Spring 2026 Graduate Courses
Confirm course listings on the Directory of Classes
Bridge Lectures
Bridge lectures are open to all undergraduate and graduate students. They do not require an application.
AHIS GU4023 Medieval Art II: Castles, Cathedral, and Court
G. Bryda
M/W 1:10–2:25, 807 Schermerhorn Hall
This advanced lecture course is intended for students with little or no background in medieval art of Latin (“Western”) Europe. It provides a comprehensive introduction to a period spanning roughly one millennium, from Pope Gregory the Great’s defense of art ca. 600 to rising antagonism against it on the eve of the Protestant Reformation. Themes under consideration include Christianity and colonialism, pilgrimage and the cult of saints, archaism versus Gothic modernism, the drama of the liturgy, somatic and affective piety, political ideology against “others,” the development of the winged altarpiece, and pre-Reformation iconophobia. We will survey many aspects of artistic production, from illuminated manuscripts, portable and monumental sculpture, stained glass, sumptuous metalworks, drawings, and reliquaries to the earliest examples of oil paintings and prints. While this course is conceived as a pendant to Medieval Art I: From Late Antiquity to the End of the Byzantine Empire (AHIS GU4021), each can be taken independently of one another. In addition to section meetings, museum visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters, and The Morgan Library are a required component to the course. Discussion section required for undergraduates.
AHIS GU4110 Modern Japanese Architecture
J. Reynolds
M/W 10:10–11:25, 807 Schermerhorn Hall
This course will examine Japanese architecture and urban planning from the mid-19th century to the present. We will address topics such as the establishment of an architectural profession along western lines in the late 19th century, the emergence of a modernist movement in the 1920s, the use of biological metaphors and the romanticization of technology in the theories and designs of the Metabolist Group, and the shifting significance of pre-modern Japanese architectural practices for modern architects. There will be an emphasis on the complex relationship between architectural practice and broader political and social change in Japan.
Bridge Seminars
Bridge seminars are 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 2026 bridge seminar applications are due by 5PM on Wednesday, January 7, 2026.
AHIS GU4558 Making Modern New York
C. Willis
M 12:10–2, 934 Schermerhorn Hall
The aim of this course is to examine the built environment of New York City as it enters – and helps define – the modern era. The scope of our study is the last quarter of the 19th century to today and the strategy to tackle the vast topic will be to highlight significant moments and monuments – for example, the Brooklyn Bridge, Grand Central, Empire State Building, NYCHA housing, the U.N. complex, postwar Park Avenue, the 1964 New York World’s Fair, and Twin Towers – and question “In what ways are they modern?” The lectures and class discussion will explore the idea of modernity using multiple lenses, including technological advances, architectural style and ideology, products and sites of construction and real estate investment, and acts of government planning and social policy. 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.
Making Modern New York - Application Form
AHIS GU4577 Constructs of Solidarity: Architecture and Urban Culture in Latin America, 1950–2010
M. Caldeira
T 12:10–2, 832 Schermerhorn Hall
Since the 1950’s, built environments across Latin America increasingly served as testing grounds for new strategies of urban solidarity in architecture. Writing on the rapid modernization of this period, social theorists in the region have identified solidarity as a distinct marker of Latin American modernity. This seminar examines the role of architecture in this recent history of Latin America with a focus on the cultural forms and social practices that fostered solidarity processes since the mid-twentieth century. Through interdisciplinary and cross-border collaborations, communities, architects, social thinkers, and policy makers combined experimental ideas of aided housing and public spaces with new social concepts in efforts to restructure Latin American cities reshaped by the “great urban explosion.” These social projects in architecture were closely followed by their North American counterparts and soon connected vaster Pan-American territories. Seen primarily as the pursuit of egalitarian and inclusive values in the built environment, we will examine the many forms that these constructs of solidarity in Latin America assumed in architecture during the following decades.
Architecture and Urban Culture in Latin America, 1950–2010 - Application Form
AHIS GU4589 Orientalism, Art, and Architecture: From Representation to Display
I. Guermazi
W 12:10–2, 934 Schermerhorn Hall
This graduate seminar examines the intersections of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) with the study of art, architecture, and visual culture. It asks how the Saidian critique—conceived in a literary framework—has been applied, adapted, and contested in the analysis of visual forms from the eighteenth century to the present. Foregrounding aesthetics as a political language, the course traces how “Orientalist” motifs and styles have been negotiated, re- appropriated, and hybridized, often complicating the very notion of an identifiable “Orientalist” aesthetic. We map sites where Orientalism is expected, where it proves elusive, and where the label itself obscures more than it reveals, while testing the usefulness—and limits—of Orientalism as an analytic for visual and spatial evidence. Along the way, we consider whether “Orientalism” functions as an artistic style; questions of authorship and intention in painterly practice and studio/market contexts; late Ottoman self-representation (e.g., Osman Hamdi Bey); neo-Orientalist urbanism and the redevelopment of Mecca; religion’s place in visual Orientalism (crusade imaginaries, typologies of the “Saracen” and the “Jew,” and “sacred photography”); the weaponization of Orientalist codes in propaganda and heritage destruction; the category of “Islamic art” and its historiography; and the museum—especially the Metropolitan Museum of Art—as a site where collecting, classification, and display mediate knowledge and power. The seminar closes by considering decolonial proposals that refine, extend, or challenge the Saidian paradigm for art and architectural history.
Orientalism, Art, and Architecture: From Representation to Display - Application Form
AHIS GU4592 Bodies and Body Cultures
S. Kaligotla
R 2:10–4, 930 Schermerhorn Hall
Sumptuous attire, aromatics, heady intoxicants, pleasure gardens, water sports, and the games of love and sex. Medieval South Asians marshaled these and other aesthetic practices to fashion the spaces they moved in, show themselves to one another, and make sense of their social worlds. In this seminar, we approach the Indian subcontinent’s extensive body cultures in three related ways. Considering a range of visual media, we explore how bodies were imagined and constituted alongside image theories from early South Asia, portraiture, and the construction of personhood. What physical features characterized the bodies of ascetics, divinities, human beings, mechanical creatures, demi-gods, spirit deities, and even the body of the cosmos? How did certain visual markers communicate emotional states and moral attributes, such as defeat, grief, piety, and purity? Diving into the spaces period bodies occupied, we investigate how somatic cultures forged the accessories and accouterments of material existence. In tandem, we unpack the aesthetic values and theories central to medieval India’s court cultures, from kāma, līla, and alamkāra to rasa theory. Students will be encouraged to research and write on body cultures specific to their own regional or cultural interests.
Bodies and Body Cultures - Application Form
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
Core Graduate Courses
Required courses for first-year students.
AHIS GR5001 MODA Curatorial Colloquium
J. Kraynak
R 2:10–4, 832 Schermerhorn Hall
The Curatorial Colloquium is a required course for first year MODA students. The course introduces students to the history, theory and practice of exhibitions and institutions; histories of curating and recent models of the “curatorial.” Readings for seminar sessions cover key topics and recent debates, including the emergence of the national museum; ideological critiques of the museum; exhibitions and politics; the shifting nature and roles of exhibitions, and the latter’s relationship to new trends in and mediums of artistic practice. As a colloquium, seminar sessions are supplemented by presentations by guest speakers from the curatorial and museum fields, curatorial walk-throughs and other off-site visits to exhibitions and various programs. Please note: some visits require either extended class time to accommodate travel, or attendance out of regular class hours.
The Curatorial Colloquium does not permit enrollment from students who are not in the MODA program.
AHIS GR5003 MA Colloquium: Practices of Art History
F. Baumgartner
R 12:10–2, 806 Schermerhorn Hall
The premise of this course is that art historians and museum professionals work with objects that need to be preserved, researched, interpreted, and displayed, among others things. To engage with these questions, students will work directly with objects from Columbia’s Art Properties Collection, while also learning from leading art professionals invited to share their expertise on topics including conservation, provenance research, curatorial practice, art writing, and public programs. Students will develop a final project in one of the course areas, based on their individual professional and academic interests.
AHIS GR5006 MODA Thesis Prep
J. Kraynak
T 4:10–6, 832 Schermerhorn Hall
The MODA Thesis Prep is a required course for MODA students who plan to commence their thesis in the Fall of 2025. The course will introduce students to the fundamentals of an MA thesis, the research and writing process, and how to devise an appropriate topic for a written/scholarly, or an exhibition-based thesis. The class will also review key methodologies in modern and contemporary art history. At the end of the semester, students will have comprised a detailed topic, a preliminary proposal, and identified a faculty adviser.
Graduate Lectures
Graduate lectures are open to graduate students and do not require an application. Interested undergraduates should contact the instructor for permission to enroll.
AHIS GR6408 Origins of Modern Visual Culture
J. Crary
W 4:10–6, 612 Schermerhorn Hall
This course conducts an archaeology of modern visual culture and attempts to map out some of the pre-history of a contemporary society of the spectacle. A central premise of the course is that modern visual culture is inseparable from Western European hegemony and its expansion in the 17th and 18th centuries. Thus, we will examine how specifically Western constructions of perceptual competence occurred alongside the eradication of pre-modern and traditional cultural forms which had been defined by embodied knowledge and multi-sensory experience. Modernity in Europe and North America becomes synonymous with the positioning of sight as the privileged sense modality. The unstable status of the spectator will be discussed in terms of new strategies of social regulation, self-discipline and the formation of an individual aligned with patterns of capitalist production and accumulation. The modernization of perception will be assessed through analyses of specific art works, optical technologies, forms of display, and cultural practices. Texts by Agamben, Debord, Dussel, Bakhtin, Elias, Lefebvre, Caillois, Federici, Gunning, Foucault, and others. This is a no laptop, no e-device course.
AHIS GR6413 The Real Picasso
R. Krauss
W 2:10–4, 832 Schermerhorn Hall
Picasso’s work is the great kaleidoscope through which 20th-century art passes: from its beginnings in Cubism through which the world is given as though through cut crystal; to the commercial forms of collage; to the presage of surrealist anguish; and, finally, to an untoward neo-classicism. The result of this restless exploration is the invention of multiple formal languages, which need to be deciphered in spite of the perverse literature on the subject which insists on transposing this into the art-historical language of iconography. The literature is rich with the analytic struggles between the great Picasso scholars: William Rubin, Leo Steinberg, and Picasso’s biographer, John Russel. The skirmishes over the “iconography” of cubism extends to the interpretation of the work’s relation to “primitivism.” This controversy has given rise to yet a new vector on Picasso’s work: structuralism and semiotics.
AHIS GR6715 Mural Art and the Ancient Americas
L. Trever
R 4:10–6, 832 Schermerhorn Hall
Most simply defined, a "mural" is an artwork made directly on a wall. Its meaning can extend as well to wall-scaled works. A modern sense of the word often evokes the idea of a public or community-facing work at large scale, often made by a collective. That modern image does not often hold for premodern settings, but what is enduring in deep historical study is the fact of mural art as both social and spatial practice. This graduate lecture course is an exploration of the diversity of mural art made in cities and centers in parts of what is now Latin America during the long autonomous era—from about 2000 BC until the European invasions of the 1520s and 30s. Lectures will present case studies of wall painting, relief sculpture, and occasionally textiles that covered the facades and interiors of public monuments, temples, courtyards, and palaces at sites in Mexico, Peru, Guatemala, and Colombia. A secondary throughline of this course will be how images and traditions of Pre-Columbian mural art have been brought into twentieth- and twenty-first-century muralisms and community practices, both in and beyond Latin America. The course's final assignment allows three options: a research paper, a digital project, or an interpretive project designed to be public-facing. While some background in this field is helpful, there are no formal prerequisites for enrollment.
Graduate Seminars
Open to graduate students. Students must submit an application, linked below each course description, in order to be considered for enrollment. Admission is at the instructor’s discretion.
Spring 2026 graduate seminar applications are due by 5PM on Wednesday, January 7, 2026.
AHIS GR8026 How to Study Clothing?
A. Higonnet
T 10:10–12, 934 Schermerhorn Hall
At a time when courses on clothing draw exceptionally large audiences in the humanities field, and when art museums depend increasingly for audiences and revenue on exhibitions of clothing, accompanying those exhibitions with increasingly ambitious catalogues, it has become pertinent for graduate students in a range of art history sub-fields, as well as in adjacent disciplines such as history, design, or anthropology, to become familiar with the newest options for the study of clothing. Among the 10 most visited exhibitions in the 150-year history of the Met, for instance, 5 have been devoted entirely or in part to clothing. The trend toward the incorporation of clothing in temporary exhibitions nominally devoted to painting, or to a period subject, as well as the installation of clothing in permanent galleries, will also be discussed. This seminar reads recent books or museum catalogues, chosen to offer a representative range of approaches, time periods and issues of rank, gender, race, geography, and politics.
How to Study Clothing? - Application Form
AHIS GR8031 Aesthetics
S. Berger
T 2:10–4, 930 Schermerhorn Hall
What is beautiful? What is sublime? What makes a work of art good? What are artworks for? This course will address these and other questions with a focus on Western art and its evaluation by European thinkers from antiquity to more recent times. We will begin with Plato’s discussions of art in the Ion and The Republic and we will turn next to Aristotle’s defense of art in the Poetics. The course will go on to discuss writings on aesthetics by thinkers such as Aquinas, Vasari, and Bellori. We will then devote considerable attention to eighteenth-century contributions to the history of aesthetics and art criticism, as it was in this period that the term “aesthetics” was first coined and that the “philosophy of art” was invented. Many of the most influential and difficult notions in modern aesthetics, such as genius and originality, developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We will analyze the writings of Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Edmund Burke, Hegel, and others. This course is appropriate for graduate students in art history, visual art, history, philosophy, music, English, and other humanities departments.
AHIS GR8213 Venice and the East: Art, Architecture, and Devotion in the Medieval Mediterranean, ca. 800–1500
H. Klein
T 4:10–6, 934 Schermerhorn Hall
This graduate seminar investigates the art, architecture, and visual culture of the city of Venice and its territorial possessions in the Eastern Mediterranean from the early ninth through the late fifteenth century. Particular emphasis will be placed on the artistic and cultural impact of Venice’s contacts with the Byzantine and Fatimid empires as well as the Crusader kingdoms and principalities in the Levant.
Venice and the East - Application Form
AHIS GR8374 The Rise of Architectural Drawing
M. Waters
R 10:10–12, 934 Schermerhorn Hall
Over the last four decades, the emergence of digital design technologies has fueled debates about the fate of drawing in architectural practice. These discussions often presume a narrow definition of drawing as something executed by hand, typically with a pen on paper. As an architectural medium, however, drawing has historically encompassed a wide range of graphic acts of mark-making that engage a variety of scales, materials, and surfaces, long preceding the proliferation of paper and the authorial figure of the architect. Employing a longue durée approach that embraces a capacious and porous definition of drawing, this seminar seeks to reevaluate the development of architectural drawing in Europe. Rather than beginning in sixteenth-century Italy, as many standard narratives do, it ends there, offering a fundamentally different view of Renaissance practice. The seminar also seeks to deepen our understanding of architectural drawing through direct, object-based study, making use of the rich collections of Avery Library, New York Public Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Cooper Hewitt, as well as the exhibition Gothic by Design: The Dawn of Architectural Draftsmanship (opening April 16) at the Met.
The Rise of Architectural Drawing - Application Form
AHIS GR8496 Art History and the Archive
M. Gamer
W 2:10–4, 934 Schermerhorn Hall
This graduate seminar explores the concept and role of “the archive” in the history and making of art history. How has the discipline defined its archives in the past, and how is it doing so now? How does one identify, navigate, and mine repositories of historical knowledge for the purpose of art historical study? And what challenges or problems—theoretical, methodological, ethical—does such work raise? Our investigation will be grounded in and guided by readings drawn from a range of fields, including queer, feminist, postcolonial, indigenous, and critical race studies. Graduate students from all disciplines are encouraged to apply.
Art History and the Archive - Application Form
AHIS GR8863 Building, Rebuilding, and Moving Temples in Medieval Japan
M. McKelway
T 4:10–6, 806 Schermerhorn Hall
This graduate seminar seeks to address impermanence as a salient feature in the history of Japanese architecture by examining the construction, restoration, and relocation of temples buildings and images in Japan during from the Kamakura through early Edo period (13th-17th c.). We will explore how the inherent tensions between old practices of periodic rebuilding (shikinen sengū) at Ise and other Shintō sanctuaries, on one hand, and the intended durability of Buddhist temples initially built according to continental East Asian standards, on the other, produced malleable architectural and institutional idioms perhaps unique to Japan. Although buildings will provide the primary framework for the course, we will also delve into parallel phenomena in sculpture and paintings created specifically for interior spaces.
Building, Rebuilding, and Moving Temples in Medieval Japan - Application Form
AHIS GR8864 Japanese Art within the Chinese Cultural Sphere
N. Miyazaki
T 2:10–4, 806 Schermerhorn Hall
This course aims to explore the stylistic evolution and unique characteristics of Chinese painting across different periods, comparing them with Japanese works that were influenced by them. We will identify the key differences between Chinese and Japanese art and develop fundamental art historical research skills, such as accurately analyzing and articulating the features of artworks. Through a careful reading of the diverse information embedded in these paintings, students will gain the tools to investigate the historical context of their creation and their reception.
A field trip to the Freer Gallery of Art is planned for the semester.
Japanese Art within the Chinese Cultural Sphere - Application Form