Fall 2025 Graduate Courses

Last update: Tuesday, April 8, 2025

Confirm course listings on the Directory of Classes

 

Bridge Lectures

Bridge lectures are advanced lectures open to all undergraduate and graduate students. They do not require an application.
 

AHIS GU4021 Medieval Art I: Late Antiquity to the End of the Byzantine Empire
H. Klein
M/W 1:10-2:25, location tbc
This lecture course, open to both advanced undergraduates and graduate students, offers a comprehensive chronological survey of the most important monuments of Late Antique and Byzantine art, spanning from the earliest surviving traces of Christian art and architecture in the city of Rome and the eastern provinces of the Late Roman Empire (Dura Europos) to the art and architecture of the Late Byzantine Empire. Topics of special interest will include the formation of Christian art and culture in the world of Late Antiquity, the relationship between imperial self-representation and urban design in the city of Constantinople, the theology and function of religious images in Byzantine society before and after the iconoclast controversy, the development of Byzantine church architecture and its function as a liturgical space, the production and use of liturgical books, sacred vessels, and the question of cross cultural relations between the Byzantine Empire and Western Europe. This course is open to all undergraduate and graduate students without prerequisites. Discussion section required for undergraduates only.

*This course will be offered in sequence with Medieval Art II: Romanesque to Gothic in Spring 2026. Students may take both courses in sequence or either course separately.

 

AHIS GU4044 Neo-Dada and Pop Art
B. Joseph
M/W 4:10-5:25, location tbc
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 GU4062 Chinese Art: Center and Periphery
J. Xu
T/R 2:40-3:55, location tbc
This course introduces you to the rich and diverse tradition of Chinese art by focusing on materials and techniques. We will discuss a wide array of artistic media situated in distinct cultural contexts, examining bronzes, jade, ceramics, paintings, sculptures, and textiles in the imperial, aristocratic, literary, religious, and commercial milieus in which they were produced. In addition to developing your skills in visual-material analysis, this course will also acquaint you with the diverse cultures that developed in China’s center and periphery during its five thousand (plus) years of history. Emphasis will be placed on understanding how native artistic traditions in China interacted with those in regions such as the Mongolian steppe, Tibetan plateau, and Central Asia.

 

AHIS GU4093 Sacred Space in South Asia
S. Kaligotla
T/R 10:10-11:25, location tbc
“Sacred” space in the Indian subcontinent was at the epicenter of human experience. This course presents Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, and Jain spaces and the variety of ways in which people experienced them. Moving from the monumental stone pillars of the early centuries BCE to nineteenth century colonial India, we learn how the organization and imagery of these spaces supported devotional activity and piety. We discuss too how temples, monasteries, tombs, and shrines supported the pursuit of pleasure, amusement, sociability, and other worldly interests. We also explore the symbiotic relationship between Indic religions and kingship, and the complex ways in which politics and court culture shaped sacred environments. The course concludes with European representations of South Asia’s religions and religious places.

 

Bridge Seminars

Bridge seminars are advanced courses open to undergraduate and graduate students. Students must submit an application, linked below each course description, in order to be considered for enrollment. Admission is at the instructor’s discretion.

Fall 2025 bridge seminar applications are due by 5pm on Monday, August 11, 2025.

 

AHIS GU4722 Medieval Art, Craft, and Science
G. Bryda
M 10:10-12, location tbc
This bridge seminar investigates the history of science through the study of artworks and monuments and the materials and techniques of their manufacture. Because the course’s method hinges on the marriage of theory and practice, in addition to discussions in the seminar room, several sessions will take the form of workshops with artisans and conservators (e.g. stonemasons, illuminators, gardeners), or “laboratory meetings” where students will conduct their own hands-on experiments with materials as part of Professor Pamela Smith’s Making and Knowing Project. Topics to be explored include but are not limited to: metallurgy and cosmogeny, paint pigments and pharmacology, microarchitecture and agriculture, masonry and geology, manuscripts and husbandry, and gynecology and Mariology. Discussion and lab experiments enhanced thanks to the service and experience of Naomi Rosenkranz, Associate Director, The Center for Science and Society, The Making and Knowing Project.

Medieval Art, Craft, and Science [application form]

 

AHIS GU4546 Gilles Deleuze: Thinking in Art
J. Rajchman
M 2:10-4, location tbc
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.

Gilles Deleuze: Thinking in Art [application form]

 

AHIS GU4949 Architecture in the Age of Progress
S. Isenstadt
M 12:10-2, location tbc
This course focuses on buildings and design theories from the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States that were responding to industrialization and rapid urbanization. Based on the premise that modernism in architecture has as much to with attitudes toward change as it does a particular set of formal traits, this class will examine those works that responded to significant technological and social upheaval in an effort to welcome, forestall, or otherwise guide change. We will look at broad themes of the period, including national character, rapid economic growth, the quickened pace of urban life, and shrinking distances due to emerging forms of transportation and communication, all in the light of new methods and materials of construction, new functional programs, and the growing metropolis.

Architecture in the Age of Progress [application form]

 

AHIS GU4762 Art and Archaeology of Immigrants in Chinese History
J. Xu
W 4:10-6, location tbc
This seminar examines the art and archaeology of immigrants and immigrant communities in pre-modern China. Since the beginning of China’s dynastic history around the first millennium BCE, people from surrounding regions and even further afield have consistently moved into the Chinese heartland. These groups include not only nomads from the Mongolian steppes and the Tibetan Plateau, but also merchants, missionaries, and Muslims arriving via the so-called “Silk Roads”—a network of land and sea routes connecting China to the rest of the Eurasian continent (India, Persia, Central Asia, etc.). In certain periods, descendants of the Chinese diaspora and refugees in frontier regions also played significant roles in Chinese history. This seminar focuses on the archaeological remains and artistic expressions of these immigrants, as well as their interactions with native Chinese art and culture. Topics covered range from painting, sculpture, and calligraphy to crafts and architecture.

Art and Archaeology of Immigrants in Chinese History [application form]

 

Cross-Listed Seminars

Courses from other departments that may be of interest to art history students. Please consult your advisor regarding the eligibility of these courses toward AHAR program requirements.
 

WMST GU4000 Genealogies of Feminism
J. Bryan-Wilson
T 2:10-4, location tbc
Course focuses on the development of a particular topic or issue in feminist, queer, and/or WGSS scholarship. Open to graduate students and advanced undergraduates, though priority will be given to students completing the ISSG graduate certificate. Topics differ by semester offered, and are reflected in the course subtitle. For a description of the current offering, please visit the link in the Class Notes.

Contact ISSG with questions on enrolling in this course

 

Core Graduate Courses

Required courses for first-year students.

AHIS GR5000 MODA Critical Colloquium
J. Kraynak
R 12:10-2, location tbc
The Critical Colloquium is a required course for all first-year MODA students. The seminar intends to deepen students’ understanding of the discipline of art history, its history and its continued evolution. Combining seminar sessions featuring close readings of texts, with guest speaker presentations, the class serves as a number of purposes for first year MODA students. First is to probe the nature of scholarship, the relations between art history and criticism, and the shifting methodologies deployed in the analysis of art. The second part includes visits by leading and emerging writers and scholars who engage with the class, sharing their expertise and recent research and publications. Each year, the thematic focus slightly alters––among recent topics include the rise of theory; alternative historiographies; multiple modernities; contemporary methodologies––allowing students to gain insights into the dynamic nature of the field, and how its canons and methods are continually challenged. Recent guest speakers inlcude scholars Eddie Chambers, Tatiana Flores, Suzanne Hudson, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Anneka Lenssen, Fred Moten, Nada Shabout, and Irene Small; artist Glenn Ligon, critic and editor, Ben Eastman, among others.

The Critical Colloquium does not permit enrollment from students who are not in the MODA program.

 

AHIS GR5002 M.A. Methods Colloquium
F. Baumgartner
R 12:10-2, location tbc
This course begins with a reflection on the practice of art history today, through the interrogation of two related issues: the canon and art history as a narrative. This preliminary reflection, informed both by foundational texts and recent interventions in the field, will help us establish a critical framework for our examination of the different methodological models that art historians have been using to interpret the visual arts. Through the close reading of texts dating from the sixteenth century to today that reflect a broad range of theoretical perspectives, we will study the history and recent developments of art history as a scholarly discipline, from biographical, iconographical and Marxist accounts to feminist, postcolonial and intersectional analyses. We will also think about how to articulate one’s critical position. For that purpose, we will discuss the concepts that have shaped the field of art history – authorship, vision, otherness and globalism, among others – while putting them in conversation with the visual arts from different time periods and geographical areas.

 

HUMA GR6913 Principles of Art Humanities
I. Mylonopoulos
R 12:10-2, location tbc
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
L. Trever
W 10:10-12, location tbc
Required course for first-year PhD students.

 

Graduate Lectures

Open to graduate students. Interested undergraduates may contact the instructor for permission to enroll.

 

AHIS GR6413 The Real Picasso
R. Krauss
W 2:10-4, location tbc
Picasso’s work is  the great kaleidoscope through which 20th-century art passes: from its beginnings in Cubism through which the world is given as though through cut crystal; to the commercial forms of collage; to the presage of surrealist anguish; and, finally, to an untoward neo-classicism. The result of this restless exploration is the invention of multiple formal languages, which need to be deciphered in spite of the perverse literature on the subject which insists on transposing this into the art-historical language of iconography. The literature is rich with the analytic struggles between the great Picasso scholars: William Rubin, Leo Steinberg, and Picasso’s biographer, John Russel. The skirmishes over the “iconography” of cubism extends to the interpretation of the work’s relation to “primitivism.” This controversy has given rise to yet a new vector on Picasso’s work: structuralism and semiotics.

 

Graduate Seminars

Open to graduate students. Students must submit an application, linked below each course description, in order to be considered for enrollment. Admission is at the instructor’s discretion.

Fall 2025 graduate seminar applications are due by 5pm on Monday, August 11, 2025.

 

AHIS GR8041 AI, Imaging, Art
N. Elcott
R 10:10-12, location tbc
This graduate seminar will interrogate intersections in artificial intelligence, machine vision, neural networks, visual culture, imaging, and art. Students will gain a foundation in the histories and technologies underlying the recent rise of neural networks and machine vision, as well as the more recent rise of generative AI, especially image generation. With this foundation, we will investigate a range of artistic, technological, mass-media, and legal developments in visual culture and AI. In addition to readings and seminar meetings, we will take advantage of the ample public and private AI-related programming at Columbia and in New York: lectures, exhibitions, screenings, studio visits with artists, etc. Students will also have the opportunity to work with custom generative AI models.
Admission by application only. Priority will be given to PhD students with backgrounds in art history, visual culture, and/or computer and data science. All students are expected to complete the readings and tutorials for the first class prior to the start of the semester.

AI, Imaging, Art [application form]

 

AHIS GR8477 Approaches to American Material Culture
E. Hutchinson
W 2:10-4, location tbc
How shall we approach the vast collection of artifacts left by Americans in the eighteenth through twentieth centuries?  What can silver tea services, Amish quilts, rubber telephone receivers or ebony Art Deco coffee tables tell us about the people who designed, produced and used them?  How can we understand the sourcing and transformation of raw materials as culturally embedded practices that reinforce, contest or evolve power dynamics between members of different human communities? What role have everyday objects played in mediating Americans’ relationships to the natural world?  How can the study of material culture deepen our understanding of U.S. entanglements with global history?
In this graduate seminar we will explore the methods used by art historians and others to explore the meanings of material culture.  The class will involve several visits to local collections and each student is expected to produce an 18-20 page research paper on a single object or class of objects.

Approaches to American Material Culture [application form]

 

AHIS GR8492 The Performative Object
J. Kraynak
W 12:10-2, location tbc
The 1960’s and ‘70s witnessed an explosion of performance works in the visual arts. Departing from precedents in the early 20th century, performance during this period is marked both by its international reach and breadth of artistic experimentation: process painting, extreme bodily acts, textual scores, video and audio recordings, sculptural installations, ritualistic drawings, and direct political interventions, proposing complex relations between object, process, and act. This course explores this history and its legacy through the lens of two contributing factors: first are political events, upheavals and revolutionary movements that erupted across the globe, generating artistic performance as protest and activism; and second is an emergent media culture characterized by technologies of repetition and recording, resulting in performance works that are defined through reproduction rather than liveness, while taking inspiration from experimental film, music, and dance. To explore these themes, the class will examine select case studies of individual artists, movements and collectives: among which include the NY based Guerilla Art Action Group; Japanese Gutai and international Happenings; Brazilian neo-Concretism; South Korean Experimental art (silheom misul); as well as video, audio, photographic and durational works (by Ana Mendieta, Bruce Nauman, Adrian Piper, Tehching Hsieh, etc.), to name a few. In final research papers, students will trace this genealogy, examining contemporary performance works that are realized variously through networked and digital forms, uncapturable ephemerality, or direct social action.

The Performative Object [application form]

 

AHIS GR8505 Photographies in Counterpoint
Z. S. Strother
T 10:10-12, location tbc
In 1999, a prominent critic celebrated the “triumph” of the postwar convergence of art and photography weven while noting that “photography can only be viewed through the undeniable fact of its own obsolescence.” The 1990s were a pivotal moment, not only for the digital revolution but also because the global community was rocked by the discovery that photographers around the globe had adapted the medium to local aesthetics and aspirations. For example, Okwui Enwezor and Olu Oguibe wowed New York in 1996 at the Guggenheim with the technical and theoretical sophistication of African photography and Christopher Pinney forever undermined any assumptions about the documentary function of a technology-based medium in 1997 through his study of the photographic ecology in one Indian city. As predicted, despite or because of the digital revolution, photographic prints remain in high demand in exhibitions and material photobooks proliferate. This course examines the impact of the display of different photographic practices on the heretofore universalizing discourse around photography and modernism. It will read certain canonical texts of photo criticism in counterpoint with research on African photography. Who has influenced whom? Although a majority of the assigned reading will be drawn from histories of African photography, students are invited and encouraged to share their own research on practices in other parts of the world. Importantly, the clash of cultures has raised questions about the relationship of ownership to authorship, visibility to privacy. We will end by asking: what rights do photographers have? Given the demands that everything be visible on the internet, can individuals claim their “right to opacity,” to use Édouard Glissant’s term? Can viewers embody “the active struggle of looking with” the portrayed, in Tina Campt’s words and can this engender new ways of seeing?

Photographies in Counterpoint [application form]

 

AHIS GR8643 Painting in Sixteenth-Century Japan
M. McKelway
T 4:10-6, location tbc
Japan’s brief Momoyama period (1573-1615) is often characterized as an “age of gold,” an era in which politically powerful warlords commissioned lavish works of art. During the 150 years between the Ōnin War and establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate in the early 17th century, a series of military rulers unified the warring Japanese states, and for the first time in Japan’s history engaged briefly with the world beyond China through contact with European missionaries and merchants. The same warlords participated in every sphere of cultural life, sponsoring the construction of lavish fortresses and temples, contributing to the development of the arts of Tea and Noh drama, and encouraging the importation of printed books from China and Korea. This course will explore the art of painting in the Japan’s “era of unification.” We will concentrate on the gilded screens and panel paintings that temples, castles, and palaces, but will also study fan paintings, portraiture, and genre painting in order to comprehend the profound impact that this pivotal era would have on all succeeding periods of Japanese art.

Painting in Sixteenth-Century Japan [application form]

 

AHIS GR8812 Cities of Knowledge: Orientalizing Manhattan
A. Shalem [Art History]; Z. Jamaleddine [GSAPP]
T 2:10-4, location tbc
In this course, graduate students from different disciplines will explore the ‘Orient’ in Manhattan. The course involves the active search for and analysis of Manhattan's urban space to survey its ‘Oriental’ buildings, monuments, parks, public inscriptions, and even ephemeral, everyday spaces that carry the sense of the ‘Orient’ to the city. Cities are physical places, yet, they are also assemblages of different layers of time, and geographies. These layers are designed to create communal identities and evoke recollections of past memories. Focus will be put on the written history of these spaces by searching in archives (in the City of New York) and digging out written and oral information about the histories of the formation of these spaces and their interactions with their surroundings.

The course will cover many monuments, like the famous obelisk in Central Park or the less known Jordanian column in Flushing Meadows Park in Queens; public buildings like Central Synagogue on Lexington, the Islamic Cultural Center on Upper East Side Mosque, or Olana State Historic Site in Hudson, NY; but also, the inner decorations of restaurants, bars (the Carlyle Bar) and even oriental Halal shops, as well as ephemeral spaces like international fairs, and Cairene grill boots.

Traditionally, Islamic art and Islamic architecture have been studied separately within art history and architecture history disciplines. The purpose of this course is, in the first place, to bridge the gap between the two disciplines while working across theories of visual culture and critically revisiting urban studies. A further aspect evolves the discourse about architectural ornament as part of the entire approach to ornament as an ‘Oriental’ trope. Thus, canonical discussions about Orientalism will form part of the course’s readings and will contribute to understanding how the architectural ornament of Manhattan forms identities. The course will introduce and discuss theoretical issues concerning urban architecture and ‘Orientalism’ and the making of the image of ‘Others’ in NYC public spaces. It will also provide a historical survey of these spaces and aim to create a novel comprehensive map for ‘Orientalized’ New York.

Cities of Knowledge: Orientalizing Manhattan [application form]