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Art and Power explores a wide range of artworks from the premodern to the contemporary world to reflect on how art has been shaped by structures of inequality and, conversely, how power relations are represented and reinforced by art. Co-taught by two professors to foster a multi-focal perspective, this course asks questions about the relationship of beauty and violence, and the place of art history in capitalism, colonialism, and elitism.

This seminar argues that architeccts are ultimately "placemakers," and questions what that means in the contemporary world. Part I investigates the meaning of the word "place." Additional background for understanding contemporary place making will include a critique of the history of modern place-making through an examination of modern form. Part II examines two traditional notions of place by scale: from "home" to "the city." What elements give these conceptions of space a sense of place? To answer this question, themes such as memory, mapping, and boundary, among others, will be investigated. part III presents challenges to the traditional notions of place discussed in Part II. Topics addressed include: What does it mean to be "out of place"? What sense of place does a nomad have, and how is this represented? What are the "non-places" and how can architects design for these spaces? Part IV addresses the need to re-conceptualize contemporary space. The role of digital and cyber technologies, the construction of locality in a global world, and the in-between places that result from a world in flux are topics discussed in this section of the seminar. Learning goals: Specific goals include clsoe reading of texts, understanding of philosophical thinking and writing, argument under uncertainty, and developed concepts of place, space and architecture.

Opportunity for students to pursue an internship at the Stanford University Archaeology Collections (SUAC) and receive training and experience in museum curation. Curatorial interns conduct focused object research in preparation for upcoming exhibitions to go on view at the Stanford Archaeology Center.

Given the importance of art to all aspects of their lives, the Greeks had reason to respect their artists. Yet potters, painters and even sculptors possessed little social standing. Why did the Greeks value the work of craftsmen but not the men themselves? Why did Herodotus dismiss those who worked with their hands as "mechanics?" What prompted Homer to claim that "there is no greater glory for a man than what he achieves with his own hands," provided that he was throwing a discus and not a vase on a wheel? Painted pottery was essential to the religious and secular lives of the Greeks. Libations to the gods and to the dead required vessels from which to pour them. Economic prosperity depended on the export of wine and oil in durable clay containers. At home, depictions of gods and heroes on vases reinforced Greek values and helped parents to educate their children. Vases depicting Dionysian excess were produced for elite symposia, from which those who potted and painted them were excluded. Sculptors were less lowly but still regarded as "mechanics," with soft bodies and soft minds (Xenophon), "indifferent to higher things" (Plutarch). The seminar addresses such issues as we work to acknowledge our own privilege and biases. Students will read and discuss texts, write response papers and present slide lectures on aspects of the artist's profession.

Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville - so much great poetry and prose came out of the American Civil War. In the visual arts, the same was the case. Winslow Homer painted sharpshooters poised amid leafy branches. Alexander Gardner and Timothy O'Sullivan shockingly photographed the dead at Antietam and Gettysburg. In the theater, the famous actress Charlotte Cushman wowed an audience as Lady Macbeth in a one-night charity performance of Shakespeare's play in Washington, DC in 1863. And beyond these art forms, there was the daily round of life, the experience of soldiers and slaves, of women in Richmond, Washington, and elsewhere - all an art form of its own kind, descended to us in diaries, medals, and uniforms; in cemeteries, fragments of shrapnel found in fields; in the haunting space of Ford's Theatre, where John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln on April 14, 1865. Together, all these places and pictures and poems and stories create a mosaic of life between 1861 and 1865 and beyond - a mosaic that's made to this day, in the war's ongoing political and poetic after-effects, most recently, the defacing and removal of Confederate statues in Richmond and other places in 2020. Focusing on poems, paintings, and photographs, but also on the lived experience of Americans during the war, the course is a personal and poetic journey into the past, told by Alexander Nemerov. More than that, it is a chance for students to reflect on their own personal and emotional connection to the American past.

With their fantastic powers, mutable bodies, multiple identities, complicated histories, and visual dynamism, the American superhero has been a rich vehicle for fantasies (and anxieties) for 80+ years across multiple media: comics, film, animation, TV, games, toys, apparel. This course centers upon the body of the superhero as it incarnates allegories of race, queerness, hybridity, sexuality, gendered stereotypes/fluidity, politics, vigilantism, masculinity, and monstrosity. They also embody a technological history that encompasses industrial, atomic, electronic, bio-genetic, and digital.

The dynamic period of late Ming and early Qing dynasty China, roughly 1500-1800 CE, was marked by political crisis and conquest, but also by China's participation in global systems of trade and knowledge exchanges involving porcelain, illustrated books, garden designs and systems of perspectival representation. Topics will include Innovations in urban centers of painting and print culture, politically inflected painting, and cultural syncretism in court painting and garden design.

This course takes clothing seriously. It examines fashion both as a concept and as a global industry that grew massively during the early modern period (15th-18th centuries), contributing to making the world what it is. Taught by an ex-Vogue journalist, this seminar explores how clothes communicate and subvert ideas of distinction while also examining why many people have overlooked this power over time. In particular, the course focuses on the understudied relationship between fashion, wars, and other geopolitical catastrophes since only disasters provide the necessary ground zero for narratives of change that are fundamental for fashion's constant regeneration.

This course explores how new image technologies transformed culture and society in the 19th century, from the invention of lithography in the 1790s, to the development of photography in the 1830s, to the birth of cinema in the 1890s. We will consider how these and other new media and the makers who wielded them shaped art, politics, science, and entertainment in the period, with a focus on French and British contexts. The course will address themes of reproduction, originality, expression, documentation, realism, and seriality, among others, and will engage closely with the print and photography holdings of the Cantor Arts Center.