Spring 2026 Undergraduate Courses
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 UN2109 Roman Art and Architecture
B. Fowlkes Childs
T/R 11:40–12:55, 612 Schermerhorn Hall
Art and architecture were of paramount importance to Roman public and private life. In this course, we will examine buildings, monuments, bronze and marble sculpture, paintings and mosaics in ancient Rome between the second century B.C.E. and the end of the Empire in the West in the fourth century C.E. Topics to explore include Roman innovations and values, the fascinating relationship between “Greek” and “Roman” art and architecture, and the complex interplay between the material’s artistic, social, political, cultural and economic significance. Our class visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art will provide an outstanding opportunity to analyze and discuss multiple key works of art first-hand.
AHIS UN2315 Northern Renaissance Art
S. Berger
T/R 10:10–11:25, 807 Schermerhorn Hall
This course will explore extraordinary artworks made by Northern European painters, sculptors, weavers, and printmakers from about 1400 to 1590. Sessions will examine outstanding productions by such figures as Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Hieronymus Bosch, Albrecht Dürer, Hans Baldung Grien, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hans Holbein, and Bernard Palissy. The themes we will discuss include the redefinition of the aims and nature of art and the artist, Protestantism and iconophobia, the ascent of the printing press, the dissemination of humanism, familial relations, courtly politics, art and knowledge, technology, the persecution of witches, as well as exploration and the broad-based shift from a European to a global mindset. The course will focus on the patterns of visual culture and how those patterns develop over time. The course is suitable for students from all disciplines and all years.
AHIS UN2317 Renaissance Architecture
M. Waters
T/R 2:40–3:55, 612 Schermerhorn Hall
This course examines the history of architecture between roughly 1400 and 1600 from a European perspective outward. Employing a variety of analytical approaches, it addresses issues related to the Renaissance built environment thematically and through a series of specific case studies. Travelling across a geographically diverse array of locales, we will interrogate the cultural, material, urban, social, and political dimensions of architecture (civic, commercial, industrial, domestic, ecclesiastical and otherwise). Additional topics to be discussed include: antiquity and its reinterpretation; local identity, style, and ornament; development of building typologies; patronage and politics; technology and building practice; religious change and advancements in warfare; the creation and migration of architectural knowledge; role of capitalism and colonialism; class and decorum in domestic design; health and the city; the mobility of people and materials; architectural theory, books, and the culture of print; the media of architectural practice; the growth of cities and towns; the creation of urban space and landscape; architectural responses to ecological and environmental factors; and the changing status of the architect. Discussion section required.
AHIS UN2400 Nineteenth-Century Art in Europe
M. Gamer
M/W 10:10–11:25, 612 Schermerhorn Hall
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 UN2602 Arts of Japan
M. McKelway
M/W 2:40–3:55, 807 Schermerhorn Hall
Survey of Japanese art from the Neolithic through the Edo period, with emphasis on Buddhist art, scroll painting, decorative screens, and wood-block prints.
AHUM UN2604 Arts of China, Japan, and Korea
Y. Li
M/W 11:40–12:55, 832 Schermerhorn Hall
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.
AHIS UN2622 Introduction to East Asian Art: China, Japan, and Korea
J. Xu
M/W 4:10–5:25, 807 Schermerhorn Hall
This lecture course, with two weekly lectures and additional section meetings, surveys the broad outlines of the artistic traditions of China, Korea, and Japan, introducing key concepts, such as multiplicity, impermanence, and transmediality, through a diversity of forms of visual expression in painting, sculpture, bronze, ceramics, lacquer, and architecture. The weekly lectures and discussions will explore interregional relations and influence in order to discover not only the features that make each geographical tradition distinct, but also closely interconnected. Among the key themes to be examined are the archaeology of ancient East Asia, the development of Buddhist art, the arts of landscape and narrative painting, woodblock prints, and finally East Asia after modernity. Discussion section required. CC/GS/SEAS: Partial fulfillment of Global Core Requirement.
AHIS BC1002 Introduction to the History of Art II (Barnard Course)
A. Higonnet
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 BC2901 Contemporary Latin American Art (Barnard Course)
D. Biczel
T/R 11:40–12:55, 504 Diana Center
Focusing on South America, this course examines contemporary art produced in the region known as Latin America and its diasporas, roughly since mid-1940s to the present. The first half of the class attends to two tendencies of the 1940s–1970s, abstraction and conceptualism, lionized through a slew of acclaimed group and solo exhibitions organized across the hemisphere in the last twenty years. We will analyze these two tendencies in the distinct social, political, and economic contexts of their emergence in various “centers” of the continent paying special attention to the ideologies of modernization, progress, and economic development; political upheavals including violent dictatorships and other crises; artists’ relationship to Western European and U.S. cultural centers, and transnational circulation networks; and the role of art institutions. To this end, we will pay special attention to how these trends have been historicized to date, and to what ends. The second half of the class will examine practices since the mid-1970s to the present in a comparative perspective: one, through the lens of identity politics and, two, analyzing the dynamics of the increased global dissemination of works from Latin America and by Latin-American descendants. Several visits to art institutions in NYC will be required as a part of the course.
AHIS BC3625 Rewriting History: Queer-Feminist Inscriptions in Contemporary Art (Barnard Course)
V. Tello
M/W 1:10–2:25, 328 Milbank Hall
Undergraduate Colloquia
Required course for all majors. Open only to AHIS/HTAC/AHVA majors in the Department of Art History and Archaeology. Interested students must sign up using the Spring 2026 Majors Colloquium Sign-Up Form by 5PM on Thursday, November 13, 2025. 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
M. Cole
R 2:10–4, 934 Schermerhorn Hall
Section 002
A. Shalem
M 4:10–6, 934 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 2026 undergraduate seminar applications are due by 5PM on Thursday, November 13, 2025.
AHIS UN3002 Senior Thesis Seminar
B. Joseph
M 2:10–4, 934 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 UN3444 Reflexivity in Art and Film
J. Crary
T 4:10–6, 930 Schermerhorn Hall
This seminar will explore a range of individual works of Western art from the 16th century to late 20th century in which the tension between illusionism and reflexivity is foregrounded. It will focus on well-known paintings and films in which forms of realism and verisimilitude coexist with features that affirm the artificial or fictive nature of the work or which dramatize the material, social and ideological conditions of the work’s construction. Topics will include works by Dürer, Holbein, Velazquez, Watteau, Courbet, Hoch, Vertov, Epstein, Deren, Godard, Varda, Brakhage, Akerman and others. Readings will include texts by Brecht, Barthes, Bazin, Lukacs, Michelson, Wollen, and Mulvey.
Reflexivity in Art and Film - Application Form
AHIS UN3451 Latinx Artists Coast to Coast
K. Jones [Art History], R. Newman [AAADS]
W 4:10–6, 832 Schermerhorn Hall
This course takes a close look at visual art and performative culture by artists of Latin American descent in the U.S. or Latinx, Latina/o art. The artists we will study trace their heritage to Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba, along with other countries in Latin America. We will consider how these wide-ranging and diverse creative expressions come to signify Latinidad while in the process transforming U.S. culture. This means examining colonial era histories that inform the work of contemporary Latinx artists including, but not limited to, histories of race and botanical illustration. We will also look at the histories and visual expressions of Afro-Caribbean and Taíno spiritual practices that have had a great influence on Latinx art production. Course themes include: physical and psychic borders, indigeneity, colonialism and racialization, gender and sexuality, and expanding notions of American art and identity. Class discussions will focus on close examination of theoretical approaches and individual works along with shifting ideas of representation.
Latinx Artists Coast to Coast - Application Form
AHIS UN3481 Contemporary Handicraft in England from Mill to Museum (*Travel Seminar)
J. Bryan-Wilson
T 2:10–4, 934 Schermerhorn Hall
This undergraduate travel seminar examines the resurgence of craft within contemporary art and theory, with a focus on the institutionalization of handicraft in England. With a focus on the multiple legacies of designer William Morris for artists and activists working today, we will read formative theoretical texts regarding questions of process, materiality, skill, bodily effort, domestic labor, and alternative economies of production. In a time when much art is outsourced -- or fabricated by large stables of assistants-- what does it mean when artists return to traditional, and traditionally laborious, methods of handiwork such as knitting, jewelry making, or woodworking? Though our emphasis will be on recent art (including the Black feminist reclamation of quilts, an artist who makes pornographic embroidery, a transvestite potter, queer fiber collectives, do-it-yourself environmental interventions, and anti-capitalist craftivism), we will also examine important historical precedents. Throughout, we will think through how craft is in dialogue with questions of race, nation-building, gendered work, and mass manufacturing. A trip to sites in London and Manchester (such as the textile mills that inspired Marx and Engels and several museum collections) will emphasize the contradictions of "slow" making within the accelerations of capitalism.
*Students who enroll in AHIS UN3481 must attend the trip over spring break in order to earn credit for the course
Contemporary Handicraft in England from Mill to Museum (*Travel Seminar) - Application Form
AHIS UN3617 Imperial Art and Architecture of Beijing (*Travel Seminar)
J. Xu
R 4:10–6, 806 Schermerhorn Hall
Imperial art and architecture in Beijing—the capital of the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties (1271-1911)—have inspired awe and admiration in the Western world since the late 19th century. Despite massive destruction caused by foreign invasions before 1911 and rapid urban development after 1949, a significant portion of historic Beijing has survived, including imperial temples and gardens, princely courtyard residences, alleyway neighborhoods, and, most importantly, the Forbidden City—the magnificent seat of imperial power. Moreover, artifacts and artworks from the palaces of Beijing are now housed in museums across the Western world.
This seminar introduces students to the imperial art and architecture of Beijing through the lens of the reign of two Qing-dynasty rulers: the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1736-1796) and Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908). Their artistic legacies have profoundly shaped modern understanding of the city’s imperial past. Over the spring break, students will travel with the instructor to Beijing to visit sites that were inhabited, commissioned, or even designed by these two rulers.
Through lectures in New York City and a field study in Beijing, the course encourages students to consider questions such as: How did art and architecture serve to reinforce and glorify Qianlong’s rule over the multiethnic Qing empire for much of the 18th century—a reign often celebrated as inclusive, efficient, and prosperous, yet also criticized as despotic, corrupt, and repressive? To what extent did Empress Dowager Cixi’s artistic patronage inherit or challenge conventional imperial traditions? And how does historic Beijing continue to shape the social and political life of its inhabitants—and influence broader national identity—in contemporary China?
The course features a study trip to Beijing, where we will explore imperial palaces, gardens, and temples to engage directly with the monuments discussed in class. Each student will prepare a presentation in advance, taking the lead as a guide during our site visits. These presentations will serve as the foundation for the final research papers.
*Students who enroll in AHIS UN3617 must attend the trip over spring break in order to earn credit for the course
Imperial Art and Architecture of Beijing (*Travel Seminar) - Application Form
AHIS BC3782 Prints in Seventeenth-Century Holland: A Curatorial Seminar (Barnard Course)
N. Orenstein
M 10:10–12, location tbc
Prints in Seventeenth-Century Holland: A Curatorial Seminar - Application Form
AHIS BC3864 Signals: Networks, Publics, and Performance (Barnard Course)
P. Marshall
W 10:10–2, 501 Diana Center
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.
Signals: Networks, Publics, and Performance - Application Form
AHIS BC3688 Tokyo (Barnard Course)
J. Reynolds
T 2:10–4, 502 Diana Center
This seminar will take an interdisciplinary approach to the history of the complex and dynamic city of Tokyo from the mid-19th century to the present. The class will discuss the impact that industrialization and sustained migration have had on the city’s housing and infrastructure and will examine the often equivocal and incomplete urban planning projects that have attempted to address these changes from the Ginza Brick Town of the 1870s, to the reconstruction efforts after the Great Kanto Earthquake. We will examine the impact of and response to natural disasters and war. We will discuss the emergence of so-called “new town” suburban developments since the 1960s and the ways in which these new urban forms reshaped daily life. We will discuss the bucolic prints of the 1910s through the 1930s that obscured the crowding, pollution and political violence and compare them with the more politically engaged prints and journalistic photographs of the era. We will also consider the apocalyptic imagery that is so pervasive in the treatment of Tokyo in post-war film and anime. There are no prerequisites, but coursework in modern art history, urban studies, and modern Japanese history are highly recommended.
Bridge Lectures
Bridge lectures are advanced lectures 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 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 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.