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This course delves into the rapidly evolving landscape of contemporary art as it intertwines with the advancements in artificial intelligence. Students will explore how artists from Asia and its diaspora are harnessing the capabilities of AI to redefine artistic expressions, appropriate traditional media and aesthetics, and interrogate the boundaries between human creativity and machine intelligence. Drawing upon case studies, hands-on experiments, and critical discussions, students will gain a deeper understanding of the sociocultural implications of AI-infused artistry and its impact on society. This course contextualizes its content in a global narrative, discussing challenging themes and existential inquiries AI has evoked worldwide. Situating AI in the long history of machines, automation, and human engagement with technologies, the class encourages students to think critically about the "transformations" AI made to society. Central to our exploration will be the fundamental questions of what it means to be "human" in a world where machines can mimic, and even surpass, human cognition in certain domains. Drawing parallels between diverse cultures and technologies, we will dissect how human-machine collaborations shape our perceptions of reality, authenticity, emotion, and creativity. Through examination of both Asian philosophies and theories of posthumanism, students will reflect upon the broader philosophical implications of a world where artificial and human intelligence coexist, intertwining and reshaping the very fabric of society, culture, and personal experience. Instructor: Gerui Wang.

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.

TBD

This course explores central topics in aesthetics where aesthetics is understood both in the narrow sense of the philosophy of art and aesthetic judgment, and in a broader sense as it relates to questions of perception, sensation, and various modes of embodied experience. We will engage with both classical and contemporary works in aesthetic theory, while special emphasis will be placed on phenomenological approaches to art and aesthetic experience across a range of media and/or mediums (including painting, sculpture, film, and digital media). PhD students in the Art History program may take the class to fulfill degree requirements in Modern/Contemporary Art or Film & Media Studies, depending on the topic of their seminar paper.

More than a decade ago, in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, the city of Cairo became a theater of social and political upheaval. In Istanbul, the Gezi protests in spring and summer 2013 drew attention to public space and how it is affected by the construction of major government projects. This seminar introduces students to the architectural and urban history of Istanbul and Cairo, with the perspective of current urban transformations as a central point of reference. As one of the major political, cultural, and economic centers of the Islamic world, Cairo has long played a central role in the urban imaginary of the region. Istanbul, has become a global city that connects Europe and the Middle East. Readings will focus on the lack of integration of the historical center with the more recent development of suburban residences, the segregation of the urban landscapes, migration, climate change, and will examine the reactions of architects, writers, filmmakers and street artists.

In the past few years, campus protests and petitions have brought about a remarkable reckoning with systemic, curricular structures of inequality, underscoring the epistemic violence of the privileging of white, western, cisheteropatriarchal intellectual traditions in the academy. This seminar mobilizes multiple approaches and orientations from anti-colonial, postcolonial, and decolonial traditions to study discourses of race, caste, indigeneity, gender, and sexuality across a variety of regional and cultural contexts. We will engage with a range of materials -- written texts, films, visual and performance art. In addition to theoretical and historical engagements with decolonization and decoloniality, we will begin to explore decolonial praxis through somatic workshops (including basket-weaving and dance) and through radical pedagogy and critical university studies frameworks.

For Art History Ph.D. candidates. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.