Fall 2019 Graduate Courses
Last updated: Friday, August 30th, 2019. Red text denotes a new or changed course since the previous update.
Bridge Lectures
Bridge lectures are open to graduate and advanced undergraduate students. They do not require an application.
AHIS GU4044 Neo-Dada and Pop Art
B. Joseph
T/R 10:10-11:25, 612 Schermerhorn Hall
This course examines the avant-garde art of the fifties and sixties, including assemblage, happenings, pop art, Fluxus, and artists' forays into film. It will examine the historical precedents of artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Allan Kaprow, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Carolee Schneemann and others in relation to their historical precedents, development, critical and political aspects.
AHIS GU4150 Tourism, Nature, and the North American Landscape
E. Hutchinson
T/R 4:10-5:25, location tbc
This course takes as its departure point that space is constructed in the act of viewing. We will look at how visual culture reflected and contributed to changing notions of the cultural meaning of the American landscape from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through lectures and discussions centered on the development of tourism in diverse American locations—from the Hudson River Valley to the far west to the Caribbean—we will survey the development of tourism in the United States and consider how it served as a means of cultivating taste and expressing cultural, national, racial, gendered and class identity. And we will interrogate the implication of the developing tourist industry with new technologies of vision and consider how both impacted American attitudes toward the natural environment.
Bridge Seminars
Bridge seminars are open to graduate and advanced undergraduate students. Interested students must submit an application in order to be considered for enrollment. Admission is at the instructor’s discretion.
Each bridge seminar description includes a link to an online application form. Students must fill out and submit their fall 2019 bridge seminar applications by 5pm on Thursday, August 1st, 2019.
AHIS GU4546 Gilles Deleuze: Thinking in Art
J. Rajchman
W 2:10-4, 832 Schermerhorn Hall
The philosophy of Gilles Deleuze has emerged as one of the richest, most singular adventures in post-war European thought; Foucault considered it the most important in France, and more generally, in the 20th century. In all of Deleuze's work there is a search for a new 'image of thought.' But how did art figure in this search, and how did the search in turn appeal to artists, writers, filmmakers, architects, as well as curators or critics? In this seminar, we explore the complex theme of 'thinking in art' in Deleuze, and its implications for art in the 21st century or for the global contemporary art of today.
Apply for ‘Gilles Deleuze: Thinking in Art’ using this online form.
AHIS GU4749 Bauhaus and Architecture (Travel Seminar)
B. BergdollW 10:10-12 T 2:10-4, 930 Schermerhorn Hall
Although architecture, or building, was at the center of Walter Gropius’s famed and influential diagram of the curriculum of the Bauhaus from the 1919 founding of the school, in fact architecture was not taught during the first half of the school’s short existence. This seminar will examine the role of architecture as metaphor, discipline, and field of influence of the Bauhaus under the directorships of Gropius (1919-28), Hannes Meyer (1928-30), and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1930-33). A key theme will be the role that exhibitions and exhibition designed played both during the lifetime of the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, as well as the role that exhibitions played in extending the influence of the Bauhaus and – after its closure under the Nazis in 1933—in establishing its powerful legend. Attendance in the travel component of the seminar is obligatory: from November 1-5 we will travel to Germany to visit the three principle Bauhaus sites and the museums, as well as centennial exhibitions being staged in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin.
Apply for ‘Bauhaus and Architecture’ using this online form.
Core Graduate Courses
Required courses for first-year students.
AHIS GR5000 MODA Critical Colloquium
J. Kraynak
R 12:10-2, 934 Schermerhorn Hall
Required course for all first-year Modern Art M.A. students. The Colloquium features reading and analysis of texts by major theorists, critics and artists, organized through three components: 1) an introduction to the different interpretive methods and models shaping the discourses of art history and criticism 2) a presentation of major theoretical concepts and terms that are utilized in relation to the analysis and interpretation of art and culture 3) an examination of rhetoric, language and different models of critical writing from philosophy/theory; to art history, scholarly writing and criticism; to recent online formats and the blogosphere. The course is designed to allow for guest presentations on particular issues by scholars, critics and writers, just as it draws on the expertise and participation of Columbia faculty. The aim is to develop students' critical thinking and for them to learn directly from leading practitioners writing about modern and contemporary art. Guest writers from Artforum, Grey Room, Parkett, Texte zur Kunst, and October, among other venues, regularly participate in the colloquium.
AHIS GR5002 M.A. Methods Colloquium
F. Baumgartner
R 12:10-2, 930 Schermerhorn Hall
This course examines the range of methods employed by art historians for the interpretation of art, including biography, iconography, social art history, psychoanalysis, feminism, gender studies, and post-colonialism. Through the critical reading of primary and secondary sources, we will not only study the history and developments of the methods of art history, but also begin to define our own theoretical positions. Our collective task will be to discuss the critical issues that have shaped the field of art history (aesthetics, style, materiality, vision, otherness, etc.), while putting them in conversation with artworks from different traditions and time periods.
HUMA GR6913 Principles of Art Humanities
N. Elcott
R 12:10-2pm, 832 Schermerhorn Hall
Art Humanities aims to instill in undergraduate students a passion and a critical vocabulary for the study of art as well as a fundamental capacity to engage the world of images and built environments. Principles of Art Humanities aims to prepare instructors to teach Art Humanities. We will study each unit of Art Humanities with an eye toward pedagogy, formal and critical analysis, and a capacious understanding of art and culture of past epochs. The course comprises presentations by the Art Humanities Chair and by weekly invited guests, as well as discussion among all participants. Required of all first-time Art Humanities instructors. Open to retuning instructors.
AHIS GR8000 Proseminar: Introduction To the Study of Art History
A. ShalemM 2:10-4 M 10:10-12, 930 Schermerhorn Hall
Required course for first-year PhD students.
Graduate Lectures
Graduate lectures are open to graduate students. They do not require an application. Interested undergraduates should contact the instructor for permission to enroll.
AHIS GR6501 Art in the African Diaspora
K. Jones
W 10:10-12, 807 Schermerhorn Hall
This course explores developments in contemporary art history in an international framework. Our specific focus is the art of the African Diaspora, defined as the cultures of peoples of African descent worldwide living both within and outside of the African continent. We will consider art and aesthetics in Africa, the Caribbean, Britain, and the U.S., interrogate ideas of the postcolonial, concepts of diaspora, and the Atlantic world. How do such works engage a global community and marketplace? In what ways does theory and criticism further elucidate the practice of these artists as well as their objects in order to address culture as a site of ideological contestation and the relationship of the formal aspects of a work to its representational significance?
AHIS GR6610 Heian Period Buddhist Painting, 11th–12th Centuries
R. Masuki; M. McKelway
W 4:10-6, 832 Schermerhorn Hall
The 11th and 12th centuries were a period of both political flux and religious fervor brought by what was believed to be the onset of the Latter Age of the Buddhist Law (mappō), calculated to begin around 1052. Paintings created as visualizations of Buddhist faith are considered to have reached their apogee of formal expression and iconographical complexity in these last centuries of the Heian period (794-1185), when imperial authority dominated both the political and religious spheres prior to the advent of military regimes that would govern Japan until the modern era. This course will introduce the main forms of Heian period Buddhist painting, such as mandalas, representations of individual enlightened beings, and iconographical drawings, and will also explore narrative paintings that expound upon the content of sacred texts or present hagiographies and legends of sacred sites. Students interested in taking this course for lecture credit should enroll in AHIS GR6610. Students interested in taking this course for seminar credit should enroll in AHIS GR8642.
Graduate Seminars
Interested students must submit an application in order to be considered for enrollment. Admission to graduate seminars is at the instructor’s discretion.
Each course description includes a link to an application form for that seminar. Students must fill out and submit their fall 2019 graduate seminar applications by 5pm on Thursday, August 1st, 2019.
AHIS GR8146 Curatorial Seminar for Ancient Near Eastern Art
Z. Bahrani
R 4:10-6, 832 Schermerhorn Hall
The curatorial seminar will train graduate students in research and curatorial skills in the context of work on an exhibition in New York. This year the work will be in preparation for an exhibition at the Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum in New York called, She Who Wrote: Enheduanna of Ur, ca. 2250 B.C. The seminar and exhibition will focus on the art and literature of ancient Mesopotamia during the third millennium BC, looking in particular at the princess and priestess Enheduanna, known as the author of literary texts. The seminar will provide graduate students an opportunity to take part in the preliminary preparation of an exhibition scheduled to open January, 2021, and it will also introduce students to theories of gender and authorship in the study of antiquity. The seminar is focused both on researching the art, literature and archaeology of the third millennium BC, and on learning curatorial skills necessary for the installation of a major exhibition.
Apply for ‘Curatorial Seminar in Ancient Near Eastern Art’ using this online form.
AHIS GR8206 Byzantium, Venice, and the Medieval West ca. 800-1500
H. Klein
T 2:10-4, 934 Schermerhorn Hall
Engaging with the question from a post-modern and post-colonial perspective, this course will re-examine the long established question if and how Byzantine art ‘influenced’ and ‘transformed’ the Western tradition. Topics will include the revival of Early Christian and Early Byzantine art at the court of Charlemagne, the adaptation of Byzantine art and culture by the political and ecclesiastical leaders of the Ottonian Empire, the dissemination of Byzantine style and iconography over Western Europe during the time of the Crusades, the hybrid culture of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, Byzantine or Byzantine-inspired monuments in Italy, especially in Venice and Norman Sicily, the Fall of Constantinople and its effects on the artistic production of the West, and the evidence of Western artists in the Latin Empire of Constantinople.
Apply for ‘Byzantium, Venice, and the Medieval West ca. 800-1500’ using this online form.
COURSE ADDED (6/28/2019)
AHIS GR8334 Curatorial Practices
M. Cole
M 1:10-3, course meets at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
The aim of this seminar is to introduce graduate students to questions that guide the work of curators. It is intended not only to allow prospective curators the opportunity to build relevant skills but also to expose those on the academic side to a different mode of art history. The course will be organized not around a specific historical or geographical field, but rather around broader practices and questions. To the extent possible, sessions will be object-based; students wishing to take the course should expect to meet most weeks at the Metropolitan Museum or at other locations around the city. Assignments may require forms of research that can be done only off-campus. The course will be team-taught by Michael Cole and Joanne Pillsbury, Andrall E. Pearson Curator of Ancient American Art at the Met, though the group will frequently be joined by other curators, conservators, and specialists.
Apply for ‘Curatorial Practices’ using this online form.
AHIS GR8349 Architecture, Ornament, and the Renaissance Print
M. Waters
T 10:10-12, 930 Schermerhorn Hall
This seminar seeks to explore the intersection of architecture and ornament in the era of mechanical reproduction through an investigation into the genre of ornament prints. Utilizing the extraordinary resources of New York collections and a comparative object-based approach, students will scrutinize the complex interchanges between printed architectural images and other types of ornament in the Renaissance. Treatises on the columnar orders, for example, will be studied alongside artist model-books, textile pattern-books, and writing manuals, just as engravings of architectural exempla will be placed in dialogue with prints for vases, jewelry, liturgical objects, and other crafted things. We will also consider the transmedial movement of two-dimensional ornament across printed and built surfaces as well as the exchange between buildings and different classes of objects. While the seminar will focus heavily on sixteenth-century Europe, students will be encouraged to research topics across time periods and geographies. Please note, in addition to sessions at Avery and RBML, several class meetings will be held at the Met and NYPL.
Apply for ‘Architecture, Ornament, and the Renaissance Print’ using this online form.
COURSE POSTPONED (6/6/2019)AHIS GR8350 Travel: Art, Architecture and Mapping Worlds
E. Pistis
W 4:10-6, 930 Schermerhorn
This aim of this seminar is two-fold. On the one hand, it explores how travels of people, objects, and knowledge have contributed to the mapping of art and architecture as well as the making of art and architectural history on a world-wide scale. On the other, it studies how art and architectural expertise (making of views, survey drawings and maps) have contributed to the physical and mental mapping of the world. The seminar approaches issues of mobility, translation, appropriation, forgery, cultural transmission, knowledge migrations, as well as of constructions of national identities. Together with a critical approach to secondary sources, the class will focus on literary and visual primary sources, from travel accounts to cartography. The semester starts in the fourteenth century and ends in the nineteenth century, and it addresses travels (true, fabricated, or deliberately imaginary) that span—listed in alphabetic order—the Americas, China, India, Japan, and the Mediterranean.
AHIS GR8351 Strangers in Venice
D. Bodart
R 10:10-12, 934 Schermerhorn
In 1556, Francesco Sansovino published his first guidebook of Venice, Delle cose notabili che sono in Venezia, which he articulated as a dialog between a Venetian and a forestiero, a foreign visitor. But what defined the forestiero in a city such as Renaissance Venice where, as Philippe de Commynes wrote, “la plupart de leur peuple est estranger” – most of the people are foreigners? Sansovino himself was a second-generation immigrant from Central Italy. This seminar will explore the figure of the foreign artist in Renaissance Venice, analyzing short and long journeys—undertaken, for example, by Antonello da Messina, Albrecht Dürer, and El Greco—as well as permanent relocations, such as in the case of Pietro Lombardo, Andrea Schiavone, and L’Aliense. Taking into consideration the specific status of strangers defined by the laws of the Republic of Venice, the social structures of assistance for foreign communities, as well as the organization of workshops and trade, this seminar will investigate the contribution of foreign artists to the artistic production in Renaissance Venice and to the elaboration of the maniera veneziana (Venetian style).
Apply for ‘Strangers in Venice’ using this online form.
AHIS GR8421 Periodizing the Seventies
B. Joseph
R 2:10-4, 930 Schermerhorn
This course focuses on the artistic practice of the 1970s as it has been delimited and defined within art history and criticism. Particular attention to the emergence of new movements and genres, the legacy of political radicalism, and the transformations of poststructuralist and autonomist theory.
Apply for ‘Periodizing the Seventies’ using this online form.
CMPM GR8483 Introduction to Comparative Media
Z. Çelik; S. Andriopoulos
R 10:10-12, 930 Schermerhorn
Comparative media is an emergent approach intended to draw upon and interrupt canonical ideas in film and media theory. It adopts a comparative approach to media as machines and aesthetic practices by examining contemporary media in relation to the introduction of earlier technologies. The class also extends our focus beyond the U.S. and Europe by examining other cultural locations of media innovation and appropriation. In doing so, it decenters normative assumptions about media and media theory while introducing students to a range of media practices past and present.
Apply for ‘Introduction to Comparative Media’ using this online form.
AHIS GR8491 Methods Seminar: Postmodernism
R. Krauss
T 2:10-4, 832 Schermerhorn
In the 1970s the sudden incursion of Post-structuralist discourse into the academy brought about fundamental changes in the institution’s very structure: about what it means to be a discipline; a genre; a history within a specific medium; a challenge to all those things without which course identities couldn’t exist. At about the same time, this theoretical transformation attacked the arts, both visual and architectural. Thus was post-modernism born. It has been work to take back the idea of a discipline, of a genre, of the self-identity of a medium. The seminar will examine the post-structuralist anti-disciplinary reaction in the work of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, as well as the phenomena in the arts, in the 1970s, which functioned to reclaim this possibility.
Apply for ‘Methods Seminar: Postmodernism’ using this online form.
AHIS GR8492 The Performative Object
J. Kraynak
T 4:10-6, 806 Schermerhorn
The term “performance” was first widely adopted in the early 1970s to categorize artworks that were presented live–– or in front of a recording camera. Yet despite the widespread acceptance of performance as a category, its’ meanings and manifestations were (and are) multiple and varied, encompassing a range of mediums, techniques, and ideals. This course explores the multiplicity of performance as it emerged during the 1960’s and ‘70s and the ongoing legacy of these developments in contemporary practices. We will examine how performance assumes various modes: theatrical painting, bodily acts, linguistic statements, video projections, auditory recordings, sculptural interactions, politicized protest and, more recently, web-based and networked forms. Particular emphasis will be on the relationship of performance to technology and mediation––or on the “performative” that, as theorized in linguistics, is marked by citationality, repetition, and reproduction, rather than liveness and presence. Issues such as embodiment, subjectivity. spectacle, duration, interactivity, and audience will be central to this discussion, as well as the relationship of performance to cultural and political debates (over identity, democracy, economics, etc.). In final research papers, students will trace this genealogy, exploring the recent reception and transformation earlier performance strategies, where the significance of media (“new media”) and digitization become increasingly prevalent, raising further theoretical and ideological questions regarding what “performance” is.
Apply for ‘The Performative Object’ using this online form.
AHIS GR8493 Restitution or Repatriation of Cultural Heritage: New Directions?
Z. Strother
M 4:10-6, 806 Schermerhorn
Heated debates over restitution or repatriation of cultural heritage are reshaping museum practice and the law itself. It is an issue that has or will affect every branch of art history. Many museums have already become embroiled in the question of “who owns antiquity?” (as James Cuno phrases it) or who owns goods seized by the Nazis. Should Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, now in Dresden, be moved back to the church in Italy for which it was made? Or does the impact it long held on the German imagination grant its present owners the rights of perpetual guardianship? In particular, the seminar is timed to take advantage of the colloquium organized at Columbia on Oct. 18, 2019 addressing the impact of the report prepared by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy for French President Emmanuel Macron recommending a policy of “swift” and permanent repatriation of African cultural heritage acquired during the colonial period to concerned nation states unless the consent of the seller can be “attested.” Although the report strictly restricts its inquiry to sub-Saharan Africa, it is hard to believe that its impact will not be far-reaching as representatives from Italy, Greece, Egypt, and China are watching closely. In this fast-evolving domain, students will be asked to research the “biography” of a single object from the field that they know best and to think through the historical, moral, political, and practical ramifications of restitution or repatriation. It is hoped that by putting into conversations histories drawn from diverse fields that we can develop some principles to negotiate competing moral and political claims.
Apply for ‘Restitution or Repatriation of Cultural Heritage: New Directions?’ using this online form.
AHIS GR8639 Reading Places and Images in Edo-period Illustrated Books
M. McKelway
T 4:10-6, 832 Schermerhorn Hall
An introduction to reading illustrated books from Edo-period Japan. Texts to be covered will include Saga-bon Noh libretti, illustrated guidebooks and gazetteers (meisho zue), painting manuals, and poetry, such as Ehon Tōshi-sen, illustrated by Katsushika Hokusai. Reading and translating passages from written in premodern Japanese scripts variously called hentaigana, kuzushiji, and sōsho will be the central activity of the course, but we will also consider such themes as the development of woodblock printing, the book as a format, and how the content both reflects and shapes knowledge of the subjects and themes with which they are concerned. Familiarity with Classical Japanese will be useful.
Interested students are encouraged to contact the professor.
Apply for ‘Reading Places and Images in Edo-Period Illustrated Books’ using this online form.
AHIS GR8642 Heian Period Buddhist Painting, 11th–12th Centuries
R. Masuki; M. McKelway
W 4:10-6, 832 Schermerhorn Hall
The 11th and 12th centuries were a period of both political flux and religious fervor brought by what was believed to be the onset of the Latter Age of the Buddhist Law (mappō), calculated to begin around 1052. Paintings created as visualizations of Buddhist faith are considered to have reached their apogee of formal expression and iconographical complexity in these last centuries of the Heian period (794-1185), when imperial authority dominated both the political and religious spheres prior to the advent of military regimes that would govern Japan until the modern era. This course will introduce the main forms of Heian period Buddhist painting, such as mandalas, representations of individual enlightened beings, and iconographical drawings, and will also explore narrative paintings that expound upon the content of sacred texts or present hagiographies and legends of sacred sites. Students interested in taking this course for seminar credit should enroll in AHIS GR8642.Students interested in taking this course for lecture credit should enroll in AHIS GR6610.
AHIS GR8802 Woven Histories: The Agency of Material Textiles in the Lands of Islam
A. Shalem
T 4:10-6, 930 Schermerhorn Hall
Although textiles seem to invade our surroundings quite powerfully and to form important part in our life, fulfilling both basic needs and desires for luxury, art historians usually have paid less attention to these soft materials and, as compared to other fields like architecture or painting, categorized textiles as applied art. This graduate level seminar aims at exploring the varied types, techniques and particular aesthetics of textiles in their social and political contexts in the medieval world of the lands of Islam. The material discussed in this course covers the large geographical areas between the Oxus (Amu Darya) in Central Asia and the Guadalquivir in Al-Andalus from circa 800 till 1300 CE. It aims at providing a critical introduction to the field by moving beyond the usual questions about centers of productions, manufacturing techniques and trade routes. This course specifically focuses on questions concerning textiles’ political and social functions and particularly textiles’ agencies. Moreover, it discusses medium-interactions, namely textile as interactive matter at work with other materials, and textiles’ image making in medieval literature and painting. The course also pays attentions to their long history of display. Several meetings will take place in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Thus the textiles’ exhibition praxis in public sphere will also critically be discussed.
Apply for ‘Woven Histories: The Agency of Material Textiles in the Lands of Islam’ using this online form.
AHIS GR8903 The Body, Human and Divine, in the Art of India
V. Dehejia
W 12:10-2, 930 Schermerhorn
This seminar explores the centrality of the human form, male and female, human and divine, in the artistic tradition of India. It focuses on the idealized and stylized body which was never based on studies from life, and establishes the vital importance of adornment, a concept associated with auspiciousness. It raises questions about the use of the phrase "sacred space," pointing out that such spaces invariably carried imagery that had little or nothing to do with the sacred.
Apply for ‘The Body, Human and Divine, in the Art of India’ using this online form.