Spring 2027 Courses

Bridge Lectures

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

AHIS GU4027 Architecture in Western Europe from 1066 until 1399
S. Van Liefferinge
day/time in Vergil
This course explores architecture over the period of about 400 years that corresponds roughly to the second half of the Middle Ages in Western Europe. The start of the time frame coincides with the conquest of England in 1066 by the Normans who undertook an ambitious building campaign representative of the important architectural advances in Western Europe during the 11th c. From then on, builders would steadily develop ingenious methods of construction that would lead to the creation of architecture of a bewildering scale and refinement. Conventionally, the buildings are called Romanesque and Gothic, but, as will be presented in this course, the story of this architecture, which culminated in the construction of the great Gothic cathedrals, is complex. The end of the time frame coincides with the appointment of experts in Gothic architecture invited to advise on the construction of Milan Cathedral at the end of the 14th c. The corresponding debates indicate the rising skepticism towards Gothic architecture; the practice of building without architectural treatises - or architectural theory – became obsolete. This course on medieval architecture will explore how with chisels and natural stone, with bricks and manually powered lifting machines, and, in particular, how without three-dimensional schemas or plans, the architects of this period created some of the most spectacular and sophisticated monuments in the history of architecture that are still standing.
 

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 GU4517 Hadrian's Villa: An Imperial Court and Its Spaces
F. de Angelis
day/time in Vergil
This seminar aims to understand Hadrian’s Villa by contextualizing it within the broader network of Roman imperial residences—palaces and villas alike—and by focusing on the relationship between architectural spaces and decoration on the one hand, and social practices and daily routines on the other. Basing on the findings of Columbia’s own excavations, special attention will be devoted to the cultic life at the villa, with particular emphasis on its non-elite inhabitants and the relationship between “high” and “low” forms of religiosity. The scope of the seminar is interdisciplinary: applications of students from all departments are welcome. Familiarity with Greek and Roman art, architecture, and history is strongly recommended.
 

AHIS GU4536 Art and the Interpretation of the French Revolution
F. Baumgartner
day/time in Vergil
This seminar examines the radical transformation of the visual arts during the French Revolution. We will focus on how this moment of upheaval infiltrated artistic representations and cultural practices, along with the methodological consequences of this synergy for studying the period. Revolutionary reality never simply meant political reform; it was people’s entire relationship to the world that was transformed. The arts and, more broadly, the visual played a central role in this process. We will explore three larger themes: the relationship between current events and artistic production, especially in the case of painting and print; Paris as a space for new visual experiences, as a result of outdoor festivals and other public demonstrations; and the portrayal of new actors, such as the sans-culotte and the revolutionary martyr. We will be attentive to the fact that images occupy an ambivalent place in the historiography of the French Revolution: their proliferation makes it impossible to ignore them, yet they often play a marginal role as sources that can effectively help us interpret the period. With this in mind, we will read the work of historians, cultural historians, and art historians reflecting diverse engagements with images, along with primary sources focusing on the lived experience of the Revolution (Louis-Sébastien Mercier and Madame de Staël, among others). We will put a particular emphasis on what can be gained from careful visual analysis, looking at canonical works of art—including those by Jacques-Louis David, whose 2026 Louvre exhibition contributed new insights—as well as lesser-known productions, particularly prints and drawings.
 

AHIS GU4741 Art and Theory in a Global Context
J. Rajchman
day/time in Vergil
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.

Core Graduate Courses

Required courses for first-year students.

AHIS GR5001 MODA Curatorial Colloquium
J. Kraynak
day/time in Vergil
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
day/time in Vergil
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
day/time in Vergil
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
day/time in Vergil
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 GR6414 The Wisdom of Art: Roland Barthes’ Practice of the Sign
R. Krauss
day/time in Vergil
The postwar analysis of contemporary art has jettisoned many of the fields of the discipline of art history: iconography; workshop; style, in favor of a reading based on the semiology of the sign. This has transformed the discourse on contemporary art, especially as that concerns Cubism and Abstraction. The course will focus on semiology and Barthes’ practice of it, with recourse to his major works: Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, S/Z, Mythologies, and Camera Lucida.
 

Graduate Seminars

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

Department of Art History and Archaeology Seminar Application Form
 

AHIS GR8100 Eidolon: The Image in Antiquity
Z. Bahrani
day/time in Vergil
This seminar will look into concepts of the aesthetic, the image and image making in antiquity, in the ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean world by means of ancient works of art, and ancient texts. The class will discuss this material within the context of recent theories of the image and aesthetics in art history, anthropology and philosophy.
 

AHIS GR8205 Medieval Sculpture
G. Bryda
day/time in Vergil
This graduate seminar will take place almost exclusively in museum galleries in New York (and one weekend trip to the Boston area, date TBD), where we will study medieval sculpture through firsthand encounters with artworks. While engaging with classic and contemporary theoretical approaches to the medium, we will prioritize close examination of objects themselves. Starting with sculpture's ambivalent reception and its association with pagan idolatry, the course will explore how the formal, material, and phenomenal qualities inherent to the three-dimensional medium endowed sculpture with a unique ability to convey complicated theological precepts to the masses, elevate the drama of the liturgy, and conjure visionary experiences. Our study will encompass reliquaries, altarpieces, tombs, monumental architectural programs, and liturgical props, among other works.
 

AHIS GR8128 Edo Period Painting
M. McKelway
day/time in Vergil
This seminar will examine visual expressions of sinophilia and eccentricity in Japanese painting of the Edo period. Through an investigation of both original texts and modern studies of such artists as Ike Taiga, Itō Jakuchū, and Nagasawa Rosetsu, the seminar will also explore how such factors as the social background, personal networks, religious faith, and degree of literacy of Edo-period painters found expression in their art. Using Tsuji Nobuo's Kisō no keifu (The Lineage of Eccentricity) and more recent publications in Japanese and western languages as a guide for discussions, the course will concentrate on painters active in mid-late Edo period (late 17th- early 19th century) Kyoto and Edo.
 

AHIS GR8383 The Diagram
S. Berger
day/time in Vergil
How does diagramming make subjects available for intellectual exploration, explanation, and even play? How do diagrams thwart understanding? We might think of diagrams as fixed forms of imaging that passively reflect existing notions, but by exploring recent work on diagramming by historians of art as well as scholars in the philosophy of mind, this course will study the ways in which diagrams can function as creative spaces in which thinkers can contemplate the possibilities of innovative juxtapositions and systems of organizing information.
 

AHIS GR8485 Architecture in and of the Museum
B. Bergdoll
day/time in Vergil
In the last twenty-five years the historical study of museums has ballooned into a veritable separate discipline known as museum studies, which deals with the history of collections, the ideology of the museum as a public institution, and the politics of exhibitions. It is not the intention of this seminar to present an overview of this vast literature but rather to posit a set of questions proper to architectural history that intersect with both the history and historiography of the museum since the mid-18th century, with an overwhelming emphasis on the art (as opposed to the natural history, science, technology, history, or literary) museum.  The seminar intertwines two themes at vastly different scales: the inclusive one of the architectural history of the art museum as a building – including all aspects of interior disposition, display strategies and technologies, lighting, exterior form, and urban spatial disposition – and the more highly specialized one of architecture as a subject matter for collecting and display in the museum context.   Within art history the focus has been largely on the development of both the architectural and institutional structure of the art museum; but the fact that architecture overlaps issues of aesthetics, of history, and of science and technology, invites us to consider both the question of the architecture of the museum and architecture in the museum from a more comprehensive view of the museum type.  In both a set of questions recur: the idea of de-contextualization, of aesthetic experience divorced from use and daily environment, of classification and display, of education and/or vs. entertainment, or cultural hegemony and colonialism. 
 

AHIS GR8762 South–South Constellations in Contemporary Art
A. Alberro
day/time in Vergil
This course proposes that a significant strand of contemporary art and exhibition-making activates the political and epistemic force of the 1955 Bandung Conference and its afterlives in the tricontinental and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) as a living methodology. We will examine how the Bandung Conference’s legacy of anti-colonial struggle, political nonalignment, and Third World solidarity gives rise to a new kind of art and a new kind of exhibition—both occupying an in-between position that refuses the terms of Western modernism and the socially engaged realism promoted by many on the left in the midtwentieth century. Rather than treating Bandung as a fixed historical event, we will approach it as a methodological orientation that produces this third space of practice and display, structuring how artists and curators alike rethink sovereignty and democratic cultural exchange.
 

AHIS GR8814 Drawing the Mosque
A. Shalem [Art History]; Z. Jamaleddine [GSAPP]
day/time in Vergil
Why and what do we draw? What were the tools and materials for drawing sacred architectural complexes in the lands of Islam (and beyond)? How were drawing used? And for which purposes or objectives? This course is design to give a large overview (from the early medieval times till the beginning of the 20th century) of the different historical trajectories of the “Drawing of the Mosque” for different purposes, from the architect’s drawings to the manuscript illustrators’ ones, and from the pilgrims’ memorial drawing of sacred sites to the academic educational, scientific and also ideological ones. The course involved theoretical discussions based on readings and interactions with drawings and artifacts in the varied collections on campus (Butler and Avery libraries), as well as in the city (Metropolitan Museum of Art).
 

AHIS GR8960 Images for Eternity: Pictorial Stones of Early Medieval China
J. Xu
day/time in Vergil
This seminar contributes to a larger project consisting of an exhibition and a catalogue devoted to early medieval Chinese pictorial stones in the collections of American museums. These stone objects, mostly dating to the sixth century CE, were originally panels from sarcophagi and funerary couches. They are carved with a rich variety of motifs, ranging from narrative scenes of filial offspring to apotropaic and mythical creatures. The occupants of these sarcophagi and couches were members of the elite during the Northern Dynasties (386-582 CE)—a period in northern China dominated by states founded by the Xianbei people from the Mongolian steppes—including Xianbei princes, Central Asian immigrants, and Chinese men of letters. Since their acquisition by American museums in the early twentieth century, many of these stones have become highlights of their respective collections and have played a central role in the study of early Chinese art. However, no special exhibition has ever been devoted to these objects, and a comprehensive, high-quality catalogue has yet to be published. In the seminar, by focusing on the exhibition and catalogue, students will develop crucial research and curatorial skills, including object study, archival research, writing catalogue essays and object entries, and exhibition planning. The final assignments of the program will be an exhibition proposal and catalogue essays and entries.
 

CMPM GR8483 Introduction to Comparative Media
Z. Celik Alexander [Art History]; B. Larkin [Anthropology]
day/time in Vergil
Comparative media is an emergent approach intended to draw upon and interrupt canonical ideas in film and media theory. It adopts a comparative approach to media as machines and aesthetic practices by examining contemporary media in relation to the introduction of earlier technologies. The class also extends our focus beyond the U.S. and Europe by examining other cultural locations of media innovation and appropriation. In doing so, it decenters normative assumptions about media and media theory while introducing students to a range of media practices past and present.