Spring 2025 Undergraduate Courses
Last update: Thursday, January 23, 2025
Confirm course listings on the Directory of Classes
Undergraduate Lectures
Undergraduate lectures are open to all undergraduate students. Graduate students may contact the graduate programs manager to sign up for a 2000-level course, per the PhD student handbook.
AHIS UN2129 Before Rome: The Art and Architecture of Italy’s Peoples in the First Millennium BCE
F. de Angelis
M/W 4:10-5:25, 807 Schermerhorn Hall
This course explores the rich artistic traditions of the peoples living in Italy—the Etruscans, Italics, Greeks, Celts—from their emergence in the early first millennium BCE to their eventual absorption within the system of “Roman” art. While the arts of Etruria will form the backbone of the course, its conceptual focus will be on the densely entangled web that connected the diverse visual landscapes and creative practices of the Italian peninsula both to each other and to external centers of artistic production, from Cyprus and Carthage to Syria and the cultures of northern Europe. In addition to intercultural connectivity—imports and exports, convergences and divergences, parallels and unique features—special attention will be paid to the socio-political and religious dimensions of art and architecture. Both iconic and non-canonical objects will be examined, ranging from furniture and weaponry to anatomical votives and mythological painting. This lecture is the first in a three-year cycle that also includes “Roman Art and Architecture” and “Rome Beyond Rome.”
AHIS UN2309 Early Modern Architecture, 1550–1799
E. Pistis
T/R 6:10-7:25, 612 Schermerhorn Hall
This course examines the history of early modern architecture from a European perspective outward. It starts with the time of Michelangelo and Palladio and ends in the late eighteenth century. It addresses a number of transhistorical principal issues and analytical approaches while focusing on to a series of roughly chronological thematic studies. Travelling across courts, academies, streets, and buildings devoted to new institutions, this course examines the cultural, material, urban, social, and political dimensions of architecture, as well as temporal and geographic migrations of architectural knowledge. Topics will also include: the resurgence of interest in antiquity; the longue durée history of monuments; changes in building typology; the patronage and politics of architecture; technological developments and building practice; architectural theory, books, and the culture of print; the growth of capital cities; the creation of urban space and landscape; the formalization of architectural education; and the changing status of the architect.
AHIS UN2311 Baroque Imperial Spain
D. Bodart
T/R 10:10-11:25, 807 Schermerhorn Hall
The course will survey Baroque art in Hapsburg Spain, considered in the wide geographical context of the extended and dispersed dominions of the different crowns of the Spanish monarchy, which connected the Iberian Peninsula with Italy, Flanders and the New World. It will concern visual art in its various media, mainly painting, sculpture and architecture, but also tapestries, prints, armor, goldsmithery and ephemeral decoration, among others. Works of the main artists of the period will be introduced and analyzed, giving attention to the historical and cultural context of their production and reception. The course will particularly focus on the movement of artists, works and models within the Spanish Hapsburg territories, in order to understand to what extent visual arts contributed to shaping the political identity of this culturally composite empire.
AHIS UN2409 Nineteenth Century Architecture
Z. Celik Alexander
M/W 1:10-2:25, 612 Schermerhorn Hall
This course revisits some of the key moments in the architecture of the nineteenth century with the goal of understanding the relationship between these developments and a global modernity shaped by old and new empires. In doing so, it assumes a particular methodological stance. Rather than attempting to be geographically comprehensive, it focusses on the interdependencies between Europe and its colonies; instead of being strictly chronological, it is arranged around a constellation of themes that are explored through a handful of projects and texts. Reading of primary sources from the period under examination is a crucial part of the course. Students will have the opportunity to hone their critical skills by reading, writing, and conducting research toward a final paper. Discussion section required.
AHIS UN2425 Visual Activism
J. Bryan-Wilson
T/R 10:10-11:25, 612 Schermerhorn Hall
How has visual culture played a role within the social movements of the last several decades, such as #BlackLivesMatter and Extinction Rebellion? How, we might ask, is activism made visible; how does it erupt (or disappear) with collective fields of vision? Drawing upon Black South African queer photographer Zanele Muholi’s term “visual activism” as a flexible rubric that encompasses both formal practices and political strategies, this lecture class interrogates contemporary visual cultures of dissent, resistance, and protest as they span a range of ideological positions. We will examine recent developments in and around recent intersections of art and politics from around the world, looking closely at performances, photographs, feminist dances, graffiti, murals, street art, posters, pussy hats, and graphic interventions, with a special focus on tactics of illegibility and encodedness. Topics include visual responses to structural racisms, global climate change, indigenous land rights, state violence, gentrification, forced migration, and queer/trans issues. Discussion section required.
AHIS UN2600 Arts of China
C. Zhu
T/R 11:40-12:55, 807 Schermerhorn Hall
An introduction to the arts of China, from the Neolithic period to the present, stressing materials and processes of bronze casting, the development of representational art, principles of text illustration, calligraphy, landscape painting, imperial patronage, and the role of the visual arts in elite culture.
AHUM UN2604 Arts of China, Japan, and Korea
This course introduces distinctive aesthetic traditions of China, Japan, and Korea—their similarities and differences—through an examination of the visual significance of selected works of painting, sculpture, architecture, and other arts in relation to the history, culture, and religions of East Asia. CC/GS/SEAS: Partial fulfillment of Global Core Requirement.
Section 001
T/R 2:40-3:55, 832 Schermerhorn Hall
Y. Seo
Section 002
M/W 1:10-2:25, 832 Schermerhorn Hall
Y. Li
AHIS UN2702 Pre-Columbian Art and Architecture
L. Trever
M/W 10:10-11:25, 807 Schermerhorn Hall
The Western Hemisphere was a setting for outstanding accomplishments in the visual arts for millennia before Europeans set foot in the so-called “New World.” This course explores the early indigenous artistic traditions of what is now Latin America, from early monuments of the formative periods (e.g. Olmec and Chavín), through acclaimed eras of aesthetic and technological achievement (e.g. Maya and Moche), to the later Inca and Aztec imperial periods. Our subject will encompass diverse genre including painting and sculpture, textiles and metalwork, architecture and performance. Attention will focus on the two cultural areas that traditionally have received the most attention from researchers: Mesoamerica (including what is today Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, and Honduras) and the Central Andes (including Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia). We will also critically consider the drawing of those boundaries—both spatial and temporal—that have defined “Pre-Columbian” art history to date. More than a survey of periods, styles, and monuments, we will critically assess the varieties of evidence—archaeological, epigraphic, historical, ethnographic, and scientific—available for interpretations of ancient Latin American art and culture.
AHIS BC1002 Introduction to the History of Art II (Barnard course)
D. Biczel
M/W 2:40-3:55, 304 Barnard Hall
Either term may be taken separately. Brief examination of the techniques of visual analysis, followed by a chronological survey of the major period styles of Western European art. Emphasis on the introduction of form and content in the works studied and on the correlation of the visual arts with their cultural environments. BC1001: Greek and Roman art; medieval art. BC1002: Renaissance to modern art. Discussion section required.
AHIS BC2355 Apocalypse (Barnard Course)
G. Bryda
M/W 4:10-5:25, 504 Diana Center
This lecture course explores how art and architecture responded to changing attitudes toward death, the afterlife, and the end of the world over the course of the European Middle Ages, from early Christian Rome to the dawn of the Protestant Reformation in Germany. Medieval illustrations of the Book of Revelation in New York collections will play a central role in discussions of plague, rapture, and “eschatology”—or concerns over the fate of the soul at the end of time. We will analyze the visual culture associated with ordinary people preparing for their own death and the deaths of loved ones, saints and Biblical figures whose triumph in death served as exemplars for the living, and institutional and individual anxieties over humankind’s destiny on Judgment Day. Artworks under consideration will encompass various media and contexts, including monumental architecture and architectural relief sculpture, tomb sculpture, wall painting, manuscript painting, reliquaries, and altarpieces. The course satisfies the major requirement's historical period of 400-1400. Note course requires 1 hour weekly TA discussion sections to be arranged.
AHIS BC3673 History of Photography (Barnard Course)
A. Alberro
T/R 2:40-3:55, 504 Diana Center
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.
Undergraduate Colloquia
Open only to AHIS/HTAC/AHVA majors in the Department of Art History and Archaeology.
Interested students must sign up using the Spring 2025 Majors Colloquium Sign-Up Form which will open at 10am on Tuesday, October 22nd, and close at 5pm on Monday, November 11th. Early sign-up is strongly encouraged.
AHIS UN3000 Majors Colloquium: Introduction to the Literature and Methods of Art History
This course is an introduction to the theories and methods of art history and visual culture. It is required for undergraduate majors.
Section 001
H. Klein
T 4:10-6, 934 Schermerhorn Hall
Section 002
M. Cole
R 12:10-2, 930 Schermerhorn Hall
Undergraduate Seminars
Open to Columbia 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.
Spring 2025 undergraduate seminar applications are due by 5pm on Thursday, November 14th.
AHIS UN3002 Senior Thesis Seminar
B. Bergdoll
T 2:10-4, 930 Schermerhorn Hall
Required year-long course for all thesis writers. Counts toward elective lecture credit. For more information about the senior thesis program, visit the Senior Thesis Information Page
AHIS UN3105 Sacred Spaces and Divine Images Transformed: The Middle East during the Roman Period
B. Fowlkes Childs
T 6:10-8, 930 Schermerhorn Hall
This seminar will explore the profound transformation of art and architecture connected to the religious practices of both polytheists and monotheists that occurred across the Middle East when much of the region was under Roman rule. Sacred spaces we will focus on include the Temples of Bel and Baalshamin at Palmyra (destroyed in 2015) and Jupiter Heliopolitanus at Baalbek, the recently discovered synagogues at Migdal (Magdala), and the temples, housechurch, and synagogue at Dura-Europos. We will delve into topics such as possible cult continuity between the Iron Age and the Hellenistic and Roman periods, the creation of new deities, the roles of priests, aniconism and figural sculpture, and the construction and adornment of buildings to meet the specific needs of the cults of various deities, Judaism, and Christianity. We will explore and challenge traditional categories such as “Roman” and “provincial” art/architecture. Key questions to consider include the following: how were individuals/communities’ personal, civic, and religious identities expressed in art/architecture that was influenced by interaction with Roman culture broadly, but also highly localized?
Sacred Spaces and Divine Images Transformed: The Middle East during the Roman Period application form
AHIS UN3318 Books and Architecture
E. Pistis
R 2:10-4, 806 Schermerhorn Hall
This seminar investigates architectural books as both carriers of knowledge and objects. Through the analysis of books, prints and drawings, as well as of their production, circulation and reception, this course explores how different figures have thought, discussed and written about architecture in Europe from the mid-Sixteenth Century to the end of the Eighteenth Century. The objects of investigation include architectural treatises, but also prints and books of various natures that contain architectural information. By questioning the stability of these media, the seminar aims to explore their mutability over time and place. It explores how these objects' meanings were shaped by their makers, by the material manipulations of their owners, and by their physical proximity to other works on desks and library shelves. The seminar examines architectural theory’s relationships with practice and with contemporary debates on society, as well as fields of knowledge such as literature, music, philosophy and science. It aims to understand how media have shaped the migration of architectural knowledge, the construction of Western architectural canons, and the developments of the architect’s profession. At the same time, the object-based analysis of the rare books kept at the Avery Library will allow the class to address questions related to architectural representation, different architectural media, and printing technology. Students will learn how to deal with the complex relationships between texts and images, between drawings and prints, and between the ‘architecture’ of a book and its content.
Books and Architecture application form
AHIS UN3402 Introduction to Design History
H. Pivo
W 10:10-12, 806 Schermerhorn Hall
This course offers an introduction to the history of design from the eighteenth century through the twenty-first century, with emphasis placed on the twentieth century. Attention will be paid to a wide range of design specializations, including industrial design and product design, fashion and textile design, automotive design, and graphic design. Proceeding in roughly chronological order, it will explore key themes in the history of design, including matters of taste and etiquette, social reform, the production of value, design education, branding and marketing, and recent trends in sustainable, speculative, and digital design. The course also considers the relationship between design and other modes of material production, including architecture, fine art, and craft.
Introduction to Design History application form
AHIS UN3410 Approaches to Contemporary Art
B. Joseph
W 2:10-4, 930 Schermerhorn Hall
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.
Approaches to Contemporary Art application form
AHIS UN3429 American Architecture: Skyscrapers & Urbanism
C. Willis
T 12:10-2, 930 Schermerhorn Hall
This course will examine the distinctly American invention of the building type the “skyscraper” and its evolution and impact from the 1870s to today. We will approach the subject through a range of lenses – historiographical, critical, and methodological – exploring tall buildings and their history as objects of design, products of technology, sites of construction, investments in real estate, and places of work and residence. Throughout, the urban dimension will be key in our critical analysis. Classroom sessions, for the most part, will be organized as lectures and discussions of assigned readings. There will also be sessions outside the classroom, including a visit to the drawing collection of Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library and to The Skyscraper Museum, as well as a walking tour of Midtown Manhattan.
American Architecture: Skyscrapers & Urbanism application form
AHIS UN3438 Land and Landscape
Z. Celik Alexander
T 4:10-6, 930 Schermerhorn Hall
How did land—a primary source of economic value—become separated from landscape—an object of aesthetic enjoyment—in Europe? This course examines the moment between the early eighteenth and the late nineteenth centuries when the physical and conceptual demarcations of land from landscape coincided with the emergence of political economic discourses, on the one hand, and the formulation of aesthetics as a separate branch of philosophical inquiry, on the other. Re-examining well-known moments in landscape history, the course aims to ask: What does a global modernity fueled as much by agriculturalization as by industrialization look like? How can this theoretical recalibration help construct new historical ontologies of such key concepts as nature, culture, and environment? What might this examination reveal about the vexed relationship between politics and aesthetics? And what are the historical interdependencies between economic value and aesthetic value?
Land and Landscape application form
AHIS UN3791 Epic India: The Rama Story in Visual Art
S. Kaligotla
T 10:10-12, 934 Schermerhorn Hall
The epic story of Rama (Ramayana) is one of the most influential tales of the Indian subcontinent. It has been told and experienced in a stunning range of media across time and space: from epic verse and lyric poetry to painting, narrative sculpture, film, graphic novels, and puppet theater. While Valmiki’s Sanskrit Ramayana of ca. 500 BCE is acknowledged as the first, writers have recounted the tale in the polyglot array of Indic languages, from Kashmiri to Telugu, and infused it with the values and interests of their own time and place. The story’s flexibility and capaciousness has encouraged social contestation and given voice to the concerns of disenfranchised social groups, including women and Dalits. This seminar will examine a generous array of South Asia’s visual Ramayana traditions from the ancient to the modern, encompassing temple relief sculpture, painted courtly manuscripts, and comic book and film Ramayanas. Reading a selection of primary texts alongside we consider this tale’s immense capacity to represent the gamut of human experience, both private and public, and its continued resonance for artists, writers, performers, and their publics.
Epic India: The Rama Story in Visual Art application form
AHIS BC3877 British Portraits: Identity, Empire, and the Museum (Barnard Course)
A. Eaker
M 10:10-12, 502 Diana Center
This course explores the making, cultural significance, and display of British portraiture from the end of the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. It explores how portraits engaged with questions of class, race, gender, and empire during an era of rapid historical and cultural transformation, as well as the subsequent collecting and exhibition of British portraits within the post-colonial context of American museums. Taught through a combination of seminar discussions and excursions to New York museums, this course is also designed to give students an introduction to various aspects of curatorial practice and to professional writing within a museum setting.
British Portraits: Identity, Empire, and the Museum application form
AHIS BC3976 Japanese Photography (Barnard Course)
J. Reynolds
W 2:10-4, 501 Diana Center
This course will examine the history of Japanese photography from the middle of the 19th century to the present. The class will be organized both chronologically and thematically. Throughout its history, photography has been an especially powerful medium for addressing the most challenging issues facing Japanese society. Among the topics under discussion will be: tourist photography and the representation of women within that genre in the late 19th century, the politics of propaganda photography, the construction of Japanese cultural identity through the representation of “tradition” in photography, and the interest in marginalized urban subcultures in the photography of the 1960s and 1970s. Although the course will be focused on Japan, the class will read from the literature on photography elsewhere in order to situate Japanese work within a broader context.
Japanese Photography application form
AHIS BC3864 Signals: Networks, Publics, and Performance (Barnard Course)
P. Marshall
R 10:10-12; please see Barnard Art History page for location
This course explores the pirating, transformation, and circulation of media from the 1960s to the present. It examines the ways that media artists question public participation, democratic commitment, and collective memory. During the 1960s in the United States and abroad, the promise of networked communication prompted a consideration of global connectivity that brought artists and artworks outside of the gallery into the public sphere. Artist, often activists, explored the dissemination of information, and they commandeered messaging. Many of these artists positioned their output against mainstream media, while other artists seized existing media streams with the aim, optimistically, to alter them. Case studies include Stan VanDerBeek, Dara Birnbaum, Black Audio Collective, Tiffany Sia, Sondra Perry, and CAMP. This course brings together seminar discussions, the practice of making, and the hosting of practitioners; it is designed to offer students an introduction to various aspects of media as it is crafted and curated within and without museum environments.
Enrollment Notes: Enrollment is limited and requires the instructor's approval via application due 11/14
Link to Application: https://forms.gle/Zzj2xg798NWp5qkS6
AHIS BC3861 Memory and Democracy in Latin American Art (Barnard Course)
D. Biczel
W 2:10-4pm, 501 Diana Center
This course examines the roles of various forms of artistic production in the ongoing struggles over historical memory and constitution (or reconstitution) of democracy in Latin America in the wake of brutal dictatorships and internal conflicts of the last 60 years, as well as the most recent authoritarian turns in the region. Through a country-based selections of case studies—from Mexico, through Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, to Peru and Colombia—we will examine practices that range from grassroots “artivism” and public-site interventions, through sanctioned and unsanctioned memorials and monuments, to official memory museums and “places of reconciliation.” We will consider how different artistic practices engage and mobilize different modes of memory—collective, official, public, counter, and living—and to what ends, and why. We will also think about longue dureé (that is, “long duration” as per the French historian Fernand Braudel) effects of the Spanish conquest, European colonialism, and elite nation-state formation, and their impacts on the contemporary battles over human rights, social justice, belonging, and citizenship. In addition to readings, class materials will include film, both documentary and fictional, providing an expanded insight into how different cultural forms shape and intervene into memory and history formation, and how those, in turn, constitute the imaginary and limits of “democracy.”
Enrollment Notes: Enrollment is limited and requires the instructor's approval via application due 11/14
Link to Application: https://forms.gle/UQSYvRj4xQ8QRagB8
Bridge Lectures
Bridge lectures are advanced lectures open to all undergraduate and graduate students. They do not require an application.
AHIS GU4089 Native American Art
E. Hutchinson
T/R 4:10-5:25, 302 Barnard Hall
This introduction to Native North American art surveys traditions of painting, sculpture, ceramics, textiles, photography and architecture and traces the careers of contemporary Indian modernists and postmodernists. It emphasizes artistic developments as a means of preserving culture and resisting domination in response to intertribal contact, European colonization and American expansion.
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.
Spring 2025 bridge seminar applications are due by 5pm on Wednesday, January 8th.
AHIS GU4518 Greek Sanctuaries
I. Mylonopoulos
M 10:10-12, 934 Schermerhorn Hall
In every culture there exist highly specific features, which, in their interplay, create its quintessence. In terms of Greek antiquity, temples are generally considered one of these significant cultural parameters. One easily tends, however, to forget that temples are simply a small part – and not even an essential one – of so-called sacred or religious spaces. It is the sanctuary with its precinct wall, temples, sacred groves, divine images, offerings, and – above all – the altar or altars that constitutes the central and transcendent spatial element of ancient Greek religion. Nevertheless, despite their primarily religious function, Greek sanctuaries were never simply cultic spaces; every single one of them was to various degrees an integral part of its social, political, and economic context. The occasionally problematic interpretive model of the “polis religion” makes it absolutely clear that Greek sanctuaries cannot be studied and properly understood, if they are not examined beyond the constraints of religion. Aim of the seminar is to understand the forms and functions of architecture and dedicatory objects in Greek sanctuaries while analyzing these religious, social and political spaces as the centers in which Greek aesthetics, Greek identity, and ultimately Greek culture were shaped.
Greek Sanctuaries application form
AHIS GU4534 Pastel and the Enlightenment
F. Baumgartner
T 2:10-4, 806 Schermerhorn Hall
This seminar takes as its hypothesis that pastel, an artistic medium whose rise to prominence in eighteenth-century Europe was as spectacular as it was short-lived, offers a particularly productive lens through which to consider some of the fundamental aesthetic, social, and cultural debates that helped shape Enlightenment thought. To test this hypothesis, we will study the work of celebrated pastel practitioners such as Rosalba Carriera, Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Jean-Étienne Liotard, and John Russell, in dialogue with primary sources authored by artists, art critics, art theoreticians, and philosophers, whose thought found provocative responses in the luminous, fragile, and ultimately modern surfaces of pastels. Topics of discussion will include: the triumph of color in the academic discourse; the art market and the debate on luxury; craft in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie; gender, class, and cosmetics; the senses; and new understandings of the self. These discussions will be informed by recent scholarship on eighteenth-century art engaging with questions of materiality, identity, and consumption, among others. The seminar will include at least one class trip to the Metropolitan Museum.
Pastel and the Enlightenment application form
*SSOL registration for this seminar will take place in January
AHIS GU4741 Art and Theory in a Global Context
J. Rajchman
M 4:10-6, 612 Schermerhorn Hall
What is “globalization”? How does it change the way we think about or show art today? What role does film and media play in it? How has critical theory itself assumed new forms in this configuration moving outside post-war Europe and America? How have these processes helped change with the very idea of ‘contemporary art’? What then might a transnational critical theory in art and in thinking look like today or in the 21st century? In this course we will examine this cluster of questions from a number of different angles, starting with new questions about borders, displacements, translations and minorities, and the ways they have cut across and figured in different regions, in Europe or America, as elsewhere. In the course of our investigations, we will look in particular at two areas in which these questions are being raised today -- in Asia and in Africa and its diasporas. The course is thus inter-disciplinary in nature and is open to students in different fields and areas where these issues are now being discussed.
Art and Theory in a Global Context application form
AHIS GU4763 Reading Places and Images in Edo-Period Illustrated Books
M. McKelway
W 4:10-6, 806 Schermerhorn Hall
A colloquium devoted to reading illustrated books from Edo-period Japan. Texts to be covered will include Saga-bon illustrated tales, illustrated guidebooks and gazetteers (meisho zue), painting manuals, and poetry, such as Ehon Tōshi-sen, illustrated by Katsushika Hokusai. Reading and translating passages written in premodern Japanese scripts variously called hentaigana, kuzushiji, and sōsho will be the central activity of the course, but we will also consider such themes as the development of woodblock printing, the book as a format, and how the content both reflects and shapes knowledge of the subjects and themes with which they are concerned. If possible we will examine firsthand printed books in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Freer Gallery, and New York Public Library but will also take advantage of ample hi-res interactive resources available through each of these institutions. Familiarity with Classical Japanese will be useful.
Reading Places and Images in Edo-Period Illustrated Books application form
NEW COURSE:
AHIS GU4856 Cities of Knowledge: Mediterranean Artistic Interactions in the Middle Ages*
A. Shalem
M 2:10-4, 934 Schermerhorn Hall
With the Muslim expansion into the Mediterranean Basin, the capture of the Iberian Peninsula in 711, and, later on, the conquest of Sicily and South Italy by the very beginning of the 9th century, the Christian Latin West came into direct contacts with the new Muslim Empire. In fact, the new Muslim Empire, which ruled the world from Gibraltar to India, with its capital city of Baghdad served from the mid 8th century as the center of trade network which tied under its rule spaces in Africa, Asia and the South of Europe. Moreover, diplomacy between the Carolingian and the Ottonian courts with potent Muslim powers in Baghdad and Cordoba, wars and conflicts in the age of Crusade, and extensive trade ventures between western Europe and the “Orient” in the High Middle Ages brought a new aesthetic language – a sort of artistic lingua franca – that strongly shaped the art of Latin Christian Europe, Byzantium and that of the Muslim world. In this series of lectures/discussions, the artistic interactions between the three continents will be chronologically discussed, while setting our gaze in each lecture in one of the important urban centers of the Mediterranean. In addition, contact zones, such as important trade centers, and particular frontier regions located on the verges of the Christian and Muslim worlds will be highlighted as the major interactive spaces for artistic exchanges and mobility of people and objects.
*Interested students should enroll directly via SSOL
AHIS GU4946 Historicism and Restoration in European Architecture, 1789–1914 (*Travel Seminar)
B. Bergdoll
T 10:10-12, 930 Schermerhorn Hall
The aim of this seminar is to explore the relationship between changing theories of historical change and the practice of architecture in the long nineteenth century from the ideas of progress that animated architectural theory and design in the European Enlightenment to the critiques of historicism and of revivalism in the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century. It is the hypothesis of this seminar that during the period one of the dominant themes of architectural form making was the notion that all understanding is historically conditioned, that an understanding of the past evolution of architectural form was necessary to defining current practices and preparing for the future, increasingly a subject of anxiety in this crucial period industrializing modernity. This relationship between theory and practice will not be considered uniquely in the realm of the history of ideas, however. Rather we will strive to “historicize historicism,” and to examine the political, social and economic stakes and settings of historicist architectural practices primarily in France, Britain, and Germany. Issues of nationalism, colonialism, the discourses of progress, of natural science, and of evolution must necessarily overlap with our joint research. A key theme that runs throughout the course is the relationship between ideas of defining an appropriate historically based style for modern practice and the rise of a culture of restoration (rather than repair) of the newly defined category of the historical monument. As a result the course will be punctuated by a series of pairs that look at a single practitioner’s practices between newly conceived construction and restoration.
Historicism and Restoration in European Architecture, 1789–1914 application form