Fall 2025 Undergraduate Courses

Last update: Tuesday, April 1, 2025

Confirm course listings on the Directory of Classes
 

Undergraduate Lectures

Open to all undergraduate students. Graduate students may enroll in lecture courses at the 2000-level and above, as outlined in the program handbooks.
 

AHIS BC1001 Introduction to the History of Art I (Barnard Course)
G. Bryda
M/W 2:40-3:55, location tbc
An introduction to the art and architecture of the ancient and medieval world. The artistic traditions of Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and the Americas will be surveyed from the prehistoric era to c. 1400 CE. Questions of style, content, function, and cultural and historical context will be emphasized throughout. Museum visits will play an integral role in the course. Discussion section required.

 

AHIS UN2219 Medieval Architecture in Europe
S. Van Liefferinge
T/R 4:10-5:25, location tbc
This course explores architecture and construction in Western Europe from the 5th century until the 15th century.  After the gradual collapse of the Western Roman Empire at the end of Antiquity, the profound political, religious, and societal changes provided fertile ground for architectural creativity. It was the start of a long period of innovation in architecture that would last for about 1000 years and that today is called the Middle Ages. Because of the length of this time period this course will present the formation and development of medieval architecture both through a chronological and a thematic approach. We will address major questions about  issues related to architecture such as materials, tools, patronage, the metier of the architect, communication, assimilation, drawing, and building technology. Case studies of major monuments and sites will serve to illustrate these themes. Our questions concerning architecture will also be framed within the needs, beliefs, and habits of the Middle Ages. Religious concepts, the cult of relics, pilgrimages, travel, monasticism, feudalism, urbanization, climate, and economics engendered architecture adapted to the needs of the medieval society. Finally, this course will present how, after a 1000 years of architectural developments and innovations, medieval builders left a permanent mark on architecture. Discussion section required.

 

AHIS UN2412 Eighteenth-Century Art in Europe
F. Baumgartner
T/R 10:10-11:25, location tbc
This course will examine the history of art in Europe from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. This was a period of dramatic cultural change, marked by, among other things, the challenging of traditional artistic hierarchies; increased opportunities for travel and exchange; and the emergence of “the public” as a critical new audience for art. Students will be introduced to artists, works and media that have been part of the traditional canon of art history and to others that have remained at its periphery. The course will draw on scholarship that uses different methodologies, including feminism, postcolonialism and ecocriticism, to highlight different interpretations of works of art. Topics will include: the emergence of the art market; consumer culture and global commodities; aesthetics of nature; domesticity and the cult of sensibility; the rise of women artists and patrons; and the visual culture of revolution. The emphasis will be on France, Italy and Britain, with forays to Spain, Germany, Austria, Russia and elsewhere.

 

AHIS UN2405 Twentieth Century Art
A. Alberro
T/R 2:40-3:55, location tbc
The course will examine a variety of figures, movements, and practices within the entire range of 20th-century art—from Expressionism to Abstract Expressionism, Constructivism to Pop Art, Surrealism to Minimalism, and beyond—situating them within the social, political, economic, and historical contexts in which they arose. The history of these artistic developments will be traced through the development and mutual interaction of two predominant strains of artistic culture: the modernist and the avant-garde, examining in particular their confrontation with and development of the particular vicissitudes of the century's ongoing modernization. Discussion sections complement class lectures. Course is a prerequisite for certain upper-level art history courses. Discussion section required.

 

AHIS UN2415 History Painting and Its Afterlives
J. Crary
T/R 4:10-5:25, location tbc
This course will study the persistence of history painting as a cultural practice in nineteenth century Europe, well after its intellectual and aesthetic justifications had become obsolete. Nonetheless, academic prescriptions and expectations endured in diluted or fragmentary form. We will examine the transformations of this once privileged category and look at how the representation of exemplary deeds and action becomes increasingly problematic in the context of social modernization and the many global challenges to Eurocentrism. Selected topics explore how image making was shaped by new models of historical and geological time, by the invention of national traditions, and by the emergence of new publics and visual technologies. The relocation of historical imagery from earlier elite milieus into mass culture forms of early cinema and popular illustration will also be addressed.

 

AHIS BC3428 The Making of Global Contemporary Art: Exhibitions, Agents, Networks (Barnard Course)
D. Biczel
T/R 11:40-12:55, location tbc
This lecture class introduces the notion of global contemporary art through the history of exhibitions, chiefly biennials and other large-scale endeavors, and principal agents behind them. On the one hand, the course considers exhibitions as a crucial tool of cultural diplomacy, which seek to position and/or reposition cities, regions, and even entire nations or “peoples” on the international scene. Thus, we will explore how the artistic interests vested in exhibition-making intersect with other—political, economic, ideological, and cultural—interests. We will consider those intersections paying special attention to the shifts in political relations and tensions during and after the Cold War, including the moment of decolonization in Africa; the moment commonly understood as “globalization” and associated with the expansion of the neoliberal capitalism after 1989; and, finally, the current moment of the planetary crisis. This expansive view of the “global contemporary art” will allow us to distinguish different impetuses behind internationalism and globalism that not only seek to establish hegemony, artistic or otherwise, but also look for the means to forge transnational dialogues and solidarities. On the other hand, this class seeks to illuminate how certain artistic idioms and approaches developed after World War II achieved primacy that influences artistic production to this day. To this end, we will examine the rise of a “visionary curator” as a theorist and tastemaker. We will also explore how more recent exhibitions have sought to expand the geography of the “canonized” post-WWII art movements and valorize artistic production conceived outside of the so-called “West.” In addition to weekly brief writing assignments (150–300 words each), both in and outside of class, the students in the course will reconceive the installation of one of MoMA’s permanent collection galleries (1940s-70s or 1970s-present) and produce a podcast that provides the rationale for the reinstallation in form of dialogue.

 

AHIS BC3667 Clothing (Barnard Course)
A. Higonnet
M/W 4:10-5:25, location tbc
Human beings create second, social, skins for themselves. Across history and around the world, everyone designs interfaces between their bodies and the world around them. From pre-historic ornaments to global industry, clothing has been a crucial feature of people’s survival, desires, and identity. This course studies theories of clothing from the perspectives of art history, anthropology, psychology, economics, sociology, design, and sustainability. Issues to be studied include gender roles, craft traditions, global textile trade, royal sumptuary law, the history of European fashion, dissident or disruptive styles, blockbuster museum costume exhibitions, and the environmental consequences of what we wear today. Discussion section required.

 

Undergraduate Colloquia

Open only to AHIS/HTAC/AHVA majors in the Department of Art History and Archaeology.

Interested students must sign up using the Fall 2025 Majors Colloquium Sign-Up Form which will open at 10am on Monday, March 31, 2025, and close at 5pm on Wednesday, April 9, 2025. Early sign-up is strongly encouraged.

AHIS UN3000 Majors Colloquium: Introduction to the Literature and Methods of Art History
Z. Strother
M 10:10-12, location tbc
This course is an introduction to the theories and methods of art history and visual culture. It is required for undergraduate majors.

 

Undergraduate Seminars

Open to CU and Barnard undergraduates. 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 undergraduate seminar applications are due by 5pm on Wednesday, April 9, 2025.

 

AHIS UN3002 Senior Thesis Seminar
instructor tbc
time tbc, location tbc
Required for all thesis writers. Counts toward elective lecture credit. For more information about the senior thesis program, visit the Senior Thesis Information Page

 

AHIS UN3017 Architecture and Deception
E. Pistis
R 12:10-2, location tbc
Fittingly in the age of fake news, this seminar addresses how lying, deception, concealment, and forgery have shaped the history of architecture and its historiography. It deals not only with architects’ lies, but also with how their architecture can be deceptive in many different ways. It also analyses how architectural narratives—including biographies—and historical accounts have been shaped by falsehoods and distortions. While addressing philosophical issues that remain relevant to our present, the course will examine some of the most influential architects and key works of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth century—a pivotal time within intellectual history for the definition of the concept of ‘truth’ and also, therefore, of its opposite. Students will learn how to make use of the many lenses through which architecture can be investigated. The goal is not only to acquire a foundation in European architectural history, but also, more broadly, to develop the skills necessary to analyze architecture and to deal with original architectural objects and texts, as well as to cultivate a critical attitude towards architectural literature.

Architecture and Deception [application form]

 

AHIS UN3317 Shaping Renaissance Rome
M. Waters
T 2:10-4, location tbc
This year the eyes of the Catholic world will once again turn to Rome as the city celebrates the Jubilee—a tradition that has occurred every twenty-five years since the fifteenth century. In this seminar, we will investigate the architectural and urban history of Rome, stressing projects (both realized and ideal) conceived during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The city will be analyzed as the product of successive interventions that have created a deeply layered topography. How Rome has continued to build upon its past, both literally through physical reuse and figuratively through symbolic appropriation, from the time of Pope Martin V to Pope Sixtus V, will thus serve as a key theme. Working within this overarching framework, each class session focuses on a thematic group of projects that will be studied in relationship to one another rather than as independent monuments. We will examine churches, palaces, villas, public amenities, streets, and piazzas through the functional demands that shaped them and the life that went on in and around them. Topics under discussion include architectural and urban palimpsest; the resurgence of interest in antiquity; building typologies; self-aggrandizement by means of architectural patronage; the reverberations of the Counter-Reformation in architecture; the role of urban rituals and spectacles; and the representation of the city and its buildings in drawings, maps, and prints.

Shaping Renaissance Rome [application form]

 

AHIS UN3413 Nineteenth Century Criticism
J. Crary
M 4:10-6, location tbc
This course examines a diverse selection of social and aesthetic responses to the impacts of modernization and industrialization in nineteenth-century Europe. Using works of art criticism, fiction, poetry, and social critique, the seminar will trace the emergence of new understandings of collective and individual experience and their relation to cultural and historical transformations. Readings are drawn from Friedrich Schiller's Letters On Aesthetic Education, Mary Shelley's The Last Man, Thomas Carlyle's "Signs of the Time," poetry and prose by Charles Baudelaire, John Ruskin's writings on art and political economy, Flora Tristan's travel journals, J.-K. Huysmans's Against Nature, essays of Walter Pater, Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy and other texts.

Nineteenth Century Criticism [application form]

AHIS UN3466 AIDS Is Contemporary
J. Bryan-Wilson
T 4:10-6, location tbc
This seminar examines two intertwined propositions. One is the indisputable fact that the global HIV/AIDS pandemic is ongoing and that the disease continues to shape the way artists and activists grapple with public health, national policy, and medical injustice. The other is my own polemic-in-formation, which is that the eruption of AIDS in the 1980s was the threshold event that inaugurated what is now understood to be “the contemporary” within the art world.  Rather than periodize the start of “the contemporary” with the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, as has become conventional, we will investigate how the AIDS crisis precipitated a sudden urgency that more decisively marks this transition, in particular around the promiscuous inclusion of non-fine art forms such as demonstration posters, zines, and handmade quilts.  We will read foundational texts on HIV/AIDS organizing and look at interventions with graphic design, wheat-pasting, ashes action protests, body maps, embroidery, performance-based die-ins, voguing, film/video, and photography. We will consider: the inextricability of queer grief, anger, love, and loss; lesbian care; the trap of visibility; spirituality and death; activist exhaustion; the role played by artists of color within ACT-UP; and dis/affinities across the US, Latin America, and South Africa. Our investigations will be bookended by two critical exhibitions, Witness: Against Our Vanishing (Artists Space, 1989) and Exposé-es (Palais de Tokyo, 2023). Authors and artists/collectives include: Aziz + Cucher, Bambanani Women’s Group, Feliciano Centurion, Douglas Crimp, Ben Cuevas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Darrel Ellis, fierce pussy, Elisabeth Lebovici, José Leonilson, Nicolas Moufarrege, Marlon Riggs, and the Visual AIDS archive. We will conclude with feminist, queer, and collaborative artistic work made during the (also ongoing) Covid-19 pandemic.  In small groups, students will lead discussions of our texts and the final project will be a collectively curated virtual exhibition.

AIDS Is Contemporary [application form]

 

AHIS UN3613 Temples of Kyoto (Travel Seminar)*
M. McKelway
M 4:10-6, location tbc
Perhaps no other single institution has played a more crucial role in the development and preservation of Japanese art and other forms of visual culture than the Buddhist temple, itself an entity that has undergone significant change, particularly in the modern period. This seminar will examine Buddhist temples in the city of Kyoto, Japan’s imperial capital from 794-1867 from their beginnings in the late eighth century into the early modern period. Although architecture and sculpture will be our primary areas of focus, the course will provide students with multiple, interdisciplinary perspectives on the diverse forms of institutional organization, architecture, art, and liturgy that comprise Buddhist houses of worship, with particular attention to their development in the city of Kyoto. We will take a site-specific approach, attending to the following general issues: the legacy of continental practices in such early monasteries as Hōryūji and Tōdaiji in Nara; adaptations to Japanese urban space and landscape at Tōji and Enryakuji; physical changes in temples with the introduction of new sects such as Zen and Pure Land Buddhism; and the transformation of temples in the early modern period.

A week-long visit to Kyoto during the first week of November (week of election-day holiday) will be the highlight of the course. In Kyoto we will visit temples and museums to see first-hand the monuments we have studied in the course. Students will compile presentations in advance to serve as the main guides for our visit. These presentations will form a basis for final papers, which will be presented in class during the last three weeks of the semester, and which will be due in written form at the last class of the semester.

*Temples of Kyoto is a travel seminar that is currently pending COI approval. Students who enroll in the seminar must attend the trip in order to earn credit for the course.

Temples of Kyoto [application form]

 

AHIS UN3623 The Wall Paintings of China
Y. Li
R 4:10-6, location tbc
This seminar introduces the murals and screen paintings of pre-modern China, both functioned as “painted walls.” Besides examining the visual attributes of these wall paintings, it attends to their special materiality and spatiality rooted in their media—the wall and the screen—to explore their original functions and interactions with the audience. Special attention will be given to the wall paintings’ themes, motifs, spatial representations, styles, scale, media, placement, contexts of display, and audience. Students will take turns leading seminar discussions to analyze the readings for each week. Every week students will read the assigned essays and write a one or two page, double-space reflection on the content and argument. You will post your reflection with questions on Canvas the night before the seminar.

The Wall Paintings of China [application form]

 

AHIS BC3968 Art Criticism (Barnard Course)
J. Miller
T 10:10-12, location tbc
This course is a seminar on contemporary art criticism written by artists in the post war period. Such criticism differs from academic criticism because it construes art production less as a discrete object of study than as a point of engagement. It also differs from journalistic criticism because it is less obliged to report art market activity and more concerned with polemics. Art /Criticism I will trace the course of these developments by examining the art and writing of one artist each week. These will include Brian ODoherty/Patrick Ireland, Allan Kaprow, Robert Morris, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Smithson, Art - Language, Dan Graham, Adrian Piper, Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, Judith Barry and Andrea Fraser. We will consider theoretical and practical implications of each artists oeuvre.

Please see Barnard Art History page for Art Criticism application form.

 

AHIS BC3984 Curatorial Positions 1969-Present (Barnard Course)
V. Smith
R 10:10-12, location tbc
Contemporary exhibitions studied through a selection of great shows from roughly 1969 to the present that defined a generation. This course will not offer practical training in curating; rather it will concentrate on the historical context of exhibitions, the theoretical basis for their argument, the criteria for the choice in artists and their work, and exhibitions internal/external reception.

Please see Barnard Art History page for Curatorial Positions, 1969-Present application form.

 

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