Fall 2026 Undergraduate Courses
Undergraduate Lectures
Open to all undergraduate students. Graduate students: Please refer to the program handbook on 2000-level lecture enrollment policy.
AHIS UN2321 Northern Baroque Art and Knowledge
S. Berger
T/R 10:10–11:25, location tbc
This course will explore the intersections between visual and intellectual culture in Northern Europe during the long seventeenth century. Sessions will examine outstanding productions by such figures as Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Peter Paul Rubens, Maria Sibylla Merian, Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Charles le Brun, and others. In addition, we will study visual and material culture, from philosophical prints to anatomical models of eyes, produced by less well-known artists and artisans. The themes and topics we will discuss include the redefinition of the aims and nature of art and knowledge; collecting; competing theories of vision, attention and discernment; and the shifting interrelations of art, religion, philosophy, and science in this period in Northern Europe. We will consider a broad range of objects, including paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, architecture, gardens, shells, and flowers. The course is suitable for students from all disciplines and all years.
AHIS UN2400 Nineteenth-Century Art in Europe
M. Gamer
M/W 10:10–11:25, location tbc
How do you represent a revolution? What does it mean to picture the world as it “really” is? Who may be figured as a subject or citizen, and who not? Should art improve society, or critique it? Can it do both? These are some of the many questions that the artists of nineteenth-century Europe grappled with, and that we will explore together in this course. This was an era of rapid and dramatic political, economic, and cultural change, marked by wars at home and colonial expansion abroad; the rise of industrialization and urbanization; and the invention of myriad new technologies, from photography to the railway. The arts played an integral and complex role in all of these developments: they both shaped and were shaped by them. Lectures will address a variety media, from painting and sculpture to the graphic and decorative arts, across a range of geographic contexts, from Paris, London, Berlin, and Madrid to St. Petersburg, Cairo, Haiti, and New Zealand. Artists discussed will include Jacques-Louis David, Francisco Goya, Théodore Géricault, J.M.W. Turner, Adolph Menzel, Ilya Repin, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Mary Cassatt, James McNeill Whistler, C. F. Goldie, Victor Horta, and Paul Cézanne.
AHIS UN2411 History of Photography: Invention to AI
N. Elcott
T/R 10:10–11:25, location tbc
This course will survey selected social, cultural and aesthetic or technical developments in the history of photography, from the emergence of the medium in the 1820s and 30s through to the present day. Rather than attempt comprehensively to review every aspect of photography and its legacies in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the course will instead trace significant developments through a series of case studies. Some of the latter will focus on individuals, genres or movements, and others on various discourses of the photographic image. Particular attention will be placed on methodological and theoretical concerns pertaining to the medium.
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.
AHUM UN2800 Arts of Islam: The First Formative Centuries (ca. 700–1000 CE)
A. Shalem
M/W 4:10–5:25, location tbc
This lecture course, open to both undergraduate and graduate students, offers a comprehensive and chronological overview of the major masterpieces of art and architecture of the Muslim world between circa 700-1000 AD. Topics concerning the rise of Arabic as the official language of the new Muslim Empire and the aesthetic transformation it went from script to calligraphy, the shaping of sacred spaces and liturgical objects, rulers’ iconographies and urban designs, as well as daily-life objects, will be discussed. Mecca, Madina, Jerusalem, Damascus, Fustat (old Cairo), Qayrawan, Cordoba, Baghdad, Samarra, Balkh, Bukhara and early Fatimid Cairo are the major playgrounds to illustrate particular moments of shifting powers and aesthetic paradigms in the early days of the Muslim empire, suggesting a more differentiate picture of the arts of Islam in the age of imagining a world-wide empire. The past narratives for these regions will be critically presented by both looking at the medieval sources and the modern historiographies for these regions and by highlighting the varied ideologies at play. Taking this critical vein of studying the arts of the early Muslim age, past narratives will be reconsidered, while enhancing our awareness to the complicated, if not sometimes manipulated, processes of giving works of arts meanings and values. CC/GS/SEAS: Partial fulfillment of Global Core requirement. Discussion section required.
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 BC3667 Clothing (Barnard Course)
A. Higonnet
M/W 10:10–11:25, 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.
AHIS BC3682 Early Modernism and the Crisis of Representation (Barnard course)
A. Alberro
T/R 2:40–3:55, location tbc
This course studies the emergence and development of Modernism in all of its complexity. Particular attention will be paid to the ways in which Modern artists responded to the dramatically changing notions of space, time and dimension in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. What impact did these dramatic changes have on existing concepts of representation? What challenges did they pose for artists? To what extent did Modernism contribute to an understanding of the full consequences of these new ideas of time and space? These concerns will lead us to examine some of the major critical and historical accounts of modernism in the arts as they were developed between the 1860s and the 1920s. Discussion section required.
Undergraduate Colloquia
Open only to AHIS/HTAC/AHVA majors in the Department of Art History and Archaeology. To be considered for enrollment, students must complete and submit the Fall 2026 Majors Colloquium Sign-Up Form
AHIS UN3000 Majors Colloquium: Introduction to the Literature and Methods of Art History
M. Gamer
R 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.
Senior Thesis
Optional project open to AHIS/HTAC/AHVA majors. For more information about applying, visit the Senior Thesis Information Page
AHIS UN3002 Senior Thesis Seminar
B. Bergdoll
T 4:10–6, location tbc
Required year-long course for all senior thesis writers. Counts toward elective lecture credit.
Undergraduate Seminars
Open to Columbia and Barnard undergraduates. 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 UN3326 Images of the Apocalypse
S. Berger
T 2:10–4, location tbc
What does the end of time look like? How have still and moving images made the Apocalypse available for intellectual exploration, explanation, and even play? Why is the End so important in Western European and American culture and what role does it play in our imaginations? In this seminar we will explore the fascination with the end of time as articulated in a broad range of artworks from medieval illuminated manuscripts to Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957) and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979). We will examine diverse proposals for the expected end of time, proposals often given urgency by the imminence of the Apocalypse (an anticipation sustained even in the face of constant deferrals).
AHIS UN3328 Renaissance Architecture on the Page
M. Waters
R 2:10–4, location tbc
This seminar examines how architecture was conceived, represented, and disseminated through drawings, prints, and books in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe. Bringing together the study of manuscripts, architectural drawings, printed treatises, and reproductive media such as woodcuts, engravings, and etchings, the course investigates the central role of the page as a critical site of experimentation and the production of architectural knowledge in the Renaissance. By breaking down traditional divisions between media, it seeks to elucidate interconnected graphic and textual practices. It also aims to understand how the mediation of architecture on the page conditioned its reception across a range of contexts. The seminar will draw on a variety of critical theory while also being grounded in an object-based approach, utilizing especially the rich collections of Avery Library.
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.
AHIS UN3410 Approaches to Contemporary Art
B. Joseph
W 4:10–6, location tbc
This course examines the critical approaches to contemporary art from the 1970s to the present. It will address a range of historical and theoretical issues around the notion of "the contemporary" (e.g. globalization, participation, relational art, decolonization, Afrotropes, and artists publications) as it has developed in the era after the postmodernism of the 1970s and 1980s.
AHIS UN3482 The Modern Woman Genius in Paris and New York (*Travel Seminar)
A. Higonnet
T 10:10-12, location tbc
A Travel Seminar to Paris and in New York.
How have women turned combinations of creatives roles into artistic genius? At once daughters, fashion icons, models, mothers, muses, painters, print-makers, sisters, sculptors, and wives, great women artists have brilliantly understood the conditions of creativity in their times. This seminar studies how Impressionist Paris launched the modern woman artist, then traces a history of women’s tactics through mid-twentieth century New York Abstract Expressionism. The seminar takes advantage of: a major 2026 exhibition about Mary Cassatt at the Musée d’Orsay; a burst of 2025-26 scholarship about the women Impressionists; 2025 and 2026 exhibitions about Ruth Asawa and Frida Kahlo; a major 2026 exhibition about Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the creative ecologies of two cultural capitals: Paris and New York.
Open to Columbia and Barnard undergraduates. Admission is at the instructor's discretion. Students must attend the trip in order to earn credit for the course.
AHIS UN3708 Beyond El Dorado: Materials, Values, and Aesthetics in Pre-Columbian Art History
L. Trever
M 12:10–2, location tbc
In this seminar, we will investigate ancient and indigenous art, materials, and aesthetics from areas of what is today Latin America. Taking advantage of New York’s unrivaled museum collections, we will research Pre-Columbian gold and silver work, as well as equally precious stone, shell, textile, and feather works created by artists of ancient Mexico, Central America, and Andean South America. We will also study latter-day histories of collecting, reception, display, appropriation, and activism that shape contemporary understandings of Pre-Columbian art.
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 the Barnard Art History website for Art Criticism application form.
AHIS BC3984 Curatorial Positions 1969-Present (Barnard Course)
V. Smith
W 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 the Barnard Art History website 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.
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