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 Europe, the Islamic world, Asia, the Americas, and the trans-Atlantic 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, which 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 our 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
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.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course explores world art and architecture from c. 1400 to the present 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.
Area: Humanities
This course is an introduction to the art of the Islamic world, covering a geography that stretches from Spain to India and a chronology that extends from the seventh century into our own time. Within this rich and varied continuum, we will look at a range of art forms—including architecture, painting, sculpture, ceramics, and calligraphy—in relation to such themes as patronage, production, function, and audience. A number of the artworks will be viewed firsthand in local collections. We will also explore the intersection of Islamic art with today’s political realities.
Area: Humanities
This course explores key monuments of medieval art and architecture in Italy from c. 400 until 1350. We will concentrate on historical, functional, and aesthetical aspects that lead to the creation of single monuments and art works. Emphasis is given to the analysis of “sacred space” by means of architecture, painted, and sculptural decoration, as well as ritual performances. Another focus is laid on the emergence on the political dimension of art for the creation of civic identity as well as in the context of the late medieval courts. We raise questions about the importance of materiality and science for the creation of medieval art works.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course provides a basis for the study of Mesoamerican visual cultures and urban settings. We will explore the artistic production of the Olmec, Maya, and Aztec as well as works created by the artists of Teotihuacan, Monte Albán, and West Mexico. With a focus on aesthetics and cultural function, case studies range from stone sculpture, painted ceramics, and screenfold codices, to architectural complexes from Mexico and Central America. Themes to be discussed include: representations of humans and deities, monumentality and rulership, mutilation and destruction of monuments, and ritual and political significance of materials.
Area: Humanities
How does a notary’s son trained as a painter come to claim expertise in the construction of machines and acquire knowledge of the principles of optics, human anatomy, the flight of birds, the dynamics of air and water? The course will focus critically on the myth of Leonardo’s singularity and explore his achievements with regard to the artisanal culture of his time, as well as the problems of authority in the recognition of artisanal knowledge as scientific discovery.
Area: Humanities
Explores the different ways Early Modern painters and printmakers incorporated mirrors and optical reflections into their works for the sake of illusion and metaphor, deception and desire, reflexivity and truth-telling. Connecting sense perception and ethical knowledge, embedded mirror images often made claims about the nature of the self, the powers of art, and the superiority of painting in particular.
Area: Humanities
This course critically examines the visual arts through the medium of documentary, historical, and Hollywood film. Coverage is mostly North America and Mesoamerica.
Area: Humanities
This course serves as an introduction to the art and architecture of the Mediterranean region between the early Christian period and the Second Crusade (c. 250-1150). We will analyze the interactions between WesternEuropean, Byzantine, and Islamic cultures through the development of religious art and architecture, asking specifically how these interactions were mediated by culturally distinct representational practices. The course will cover the broad Mediterranean region by focusing on specific sites of interaction around the Sea (i.e. Islamic Spain, Norman Sicily, Byzantine North Africa, Venice and the Adriatic Coast, and Crusader Palestine). Select topics will include: the rise of religious image theory and its effect on the visual cultures of the Mediterranean region; the trans-regional movement of artists, crafted objects, and artistic technologies; the history of urbanism and the production of artistic objects in port cities and centers of trade; and the concept of the Mediterranean as “Premodern Globalism.” Readings will include both primary and secondary sources, and we will investigate a variety of methods and approaches to the interpretation of art objects.
Area: Humanities
This course examines the art and architecture of East, South, and Southeast Asia produced since the mid-twentieth century. We will engage with theoretical, visual, and political developments in the recent art of this region, reading statements by artists and architects, discussing the rising commercial and international profile of contemporary Asian art, and exploring established and emerging art histories of this period.Cross-list with East Asian Studies
Area: Humanities
This course explores seven centuries of fruitful collaboration between physicians and artists, uncovering the shared discourses, diagnostic techniques and therapeutic agendas that united the art of picture-making with the art of healing. Topics include the origin and development of medical illustration; the long, cross-cultural history of the therapeutic artefact; the anatomical investigations of Renaissance artists such as Leonardo and Michelangelo; depictions of bodily pain and disease in the art of Matthias Grünewald and psychosomatic syndromes like melancholy in the work of Albrecht Dürer; the spectacularization of the body in Enlightenment science and the ethics of medical specimen display today -- all in order to bring the complex intersections of the history of medicine and the history of art into view.
Area: Humanities
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.”
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
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.
Area: Humanities
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.
Area: Humanities
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, engaging viewers, or spurring participation, performance art asks what it means to perform, and what kinds of actions count, in contemporary culture. As such, performance art allows us to rethink established art historical concerns with form, perspective, and materiality, while offering critical insight into everyday life. 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 diverse array of artists and practices will be supplemented by readings in art history and criticism, as well as in feminist and queer theory, critical race theory, and political thought.
Area: Humanities
In the premodern world, the five senses were conceived as central to human perception. This course will explore the significance of the senses in the conception, creation, and reception of the visual art and architecture in the Middle Ages. Medieval objects and buildings were not only meant to be seen, but also to be experienced by touching, tasting, smelling, and hearing. They could elicit multisensory, often performative, or synesthetic responses in the viewers. Each week, we will focus on a specific sense and a related group of images, objects, or buildings to discover how medieval people experienced and interpreted them. To test out these ideas ourselves, we will explore works of art from the collections of Baltimore. Over the course of the semester, we will study sculptures, panel paintings, illuminated manuscripts, reliquaries, stained glass windows, rosaries, censers, spice containers, buildings, and ephemeral objects from Christian, Jewish, and Islamic art.
Area: Humanities
This course explores the major painters and printmakers working in the Netherlands during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the period that saw the outbreak of the Reformation, the revolt against Spanish rule, iconoclasm, the birth of the Dutch Republic, and the establishment of a Dutch colonial empire. Featured artists include Jan Gossaert, Pieter Aertsen, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Jan Brueghel, Rembrandt van Rijn, Peter Paul Rubens, Jan Steen, Jan Vermeer, and others.
Area: Humanities
An introduction to Chinese Art, with a focus on the (often absence of) women, through the lens of gender and sexuality.
Area: Humanities
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.
Area: Humanities
This course investigates the impact of political, religious, and social change for the making of art and architecture in the city of Rome from Constantine the Great (ca. 274-337 CE) until 1308, when the papal court moved to Avignon. From being a thriving metropolis and the political center of an empire in a pagan, multi-ethnical society, Rome became a small town of a few thousand inhabitants dwelling in the ancient ruins under the spiritual leadership of a powerless Christian bishop and unprotected from the invasions of the migrating peoples from Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Later transformations concern the rise to political power of the popes, achieved by the military alliance with the Frankish dynasty of Charlemagne around 800, and the controversy over the superiority of power between the German emperors and the Roman popes. How did the transformation from worldly to religious power affect the architecture of public buildings in the city? What strategies were developed to visually promote the new religious leaders of the city, the popes, and the new Christian God? How did the new status of Rome as one of the most important Christian pilgrim sites with its countless bodies of Early Christian martyrs in the catacombs outside the city influence urban development? And finally, what impact did the economical ups and downs in these periods of transition have for the arts? As we try to reconstruct the ‘image’ and the appearance of medieval Rome, this course discusses ideas and concepts behind different forms of leadership, both political and religious, as they intersect with the power of the arts and the self-referential character of a city that is obsessed with its own past.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
The development of archaeology in the Middle East – its history of explorers, diplomats, missionaries and gentlemen-scholars – profoundly shaped the modern world, from the creation of new museums and the antiquities market to international relations and terrorism.
Area: Humanities
This thematic course will explore the art, architecture, material culture, and textual evidence from the ancient city of Athens, the many cultures and social positions that made up the ancient city, and the idea of the city as something far beyond its reality. We will take a number of field trips to museums in the area and some of your assignments will be based in local museums.
Area: Humanities
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.
Area: Humanities
The course focuses on art and architecture in the political and religious contexts of the Middle East, from the 4th to the 14th c. The three monotheistic religions all claimed specific territories -- in particular the city of Jerusalem -- for cult practices. This situation resulted in military conflicts that had an impact of Jewish, Medieval, Byzantine, and Islamic art in the Holy Land. The political conflicts, which still plague the region today, are rooted in the complex situation of the medieval period. The Roman, Arab, Byzantine, and crusader invasions resulted however in exciting eclectic styles that characterize the art and architecture of the region. We will discuss concepts behind political and religious leadership, as they intersect with the power of the arts.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Viewed within the dynamic historical context of colonial society, we consider the pictorial, sculptural, and architectural programs that ensued in viceregal Peru (1532-1825). We examine the role of religious orders, art schools, artisan guilds and cofradía, and consider the social and political implications of art patronage.
Area: Humanities
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). Finally, the book 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 in the medieval West and in Byzantium, permeating Jewish and Islamic traditions. 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 course 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. A major aspect of the seminar focuses on the performative aspect of the book in its wide range of functions: secular and liturgical, public and private. Students will be able to work first hand with manuscripts and facsimiles from the rare book collection of Eisenhower Library and the Walters Art Museum.
From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, visual forms and practices linked such far-flung places as Mexico City and Naples, Manila and Lima, Cuzco and Antwerp, Quito and Madrid: all cities in the Spanish Empire. This course is conceived as a voyage, moving city by city to explore objects that connected Spain’s vast holdings. We will investigate how the Spanish Crown and the Catholic Church used visual strategies to consolidate political power and instill religious faith across the world; and, alternatively, we will consider how local conditions, concerns, and resistance reshaped those efforts. This course surveys a diverse range of artistic production: religious paintings and sculptures; maps used for imperial surveillance; luxury goods crafted from shimmering feathers, ceramics, ivory, and precious metals; urban design and architecture from the ports of Europe to the highland outposts of the Andes; ephemeral cityscapes for civic performances. In examining such materials, students will be introduced to the art historical methods and theoretical concerns used to study a wide diversity of objects within an imperial frame.
Area: Humanities
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 Asia America to include the discussion of artists whose work directly addresses the fluidity of location and the transnational studio practice.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Centered on modern-day Turkey and encompassing vast territories in Asia, Africa, and Europe, the Ottoman Empire (1299 – 1923) was the longest lived and among the most powerful Islamic states in history, with an artistic tradition to match. This course explores the functional and symbolic role that architecture played during the empire’s formative centuries, when three successive capital — Bursa, Edirne, and Istanbul — served to visualize the sultans’ growing claims to universal authority. With reference to mosques, palaces, tombs, and other categories of architecture, the course will examine the buildings in their artistic, social, and political contexts. Themes to be addressed include patronage and audience, architectural practice and the building trade, ceremonial and ritual, topography and urban planning, and the relationship of Ottoman architecture to other traditions.
Area: Humanities
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.
Area: Humanities
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.
Area: Humanities
This course examines the visual and material culture of the Dutch Golden Age as the product of global forces. The young Dutch Republic quickly achieved a global reach in the seventeenth century. And Amsterdam served as its commercial capital, which by 1630 could be counted as one of the most important port cities in the world and home to the Dutch East India Company (VOC), the world’s first multinational corporation. Moving an incredible quantity of goods (spices, silks, porcelain, coffee, precious stones, “exotic” arts, and slaves) generated not only the economic riches, but also the cultural touchpoints that would give rise to art produced by the likes of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals, and the many exceptional craftsmen that have left us some of the most enduring masterpieces of the seventeenth century. This course situates that art, and the city of Amsterdam itself, within networks that connected it to such far flung places as Japan, Jakarta, Surinam, Curacao, Brazil, and the Indian Subcontinent.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Long characterized in the Western imagination as exotic realms of fantasy, harems in Islamic tradition served as private domestic quarters for the women of elite households. This course explores the harem—as an institution, a physical space, and a community of women—from various art-historical perspectives, considering such topics as the harem’s architecture, the agency of its inhabitants as patrons and collectors, the mediating role of eunuchs in the harem’s visual and material culture, and the ability of harem women to make their mark through public artistic commissions. Our case studies will address a range of Islamic geographical and chronological contexts, though we will focus on the empires of the early modern period and, above all, the famous harem of the Ottoman sultans at the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. In challenging popular misconceptions, the course will also look at the wealth of exoticizing imagery that the harem inspired in Western art, which we will consider through Orientalist paintings at the Walters Art Museum and illustrated rare books at Hopkins itself.
Area: Humanities
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.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
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.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
The arts of Egypt, Greece and the Near East are typically taught separately from one another. However, the Mediterranean Sea has always served as a connector, and the diverse cultures of these areas were in close contact with one another for much of their histories. From 2000 to 500 BCE (the Middle/Late Bronze and Iron Ages), these interactions were particularly dynamic, resulting in a diversity of arts including wall frescoes, precious jewelry, and elaborate furnishings and weaponry. This course examines the arts of the interactions among Egyptians, Near Easterners, Greeks and others. It focuses special attention on the role of artistic products in intercultural relations, including trade, diplomacy, war, imperialism, and colonization.
Prerequisite(s): AS.010.301 - Titled "Art and Interactions in the Eastern Mediterranean from 2000 to 500 BCE" - Students who have taken that course in 2014 or prior are not permitted to take this course.
Area: Humanities
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.
Area: Humanities
This course will explore modern and contemporary art in colonial and postcolonial contexts from Bangladesh to northern Africa. How do artists negotiate demands to support their national and local identities while participating in modernism across borders? What role do secularism and spirituality have in modern art? How do anticolonial, Marxist, and feminist politics shape art in these regions? How do global economic forces and the rise of powerful collectors, private museums, and international art fairs shape art and artists working across this geographic area? We will foreground the role of women as artists, collectors, patrons, and scholars throughout.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
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.
Area: Humanities
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.
Area: Humanities
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.
Area: Humanities
Visual arts are examined and discussed in their respective social and historical contexts.
Area: Humanities
This seminar will culminate in an exhibition in the library, focused on the photographic works of Dayanita Singh (b. India, 1961) in Hopkins’ collections. Singh’s work delves deeply into her subjects, exploring issues of identity, the body, and sexuality as well as questions related to memory and the archive. She has long presented her photography in the form of the book, and as such we will pursue readings in photography, book arts, and the archive, and bring nineteenth-century illustrated books in our collection into dialogue with Singh’s work. This will be a hands-on seminar: students will develop the framework for the exhibition, write the textual materials (labels, wall text), and decide on the arrangements of objects in the show.
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.
Area: Humanities
Through an examination of colonial exhibitions, the rise of national, regional, and archaeological museums, and current practices of display and representation in institutions, we will explore how the image of South Asia has been constructed in the colonial, modern, and contemporary eras. We will engage with the politics of representation, spectacle, and the economies of desire as related to colonialism and the rise of modernity. Readings from postcolonial theory, museum studies, anthropology, history, and art history.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Advanced inquiry into imperial Inka architecture and fiber arts.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Analysis of ancient Americas collection held in the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum.
Prerequisite(s): AS.010.105 OR AS.010.407 OR AS.010.398 OR AS.010.365 OR AS.010.389 OR AS.010.366 OR AS.010.214 or in consultation with professor prior to registration.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Centering on the tomb as the unit of analysis, this course examines the cultural and material aspects of death and funerary ritual. Case studies are drawn from North America, Mesoamerica, and the Andes. Collections study in museums.
Area: Humanities
The course examines the notion of the authentic in conjunction with medieval images, relic veneration, and the practice of law. It investigates the construction, reception, and theoretical grounding of authenticity of reliquaries, icons, and imprints on cloth or seals, and legal documents. These objects elucidate artistic strategies such as cross media references, abstraction, mimesis and bricolage to convey an aura of authenticity. We address other authenticating factors, such as complex ritualized forms of communication. This is a new course for the undergraduate section, existing course is AS.010.644. Will be taught as a hybrid this Fall 2020.
Writing Intensive
This course addresses the technology, iconography and social significance of metals and draws on case studies from the Americas. Collections study in museums.
Area: Humanities
This seminar will ask how photography produces ways of knowing: how does photography’s reality-effect shape its dissemination and absorption? Is photography’s emergence during the colonial era coincidental or catalytic? How is memory (re)constituted in a photography-saturated world? What kinds of histories does photography encourage and discourage? Is a photograph an object? We will read across disciplines (literature, anthropology, history, history of art, political science, theory) to investigate the epistemology of photography and the photograph.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
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.
Area: Humanities
In the early modern world, people traveled further and more routinely than ever before. This course looks at the tools used to facilitate such endeavors—from maps to navigational charts, from atlases to astrolabes. However, beyond mere logistical instruments for imperial expansion, colonial settlement, and commercial trade, these objects and pictures structured new ways of thinking about and imagining the world and its spaces. An armchair traveler in Amsterdam could envision a journey to and travel within a place like modern-day Indonesia; a Spaniard living in the highlands of present-day Bolivia could imagine, in period terms, “all the cities of the universe and more.” This course attends to excavating the representational economies forged from the mass-production and wide circulation of navigational objects and pictorialized territories. Though the focus will be on the early modern period, we will read broadly and engage a wide range of theories; and students are encouraged to use the tools we develop in class to research representation from any time and place.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
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.
Area: Humanities
This seminar explores the technologies of colonial power, from small ephemeral watercolor images of religious processions to massive multi-volume photographic projects documenting the “people of India,” and extending to the establishment of new urban and architectural spaces, archaeological museums, and art schools, the circulation of diplomatic art collections, and the commissioning of survey data. We will engage with the anti-colonial movements of resistance and uprising that took place across this century, examining the central participation of modern artists with these political movements, and explore the way this period fundamentally shaped the foundations for the study of South Asian art and archaeology. Readings will include colonial and postcolonial theory, Orientalism, historiography; we will be actively working with materials in the library’s Special Collections.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
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.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This seminar examines the myriad ways artists and writers geared their work toward the therapeutic healing of mind, body, and soul, and the role images and texts could play in programs of individual and collective transformation. Taking as our point of departure the ancient tradition of spiritual exercises and inner dialogue, Petrarch's therapy of the passions, and the revival of consolatory letters, we will consider how the Christian artist could invest their work with medicinal, magical, sacramental, or spiritual efficacies, and even take on the mantle of a "physician of souls." Intersections with the histories of medicine and religion will lead us to the ways natural medicine and the thaumaturgical practices associated with pilgrimage could be transposed into the arena of spiritual therapy. Featured authors include Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine of Hippo, Boethius, Petrarch, Michel Foucault, Pierre Hadot, and Allain de Botton; artists include Hieronymus Bosch, Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald, and many others.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Baltimore’s rich museum and library collections create a dynamic laboratory for students to gain an understanding of early modern European traditions of prints and books. Engraving, etching, woodcut, mezzotint, à la poupée; Rembrandt, Dürer, Aldus Manutius, Plantin-Moretus. This course will introduce students to the basic techniques, concepts, terms, and artists that shaped the production of reproductive works on paper in early modern Europe and their subsequent art historical study. All sessions will be taught out of local collections (BMA, Walters, NGA, Hopkins Special Collections); that is, this is a hands-on class that—while requiring no previous experience—will attend to the nitty-gritty details and methods of studying works in person, giving students the tools, expertise, and confidence to pursue their own research with historical printed materials.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
In the Ottoman Empire—a vast multiethnic state straddling Africa, Asia, and Europe—how one dressed was a deeply political affair. Ottoman rulers and subjects alike used clothing to express (and sometimes transgress) the hierarchical, religious, and communal distinctions defining their society, much to the fascination of foreigners who visited the empire or sought knowledge of its sartorial traditions in texts and images. This seminar will explore Ottoman dress and dress codes in the context of the empire’s long and complicated relationship with Western powers, focusing on the role that costume played as a charged site of cross-cultural interaction, posturing, and self-assertion from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Our case studies will include costume albums—books showing people high and low in their characteristic garb—painted by Ottoman artists for Western buyers; diplomatic robes of honor and their attendant ceremonies; and cultural cross-dressing as manifested in European turquerie portraiture and masquerades. Moving into the modern period, we will consider how nineteenth-century dress reforms bridged the gap between Ottoman and Western costume while engendering new modes of Ottoman sartorial self-representation that challenged hardening Orientalist discourses in such venues as mannequin museums and world’s fairs. The seminar will make considerable use of artworks in local collections, including rare books and prints at Hopkins itself.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
The Antioch Recovery Project is an ongoing, iterative research lab course dedicated to the study of mosaics from the city of Antioch-on-the-Orontes and its surroundings (modern Antakya, Turkey). Led by principal investigator Jennifer Stager, ARP works in collaboration with a number of experts at Hopkins and in the Baltimore area, as well as with the global community of Antioch researchers to explore the mosaics across three distinct moments: ancient Antioch, the early 20th century excavations, and collection afterlives. No experience necessary.
Area: Humanities
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.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
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.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
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.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
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.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
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.
Area: Humanities
This is a seminar on the histories and theories of the art of landscape as knowledge, medium, and contesting field of power and identity.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
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.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
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.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Independent work
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
Independent work
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
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 Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
Writing Intensive
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 Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
Writing Intensive
The relationship of “word” and “image” has been a central concern of both the history of art and other humanistic disciplines; and semiotics, (post-)structuralism, narrative studies, media studies, and theories of ekphrasis and representation have been marshalled to probe how visual and verbal systems work in conjunction, overlap, and conflict. Much less art historical attention has been paid to the visuality of writing itself. Against the backdrop of robust work on the relationship between text and image, this course focuses on text as image: the visuality of text, the imagistic dimensions of writing, Schriftbildlichkeit. The seminar takes as guiding premise that art historical method might be robustly brought to bear on the visual and material features of texts, both those that appear as part of traditional art historical media (paintings, sculptures, and architectural monuments) and those that have primarily remained within the purview of other humanistic subfields: books, archival documents, writers’ manuscripts, epistolary communication, and inscriptions (both analog and digital). In this course, we will survey a broad range of textual objects, from ancient inscriptions to moveable type to digital texts to “writing” in twenty-first century artists’ books; and we will work together towards assembling an art historical toolkit for excavating the full valences of texts, accounting for the ways they make meaning in linguistic, semiotic, formal, material, visual, and media-specific registers. Though art historical in focus, this course will be essentially interdisciplinary, and students from other subfields are warmly welcomed. There will be ample opportunity for discussing and studying objects in local collections.
Area: Humanities
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.
Area: Humanities
The discipline of art history has passed through a number of major methodological and theoretical shifts since its inception (and in particular, over the last thirty years). Foundational disciplinary methods derive principally from the arts of Classical Greece, the Renaissance and contemporary periods. As the discipline embraces an enlarged field of inquiry, particularly drawing upon developments in anthropology, material culture studies, feminism, queer theory, and political theory, additional avenues for understanding the arts of the ancient world are emerging. The seminar focuses on how art historical method and theory – both foundational and emergent – might be profitably applied to the subfields of the ancient Near East and eastern Mediterranean (understood in the broadest sense).
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This seminar will ask how photography produces ways of knowing: how does photography’s reality-effect shape its dissemination and absorption? Is photography’s emergence during the colonial era coincidental or catalytic? How is memory (re)constituted in a photography-saturated world? What kinds of histories does photography encourage and discourage? Is a photograph an object? We will read across disciplines (literature, anthropology, history, history of art, political science, theory) to investigate the epistemology of photography and the photograph.
The seminar will explore cases of European pre-modern picture-making in various media that solicit tactile as well as sensory engagement, and that call into question the "Albertian" metaphor of pictura as window. Case studies will include mosaics, reliefs, pastiglia, medals, portable paintings, et al.”
Area: Humanities
Study of topics relevant to the field of Near Eastern Art.
The role of place in the art historiography of the Renaissance, with readings in geographical theory. The seminar will also consider the role in the art of Lorenzo Lotto, Gaudenzio Ferrari, Cesare da Sesto, Romanino, Moretto, Pordenone, Titian, and other artists active before the canon-formation enterprise of Giorgio Vasari definitively altered the map of Italian art after 1550.
This seminar examines the myriad ways artists and writers geared their work toward the therapeutic healing of mind, body, and soul, and the role images and texts could play in programs of individual and collective transformation. Taking as our point of departure the ancient tradition of spiritual exercises and inner dialogue, Petrarch's therapy of the passions, and the revival of consolatory letters, we will consider how the Christian artist could invest their work with medicinal, magical, sacramental, or spiritual efficacies, and even take on the mantle of a "physician of souls." Intersections with the histories of medicine and religion will lead us to the ways natural medicine and the thaumaturgical practices associated with pilgrimage could be transposed into the arena of spiritual therapy. Featured authors include Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine of Hippo, Boethius, Petrarch, Michel Foucault, Pierre Hadot, and Allain de Botton; artists include Hieronymus Bosch, Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald, and many others.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Topics in artistic theory and multimedia practice from seventeenth century Italy and Spain to other early modern and modern global baroques.
Area: Humanities
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.
Area: Humanities
This seminar explores the technologies of colonial power, from small ephemeral watercolor images of religious processions to massive multi-volume photographic projects documenting the “people of India,” and extending to the establishment of new urban and architectural spaces, archaeological museums, and art schools, the circulation of diplomatic art collections, and the commissioning of survey data. We will engage with the anti-colonial movements of resistance and uprising that took place across this century, examining the central participation of modern artists with these political movements, and explore the way this period fundamentally shaped the foundations for the study of South Asian art and archaeology. Readings will include colonial and postcolonial theory, Orientalism, historiography; we will be actively working with materials in the library’s special collections.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
As a major global power straddling three continents, the Ottoman Empire developed a rich and diversified ceremonial culture aimed at impressing local and international audiences alike. This seminar will explore the ways in which works of art and architecture provided settings and apparatus for, and were themselves shaped and enlivened by, the ceremonial acts in which they featured. Covering the period between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, we will address a range of case studies—including mosque inaugurations, royal processions, the reception of foreign ambassadors, and the exchange of diplomatic gifts—with regard to their sociopolitical, visual, material, and spatial contexts. A major concern of the seminar will be the question of how Ottoman ceremonies, together with their staging and attendant art forms, were adapted in response to changing conditions and audiences, particularly with the shift from the early modern to the modern period. While our focus will be on the Ottoman Empire, the course will also consider the ceremonial cultures of the various Asian and European polities with which the Ottomans interacted, investigating the points of comparison and contrast that defined these multifarious but connected interregional approaches.
Area: Humanities
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.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Baltimore’s rich museum and library collections create a dynamic laboratory for students to gain an understanding of early modern European traditions of prints and books. Engraving, etching, woodcut, mezzotint, à la poupée; Rembrandt, Dürer, Aldus Manutius, Plantin-Moretus. This course will introduce students to the basic techniques, concepts, terms, and artists that shaped the production of reproductive works on paper in early modern Europe and their subsequent art historical study. All sessions will be taught out of local collections (BMA, Walters, NGA, Hopkins Special Collections); that is, this is a hands-on class that—while requiring no previous experience—will attend to the nitty-gritty details and methods of studying works in person, giving students the tools, expertise, and confidence to pursue their own research with historical printed materials.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
The course examines the notion of the authentic in conjunction with medieval images, relic veneration, and the practice of law. It investigates the construction, reception, and theoretical grounding of authenticity of reliquaries, icons, and imprints on cloth or seals, and legal documents. These objects elucidate artistic strategies such as cross media references, abstraction, mimesis and bricolage to convey an aura of authenticity. We address other authenticating factors, such as complex ritualized forms of communication.
This seminar investigates the fascinating landscape of medieval art and architecture of Georgia. Its specific geographic position in the South Caucasus, at the cross roads between the East and West, the Christian and Islamic Worlds, had a profound impact on the art and architecture in the region. Ancient sites show close connections with the Graeco-Roman World on the western border and with the Sassanid Empire in the East. The Christianization of the Kingdom of Kartli in the early fourth century resulted in close ties with the development of early Christian art in Syria, the Holy Land, and Byzantium. While the Christian religion remained an identifying factor during several hundred years of Muslim rule (736 to 1122) during which the city of Tbilisi was the capital of an emirate, Islamic motifs and style became an important factor for art works in medieval Georgia. Art and architecture with a specific Byzantine profile flourished in particular after the reunification of Georgia during the reign of King David the Builder (1073- 1125) and Queen Tamar (1184 to 1213). The cathedral and monastery of Gelati and Mzcheta, the murals in the royal monasteries of Vardzia and Khintsvisi, and the countless icons are a testimony to this relationship. We will discuss the specific diverse aesthetics and materiality (stone, enamel and metal works) of Georgian art with the goal to reassess the map of medieval art and architecture that currently does not include the Eastern Frontier. A mandatory c. 10 days field trip to Georgia is planned after classes end in May 2020.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
In the Ottoman Empire—a vast multiethnic state straddling Africa, Asia, and Europe—how one dressed was a deeply political affair. Ottoman rulers and subjects alike used clothing to express (and sometimes transgress) the hierarchical, religious, and communal distinctions defining their society, much to the fascination of foreigners who visited the empire or sought knowledge of its sartorial traditions in texts and images. This seminar will explore Ottoman dress and dress codes in the context of the empire’s long and complicated relationship with Western powers, focusing on the role that costume played as a charged site of cross-cultural interaction, posturing, and self-assertion from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Our case studies will include costume albums—books showing people high and low in their characteristic garb—painted by Ottoman artists for Western buyers; diplomatic robes of honor and their attendant ceremonies; and cultural cross-dressing as manifested in European turquerie portraiture and masquerades. Moving into the modern period, we will consider how nineteenth-century dress reforms bridged the gap between Ottoman and Western costume while engendering new modes of Ottoman sartorial self-representation that challenged hardening Orientalist discourses in such venues as mannequin museums and world’s fairs. The seminar will make considerable use of artworks in local collections, including rare books and prints at Hopkins itself.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
The seminar will investigate the question of art and reform in three major centers of the Italian peninsula (Rome, Naples, Milan), with attention to parallel phenomena in other centers of Catholic Europe (Spain and the Spanish Netherlands). We will examine transformations in the practice of pilgrimage and the organization of sacred shrines, tensions between centralization and the persistence of the local, and the initiative of artists and architects in responding to the call for a “reform” of sacred art."
Antioch Recovery Project investigates mosaics from the ancient city of Antioch (modern Antakya, Turkey, near the border with Syria) now in the collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Excavated by an international team of archaeologists in the 1930s, hundreds of ancient mosaics from the cosmopolitan city were subsequently dispersed to museums across the globe, with twenty-four mosaics entering the collection of the BMA. Phase I will focus on the digital documentation and analysis of the mosaic of Narcissus as a prototype for ongoing research bringing together the fragments of ancient Antioch for contemporary beholders. The Greek myth of Narcissus tells the story of a beautiful Theban hunter doomed to love his own reflection and is the origin of the modern psychiatric term “narcissism”. Researching the mythology, materials, conservation history, archival material, historiography, and contemporary reception of the Narcissus mosaic and myth offers extensive opportunities to collaborate with scholars across a range of disciplines at JHU, in the Baltimore museum community, and beyond. Investigators will move between the Baltimore Museum of Art, the CRL processing lab in Gilman Hall, and Special Collections. The course will involve some travel to visit other mosaics from Antioch now in collections at Harvard’s Dumbarton Oaks in Washington D.C., and the Princeton Art Museum in Princeton, New Jersey.
Area: Humanities
This seminar focuses on “the cut”—both as material practice and conceptual trope. Looking specifically at the early modern period, we will attempt to stitch together arts of cutting that have all too often been thought of separately or entirely in isolation—decoupage and inlaid stone, silhouette and turned ivory, repurposed drawing and perfectly hewn precious gem, pared-down panel and paper cut-out. To do so, we will look to expansive modern treatments and theorizations of “the cut” as literal gesture and figurative process, material technique and metaphoric mode. At stake is a reappraisal of creative paradigms that rest upon myths of wholeness, finitude, completion, generation, etc., and that thus undergird the early modern emergence of the very notion of “Art.” This seminar thus asks whether recentering the cut has the potential to position the art object within more expansive fields of material culture and to resituate artistic production within less hegemonic frameworks of creation and creativity. Though focused on the early modern period, students are encouraged to pursue research in their own fields/periods of study.
Writing Intensive
Bodies—material, artistic, political, cartographic—and their breakdown, form the focus of this seminar. Situating this inquiry in the ancient Mediterranean, we will analyze the human body as an organizing term, giving rise to a robust set of practices and performances. We will consider the conception of atoms as bodies in motion, the role of direct democracy and assembly as they intersect with artistic practices of both figuration and other non-figural corpora, and the emerging body of medical knowledge that would eventually be gathered under the Hippocratic corpus. The Mediterranean sea itself as it connects with other bodies of water and forged connections between different land bodies will also be among the topics we explore. While organized around the ancient Mediterranean and its afterlives, students from all formations are very welcome.
Area: Humanities
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.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
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.
Area: Humanities
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.
Area: Humanities
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.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
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
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.
Area: Humanities
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
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.
Area: Humanities
This seminar aims to excavate six distinct modalities of attention and attentiveness in the visual arts from Middle Ages to Modernity (cultic, narrational, speculative, ethical, sexual, and artistic). While emphasizing European developments, close consideration will be given to the role of visual attention in Hindu and Islamic visual cultures, providing the opportunity for cross-cultural comparison. Each case study will consider the historically shifting roles given to vision, cognition, imagination, affect, desire and power-knowledge in the culturally prevalent patterns of attention we study, and explore how specific kinds of pictorial schema or spatial environments served to structure and guide, or deflect and disrupt, the attention of their beholders. Finally, we will ask whether the historical study of attention can suggest analytical models or ethical lessons for the (re)mobilization of attentiveness in our own art-historical methods.
Area: Humanities
Examines major interpretations of the art and career of the great Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525?-1569), with an emphasis on new approaches and research agendas. In the aftermath of the 450-year Bruegel Anniversary of 2019, with its major exhibitions and comprehensive catalogues, what comes next?
Area: Humanities
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.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
A critical interrogation of past and current interpretative approaches to the devotional arts of western Europe, c. 1300-1500.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
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.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course is for students who wish or need special instruction in areas of art history not included in the currently offered courses.
This course is for students who wish or need special instruction in areas of art history not included in the currently offered courses.
Students preparing dissertations will enroll in this course with the permission of their doctoral advisers.
Students preparing dissertations will enroll in this course with the permission of their doctoral advisers.
Summer research for doctoral students
Cross Listed Courses
Classics
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.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
First Year Seminars
How does a notary’s son trained as a painter gain expertise in the construction of machines and acquire knowledge of the principles of optics, human anatomy, the flight of birds, the dynamics of air and water? How did an artist/engineer who brought few projects to completion come to have such a huge impact on later generations? This First-Year Seminar will focus critically on the myth of Leonardo’s singularity while showing his achievements to be characteristic of the artisanal culture of his time.
Area: Humanities
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.
Area: Humanities
History
This interdisciplinary course surveys critical themes related to Asian American art and activism including perspectives from history, art and visual culture, literature and gender and sexuality studies.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
How do museums represent the world? The course will focus on the colonial legacy of museums and complicate discourses of decolonization by looking at a range of case studies. We will study the world’s fairs, artworks, artifacts, collections, curatorial practices, exhibition histories, repatriation requests, and exhibitionary modes of display, in order to analyze their relationship to histories of decolonization, temporality, translation, untranslatability, spectatorship, provenance, and the life of objects.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
How do museums represent the world? The course will focus on the colonial legacy of museums and complicate discourses of decolonization by looking at a range of case studies. We will study the world’s fairs, artworks, artifacts, collections, curatorial practices, exhibition histories, repatriation requests, and exhibitionary modes of display, in order to analyze their relationship to histories of decolonization, temporality, translation, untranslatability, spectatorship, provenance, and the life of objects.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Interdepartmental
"When the Spanish unleashed their regime of colonization of what is present-day Mexico, their primary justification was the religious salvation of Indigenous people. Spaniards, along with other Europeans, arrived by the boatload to impose colonial order, taking up bureaucratic and ecclesiastical positions. The result was far from smooth—the sixteenth-century saw widespread disease, missionary violence on behalf of salvation, crop destruction and the recultivation of land, urban plans that radically altered the environment, the resettlement of entire populations, among other dramatic social and environmental events. This course investigates the complex and dynamic elements of colonial New Spain (as Mexico was called) from an interdisciplinary perspective. It tries to make sense of the chaotic landscape of the first century of Spanish colonial rule in New Spain. It is a research and writing intensive course that serves as an introduction to both the history and art history of this place and moment. Our meetings will act as a springboard for a group trip to Mexico during the January intersession to study objects and spaces in situ. Final projects will relate to materials viewed in person in Mexico. The costs for this trip are included for all students, no fees required. Knowledge of Spanish preferred but not required.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
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.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
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
Medicine, Science and the Humanities
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.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Modern Languages and Literatures
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.
Area: Humanities
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.
Area: Humanities
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.
Area: Humanities
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.
Area: Humanities
Near Eastern Studies
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? The courses will be complemented by one visit to the JHAM and one visit to the Walters Art Museum; Dr. Aude Semat, curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) will also give a lecture about the Egyptian Collections at the MET.
Area: Humanities
How do art historians and archaeologists recover and study genders and sexualities of ancient people? This writing-intensive seminar looks at texts and objects from ancient Egypt, Assyria, and Greece through the lens of gender and sexuality studies. Beyond exploring concepts of gender in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean, students will also consider how modern scholars have approached, recovered, and written about ancient gender identities. There are no prerequisites for this course.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This writing intensive seminar examines the relationship between religion and science in ancient Mesopotamia and the rest of the Near East from the 4th millennium to the Hellenistic period. Using a variety of case studies, and through engagement with scholarly literature pertaining to the topic of the course, students will develop skills in specific research skills such as critical reading, analysis, and interpretation.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This writing intensive seminar examines the relationship between religion and science in the ancient world. While the focus will be on religious and scientific practices in Mesopotamia, the topics covered -- which include astronomy and divination, magic and medicine, cosmology, and cartography -- will be examined together with studies in anthropology, sociology, and comparative religion that shed light on the intersection of science and religion in the practices considered in the course. By reading and engaging with a wide range of perspectives on these subjects, students will develop specific research skills such as critical reading, analysis, and interpretation.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Program in Museums and Society
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. Crosslisted with Archaeology, History, History of Art, International Studies and Medicine, Science & Humanities.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
We explore the possible futures of cultural heritage and museums in times of accelerating climate change, pandemics, armed conflict and political and social turmoil by examining past and contemporary events.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Course will examine the collecting behavior of Americans. Students will explore how collectors have defined the holdings of the nation’s museums, galleries, and libraries and used objects to shape taste and status in the U.S.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The course examines recent controversies in the conservation of major global art works and sites, raising questions concerning the basic theoretical assumptions, practical methods and ethical implications of art conservation. Cross-Listed with History of Art and Anthropology
Area: Humanities
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.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Students investigate the Baltimore Museum of Art’s American art collection and its presentation to the public alongside current scholarship on American art to develop strategies for a new permanent collection display that aligns with the museum’s commitment to artistic excellence and social equity. M&S Practicum. Co-taught with BMA curator Virginia Anderson.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
As part of an ongoing collaboration with the Baltimore Museum of Art, students are invited to contribute to a special exhibition about touch and tactility in 20th century American art. Research artists such as Jasper Johns, Yoko Ono, Betye Saar, Felix Gonzalex-Torres, create thematic installations, and conceptualize museum interpretation to activate the tactile dimensions of art.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences