Fall 2026 Graduate Courses

Bridge Lectures

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

AHCE W4149 The Roman Art of Engineering: Traditions of Planning, Construction, and Innovation
F. de Angelis [Art History]; J. Chang [Engineering]
T/R 4:10–5:25, location tbc
Interdisciplinary study of ancient Roman engineering and architecture in a course co-created between Arts & Sciences and Engineering. Construction principles, techniques, and materials: walls, columns, arches, vaults, domes. Iconic Roman buildings (Colosseum, Pantheon, Trajan’s Column) and infrastructure (roads, bridges, aqueducts, baths, harbors, city walls). Project organization. Roman engineering and society: machines and human labor; engineers, architects, and the army; environmental impact. Comparisons with current practice as well as cross-cultural comparisons with other pre-modern societies across the globe. A Columbia Cross-Disciplinary Course.
 

AHIS GU4017 Sumer: Art & Architecture
Z. Bahrani
T/R 2:40–3:55, location tbc
The fourth millennium BC was a time of tremendous innovation in monumental architecture, the organization of urban space and developments in the visual arts in southern Mesopotamia. As settlements grew into city-states, monumental architectural works transformed the landscape. New technologies of metallurgy, casting, the mechanical reproduction of images, stone sculpture and seal carvings emerged alongside the invention of writing, a technology first documented in the city of Uruk, the place of the setting of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Sculpted images and monuments began to be inscribed with texts that reveal a great deal about the ontological and agentive, the aesthetic and the order of the divine. The lecture introduces students to these extraordinary developments in early art and architecture of ancient Sumer (southern Iraq). Lectures will discuss votive statues, portraiture, image rituals, and the visual manifestation of the gods. The lectures also introduce the extraordinary developments in architecture and monuments.
 

AHIS GU4062 Chinese Art: Center and Periphery
J. Xu
M/W 4:10–5:25, 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 GU4074 Latin American Artists from Independence to Present
K. Jones
M/W 2:40–3:55, location tbc
The course looks at works produced in the more than 20 countries that make up Latin America. Our investigations will take us from the Southern Cone nations of South America, up through Central American and the Caribbean, to Mexico to the north. We will cover styles from the colonial influences present in post-independence art of the early 19th century, to installation art found at the beginning of the 21st century. Along the way we will consider such topics as, the relationship of colonial style and academic training to forging an independent artistic identity; the emergence and establishment of a modern canon; experimentations in surrealism, neo-concretism, conceptual art, and performance. We will end the course with a consideration of Latinx artists working in the U.S.

 

Bridge Seminars

Bridge seminars are open to undergraduate and graduate students. Admission is at the instructor's discretion. Students must complete and upload the seminar application below when joining the Vergil wait-list in order to be considered for enrollment:

Department of Art History and Archaeology Seminar Application Form


AHIS GU4505 AI, Imaging, Art
N. Elcott
R 2:10–4, location tbc
This bridge seminar welcomes graduate and advanced undergraduate students with backgrounds in art history or computer science (and related fields). We 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. All students are expected to complete the readings and tutorials for the first class prior to the start of the semester.
 

AHIS GU4722 Medieval Art, Craft, Science
G. Bryda
W 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.

AHIS GU4535 Painted Reflections in Early Modern Europe
D. Bodart
R 4:10–6, location tbc
In the early 15th century, technical refinements in glazing allowed oil painting in the Netherlands to achieve its characteristic transparency and brilliance, while technical advances in glass tinning enhanced the reflectivity of convex mirrors in Northern Europe, and the new steel quenching technique, developed by Milanese armorers,made armor as reflective as a mirror. These reflective mirrors and pieces of armors became quintessential pictorial objects and contributed to the specular metaphor that underpins Renaissance painting. The seminar will explore how the “mise en abyme” operated by the reflection reveals the reverse side of painting, in terms of pictorial composition, mediality and artistic conception within a specific cultural context. Addressing materials from the early 15th to the early 17th century, the seminar will analyze how the detail of the reflection offers a specific lens through which to understand the challenges and transformations of painting in early modern Europe.

The course will be run as a seminar, with meetings devoted to discussions. Students will be responsible for introducing and commenting on the weekly readings. They will also be asked to carry out a research project, culminating in a class presentation and a final paper.

Prerequisites: The seminar is open to graduate students and upper-level art history major undergraduates.
 

AHIS GU4559 Thinking New York: The Urban Conceptions of Lewis Mumford, Robert Moses, Jane Jacobs, and Rem Koolhaas, and the 20th-Century City That Shaped Them
J. Ockman
R 12:10–2, location tbc
“New York is the perfect model of a city,” stated Lewis Mumford, “not the model of a perfect city.” This seminar contrasts the ideas of four urban thinkers and actors who possessed radically different perspectives on the modern metropolis and brought them to bear in and on New York City. The protagonists are Lewis Mumford (1895–1990), Robert Moses (1888–1981), Jane Jacobs (1916–2006), and Rem Koolhaas (1944–). We discuss the urban and architectural issues that animated them—and frequently pitted them against each other—as they variously strove to imagine and affect New York’s built future. From Mumford’s prophetic environmentalism and “sidewalk criticism” to Moses’s “expressway world,” from Jacobs’s neighborhood activism and battles against urban renewal to Koolhaas’s celebration of Manhattan’s “delirious” architectural imaginary, the course reassesses the legacies of these figures, placing them into historical context and exploring the changing social, political, and cultural forces and landscapes that shaped their thinking. What “usable past,” to invoke Mumford again, do they offer to urbanism today? Concerned with both realities on the ground and big ideas about how to build and inhabit cities, class discussions revolve around key texts supplemented by slide lectures, film excerpts, and case-study presentations. Students are expected to make site visits and to carry out primary research utilizing archival and material resources available around New York City.
 

AHIS GU4646 Foucault and the Arts
J. Rajchman
M 4:10–6, location tbc
Michel Foucault was a great historian and critic who helped change the ways research and criticism are done today – a new ‘archivist’. At the same time, he was a philosopher. His research and criticism formed part of an attempt to work out a new picture of what it is to think, and think critically, in relation to Knowledge, Power, and Processes of Subjectivization. What was this picture of thought? How did the arts, in particular the visual arts, figure in it? How might they in turn give a new image of Foucault’s kind of critical thinking for us today? In this course, we explore these questions, in the company of Deleuze, Agamben, Rancière and others thinkers and in relation to questions of media, document and archive in the current ‘regime of information’. The Seminar is open to students in all disciplines concerned with these issues.


AHIS GU4841 American Conceptualism
V. Tello
W 12:10–12, location tbc
This seminar explores the history and evolution of conceptual art and conceptualism across four major cities in the Americas: New York, Buenos Aires, Rosario, and Santiago de Chile. Between 1966 and 1975, artists and curators working in distinct geographical and political landscapes simultaneously foregrounded the notion that the “work” of art was an “idea” rather than an act of object-making. Together, they expanded this concept, producing innovative dematerialized, ephemeral, installation, site-specific, and participatory artworks and exhibitions. Instead of viewing U.S. conceptual art as contemporaneous but ultimately distinct from Latin American conceptualism (as is often assumed), this seminar adopts a hemispheric approach.

Our focus will be on the alternative circuits formed by artists, curators, and critics, as well as the dynamic movement of ideas and the distinct local imperatives that have shaped these global connections. Our investigation will be limited to a critical decade, allowing us to develop a depth of context while underscoring the porosity of dematerialized art across borders. We will examine how translations and mistranslations of art terminology, such as “conceptual art”, “Conceptual Art,” and “conceptualism,” can expand or evade rigid institutional categorizations. We will engage with archival materials and listen to the voices of prominent and outlier artists and curators, including Oscar Masotta, Lucy Lippard, Seith Siegelaub, Nemesio Antúnez, Jorge Glusberg, Catalina Parra, Cecilia Vicuña, Juan Pablo Langlois, Art & Language, the Art Workers’ Coalition, and the Rosario Group, to trace the contours of post-1960s conceptualism anew.


AHIS GU4586 It is Time to Write about Time in Art: On 'Islamic' Objects in Oriental Painting
A. Shalem
T 2:10–4, location tbc
Much has been written about the role of architecture and, to some extent, the significance of representing sculpture in painting. However, the function of the depicted artefacts in painting in general and that of the depicted Islamic Object in particular, has not been thoroughly explored. It is perhaps the derogative general terms of ‘applied arts’ and ‘minor arts’ which probably hint at the relatively underestimated status in which this category of artifacts was, and still is, classified and still held. And yet, one should admit that only few case studies have so far been devoted to the manifold meanings of objects in painting (European and non-European alike), mainly in moments in which objects took major part in the shaping of the capitalistic and consumerist societies in which they were used (and misused). 

The aim of this seminar is to contribute to the large and still unexplored field of research, which involves the significance of the presence of objects in painting, namely the iconography of objects, or better say objectology. At the core of this seminar is the exhibition “Orientalism” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (to be opened in June 2026 and run during the Fall of 2026). Most of the meeting will be held at the Met Museum, in front of paintings. Students will be asked to read and discuss theoretical articles related to the role of objects in painting and to critically analyse the important roles of the depicted objects. This course explores the different sort of objects, from the biblical, sacred, historical and the mundane objects to the scientific and the imagined ones. The object’s role as signifier of geography, time, idea and even unconscious desires will be investigated by reading about and looking at objects.

 

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: Artists, Workers, and Witches
J. Bryan-Wilson
T 4:10–6, location tbc
Reading within and around feminist critiques of the gendering of labor, this seminar looks at how artists, workers, and witches are celebrated—and reviled—for their ability to shape matter, generate value, and potentially re-direct power. We will examine historical and recent texts around the entanglements between gendered creative production, non-normative sexualities, and racialized persecution. We will consider influences and points of intersection/disjunction amongst Black feminist theorizations, Italian Marxisms, Latin American activisms, and Indigenous perspectives as we untangle knotted genealogies around issues such as transformation, animism, handicraft, enchantment, reproduction, alternative forms of knowing, queer and trans self-making, peasant/folk wisdom, outlawed healing traditions, criminalized spiritualities, women’s autonomy, and revolutionary cultural labor. Three “spirits of the forest” in particular will guide our inquiries: Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia Federici, and Sylvia Wynter. We will take seriously strikes, hexes, and poetry as strategies for collective liberation in the face of racism, capitalism, and patriarchy. 

Contact ISSG with questions on enrolling in this course

 

Core Graduate Courses

Required courses for first-year students.

AHIS GR5000 Critical Methods Colloquium
J. Kraynak
W 4:10–6, location tbc
The Critical Methods 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 Methods 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.
 

AHIS GR8000 Proseminar: Introduction to the Study of Art History
J. Bryan-Wilson
T 10:10–12, location tbc
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 GR6608 Architecture of the Japanese Temple
M. McKelway
T 4:10–6, location tbc
Weekly lectures will cover major monuments, beginning with Ise Shrine and the introduction of continental timber-frame architecture at Hōryūji and extending to the early 19th century with special attention to the three major rubrics of the wayō (“Japanese” style), Zen, and Great Buddha Hall modes, along with their infinite variations and recombinations. Topics to be explored include wood joinery techniques and bracket technology, the development of indigenous shoin architecture, the role of varied Buddhist doctrines in developments of liturgical space, and Japanese builders’ responses to local environmental and seismic conditions.

 

Graduate Seminars

Open to graduate students. Admission is at the instructor's discretion. Students must complete and upload the seminar application below when joining the Vergil wait-list in order to be considered for enrollment:

Department of Art History and Archaeology Seminar Application Form
 

AHIS GR8048 Scales of History
Z. Celik Alexander
T 4:10–6, location tbc
Every student of history must eventually reckon with questions of scale: What temporal and geographical boundaries are epistemologically defensible in a study? How long or short is the historical arc? How wide or narrow is the geographical scope? Does one approach one’s object of study from above or from below? What are the epistemic implications of working with anecdotes or cases, with planetary time or world-systems, with series, multiples, and sequences? This seminar is structured thematically around the problems of scaling historiography. It brings key texts from the historical disciplines (with special attention to art history and architectural history) to bear on such problematics as: the case study, the period, microhistory, world-systems, the longue durée, the anecdote, global and world history, seriality, and comparison. It is meant to be both a theoretical and a practical resource for those tackling the challenges of writing history. Weekly discussions will be driven by close readings of assigned texts.
 

AHIS GR8139 Antiquity in the Museum: Archaeology, Culture and Imperialism
Z. Bahrani
W 4:10–6, location tbc
The seminar introduces graduate students to works of ancient art and architecture held in museum collections. It explores the modern history of their study as antiquities, a category which required a detailed connoisseurship set within a framework of newly arising aesthetic and racial theories and classifications that accompanied imperial archaeological endeavour. The seminar’s focus is on Mesopotamian, Anatolian, Egyptian and Greek antiquities, as ancient works in their original context and as extracted objects that mark an imperial trail. Students will also be introduced to the development of archaeological field methods within the colonial context, and archaeology’s varied forms of visual documentation which became instrumental to imperial knowledge production: architectural and scientific illustrations, excavation images, and archaeological photography, and by the early twentieth century, the introduction of aerial photography as a way of visualizing sites and ruins. Taking ancient works and their display as a starting point, the seminar also explores the ways in which archaeology and the collecting of antiquities were inextricably linked to the technologies and economies of empire and colonialism. Reading and discussions include museum histories and theories of collecting, as well as the history and theories of archaeology and ancient art. Permission of the instructor is required before registration. Please submit a seminar application to the Department of Art History and Archaeology.
 

AHIS GR8413 Black British Art and Theory
K. Jones
T 2:10–4, location tbc
This course considers visual culture in Britain in the context of Black European studies. The discipline of cultural studies, which evolved in postwar Birmingham, intersected with the rise of black consciousness throughout Britain in the 1980s. How did the interactions of intellectuals and artists at this moment in the late 20th century lead to the creation of strong postcolonial theory and practice? We will consider the role of medium (particularly film and video), feminism, issues of diaspora, migration, and globalization, and the emergence of Black European Studies. Readings include texts by Hazel Carby, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, and Kobena Mercer. We will look at visual production and film by artists such as Sonia Boyce, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Ingrid Pollard, Chris Ofili, Isaac Julien, and Khadija Saye among others.

AHIS GR8661 Problems in Kano Painting
M. McKelway
W 2:10–4, location tbc
The graduate seminar “Problems in Kano Painting,” is a graduate seminar offered periodically to investigate the hereditary lineage of painters that dominated the field of painting in Japan’s late medieval and early modern eras. This semester we will begin with the work of Kano Motonobu and his grandson Eitoku, but will spend most of our time focused on their descendants at the turn of the seventeenth century, particularly Kano Sanraku and Kano Sansetsu. The seminar address the question of how this clan of painters managed to secure its position as official painters to Japan’s rulers for nearly three centuries—a phenomenon unique in the history of art. We will also explore such topics as the ways in which it expanded its painting repertoire beyond its origins in monochrome ink painting, what is meant by an “academic” painting tradition in the Japanese context, its systems of training, promotion, and the economics of their enterprise, and the institutionalization of the Kano project through the writing of art historical treatises.
 

AHIS GR8867 Seventeenth-Century Chinese Painting
J. Xu
R 4:10–6, location tbc