: Arts of the Mesopotamian World: Crafters & Consumers. 3 Credits.
This hybrid seminar examines in depth a series of artistic case studies over a 3000 year period in the region of what is today Iraq, Syria, and southeastern Turkey, from c, 3500-500 BCE. Discussion will focus on processes of making and contexts of using myriad forms of art and architecture. Topics will include the invention of writing and complex imagery; portraiture and ritual practice; the symbolic value of materials; visual narration; and the uses of space for expressive purposes. We will approach these and other topics through critical engagement with existing scholarship, as well as by direct study of objects in nearby museum collections.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.132.609. Research Methods: Arts of the Mesopotamian World: Crafters & Consumers. 3 Credits.
This hybrid seminar examines in depth a series of artistic case studies over a 3000 year period in the region of what is today Iraq, Syria, and southeastern Turkey, from c, 3500-500 BCE. Discussion will focus on processes of making and contexts of using myriad forms of art and architecture. Topics will include the invention of writing and complex imagery; portraiture and ritual practice; the symbolic value of materials; visual narration; and the uses of space for expressive purposes. We will approach these and other topics through critical engagement with existing scholarship, as well as by direct study of objects in nearby museum collections.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
AS.133.418. Egyptian Art & Material Culture: Principles, Materiality and Challenges. 3 Credits.
This course is dedicated to the study of the art and material culture of ancient Egypt, spanning from the 5th millennium BCE to the Roman period. The objective of the course is to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of Egyptian art, with a focus on materiality, effective methods of description and analysis, and a command of bibliography. It will also enable students to practice two fundamental aspects of their future professional life: presenting a paper at a conference and submitting an article to an academic journal. In the initial sessions, we will examine the fundamental principles and conventions that define Egyptian art. We will then investigate the natural resources available to Egyptian craftsmen and artists, including nature, origin, networks, and uses. We will analyze the production of works of art through several case studies, focusing on materiality. Finally, we will reflect on the presence of Egyptian works of art in museums around the world. Moreover, the course will provide an opportunity for discourse on professional matters pertaining to engagement with Egyptian antiquities and works of art. The course will be structured around: lectures by the professor or by guest researchers, with the students participating in a dialogue with the lecturers; sessions dedicated to discussions of articles to be read (with two/three articles per session); oral presentations by the students, with the aim of reproducing the conditions of a colloquium or conference. These will include formal presentations and question-and-answer sessions, with all students taking part.At the conclusion of the semester, students will be required to submit a paper in connection with the oral presentation they have prepared. This paper will be presented as a scientific article, and the instructor will evaluate it in the same manner as an anonymous referee.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.133.618. Egyptian Art & Material Culture: Principles, Materiality, and Challenges. 3 Credits.
This course is dedicated to the study of the art and material culture of ancient Egypt, spanning from the 5th millennium BCE to the Roman period. The objective of the course is to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of Egyptian art, with a focus on materiality, effective methods of description and analysis, and a command of bibliography. It will also enable students to practice two fundamental aspects of their future professional life: presenting a paper at a conference and submitting an article to an academic journal. In the initial sessions, we will examine the fundamental principles and conventions that define Egyptian art. We will then investigate the natural resources available to Egyptian craftsmen and artists, including nature, origin, networks, and uses. We will analyze the production of works of art through several case studies, focusing on materiality. Finally, we will reflect on the presence of Egyptian works of art in museums around the world. Moreover, the course will provide an opportunity for discourse on professional matters pertaining to engagement with Egyptian antiquities and works of art. The course will be structured around: lectures by the professor or by guest researchers, with the students participating in a dialogue with the lecturers; sessions dedicated to discussions of articles to be read (with two/three articles per session); oral presentations by the students, with the aim of reproducing the conditions of a colloquium or conference. These will include formal presentations and question-and-answer sessions, with all students taking part.At the conclusion of the semester, students will be required to submit a paper in connection with the oral presentation they have prepared. This paper will be presented as a scientific article, and the instructor will evaluate it in the same manner as an anonymous referee.Restricted to: Near Eastern Studies, Museum Studies, History of Art, or Archaeology students.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.133.717. Akhenaten, Nefertiti and the Armana Period. 3 Credits.
This course examines the visual expressions of the revolutionary pharaoh Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti. The artistic changes that this reign introduced will be discussed through art historical, religious, political, and sociological lenses. Who was the king's sole god Aten and how did he and his visual appearance impact Egypt and the ancient world 1350 to 1330 BCE?
Distribution Area: Humanities
Political Science
AS.190.415. Political Arts: Dada, Surrealism, and Societal Metamorphoses. 3 Credits.
In the years between World Wars I and II, a fascinating group of artists, manifesto-writers, performers, intellectuals, and poets, in Europe and the Caribbean, who were put off by conventional politics of the time, decided to pursue other means of societal transformation. This seminar explores the aims and tactics, and strengths and liabilities, of Dada and Surrealism, as it operated in Europe and the Americas in the years between the World Wars. We will also read texts and images from writers and artists influenced by Dada and Surrealism but applied to different historical and political contexts.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken AS.001.193 OR AS.190.613 are not eligible to take AS.190.415.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Program in Museums and Society
AS.389.201. Introduction to the Museum: Past and Present. 3 Credits.
This course surveys museums, from their origins to their most contemporary forms, in the context of broader historical, intellectual, and cultural trends including the social movements of the 20th century. Anthropology, art, history, and science museums are considered.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.389.233. Exhibiting Cultures. 3 Credits.
This course critically examines the role of exhibitions in shaping cultural narratives and public understanding of people and places across the globe. Students will explore the history, theory, and practice of exhibiting cultures in museums, galleries, and digital platforms. Topics include curatorial ethics, representation and identity, postcolonial critiques, audience engagement, and the impact of emerging technologies on exhibition design. Through case studies and hands-on projects, students will analyze how cultural heritage is displayed and interpreted, considering issues of appropriation, authenticity, and inclusivity. The course culminates in a final project where students conceptualize and design their own cultural exhibition proposal.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.389.303. A World of Things. 3 Credits.
This course aims to make the object a focus point for understanding museums and what they do, and to consider the museum as a site for investigating the interaction between humans and things. At the center of the course is a tension between the idea that things are subject to human will, on the one hand, and indications that things can and do evade human attempts to control them, on the other. Readings from scholars across many disciplines, from anthropology to political science, will stimulate our looking, thinking, and discussion. Every session includes hands-on activities to help us think through the key concepts of the readings.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.389.315. Ancient Color: The Technologies and Meanings of Color in Antiquity. 3 Credits.
What role did the colorful surfaces of sculptures, vessels and textiles play in the ancient world? We examine historical texts and recent scholarly and scientific publications on the technologies and meanings of color in antiquity, and use imaging and analytical techniques to study polychromed objects from the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.389.322. Tigers to Teapots: Collecting, Cataloging, and Hoarding in America. 3 Credits.
This course examines material culture through the lens of personal collecting. Focusing on the United States, students will explore how collectors influenced the holdings of the nation’s museums, including JHU’s Evergreen and Homewood Museum, and contemplate how collecting, for public and private purposes, shapes status and taste in America. This course will also address how collections are organized, displayed, and conserved and will delve into psychological and environmental aspects of collecting and hoarding.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.389.333. The Curator is on the Case: Museum Research Methods in Practice. 3 Credits.
How do art curators solve the puzzles posed by the collections they care for? This course invites students to work hands on with a collection of early modern paintings recently donated to the university. Students will learn to investigate art like a curator, from material and technical examination through provenance research and the reconstruction of object contexts. Students will share their research findings with public audiences in the form of an exhibition to be installed in the renovated MSEL library.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.389.341. Museum Education for Today's Audiences. 3 Credits.
Go behind the scenes of the Baltimore Museum of Art's Education Department and develop and implement programs for college students in conjunction with an exhibition about women and art in early modern Europe.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.389.405. Visualizing Africa. 3 Credits.
Examines the history of African art in the Euro-American world, focusing on the ways that Western institutions have used African artworks to construct narratives about Africa and its billion residents.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.389.420. Curatorial Seminar: European Art. 3 Credits.
Working in collaboration with staff from the Baltimore Museum of Art, students assess the opportunities and challenges of the European collections; research select objects; contribute to the department's collections development plan; and conceptualize new, more global and more inclusive approaches to the displays.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)