ARTHIST 1A:
Decolonizing the Western Canon: Introduction to Art and Architecture from Prehistory to Medieval (CLASSICS 56)
Traditional Art History viewed the Renaissance as its pinnacle; it privileged linear perspective and lifelikeness and measured other traditions against this standard, neglecting art from the Near East, Egypt, the Middle Ages, or Islam. This course will disrupt this colonizing vision by conceptualizing artworks as "methexis" (participation, liveliness, or enactment) as opposed to mimesis (imitation or lifelikeness). We will study the development of the Western canon and its systematic eradication of difference through a renewed understanding of what an artwork is.
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-GlobalCom, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ARTHIST 1B:
How to Look at Art and Why: An Introduction to the History of Western Painting
This course explores the relation of art to life - how and why works of art, even from hundreds of years ago, matter in a person's life. It trains students to find the words to share their thoughts about art with their peers, friends, and family. Some fundamental questions the course considers: How do we get beyond the idea that the study and making of art are elite, 'privileged' activities apart from the real world? How do we develop a sense of discernment - of deciding for ourselves which artists matter, and which don't - without being a snob? How can works of art teach us to feel the wonder of being alive and our deep debt to the past, to the dead? Focusing on painters such as Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Goya, Manet, Morisot, and Charlotte Salomon, this course will pursue these questions with the aim of challenging and encouraging students to develop their own ways of thinking and feeling - generously and ethically - about the past and the present. Sections will focus on original works of art at the Cantor Arts Center. No prerequisites required.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 2:
Asian Arts and Cultures (JAPAN 60)
An exploration of the visual arts of East and South Asia from ancient to modern times, in their social, religious, literary and political contexts. Analysis of major monuments of painting, sculpture and architecture will be organized around themes that include ritual and funerary arts, Buddhist art and architecture across Asia, landscape and narrative painting, culture and authority in court arts, and urban arts in the early modern world.
Terms: Win
| Units: 4-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-GlobalCom, WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 3:
Introduction to World Architecture (CLASSICS 54)
This course offers an expansive and wide-ranging introduction to architecture and urban design from the earliest human constructions to the mid-20th century. The examples range from the Americas to Europe, the Middle East, South and East Asia. The diverse technologies and materialities of building are addressed throughout and an overriding concern is to understand architecture as a sensible manifestation of particular cultures, whether societies or individuals. To the same ends, student writing assignments will involve the analysis of local space, whether a room or a building, and then the built environment at large
Last offered: Spring 2021
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 5:
Art and Power
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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 10AX:
Los Angeles Arts Immersion (ARTSINST 12AX)
In this Arts Intensive, students will learn about the dynamic art histories of Mexican American/Chicanx and Black American artists in Los Angeles. Students will visit museums, galleries, and community centers dedicated to nurturing, showcasing, and archiving the art of people of color, including Black- and Latinx-founded art institutions. Students will meet curators, artists and other art professionals, be given private tours to view historical sites and modern and contemporary art, and will participate in at least one artist-led art-making workshop. Once back at Stanford, students will continue to explore the art histories of Black and Brown peoples through class discussions of primary texts, films, and artist interviews.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 2
ARTHIST 32P:
Place: Making Space Now (CEE 32P)
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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3
ARTHIST 36:
Dangerous Ideas (COMPLIT 36A, EALC 36, ENGLISH 71, ETHICSOC 36X, FRENCH 36, HISTORY 3D, MUSIC 36H, PHIL 36, POLISCI 70, RELIGST 36X, SLAVIC 36, TAPS 36)
Ideas matter. Concepts such as progress, technology, and sex, have inspired social movements, shaped political systems, and dramatically influenced the lives of individuals. Others, like cultural relativism and historical memory, play an important role in contemporary debates in the United States. All of these ideas are contested, and they have a real power to change lives, for better and for worse. In this one-unit class we will examine these "dangerous" ideas. Each week, a faculty member from a different department in the humanities and arts will explore a concept that has shaped human experience across time and space.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 1
| Repeatable
4 times
(up to 4 units total)
ARTHIST 69SI:
Blockchain, NFTs, and the Art World (FILMEDIA 69SI)
The most expensive artwork sold in 2021 was an NFT (non-fungible token) created by Beeple, an artist previously unknown to the art world, but well respected by NFT collectors. NFTs, made possible by blockchain, are radically redefining the art world's commercial boundaries, social dynamics, and even what constitutes an artwork. How do NFTs work? What lends legitimacy to NFT artworks when digital materials can easily be copied via 'Right Click Save'? How does the blockchain alter and reinforce ideas of scarcity, authenticity, and authorship of artwork? How are artists engaging with and reacting to this new technology? How are museums, galleries, and market forces responding? Through guest lectures and discussions, this student-initiated course will provide a foundational understanding of technologies driving the NFT phenomenon and delve into its implications on contemporary artists and the art world.
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 1
ARTHIST 80N:
Looking into Portraits: Identities in Question
This seminar explores multiple aspects of this basically simple visual category - images of particular persons. We look at portraits from diverse eras and cultures, as many as possible in their original media of painting, sculpture, drawings, prints, photographs or videos from the Cantor or other local collections, and others in reproduction. We also read and discuss brief essays and articles by art historians and cultural critics as guides for approaching and understanding portraits. Our primary focus will be on the multiple purposes of portraiture, from commemoration, projection of authority, and self-fashioning to asserting social status, cultural role, and personal identity. Along with the history of art and visual culture studies we will benefit from the approaches and insights of fields such as political and social history, religious studies, anthropology, and neuroscience.
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 97:
Curatorial Internship (ARCHLGY 97A, ARCHLGY 297A)
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.
Terms: Win, Spr
| Units: 1-5
ARTHIST 100N:
The Artist in Ancient Greek Society (CLASSICS 18N)
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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 101:
Introduction to Greek Art I: The Archaic Period (CLASSICS 161)
The class considers the development of Greek art from 1000-480 and poses the question, how Greek was Greek art? In the beginning, as Greece emerges from 200 years of Dark Ages, their art is cautious, conservative and more abstract than life-like, closer to Calder than Michelangelo. While Homer describes the rippling muscles (and egos) of Bronze Age heroes, his fellow painters and sculptors prefer abstraction. This changes in the 7th century, when travel to and trade with the Near East transform Greek culture. What had been an insular society becomes cosmopolitan, enriched by the sophisticated artistic traditions of lands beyond the Aegean "frog pond." Imported Near Eastern bronzes and ivories awaken Greek artists to a wider range of subjects, techniques and ambitions. Later in the century, Greeks in Egypt learn to quarry and carve hard stone from Egyptian masters. Throughout the 6th century, Greek artists absorb what they had borrowed, compete with one another, defy their teachers, test the tolerance of the gods and eventually produce works of art that speak with a Greek accent. By the end of the archaic period, images of gods and mortals bear little trace of alien influence or imprint, yet without the contributions of Egypt and the Near East, Greek art as we know it would have been unthinkable.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 102:
Introduction to Greek Art II: From the Parthenon to Scopas (CLASSICS 162)
The class begins with the art, architecture and political ideals of Periclean Athens, from the emergence of the city as the political and cultural center of Greece in 450 to its defeat in the Peloponnesian War in 404. It then considers how the Athenians (shell-shocked from war and three outbreaks of plague) and the rest of 4th century Greece rebuild their lives and the monuments that define them. Earlier 5th century traditions endure, with subtle changes, in the work of sculptors such as Kephisodotos. Less subtle are the outlook and output of his son Praxiteles. In collaboration with Phryne, his muse and mistress, Praxiteles challenged the canons and constraints of the past with the first female nude in the history of Greek sculpture. His gender-bending gods and men were equally audacious, their shiny surfaces reflecting Plato's discussion of Eros and androgyny. Scopas was also a man of his time, but pursued different interests. Drawn to the interior lives of men and woman, his tormented Trojan War heroes and victims are still scarred by memories of the Peloponnesian War, and a world away from the serene faces of the Parthenon. His Maenad, who has left this world for another, belongs to the same years as Euripides' Bacchae and, at the same time, anticipates the torsion and turbulence of Bernini and the Italian Baroque. The history and visual culture of these years remind us that we are not alone, that the Greeks grappled as we do with the inevitability and consequences of war, disease and inner daemons.
Terms: Win
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 102B:
Coffee, Sugar, and Chocolate: Commodities and Consumption in World History, 1200-1800 (ARTHIST 302B, HISTORY 202B, HISTORY 302B, HISTORY 402B)
Many of the basic commodities that we consider staples of everyday life became part of an increasingly interconnected world of trade, goods, and consumption between 1200 and 1800. This seminar offers an introduction to the material culture of the late medieval and early modern world, with an emphasis on the role of European trade and empires in these developments. We will examine recent work on the circulation, use, and consumption of things, starting with the age of the medieval merchant, and followed by the era of the Columbian exchange in the Americas that was also the world of the Renaissance collector, the Ottoman patron, and the Ming connoisseur. This seminar will explore the material horizons of an increasingly interconnected world, with the rise of the Dutch East India Company and other trading societies, and the emergence of the Atlantic economy. It concludes by exploring classic debates about the "birth" of consumer society in the eighteenth century. How did the meaning of things and people's relationships to them change over these centuries? What can we learn about the past by studying things? Graduate students who wish to take a two-quarter graduate research seminar need to enroll in 402B in fall and 430 in winter.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 4-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-SI
ARTHIST 105B:
Medieval Journeys: Introduction through the Art and Architecture (ARTHIST 305B, DLCL 123)
The course explores the experience and imagination of medieval journeys through an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and skills-based approaches. As a foundations class, this survey of medieval culture engages in particular the art and architecture of the period. The Middle Ages is presented as a network of global economies, fueled by a desire for natural resources, access to luxury goods and holy sites. We will study a large geographical area encompassing the British Isles, Europe, the Mediterranean, Central Asia, India, and East Africa and trace the connectivity of these lands in economic, political, religious, and artistic terms from the fourth to the fourteenth century C.E. The students will have two lectures and one discussion session per week. Depending on the size of the class, it is possible that a graduate student TA will run the discussion session. Our goal is to give a skills-oriented approach to the Middle Ages and to engage students in creative projects that will satisfy either the Ways-Creative Expression requirement or Ways-Engaging Difference. NOTE: for AY 2018-19 HISTORY 115D Europe in the Middle Ages, 300-1500 counts for DLCL 123.
Last offered: Spring 2020
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-GlobalCom, WAY-CE, WAY-EDP
ARTHIST 106:
Byzantine Art and Architecture, 300-1453 C.E. (ARTHIST 306, CLASSICS 171)
This course explores the art and architecture of the Eastern Mediterranean: Constantinople, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch, Damascus, Thessaloniki, and Palermo, 4th-15th centuries. Applying an innovative approach, we will probe questions of phenomenology and aesthetics, focusing our discussion on the performance and appearance of spaces and objects in the changing diurnal light, in the glitter of mosaics and in the mirror reflection and translucency of marble.
Last offered: Spring 2021
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 110:
French Painting from Watteau to Monet (ARTHIST 310, FRENCH 110, FRENCH 310)
This course offers a survey of painting in France from 1700 to around 1900. It introduces major artists, artworks, and the concepts used by contemporary observers and later art historians to make sense of this extraordinarily rich period. Overarching themes discussed in the class will include the dueling legacies of coloristic virtuosity and classical formalism, new ways of representing visual perception, the opposing artistic effects of absorption and theatricality, the rise and fall of official arts institutions, and the participation of artists and artworks in political upheaval and social change. The course ends with an interrogation of the concept of modernity and its emergence out of dialogue and conflict with artists of the past. Students will learn and practice formal analysis of paintings, as well as interpretations stressing historical context.
Last offered: Winter 2019
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 113:
All is Fair... Love and War in Italian Renaissance Art
How are love and war comparable? Why must the creative impulse be accompanied by a destructive one? What do we really mean when we say that an artist "executed" a painting or a photographer "shot" a scene? This course explores the agony and ecstasy involved in the making and viewing of art. We will look at artists like Titian, Michelangelo, Gaudenzio Ferrari, Artemisia Gentileschi, Caravaggio to think about the processes, techniques, and materiality of artworks, their warring political and iconographic ideologies, and their afterlives of conservation and care. Our discussions will expose the porous boundaries between love and war, pleasure and pain, life and death, presence and absence, in order to complicate the glorified legacy of the Italian Renaissance.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 114A:
The Dome: From the Pantheon to the Millennium (ARTHIST 314A, CLASSICS 121, CLASSICS 221)
This course traces the history of the dome over two millennia, from temples to the gods to Temples of the State, and from cosmic archetype to architectural fetish. The narrative interweaves the themes of the dome as image of the Cosmos, religious icon, national landmark, and political monument. It examines the dome not only as a venue for structural innovation, but also metaphysical geometry and transcendent illusionism.nIndividual case studies will familiarize you with major architects from Hadrian to Richard Rogers and historical milestones from the Dome of the Rock to the Capitol in Washington DC. May be repeat for credit.
Last offered: Autumn 2020
| Units: 4-5
| Repeatable
for credit
ARTHIST 115:
The Italian Renaissance, or the Art of Success (ARTHIST 315, ITALIAN 115A, ITALIAN 315A)
How come that, even if you have never set foot in Italy, you have heard of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael? What made them so incredibly famous, back then as well as today? This course examines the shooting of those, and other, artists to fame. It provides in-depth analyses of their innovative drawing practices and the making of masterpieces, taking you through a virtual journey across some of the greatest European and American collections. At the same time, this course also offers a study of the mechanics of success, how opportunities are created and reputations managed, and what role art plays in the construction of class and in today's national politics.
Last offered: Autumn 2021
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 116:
The American Civil War: A Visual and Literary History
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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 1
ARTHIST 116N:
Making Sense of the World: Art, Medicine, and Science in Venice
In 1500 Venice was the place you wanted to be. It wasn't just the capital of the world: it was also its scientific center. This course explores the conversation between the arts and the sciences in Renaissance Venice, and, thanks to remote teaching, it will do so from Venice! Students will discover the oldest anatomical theatre and many of Venice's arresting paintings to reflect on the blurred distinction between art and science, questioning if such a divide makes sense today.
Last offered: Summer 2021
| Units: 3
ARTHIST 118A:
Space, Public Discourse and Revolutionary Practices (CSRE 95I, GLOBAL 145)
This course examines the mediums of public art that have been voices of social change, protestnand expressions of community desire. It will offer a unique glimpse into Iran¿sncontemporary art and visual culture through the investigation of public art practices such asngraffiti and street art, as well as older traditions of Naghali and Iranian Coffeehouse Painting.nnBeginning Iranian case studies will be expanded in comparison with global examples that spannprojects that include Insite (San Diego/Tijuana), Project Row Houses (Houston, TX) the DMZnProject (Korea), Munster Skulpture Projects (Germany), among others. Students will alsonexamine the infrastructural conditions of public art, such as civic, public, and private funding,nrelationships with local communities, and the life of these projects as they move in and out ofnthe artworld. This encompassing view anchors a legacy of Iranian cultural contributions in largerntrajectories of art history, contemporary art, and community arts practice. Guest artists,ncurators, and researchers with site visits included. Students will propose either new public artnproposals, exhibitions, or research to provoke their own ideas while engaging the ever changingnstate of public discourse in these case studies
| Units: 3-4
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 119:
Love at First Sight: Visual Desire, Attraction, and the Pleasures of Art (ARTHIST 319, FRENCH 149, FRENCH 349, ITALIAN 149, ITALIAN 349)
Why do dating sites rely on photographs? Why do we believe that love is above all a visual force? How is pleasure, even erotic pleasure, achieved through looking? While the psychology of impressions offers some answers, this course uncovers the ways poets, songwriters, and especially artists have explored myths and promoted ideas about the coupling of love and seeing. Week by week, we will be reflecting on love as political critique, social disruption, and magical force. And we will do so by examining some of the most iconic works of art, from Dante's writings on lovesickness to Caravaggio's Narcissus, studying the ways that objects have shifted from keepsakes to targets of our cares. While exploring the visual roots and evolutions of what has become one of life's fundamental drives, this course offers a passionate survey of European art from Giotto's kiss to Fragonard's swing that elicits stimulating questions about the sensorial nature of desire and the human struggle to control emotions.
Last offered: Summer 2021
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 120:
Superhero Theory (AMSTUD 120B, ARTHIST 320, FILMEDIA 120, FILMEDIA 320)
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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 127:
Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture in Europe: The Art World en masse
This course will survey the visual arts in Europe over the course of the long nineteenth century, from history painting of the French Revolution to avant-garde experimentation in the years leading up to World War I. This was a period of dramatic social and artistic change that included revolutionary upheavals, growth of urban centers, expansion of empire, technological developments, and the challenging of artistic conventions and institutions. Looking across media, painting, sculpture, print, photography, decorative arts, textiles, magazines, newspapers, and advertising, the course will introduce students to artists, practices, and key aesthetic movements of the nineteenth century, such as Romanticism, Orientalism, and Impressionism. Engaging with themes of labor, class, gender, and colonialism, the course will expand and reframe existing art historical narratives of this period.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 4-5
ARTHIST 133E:
A Global History of Architecture and Engineering (CEE 33E)
An introduction to the history of architecture and engineering, and to basic concepts about how we construct the built environment. This course asks one simple question: what does it mean to "make place" during different moments in history? The class will attempt to answer this question through a series of case studies from around the world and from 3,500 BCE to the present. These buildings and sites will be examined through a global perspective that emphasizes the analysis of form, structure, and theory in their cultural contexts. The class will also establish connections, contrasts, and influences among different architectural movements and cultures.
Last offered: Autumn 2022
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 135:
William Blake: A Literary and Visual Exploration of the Illuminated Poetry
An introduction to the illuminated world of William Blake¿poet, prophet, revolutionary, and visionary artist. The course will address Blake's visual iconography, belief system and ideology, unique mythology, and method of relief etching that allowed him to make every illuminated book a unique work of art, among them, The Songs of Innocence and Experience; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; The Book of Thel; Visions of the Daughters of Albion; The Book of Urizen; America a Prophecy; and Europe a Prophecy.
Last offered: Winter 2018
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 142:
Architecture Since 1900 (CEE 32G)
Art 142 is an introduction to the history of architecture since 1900 and how it has shaped and been shaped by its cultural contexts. The class also investigates the essential relationship between built form and theory during this period.
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 142A:
The Architecture of Thought: Artists and Thinkers Design for Themselves (ARTHIST 342A)
This course investigates houses, hideaways, and studios that artists and thinkers have designed for themselves with varying degrees of self-consciousness, from subconscious images of the self to knowing stages for the contemplative life. Case studies range from antiquity to the present, from the studio-house of Peter Paul Rubens to that of Kurt Schwitters; from the house-museum of Sir John Soane to the Vittoriale of Gabriele D'Annunzio; from the philosophical dwelling of the Emperor Hadrian to that of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Last offered: Spring 2021
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 143A:
American Architecture (AMSTUD 143A, ARTHIST 343A, CEE 32R)
A historically based understanding of what defines American architecture. What makes American architecture American, beginning with indigenous structures of pre-Columbian America. Materials, structure, and form in the changing American context. How these ideas are being transformed in today's globalized world.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 146:
American Dream, American Nightmare: A History of the United States in Art and Literature
Studying the American past, a person could despair or dream or both. In this course, we will move chronologically from the Revolutionary War to the present to consider artists and writers--some famous, some obscure--who've portrayed hope, who've portrayed anger and grief, who've taken it upon themselves to make contact with life as they've experienced and imagined it. Throughout, we will treat art and literature not as an illustration of facts, and not as a solution to social problems, but as a touchstone to who Americans have been and who they might become.
Last offered: Summer 2021
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 147:
Modernism and Modernity (ARTHIST 347)
This course focuses on European and American art and visual culture between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. We will begin and end in Paris, exploring visual expressions of modernism as they were shaped by industrialization and urban renewal, the fantasies and realities of Orientalism and colonial exploitation, changing gender expectations, racial difference, and world war. Encompassing a wide range of media, the course explores modernism as a compelling dream of utopian possibilities challenged by the conditions of social life in the context of diversity and difference.
Last offered: Spring 2021
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 149:
Introduction to Islamic Art (ISLAMST 149C)
This course surveys the art and architecture of societies where Muslims were dominant or where they formed significant minorities from the emergence of Islam until the present. It examines the form and function of architecture and works of art as well as the social, historical and cultural contexts, patterns of use, and evolving meanings attributed to art by the users. The course follows a chronological order, where selected visual materials are treated along chosen themes. Themes include the creation of a distinctive visual culture in the emerging Islamic polity; the development of urban institutions; key architectural types such as the mosque, madrasa, caravanserai, dervish lodge and mausoleum; art objects and the arts of the illustrated book; self-representation; cultural interconnections along trade and pilgrimage routes; westernization and modernization in art and architecture.
Terms: Win
| Units: 4-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 151:
Migration and Diaspora in American Art, 1800-Present (AMSTUD 151, ARTHIST 351, ASNAMST 151D, CSRE 151D)
This lecture course explores American art through the lens of immigration, exile, and diaspora. We will examine a wide range of work by immigrant artists and craftsmen, paying special attention to issues of race and ethnicity, assimilation, displacement, and political turmoil. Artists considered include Emmanuel Leutze, Thomas Cole, Joseph Stella, Chiura Obata, Willem de Kooning, Mona Hatoum, and Julie Mehretu, among many others. How do works of art reflect and help shape cultural and individual imaginaries of home and belonging?
Last offered: Winter 2019
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ARTHIST 152:
The American West (AMSTUD 124A, ENGLISH 124, HISTORY 151, POLISCI 124A)
The American West is characterized by frontier mythology, vast distances, marked aridity, and unique political and economic characteristics. This course integrates several disciplinary perspectives into a comprehensive examination of Western North America: its history, physical geography, climate, literature, art, film, institutions, politics, demography, economy, and continuing policy challenges. Students examine themes fundamental to understanding the region: time, space, water, peoples, and boom and bust cycles.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
ARTHIST 159B:
American Photography Since 1960 (AMSTUD 159B, ARTHIST 359B)
Since the publication of Robert Frank's THE AMERICANS (1958), many distinguished American photographers have emerged, creating a density and power of expression that arguably rivals and even surpasses the extraordinary achievements of earlier photographers in this country. Garry Winogrand's street photography, Diane Arbus's portraits, Ralph Eugene Meatyard's grotesque masks, Danny Lyon's impassioned social outsiders, William Eggleston's deadpan sidewalks and suburban tables, and on to photographers of our moment--these are just a few of the topics the course will cover. Careful attention to individual pictures; careful consideration of what it is to be an artist, and a critic.
Last offered: Spring 2020
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 160:
Censorship in American Art (AMSTUD 167, CSRE 160, FEMGEN 167)
This course examines the art history of censorship in the United States. Paying special attention to the suppression of queer, Black and Latinx visual and performance art, including efforts to vandalize works and defund institutions, students will explore a variety of writing such as news articles, manifestos, letters, protest signs, scholarly texts, and court proceedings. The course approaches censorship as an act to restrict freedom of expression and, however unwittingly, as a mode of provocation and publicity.
Last offered: Autumn 2021
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ARTHIST 162:
Visual Arts Cuba (1959 - 2015) (ARTHIST 362)
The evolution of culture in post-1959 Cuba, with a strong focus on visual arts in all media and film will be introduced in this course. Historical examples will be discussed through lectures, readings and the presentation of audiovisual material. Students will develop their research, critical thinking, and writing through assignments, discussions, and the completion of a final paper. This is a discussion-heavy course, so come prepared to read, write and talk.
Last offered: Spring 2020
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 163:
Queer America (AMSTUD 163, FEMGEN 163)
This class explores queer art, photography and politics in the United States since 1930. Our approach will be grounded in close attention to the history and visual representation of sexual minorities in particular historical moments and social contexts. We will consider the cultural and political effects of World War II, the Cold War, the civil rights movement, psychedelics, hippie culture and sexual liberation, lesbian separatism, the AIDS crisis, and marriage equality.
Last offered: Autumn 2019
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:EC-AmerCul
ARTHIST 164:
History of World Cinema III: Queer Cinemas around the World (ARTHIST 364, CSRE 102C, CSRE 302C, FEMGEN 100C, FEMGEN 300C, FILMEDIA 100C, FILMEDIA 300C, GLOBAL 193, GLOBAL 390, TAPS 100C, TAPS 300C)
Provides an overview of cinema from around the world since 1960, highlighting the cultural, political, and economic forces that have shaped various film movements over the last six decades. Specific topics may vary by term/year/instructor. This term's topic, Queer Cinemas around the World, engages with a range of queer cinematic forms and queer spectatorial practices in different parts of the world, as well as BIPOC media from North America. Through film and video from Kenya, Malaysia, India, The Dominican Republic, China, Brazil, Palestine, Japan, Morocco, the US etc., we will examine varied narratives about trans experience, same-sex desire, LGBTQI2S+ rights, censorship, precarity, and hopefulness. This course will attune us to regional cultural specificities in queer expression and representation, prompting us to move away from hegemonic and homogenizing understandings of queer life and media. Notes: Screenings will be held on Fridays at 1:30PM in Oshman Hall. Screening times will vary slightly from week to week.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ARTHIST 165:
Vincent van Gogh and His World
No artist is more famous than Vincent van Gogh. Yet how well is he known? Perhaps not at all. A victim of cliches and platitudes, his art is rarely seen, or, to put it differently, the power of its call on us is mostly unheeded. What was he searching for and what did he hope to make possible for us to experience along with him? How, to put it differently, did he love us? An adventure beyond the trite and true, an exploration in the powers of naivete, offered by someone without authority, the class will take us deeply into Van Gogh's art and his moment.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 165B:
American Style and the Rhetoric of Fashion (AMSTUD 127, FILMEDIA 165B)
Focus on the visual culture of fashion, especially in an American context. Topics include: the representation of fashion in different visual media (prints, photographs, films, window displays, and digital images); the relationship of fashion to its historical context and American culture; the interplay between fashion and other modes of discourse, in particular art, but also performance, music, economics; and the use of fashion as an expression of social status, identity, and other attributes of the wearer. Texts by Thorstein Veblen, Roland Barthes, Dick Hebdige, and other theorists of fashion.
Last offered: Winter 2020
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 168A:
Black Mirror: A.I.Activism (AMSTUD 106B, CSRE 106A, ENGLISH 106A, SYMSYS 168A)
Lecture/small group course exploring intersections of STEM, arts and humanities scholarship and practice that engages with, and generated by, exponential technologies. Our course explores the social ethical and artistic implications of artificial intelligence systems with an emphasis on aesthetics, civic society and racial justice, including scholarship on decolonial AI, indigenous AI, disability activism AI, feminist AI and the future of work for creative industries.
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ARTHIST 173N:
Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary Art
From Pop to postmodernism, contemporary art in the United States has often taken up issues of race, gender, and sexuality. In this seminar, we will study how artists from the 1960s to the present have drawn upon a wide range of media (including painting, photography, sculpture, performance, video, and the internet) to address racial injustice, gender inequity, and the surveillance of sexuality. Guest speakers will include contemporary artists confronting these issues in our current, highly charged moment.
Last offered: Autumn 2020
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP
ARTHIST 180:
Art, Meditation, and Creation (ARTSINST 280, LIFE 180)
Art and meditation invite us to be fully present in our minds and bodies. This class will give you tools to integrate mind and body as you explore artworks on display at the university's museums and throughout campus. In your engagement with activity-based learning at these venues, you will attend to perception and embodiment in the process of writing and making creative work about art. You will also learn meditation techniques and be exposed to authors who foreground the importance of the body in both writing and making art. For your meditation-centered and research-based final creative project, you will have the option of writing an experimental visual analysis or devising a performance.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
ARTHIST 181:
Pacific Dreams: Art in California
This lecture course will explore the rich and diverse history of art made in California, with special focus on the interchanges between the fine arts and subcultural expression. From the Carleton Watkins' exquisite mammoth plate photographs of Yosemite to the cool sci-fi experiments of Light and Space artists such as James Turrell; from the feminist experiments of Judy Chicago to the black magic of Betye Saar's ritualistic objects, artists have explored California's landscape, history, and diverse population in myriad ways. Topics of study will include art in San Francisco Chinatown; Hollywood and contemporary performance; psychedelia and the counterculture; Afrofuturism; and glam, punk rock, and hardcore in Los Angeles. Special attention will be paid to issues of immigration, race, and ethnicity in California.
Last offered: Spring 2020
| Units: 3-4
ARTHIST 182B:
Cultures in Competition: Arts of Song-Era China (ARTHIST 382B)
The Song dynasty (mid-10th to late 13th c.) was a period of extraordinary diversity and technical accomplishment in Chinese painting, ceramics, calligraphy, architecture and sculpture. Artistic developments emerged within a context of economic dynamism, urban growth, and competition in dynastic, political, cultural and social arenas ¿ as between Chinese and formerly nomadic neighboring regimes, or between reformers and conservatives. This course will consider major themes and topics in Song art history, including innovations in architectural and ceramic technologies; developments in landscape painting and theory; the rise of educated artists; official arts and ideologies of Song, Liao and Jin court regimes; new roles for women as patrons and cultural participants; and Chan and popular Buddhist imagery.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 185:
Arts of China in the Early Modern World, 1550-1800 (ARTHIST 385)
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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ARTHIST 186B:
Asian American Art (AMSTUD 186D, ASNAMST 186B)
This lecture course explores the work of artists, craftspeople, and laborers of Asian descent from 1850-present. Rather than a discrete identity category, we approach 'Asian American' as an expansive, relational term that encompasses heterogenous experiences of racialization and migration. Key themes include the history of immigration and displacement; diasporic geographies; art, activism, and community; feminist/queer perspectives; and interethnic conflict and solidarity. The course coincides with the public launch exhibitions of the Asian American Art Initiative (AAAI) at the Cantor Arts Center and includes regular visits to the museum and Stanford Special Collections.
Last offered: Autumn 2022
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ARTHIST 188:
Imperial Collecting, Patronage, and Taste in China and Japan (ARTHIST 388)
Explores how the imperial courts collected and censored art in China and Japan ca. 1000-1800. The imperial control over art collecting activities shaped the way in which court painters represented the world. The imperial court dictated art creations and occasionally threatened the lives of art collectors through violent art confiscations. Students learn how institutional mechanisms form the underlying force behind art creation and circulation in imperial China and Japan. Students also discover the confluence of art, politics, and cultural transmission as imperial patronage shaped transnational networks.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 188B:
From Shanghai Modern to Global Contemporary: Frontiers of Modern Chinese Art (ARTHIST 388B)
Chinese artistic developments in an era of revolution and modernization, from Shanghai Modern and New National Painting though the politicized art of the Cultural Revolution and post-Mao era re-entry into international arenas.
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ARTHIST 189:
Word Image & Emotion in Medieval Manuscripts
This course explores the sight and sound of medieval manuscripts of the Eastern Roman Empire between the seventh and eleventh centuries. This is a transitional period when challenged by Islam, the portrayal of the divine in figural images underwent a re-evaluation in the Latin West and Greek East. Through relational analysis of word and image, we carve new pathways of understanding of what the icon is and how it mobilizes emotion and shapes identity in differentiation with the other cultures of the book. We will study facsimiles of the major manuscripts and explore their use in the public ritual in Rome, Constantinople, Sinai, Damascus, Baghdad, Cordoba, and Aachen.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 191:
African American Art (AFRICAAM 191B, CSRE 191)
This course explores major art and political movements, such as the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and #BlackLivesMatter, that have informed and were inspired by African American artists. Students will read pivotal texts written by Black artists, historians, philosophers and activists; consider how artists have contended with issues of identity, race, gender, and sexuality; and learn about galleries, collections, and organizations founded to support the field. Attendance on the first day of class is a requirement for enrollment.
Last offered: Spring 2021
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ARTHIST 194:
U.S. Latinx Art (CHILATST 195, CSRE 195)
This course surveys art made by Latinas/os/xs who have lived and worked in the United States since the 1700s, including Chicanos, Nuyoricans, and other Black, Brown, and Indigenous artists. While exploring the diversity of Latinx art, students will consider artists' relationships to identity, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Students will also study how artists have responded to and challenged discrimination, institutional exclusion, and national debates through their work. Attendance on the first day of class is a requirement for enrollment.
Last offered: Winter 2021
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ARTHIST 199:
Close Cinematic Analysis - Caste, Sexuality, and Religion in Indian Media (ASNAMST 108, FEMGEN 104, FILMEDIA 101, FILMEDIA 301, TAPS 101F)
(Formerly FILMSTUD101. If you have taken this course before, please reach out to the instructor) India is the world's largest producer of films in over 20 languages, and Bollywood is often its most visible avatar, especially on US university curricula. This course will introduce you to a range of media from the Indian subcontinent across commercial and experimental films, documentaries, streaming media, and online cultures. We will engage in particular with questions of sexuality, gender, caste, religion, and ethnicity in this postcolonial context and across its diasporas, including in the Caribbean. Given this course's emphasis on close cinematic analysis, we will analyze formal aspects of cinematography, editing, mise-en-scene, and performance, and how these generate spectatorial pleasure, star and fan cultures, and particular modes of representation. This course fulfills the WIM requirement for Film and Media Studies majors. Note: Screenings will be held on Thursdays at 5:30 PM. Screening times will vary from week to week and may range from 90 to 180 minutes.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 203:
Artists, Athletes, Courtesans and Crooks (CLASSICS 163)
The seminar examines a range of topics devoted to the makers of Greek art and artifacts, the men and women who used them in life and the afterlife, and the miscreants - from Lord Elgin to contemporary tomb-looters and dealers - whose deeds have damaged, deracinated and desecrated temples, sculptures and grave goods. Readings include ancient texts in translation, books and articles by classicists and art historians, legal texts and lively page-turners. Students will discuss weekly readings, give brief slide lectures and a final presentation on a topic of their choice, which need not be confined to the ancient Mediterranean.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 204:
Dialogues with the Dead (CLASSICS 127)
This seminar considers the dynamism and resilience of Greek art and culture. The dialogues in question are not with ancient shades in the underworld but with later artists who build on the creative vision (and blind spots) of the past to addressthe issues of their day.Roman philhellenes, Renaissance humanists and Neoclassical loyalists have received much attention. More remains to be explored in the work of modern and contemporary artists such as Romare Bearden, Robert Mapplethorpe, Lawrence Argent, Daniel Arsham, Yinka Shonibare and Xu Zhen.In the Cantor Center and the Rodin Garden, the artist's debts to antiquity run deep; freed from his shadow, Camille Claudel's bronzes reflect the sunlit surfaces of Greek sculpture. On Meyer Green, the capital puns of Xu Zhen reverberate from Shanghai to Athens, from archetypes in the Louvre to galleries around the world, where classical "icons" - subverted, inverted and recharged - engage contemporary eyes. Classical tragedy spoke to war-weary Greeks in the 5th century. Today, Sophocles and Bryan Doerries' Theatre of War Productions help veterans to feel less alone as they return to civilian life bearing the wounds of war, visible and invisible. The vibrant and varied afterlife of Greek art is the subject of the seminar, but we will not ignore the sinister aspects of its legacy: the advertising industry's Botoxic embrace of "Greek perfection," the quest for fitness at any price and the persistence of white, western, ableist ideals of male and female beauty. Darker still is the lethal appropriation of classical art and architecture by genocidal tyrants and racists. These dialogues are deadl
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 205:
Enchanted Images: Medieval Art and Its Sonic Dimension (ARTHIST 405, CLASSICS 113, CLASSICS 313, MUSIC 205, MUSIC 405)
Explores the relationship between chant and images in medieval art. Examples are sourced from both Byzantium and the Latin West including the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, Ste. Foy at Conques, and Santiago de Compostela. We will explore how music sharpens the perception of the spatial, visual programs and liturgical objects.
Last offered: Autumn 2021
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 206:
The Alchemy of Art: Substance and Transformation in Artistic Practice (ARTHIST 406)
This seminar considers materiality and processes of material transformation as core elements of artistic practice and the history of making, largely from Sumer (3rd Millennium BCE) until the Early Modern period (18th Century in the West), but with several modern comparisons. Major points of focus will include pre-modern perceptions of the elemental properties of materials as matter, the reflexive relationship between materials and imagination, and the diverse ways in which societies have associated specific substances with social and cultural values. Humanistic perspectives on such issues are augmented by complementary insights from the physical sciences, and references are made to current ideas regarding material agency, affordances, and the imperfect separability of nature and culture. Indeed, a central question underlying all the readings is how to distinguish natural from synthetic: where does nature end and art begin, or maybe where does nature stop?
Last offered: Winter 2021
| Units: 3
ARTHIST 206A:
Persian Poetry: Text, Space, and Image (ARTHIST 406A, COMPLIT 126, COMPLIT 226)
Featuring several sessions led by distinguished artist Ala Ebtekar, this course traces the nexus of word and image across a millennium of Persian poetry. Our aim is to look at how texts have been represented through images and enacted in public performances, from the tenth century to the present. Topics will range from high to popular culture and include the visual representation of narrative in illuminated manuscripts, the function of calligraphy on sacred and profane buildings, the performance of poetry in mediaeval courts, the use of images in dramatic tellings of the national epic, and the practice of divination by books. What kinds of space are created in these different instances of text and image coming together? What does it mean for our understanding - and experience - of history if verses from the 13th or 14th century are inscribed on the interior of taxi cabs that navigate through the contemporary Iranian city? And how does an ancient text come alive in a performance that seeks to recreate the space of its origin? These are some of the questions that will be explored through an examination of primary sources (both texts and images) as well as theoretical analyses.
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 206B:
Audiovision in the Medieval Cult of Saints
Medieval art is silent in modern times. Often displayed in sterile museum galleries, it is presented without analytical consideration of the intended envelope of sound, chant, prayer, and recitation. Stripped of this aural atmosphere, the objects have lost the power to signify and to elicit affect. This course, in response, restores aspects of the original soundscape to explore the entanglement of chant and image in medieval times. It is the first to engage with the impact of AudioVision in experiencing medieval art in its original historical context, focusing on the golden statue of Ste. Foy at Conques in Auvergne, France, and its eleventh-century public worship. ARTHIST 206B fulfills DLCL 122: Medieval Manuscripts: Digital Methodologies core course for the Medieval Studies Minor. (ARTHIST 406B is graduate-level section of this course.)
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 207:
The Resurrected Body: Animacy in Medieval Art (ARTHIST 407)
This course explores the relationship of spirit and matter in medieval art and architecture, more specifically how the changing appearance of objects and spaces evokes the presence of the metaphysical as glitter, reverberation, and shadow. We will engage objects and monuments across the Mediterranean, studying the way they were staged in order to produce the perception of liveliness. The phenomenology of liveliness will be tied to the development of the theology of resurrection of the body.
Last offered: Autumn 2019
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 207A:
Bodies that Remain: Art and Death in the Middle Ages
This seminar investigates medieval attitudes towards dead bodies through the material culture of death, from the cult of relics, to tomb sculpture, to monumental architecture. The place of death in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities in medieval Europe will be analyzed by putting these works of art in conversation with texts dealing with death as both biological event and powerful symbol.
Last offered: Spring 2021
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 207B:
The Art of Travel: Medieval Journeys to the Unknown (ARTHIST 407B)
In many ways, the reasons that medieval people traveled are not unlike our own: to see new sights, make new connections, and return home to regale others with their exploits. Of course, travel was also a more complicated affair, limited to those who could afford the time and money to leave home. Focusing on three famous medieval travelers the pilgrim Egeria, the businessman Benjamin of Tudela, and the invented traveler John Mandeville this course will explore the visual and cultural landscape of global travel in the premodern age.
Last offered: Autumn 2021
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 207D:
Race and Ethnicity in Premodern Europe (ARTHIST 407D, HISTORY 215B, HISTORY 315B)
How do historians, art historians, and literary historians of premodern Europe shape their research and their teaching around questions of race? How do current debates on race theory shape our perception of the past and deepen historical inquiry? This graduate colloquium focuses on the most recent publications on race in medieval and early modern studies to reflect on such questions while examining the challenges that race studies put on historical definitions, research methodologies, as well as teaching institutions.
Last offered: Winter 2021
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ARTHIST 207E:
Sacred Play: The Material Culture of Christian Festivals (ARTHIST 407E)
The twentieth-century American poet and esotericist Robert Duncan once called for a return of the medieval calendar, citing its many feast days as an antidote to the modern 'weekend.' Indeed, the medieval Christian calendar was built on festivals, multimedia affairs that took place both within and outside of the purview of the Roman Catholic church, involving visual art, theatrical performances, and religious devotion. Festivals also played a vital role in the spread of Roman Catholicism across the world, especially in colonial contexts, where these spectacular events reveal tensions between colonizers and indigenous populations. This seminar examines the material culture of Catholic festivals from antiquity to the present, exploring how these elaborate events created spaces of both conformity and resistance.
Last offered: Winter 2022
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 208:
Hagia Sophia (ARTHIST 408, CLASSICS 173, CLASSICS 273)
This seminar uncovers the aesthetic principles and spiritual operations at work in Hagia Sophia, the church dedicated to Holy Wisdom in Constantinople. Rather than a static and inert structure, the Great Church emerges as a material body that comes to life when the morning or evening light resurrects the glitter of its gold mosaics and when the singing of human voices activates the reverberant and enveloping sound of its vast interior. Drawing on art and architectural history, liturgy, musicology, and acoustics, this course explores the Byzantine paradigm of animation arguing that it is manifested in the visual and sonic mirroring, in the chiastic structure of the psalmody, and in the prosody of the sung poetry. Together these elements orchestrate a multi-sensory experience that has the potential to destabilize the divide between real and oneiric, placing the faithful in a space in between terrestrial and celestial. A short film on aesthetics and samples of Byzantine chant digitally imprinted with the acoustics of Hagia Sophia are developed as integral segments of this research; they offer a chance for the student to transcend the limits of textual analysis and experience the temporal dimension of this process of animation of the inert.
Last offered: Winter 2022
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 208A:
Abject Subjects and Divine Anamorphosis in Byzantine Art (ARTHIST 408A, CLASSICS 119, CLASSICS 319)
Entering the space of the church immediately interpellated the medieval subject, transforming him/her into an abject self, marred by sin. This psychological effect of pricking the conscience was enhanced by the architectural panopticon channeled through the icon of Christ the Judge in the dome confronting the faithful. The texts recited and chanted during the liturgy further helped streamline the process of interpellation: these homilies and chants were structured as a dialogue implicating the sinful self. This course will explore the ecclesiastical space as a divine anamorphosis, an image of God that envelops the subject, transforming him/her into the object of the divine gaze.
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 208B:
The Art of Medieval Spain: Muslims, Christians, Jews (ARTHIST 408B)
The seminar reveals the religious and ethnic hybridity of the art medieval Spain, where the lives, material cultures, and artistic practices of Muslims, Christians, and Jews were more intertwined than any other region of the medieval world. We work thematically rather than strictly chronologically in order to build a model of engagement with medieval art in which the movement of ideas and objects between the three major religions is in itself a focus of study.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP
ARTHIST 208D:
Virginity and Power: The Mother of God and Visions of Empire (ARTHIST 408D)
Mary has been the most influential female figure in Christianity. Her powers stem from her paradoxical virginal motherhood. Victory over nature means indomitable power. She was perceived as the general of the Christian armies and the protector of cities, states, and rulers. Mary inherited and combined the functions of the ancient goddesses of war, victory, and maternity and offered an enduring Christian equivalent. This course explores images, relics, chants, and processions in the public and private expressions of the Marian cult.
Last offered: Autumn 2022
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 209C:
Theories of the Image: Byzantium, Islam and the Latin West (ARTHIST 409, CLASSICS 158, CLASSICS 258, REES 409)
This seminar explores the role of images in the three major powers of the medieval Mediterranean: the Umayyads, the Carolingians, and the Byzantines. For each the definition of an image- sura, imago, or eikon respectively-became an important means of establishing religious identity and a fault-line between distinct cultural traditions. This course troubles the identification of image with figural representation and presents instead a performative paradigm where chant or recitation are treated as images. As such, students will be able to see the connections between medieval image theory and contemporary art practices such as installation.
Last offered: Spring 2021
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 210:
Great Minds of the Italian Renaissance and their World (HISTORY 240C, ITALIAN 140, ITALIAN 240)
What enabled Leonardo da Vinci to excel in over a dozen fields from painting to engineering and to anticipate flight four hundred years before the first aircraft took off? How did Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel Ceiling? What forces and insights led Machiavelli to write "The Prince"? An historical moment and a cultural era, the Italian Renaissance famously saw monumental achievements in literature, art, and architecture, influential developments in science and technology, and the flourishing of multi-talented individuals who contributed profoundly, expertly, and simultaneously to very different fields. In this course on the great thinkers, writers, and achievers of the Italian Renaissance, we will study these "universal geniuses" and their world. Investigating the writings, thought, and lives of such figures as Leonardo da Vinci, Niccol¿ Machiavelli, and Galileo Galilei, we will interrogate historical and contemporary ideas concerning genius, creativity, and the phenomenon of "Renaissance man" known as polymathy. Taught in English. In 2023-24, this course is part of the Humanities Core, a collaborative set of global humanities seminars that brings all of its students and faculty into conversation. On Tuesdays you meet in your own course, and on Thursday all the HumCore seminars in session that quarter meet together: https://humanitiescore.stanford.edu/.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 212:
Desiring Machines: Buildings, Maps, and Clouds (ARTHIST 412, COMPLIT 212A, COMPLIT 312A, ILAC 212A, ILAC 312A)
Focus is on early modern machines as tools for experience and action. In their break with Freudian psychoanalysis, French theorists Deleuze and Guattari speak of the machine as a tool of desire and attraction itself as "machinic" rather than desire for something that is missing. The goal of this course is to equip students with a different way of thinking by exploring a large group of objects from the early modern world (poems, buildings, costumes, maps, nets, and clouds) that help us to approach the period in a new way.
Last offered: Winter 2022
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 212A:
Curing the Institutions with Francesc Tosquelles: Politics and exile, de-alienation and outsider art (DLCL 212, FRENCH 212E, ILAC 212)
In the occupied France of the 1940s, Catalan psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles used culture (amateur cinema, theater, and literature) and politics (self-management, cooperatives, and anti-Stalinist communism) to "cure" the institutions rather than patients. In his work he engaged with avantgarde poets like Paul ¿luard, Antonin Artaud and Tristan Tzara, the post-colonial philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon and philosopher F¿lix Guattari. His project was shaped by radical politics in Catalonia during the 1930s and his own practice of treating the therapeutic community rather than the patients themselves. Tosquelles worked with people outside the medical profession: musicians, writers, lawyers and even prostitutes. These experiences resonate in the book he wrote on poet Gabriel Ferrater and the Spanish Civil War. Taught in English.
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 217:
Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth (ARTHIST 417)
This course examines global origin myths for architecture, for example cosmic symbolism (e.g. the Mandala/dome), and the magic of technologies (e.g. the "petrification" of the wooden hut in permanent architecture). Examples range from Ethiopian rockcut churches, to the Parthenon, to the Ise Grand Shrine, to Fire Temples, and Navajo lodges. The course concludes with the modern mythology of industrialisation and the mechanised building.
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 217B:
Architectural Design Theory (ARTHIST 417B)
This seminar focuses on the key themes, histories, and methods of architectural theory -- a form of architectural practice that establishes the aims and philosophies of architecture. Architectural theory is primarily written, but it also incorporates drawing, photography, film, and other media. nnOne of the distinctive features of modern and contemporary architecture is its pronounced use of theory to articulate its aims. One might argue that modern architecture is modern because of its incorporation of theory. This course focuses on those early-modern, modern, and late-modern writings that have been and remain entangled with contemporary architectural thought and design practice. nnRather than examine the development of modern architectural theory chronologically, it is explored architectural through thematic topics. These themes enable the student to understand how certain architectural theoretical concepts endure, are transformed, and can be furthered through his/her own explorations.nCEE 32B is a crosslisting of ARTHIST 217B/417B.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 218:
Fashion and Other Disasters (ARTHIST 418)
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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 218A:
Michelangelo: Gateway to Early Modern Italy (ARTHIST 418A, HISTORY 237B, HISTORY 337B, ITALIAN 237, ITALIAN 337)
Revered as one of the greatest artists in history, Michelangelo Buonarroti's extraordinarily long and prodigious existence (1475-1564) spanned the Renaissance and the Reformation in Italy. The celebrity artist left behind not only sculptures, paintings, drawings, and architectural designs, but also an abundantly rich and heterogeneous collection of artifacts, including direct and indirect correspondence (approximately 1400 letters), an eclectic assortment of personal notes, documents and contracts, and 302 poems and 41 poetic fragments. This course will explore the life and production of Michelangelo in relation to those of his contemporaries. Using the biography of the artist as a thread, this interdisciplinary course will draw on a range of critical methodologies and approaches to investigate the civilization and culture of Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Course themes will follow key tensions that defined the period and that found expression in Michelangelo: physical-spiritual, classical-Christian, tradition-innovation, individual-collective.
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 219:
Caravaggio, Vermeer, and the Life of Paintings
Focusing on great paintings by seventeenth-century European painters--Caravaggio's Medusa, Vermeer's Girl with the Pearl Earring, Rembrandt's Self-Portraits, and many others--this seminar will consider how and why artists these artists strove to overcome the boundary between representation and the real and make the world "present" to the viewer. Reading authors such as George Steiner and Jacques Derrida, we will develop a definition of the word "presence" and consider the various critiques of it.nnNOTE: This seminar is for undergraduates only.
Last offered: Winter 2020
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 221E:
Peripheral Dreams: The Art and Literature of Miró, Dalí, and other Surrealists in Catalonia (ILAC 281E)
Why was Salvador Dalí fascinated with the architecture of Gaudí? Why did André Breton, Paul Éluard and Federico García Lorca visit Barcelona? Moreover, why did Catalonia become such an important cradle for Surrealism? Why is the (Catalan) landscape such a relevant presence in the work of Miró and Dalí? Through a critical analysis and discussion of selected works of art and literature, this seminar focuses and follows the trajectories of Miró and Dalí, from Barcelona to Paris to New York, and explores the role of their Catalan background as a potentially essential factor in their own contributions to Surrealism and the reception of their work. The course will provide the materials and guide the student to conduct research on a specific work(s) of art, architecture, literature or cinema either by Miró, Dalí or one of his peers in relation to their cultural, social and political context. The course is intended for graduate students in Iberian and Comparative Literature, Art History, Cultural Studies, and related fields. Taught in English by Jordi Falgàs i Casanovas.
Last offered: Autumn 2017
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 222A:
Image Technologies in the 19th Century: Reproductions, Revivals, and Revolutions (ARTHIST 422A)
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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 224:
Architecture as Performance from Antiquity to the Enlightenment (ARTHIST 424)
This seminar examines the nature of architectural representation in the western tradition, from antiquity until the 18th century. It considers the ancient theatre as an icon of representation and the afterlife of the stage building as a model for western architecture, including ephemera. It concludes a distinction between the theatrical and the more recent concept of the theatrical.
Last offered: Autumn 2019
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 226:
New Landscapes of China: Ecologies, Media, Imaginaries (ARTHIST 426)
An exploration of new forms of landscape art in China's contemporary era, 1980s-present. Studies of new media platforms for landscape related imagery, imagined landscapes, and expanded concepts of landscape in an era of heightened ecological consciousness.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 230:
Beauty
Is beauty an extravagance or a necessity? By allowing us to attend to the particular, quotidian and personal, what can beauty teach us about who we are and the kind of histories of art we choose to tell? This reading intensive seminar will draw from contemporary discourses on beauty from Asian American studies, Black studies, performance and queer theory to examine how various artists and thinkers have explored beauty's formal and ethical values. We will trace the shifting valuation, visibility and politicization of beauty and examine how its evolution has informed discourses around minoritized artists, artworks and movements in art history. This course has limited enrollment; if you are interested in enrolling, please email Marci Kwon (mskwon1@stanford.edu) for application instructions.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 4-5
ARTHIST 230B:
Image and Text in the Arts in China (ARTHIST 430B, CHINA 230, CHINA 430)
An examination of many types of interactions between images and texts in Chinese painting. These include poetic lines inscribed on paintings (as response or as a theme given to the artist to paint), paintings that emulate or transform ancient poetic couplets, or illustrate poetic and literary narratives, and calligraphic inscriptions. Attention will be given both to comparative perspectives and to the special aesthetic and intellectual consequences that the conjunction of the literary and visual modes give to Chinese artistic expression. [Undergraduate enrollment with consent of one of the instructors.]
Last offered: Autumn 2022
| Units: 3-5
| Repeatable
4 times
(up to 20 units total)
ARTHIST 231:
Leonardo's World: Science, Technology, and Art (ARTHIST 431, HISTORY 231, HISTORY 331, ITALIAN 231, ITALIAN 331)
Leonardo da Vinci is emblematic of creativity and innovation. His art is iconic, his inventions legendary. His understanding of nature, the human body, and machines made him a scientist and engineer as well as an artist. His fascination with drawing buildings made him an architect, at least on paper. This class explores the historical Leonardo, considering his interests and accomplishments as a product of the society of Renaissance Italy. Why did this world produce a Leonardo? Special attention will be given to interdisciplinary connections between religion, art, science, and technology.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 4-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
ARTHIST 233:
Censorship in American Art (ARTHIST 433, CSRE 233)
This seminar examines the art history of censorship in the United States. Paying special attention to the suppression of queer, Black, and Latinx visual and performance art, including efforts to vandalize works and defund institutions, students will explore a variety of writing such as news articles, manifestos, letters, protest signs, scholarly texts, and court proceedings. The course approaches censorship as an act to restrict freedom of expression and, however unwittingly, as a mode of provocation and publicity.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ARTHIST 238C:
Art and the Market (FRENCH 238)
This course examines the relationship between art and the market, from Renaissance artisans to struggling Impressionist painters to the globalized commercial world of contemporary art and NFTs. Using examples drawn from France, this course explores the relationship between artists and patrons, the changing status of artists in society, patterns of shifting taste, and the effects of museums on making and collecting art. Students will read a mixture of historical texts about art and artists, fictional works depicting the process of artistic creation, and theoretical analyses of the politics embedded in artworks. They will examine individual artworks, as well as the market structures in which such artworks were produced and bought. The course will be taught in English, with the option of readings in French for departmental majors.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
ARTHIST 240:
Millennium Approaches: The Art of the 1990s (ARTHIST 440)
This seminar will examine the art historical legacy of the 1990s, the decade of Bill Clinton, Beavis and Butthead, and Y2K. By placing art in conversation with music, popular culture, and political events, we will explore the dark underbelly of the decade's facade of sunny optimism. Key topics will include the the end of the Cold War, multiculturalism, American interventionism, the AIDS crisis, and early internet culture. Artists covered will include Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Kim Gordon, Mike Kelly, the Young British Artists, Gregg Bordowitz, Lorna Simpson, Zoe Leonard, Byron Kim, and Glenn Ligon. What is the relationship between art, popular culture, and history? How did the 1990s help shape our current culture?
Last offered: Autumn 2019
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 242A:
Art History in the First Person (ARTHIST 442)
This seminar considers the use of the first person voice in a wide range of writings about art, from fiction to criticism to scholarship. Insofar as graduate students have typically been discouraged from using the first person voice in their scholarly work, we will question the benefits and drawbacks of doing so in particular cases. To what ends have different writers put the first person voice and how do they integrate it with others strategies of written expression? How might we distinguish among different forms of speaking from the position of 'I' in art-historical writing? What kind of 'I' is at stake, personal, professional, intellectual, imaginary, or otherwise. Requirements: Students will be required to attend all seminar meetings and participate actively in discussion. They will submit two types of writing assignments: The first, which each student will prepare on a rotating basis, will be a 2-page response to a selected reading that will serve to launch discussion of that text in seminar. The second, longer paper (12-15 pages) will involve original research on a selected object or exhibition and the writing of a paper that adopts the first person voice to some degree or explains its necessary rejection.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 243:
Black Divinities: Race, God, and Nation in the Photography of Deana Lawson (AFRICAAM 143)
In recent years the Brooklyn-based photographer Deana Lawson (born 1979) has become rightly famous for her rapturous yet grounded large-sized photographs of everyday black people--those she meets in her neighborhood, as well as on her travels to Brazil, Jamaica, and the Congo. In this seminar we will look closely at Lawson's photographs, considering how she gains her subjects' trust, how she uses props and locations, how she explores her own feelings and the legacies and possibilities of being black.
Last offered: Autumn 2020
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 243N:
Beyond Words: Early Books and the Design of the Reading Experience
Copiously drawing from the Stanford Archives, this seminar will study the revolutionary design of the first printed books to ask questions about the nature of reading and the commodification of culture. Besides being trained in typography and printing techniques, the students will explore early modern books as multi-layered objects in which texts, images, cutouts, colors, and a multitude of materials constructed new frameworks for attention and fantasies while contributing to the globalization of media.
| Units: 3
ARTHIST 245:
Art, Business & the Law (SIW 245)
This course examines art at the intersection of business and the law from a number of different angles, focusing on how the issues raised by particular case studies, whether legal, ethical and/or financial, impact our understanding of how works of art circulate, are received, evaluated and acquire different meanings in given social contexts. Topics include the design, construction and contested signification of selected war memorials; the rights involved in the display and desecration of the American flag; censorship of sexually charged images; how the value of art is appraised; institutional critique and the art museum, among others.
Last offered: Summer 2021
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 246:
Duchamp Then and Now (ARTHIST 446)
This seminar provides an opportunity to explore not only the familiar though endlessly fascinating episodes of Duchamp's career (Nude Descending a Staircase; the readymade; the Large Glass; the Boite-en-valise; the persona of Rrose Sélavy, his films and exhibition designs, for example), but also works such as Etant Donnés, which has received renewed attention in what is now an extensive recent literature on this work and on Duchamp more generally that will provide a platform for drawing connections with issues, media, critical literatures and artists of students' own choosing.
Last offered: Winter 2022
| Units: 4-5
ARTHIST 247:
Russia in Color (ARTHIST 447, SLAVIC 131, SLAVIC 331)
This course explores the application, evolution, and perception of color in art, art history, literature, and popular culture - in (Soviet) Russia and emigration. Working closely with the Cantor Arts Center collection at Stanford, this course pairs artifacts art with theoretical and cultural readings (media theory, philosophy, literature, science). With a particular focus on Russian and East European objects (including those by Russian icons, Soviet posters, and prints by Wassily Kandinsky and Marc Chagall), the course will include a basic introduction to color terminology, guest lectures on the technologies color printing, the science of color perception, and a hands-on practicum in color mixing/pigmentation. In addition to direct encounters with material and artifact, our course will also seek to better understand the digital experience of art objects in general, and color in particular. No knowledge of Russian is required.
Last offered: Winter 2022
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 249:
Latinx Art: Exhibition History and Theory (ARTHIST 449, CHILATST 249)
This seminar examines exhibitions of art made by Latinas/es/os/xs in the United States, including Chicanos, Nuyoricans, and other Black, Brown, and Indigenous artists. While exploring exhibitions, students will consider curators' and artists' relationships to identity, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Students will also study how practitioners have responded to and challenged discrimination, institutional exclusion, and national debates through their work. The course will include guest curator talks and will result in final projects that comprise either research papers that critically look at exhibitions or proposals for exhibitions of Latinx art.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ARTHIST 250:
Cultural Heritage and Urban Space in Cairo and Istanbul (ARTHIST 455, ISLAMST 250C)
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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 4-5
ARTHIST 250A:
Printing Protest: The Artist as Social Critic (ARTHIST 450A)
This seminar explores the history of print and protest. From books to newspapers to posters, printed materials have generated and circulated political and social messages for centuries. The seminar takes a transhistorical and transnational approach to the history of print to consider its role in shaping public consciousness and producing social change from the fifteenth century to today. Attending to both medium and message, this course will address printing techniques and examine the graphic works of artists such as Francisco Goya, Käthe Kollwitz, Ester Hernandez, and Ebony Patterson in various collections on Stanford's campus. Seminar participants will also contribute to a course-related exhibition at the Cantor Arts Center where they will assist in various aspects of exhibition organization, such as selecting artworks and writing wall labels. This is a unique opportunity to combine the classroom study of art history with hands-on curatorial experience.
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 4-5
ARTHIST 251:
Warhol's World (ARTHIST 451)
Andy Warhol's art has never before been more widely exhibited, published, or licensed for commercial use, product design, and publication than it is today. For all Warhol's promiscuous visibility and global cachet at the current moment, there is much we have yet to learn about his work and the conditions of its making. This course considers the wide world of Warhol's art and life, including his commercial work of the 1950s, Pop art and films of the 1960s, and celebrity portraiture of the 1970s and 80s. Of particular interest throughout will be Warhol's photography as it reflects his interest in wealth and celebrity on the one hand and on the everyday life of everyday people on the other.
Last offered: Autumn 2021
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 252A:
Art and Power: From Royal Spectacle to Revolutionary Ritual (FRENCH 252)
From the Palace of Versailles to grand operas to Jacques-Louis David's portraits of revolutionary martyrs, rarely have the arts been so powerfully mobilized by the State as in early modern France. This course examines how the arts were used from Louis XIV to the Revolution in order to broadcast political authority across Europe. We will also consider the resistance to such attempts to elicit shock-and-awe through artistic patronage. By studying music, architecture, garden design, the visual arts, and theater together, students will gain a new perspective on works of art in their political contexts. But we will also examine the libelous pamphlets and satirical cartoons that turned the monarchy¿s grandeur against itself, ending the course with an examination of the new artistic regime of the French Revolution. The course will be taught in English with the option of French readings for departmental majors.
Last offered: Spring 2018
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
ARTHIST 253:
Aesthetics and Phenomenology (ARTHIST 453, FILMEDIA 253, FILMEDIA 453)
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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 254:
Contemporary Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (ARTHIST 344, ARTSINST 242, EASTASN 242)
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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 256:
What Was Photography? (ARTHIST 456)
Digital imaging has largely replaced darkroom work over the past quarter century, yet analog practices still dominate theories of photography. Working closely with the Capital Group Foundation Collection at the Cantor, this class will explore how those theories relate to vintage photographic prints and whether they are still relevant to the photography being produced today. Students will select one photographer within the Collection and create a set of writings that help contemporary viewers see these mid-century American artists through diverse contemporary perspectives.
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 260A:
Histories of the Museum: Collecting, Preserving, and Exhibiting Art (ARTHIST 460A)
Museums have a history. This course questions how museums have shaped and been shaped by society, from their origins in early modern cabinets of curiosity to their contemporary transformation into virtual galleries and online exhibitions. Incorporating visits to Stanford¿s diverse collections, this seminar considers the histories of museums as public institutions and explores key concepts guiding the acquisition and display of art.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 261:
Black Aliveness (AFRICAAM 261, AMSTUD 261A)
Based on Kevin Quashie's 2021 book "Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being," this seminar will explore moments of possibility, love, and being in works of literature and art. With Quashie as our guide, we will look closely at poems, stories, photographs, and paintings by, among others, Lucille Clifton, Audrey Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, Toi Derricotte, Gordon Parks, and Henry Ossawa Tanner. Featuring intense discussion and emphasis on developing powers of black aliveness in one's own writing.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 264B:
Starstuff: Space and the American Imagination (AMSTUD 143X, FILMEDIA 264B)
Course on the history of twentieth and twenty-first century American images of space and how they shape conceptions of the universe. Covers representations made by scientists and artists, as well as scientific fiction films, TV, and other forms of popular visual culture. Topics will include the importance of aesthetics to understandings of the cosmos; the influence of media and technology on representations; the social, political, and historical context of the images; and the ways representations of space influence notions of American national identity and of cosmic citizenship.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 265A:
Word and Image (ARTHIST 465A, COMPLIT 225, ITALIAN 265, ITALIAN 365)
What impact do images have on our reading of a text? How do words influence our understanding of images or our reading of pictures? What makes a visual interpretation of written words or a verbal rendering of an image successful? These questions will guide our investigation of the manifold connections between words and images in this course on intermediality and the relations and interrelations between writing and art from classical antiquity to the present. Readings and discussions will include such topics as the life and afterlife in word and image of Ovid's "Metamorphoses," Dante's "Divine Comedy," Ludovico Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso," and John Milton's "Paradise Lost;" the writings and creative production of poet-artists Michelangelo Buonarroti, William Blake, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti; innovations in and correspondences between literature and art in the modern period, from symbolism in the nineteenth century through the flourishing of European avant-garde movements in the twentieth century.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 272:
Feminist Avant-Garde Art in Germany and Beyond (1968-2019) (ARTHIST 472, FEMGEN 280, GERMAN 280)
In "Woman's Art: A Manifesto" (1972), the artist, performer and filmmaker Valie Export (1940) proposed the transfer of women's experience into an art context and considered the body "a signal bearer of meaning and communication." In reconceptualizing and displaying "the" body (her body) as an aesthetic sign, Export's groundbreaking work paves the way towards questioning the concepts of a "female aesthetic" and a "male gaze" (L. Mulvey). Beginning with Export, we will discuss art informed by and coalescing with feminism(s): the recent revival of the 1970s in all-women group shows, the dialectic of feminist revolution, the breakdown of stable identities and their representations, point(s) of absorption of commodified femininities. Particular attention will be paid to German-language theory and its medial transfer into art works. For students of German Studies, readings and discussions in German are possible. Online discussions will be organized with contemporary artists and curators. Emphasis will be on: the relationship between (female?) aesthetics and (gender) politics, between private and public spheres, between housework and artwork; conceptions of identity (crises) and corporeality in visual culture and mass media; categories of the artist´s self in relation to the use of media (video, photography, film, collage, installation art). This course will be taught by Professor Elena Zanichelli, a Berlin-based art historian, critic, and curator. She is junior professor for Art History and Aesthetic Theory at IKFK (Institute for Art History - Film History - Art Education) at the University of Bremen.
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 273:
Couture Culture (ARTHIST 473, FRENCH 173, FRENCH 373)
Fashion, art, and representation in Europe and the US between 1860 and today. Beginning with Baudelaire, Impressionism, the rise of the department store and the emergence of haute couture, culminating in the spectacular fashion exhibitions mounted at the Metropolitan and other major art museums in recent years. Students participate actively in class discussion and pursue related research projects.
Last offered: Autumn 2021
| Units: 4-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 273N:
What is Contemporary Art?
This course focuses on the production, criticism, and curating of contemporary art. Through a series of required readings, intensive class discussions, class trips, and first-hand encounters with art objects and exhibitions, we will investigate current understandings of contemporary art. We will also consider the history of contemporary art by looking at how art of the past was understood in its own moment, when it was new and now.
| Units: 3
ARTHIST 274:
Wonder: The Event of Art and Literature (ARTHIST 474, JEWISHST 274)
What falls below, or beyond, rational inquiry? How do we write about the awe we feel in front of certain works of art, in reading lines of poetry or philosophy, or watching a scene in a film without ruining the feeling that drove us to write in the first place? In this course, we will focus on a heterogeneous series of texts, artworks, and physical locations to discuss these questions. Potential topics include The Book of Exodus, the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin and of Elizabeth Bishop, the location of Harriet Tubman's childhood, the poetry and drawings of Else Lasker-Schüler, the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, the art of James Turrell, and the films of Luchino Visconti.
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 274A:
The Art of the Uncanny (ARTHIST 474A)
From murderous dolls to evil doppelgängers, humanoid doubles haunt the Western cultural imagination. Beginning with an in-depth look at the contested concept of the "uncanny", the seminar traces the history of anxiety about non-human humans in the West. An interdisciplinary inquiry, this course draws its sources from art, film, literature, psychology, and science.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
ARTHIST 277:
Colonial Mexico: Images and Power (HISTORY 272, HISTORY 372B, ILAC 214, ILAC 314)
How did images maintain, construct, or transform political power during the conquest and colonization of Mexico? The creation and destruction of visual materials in this period had a complicated relationship with power. The pictographic codices that celebrated the expansive Aztec Empire were created after its fall; and the conquistadors' indigenous allies painted some of the most triumphalist narratives of the conquest. Friars accused indigenous peoples of "idolatry" both to justify the destruction of their images and objects, and to construct legal defenses of their humanity. Colonial authorities frequently claimed Afro-Catholic festivals were seditious. In light of such complexity, official histories that recount the top-down consolidation of royal and viceroyal power are suspiciously simple. What counter-narratives do images and other visual phenomena from this tumultuous period offer? This course introduces students to major texts from Colonial Mexico (royal chronicles, conquistadors' tales, letters, poems, festival accounts) alongside a fascinating trove of images (painted codices with Nahuatl texts, feather mosaics, and indigenous heraldry) and considers how experiences of images and spectacles were transformed into textual accounts ("ekphrasis" or the literary device of description). Taught in Spanish with accommodations for non-ILAC students who are still improving their language skills
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 281:
Chinese Portraiture (ARTHIST 481)
Exploration of recent studies of Chinese portraiture, with a focus on modern and contemporary eras. Portrait practices in treaty port cities; photographic portraits, portraits and modernity; political portraits in public arenas, self-erasure in contemporary portraiture, women's self-portraits, and experimental video portraits will be among the potential topics of discussion.
Last offered: Spring 2020
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 284:
Material Metonymy: Ceramics and Asian America (AMSTUD 284, ARTHIST 484, ASNAMST 284)
This course explores the rich history and contemporary state of ceramic production by Asian American/diasporic makers. It is also about the way history, culture, and emotion are carried by process, technique, and materials. Taught by an art historian and a physicist/ceramist, the course will privilege close examination of works of art at the Cantor Arts Center, and will also include artist studio visits, discussions with curators and conservators, demonstrations of and experimentation with technical processes of studio ceramics. This course is designed for students with interests in making, art history, engineering, intellectual history, and Asian American studies. Limited enrollment with applications due on Wed 8 March 2023; to receive application instructions please email the course instructors.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 284B:
Introduction to Museum Practice (ANTHRO 134D, ARCHLGY 134, ARCHLGY 234)
This is a hands-on museum practicum course open to students of all levels that will culminate in a student-curated exhibit. It entails a survey of the range of museum responsibilities and professions including the purpose, potential, and challenges of curating collections. While based at the Stanford University Archaeology Collections (SUAC), we will visit other campus collections and sites. Students will plan and realize an exhibition at the Stanford Archaeology Center, gaining skills in collections management, research, interpretation, and installation.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
| Repeatable
3 times
(up to 15 units total)
ARTHIST 285:
American Photographs: A Magical History (AMSTUD 285)
What is a "magical" photograph? Who makes one? What is the photograph's relation to the world, to the real? To time and memory and to the viewer? What hold can photographs have on us if they are now everywhere, all the time? Who is the person who could bother to care and look closely at the world and at pictures? If there is such a person, why might she see her role as an ethical one? Starting with the invention of the medium in the 1830s, this course will consider the many distinguished American photographers who have pursued their own answers to these questions: Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, Gordon Parks, Diane Arbus, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, William Eggleston, Francesca Woodman, Laura Aguilar, Deana Lawson, and others. Pursuing the magical, the course offers: a meditation on photography as a medium (its difference from and relation to poetry, literature, and painting); a partial history of America since 1960; a questioning of photography's relation to history; a theory of human intelligence at work - but also passive - before the world; a reflection on how a mechanical medium allows for a personal touch, a personal vision, on the part of master practitioners; yet how even an amateur can make a photograph of haunting power; an attempt to investigate whether or not - if you are quiet and attentive and lucky enough - such a thing as an actual American experience appears before your eyes
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 287:
Pictures of the Floating World: Images from Japanese Popular Culture (ARTHIST 487X, JAPAN 287)
Printed objects produced during the Edo period (1600-1868), including the Ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating world) and lesser-studied genres such as printed books (ehon) and popular broadsheets (kawaraban). How a society constructs itself through images. The borders of the acceptable and censorship; theatricality, spectacle, and slippage; the construction of play, set in conflict against the dominant neo-Confucian ideology of fixed social roles.
Last offered: Winter 2019
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ARTHIST 287A:
The Japanese Tea Ceremony: The History, Aesthetics, and Politics Behind a National Pastime (JAPAN 188, JAPAN 288)
This course on the Japanese tea ceremony ('water for tea') introduces the world of the first medieval tea-masters and follows the transformation of chanoyu into a popular pastime, a performance art, a get-together of art connoisseurs, and a religious path for samurai warriors, merchants, and artists in early-modern Japan. It also explores the metamorphosis of chanoyu under 20th century nationalisms and during the postwar economic boom, with particular attention to issues of patronage, gender, and social class.
Last offered: Autumn 2022
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 288:
Putting it together: The Art of Curating
This course will focus on the production, criticism, and curating of art. Through a series of required readings, intensive class discussions, class trips, and first-hand encounters with art objects, collections, and exhibitions, we will investigate the history and practice of museum and gallery display. Our work together will depart from "Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered" the exhibition currently at the Cantor Arts Center. As the curator of the exhibition, Prof. Meyer will provide behind the scenes knowledge of how such a project is conceived and realized as well as the challenges encountered along the way.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 290:
Curricular Practical Training
CPT course required for international students completing degree.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 1-3
| Repeatable
for credit
ARTHIST 291:
Riot: Visualizing Civil Unrest in the 20th and 21st Centuries (AFRICAAM 291, AFRICAAM 491, ARTHIST 491, CSRE 290, CSRE 390, FILMEDIA 291, FILMEDIA 491)
This seminar explores the visual legacy of civil unrest in the United States. Focusing on the 1965 Watts Rebellion, 1992 Los Angeles Riots, 2014 Ferguson Uprising, and 2020 George Floyd Uprisings students will closely examine photographs, television broadcasts, newspapers, magazines, and film and video representations of unrest. Additionally, students will visually analyze the works of artists who have responded to instances of police brutality and challenged the systemic racism, xenophobia, and anti-Black violence leading to and surrounding these events.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 4-5
ARTHIST 292:
Romancing the Stone: Crystal Media from Babylon to Superman (ARTHIST 492, FRENCH 292, FRENCH 392)
This seminar investigates the importance of rock crystal and its imitations as material, medium, and metaphor from antiquity until modernity. The objects examined include rings, reliquaries, lenses, and the Crystal Aesthetic in early twentieth-century architecture and even Superman's Fortress of Solitude. The texts range from Pliny to Arabic Poetry to Romance Literature to modern manifestos.
Last offered: Spring 2020
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 293:
Black and Brown: American Artists of Color (AFRICAAM 193, CHILATST 293, CSRE 293)
This course explores the art history of African American and Latina/o/x artists in the United States, Latin America & the Caribbean. Focused on particular exhibition and collection histories, students will consider the artistic, social and political conditions that led Black and Brown artists to learn from each other, work together, and unite around issues of race, civil rights, immigration, and justice.
Last offered: Winter 2022
| Units: 4-5
ARTHIST 293A:
Latin American Art and Literature: 100 Years of Modernisms (ILAC 126)
This course will explore the different kinds of modernisms and modernities that Latin American artists and authors have produced from the early twentieth century to the present. Defined as a break with the past and with tradition, the term "modernism" in Latin America has signified specific transformations that speak to the continent¿s long history of colonialism and alleged marginality in relation to Europe and the United States. How have Latin American artistic and literary movements drawn from and broken with European modernisms and avant-gardes? What meanings of "tradition" and "modernity" emerge from their works, especially in their engagement with Indigenous and Afro-Latin American cultures? By examining artworks together with literary texts, we will address their aesthetic dimensions, as well as the socio-historical and political conditions that made them possible. Some movements may include Antropofagia (Brazil), Mexican Muralism, Surrealism, Indigenisms, Afro-Caribbean art and literature, Abstractionism, Neo-Concretism, and Tropicalia. Course content and discussions will be in English. ILAC/Spanish majors should take the course for 5 units and must do the readings and assignments in Spanish.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ARTHIST 293B:
The Art of Punk: Sound, Aesthetics and Performance (ARTHIST 493, CSRE 393)
This seminar explores the sonic and visual aesthetics of punk rock since the 1970s. While studying music, videos, zines, and album covers, students will examine the convergence of art with politics among artists, such as Lydia Lunch and Vaginal Davis, and bands, including Crass and Los Illegals, as well as punk subgenres, like No Wave, Riot Grrrl, and Queercore. Likewise, students will consider how issues of identity, race, gender and sexuality informed artists and their work.
| Units: 4-5
ARTHIST 294:
Writing and the Visual: The Art of Art Writing
This course, Writing the Visual: The Art of Art Writing, will explore the relationship between writing and visual art, which has been theorized as everything from an act of translation and interpretation to one of collaboration or competition. Oscar Wilde even suggested that, "criticism is itself an art." Students will study these varied approaches to art writing and put them into practice by responding to artworks seen in person around the Bay Area, with the goal of publishing a print journal of student writing at the end of the quarter. Through direct engagement with these writerly modes, students will also develop a personal stance on writing about art, championing one form of art writing in a scholarly essay.This year's topic: What is Contemporary Art? Focus on the production, criticism, and curating of contemporary art. Through a series of required readings, intensive class discussions, class trips, and first-hand encounters with art objects and exhibitions, we will investigate current understandings of contemporary art. We will also consider the history of contemporary art by looking at how art of the past was understood in its own moment, when it was new and now.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ARTHIST 295:
Visual Arts Internship
Professional experience in a field related to the Visual Arts for six to ten weeks. Internships may include work for galleries, museums, art centers, and art publications. Students arrange the internship, provide a confirmation letter from the hosting institution, and must receive consent from the faculty coordinator to enroll in units. To supplement the internship students maintain a journal. Evaluations from the student and the supervisor, together with the journal, are submitted at the end of the internship. Restricted to declared majors and minors. May be repeated for credit.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 1-5
| Repeatable
3 times
(up to 15 units total)
Instructors: ;
Barry, F. (PI);
Blessing, P. (PI);
Kwon, M. (PI);
Lee, P. (PI);
Lugli, E. (PI);
Maxmin, J. (PI);
Meyer, R. (PI);
Nemerov, A. (PI);
Pentcheva, B. (PI);
Salseda, R. (PI);
Troy, N. (PI);
Vinograd, R. (PI)
ARTHIST 296:
Junior Seminar: Methods & Historiography of Art History
Historiography and methodology. Through a series of case studies, this course introduces a range of influential critical perspectives in art history as a discipline and a practice. The goal is to stimulate thinking about what it means to explore the history of art today, to expose and examine our assumptions, expectations and predilections as we undertake to learn and write about works of art, their meanings and their status in the world.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
ARTHIST 297:
Honors Thesis Writing
May be repeated for credit.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 1-7
| Repeatable
3 times
(up to 10 units total)
Instructors: ;
Barry, F. (PI);
Blessing, P. (PI);
Kwon, M. (PI);
Lee, P. (PI);
Lugli, E. (PI);
Marrinan, M. (PI);
Maxmin, J. (PI);
Meyer, R. (PI);
Nemerov, A. (PI);
Pentcheva, B. (PI);
Salseda, R. (PI);
Tobin, A. (PI);
Troy, N. (PI);
Vinograd, R. (PI)
ARTHIST 298:
Individual Work: Art History
Prerequisite: student must have taken a course with the instructor and/or completed relevant introductory course(s). Instructor consent and completion of the Independent Study Form are required prior to enrollment. All necessary forms and payment are required by the end of Week 2 of each quarter. Please contact the Undergraduate Coordinator in McMurtry 108 for more information. May be repeated for credit.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 1-5
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Blessing, P. (PI);
Kwon, M. (PI);
Lugli, E. (PI);
Maxmin, J. (PI);
Meyer, R. (PI);
Nemerov, A. (PI);
Pentcheva, B. (PI);
Salseda, R. (PI);
Troy, N. (PI);
Vinograd, R. (PI)
ARTHIST 302B:
Coffee, Sugar, and Chocolate: Commodities and Consumption in World History, 1200-1800 (ARTHIST 102B, HISTORY 202B, HISTORY 302B, HISTORY 402B)
Many of the basic commodities that we consider staples of everyday life became part of an increasingly interconnected world of trade, goods, and consumption between 1200 and 1800. This seminar offers an introduction to the material culture of the late medieval and early modern world, with an emphasis on the role of European trade and empires in these developments. We will examine recent work on the circulation, use, and consumption of things, starting with the age of the medieval merchant, and followed by the era of the Columbian exchange in the Americas that was also the world of the Renaissance collector, the Ottoman patron, and the Ming connoisseur. This seminar will explore the material horizons of an increasingly interconnected world, with the rise of the Dutch East India Company and other trading societies, and the emergence of the Atlantic economy. It concludes by exploring classic debates about the "birth" of consumer society in the eighteenth century. How did the meaning of things and people's relationships to them change over these centuries? What can we learn about the past by studying things? Graduate students who wish to take a two-quarter graduate research seminar need to enroll in 402B in fall and 430 in winter.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 4-5
ARTHIST 305B:
Medieval Journeys: Introduction through the Art and Architecture (ARTHIST 105B, DLCL 123)
The course explores the experience and imagination of medieval journeys through an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and skills-based approaches. As a foundations class, this survey of medieval culture engages in particular the art and architecture of the period. The Middle Ages is presented as a network of global economies, fueled by a desire for natural resources, access to luxury goods and holy sites. We will study a large geographical area encompassing the British Isles, Europe, the Mediterranean, Central Asia, India, and East Africa and trace the connectivity of these lands in economic, political, religious, and artistic terms from the fourth to the fourteenth century C.E. The students will have two lectures and one discussion session per week. Depending on the size of the class, it is possible that a graduate student TA will run the discussion session. Our goal is to give a skills-oriented approach to the Middle Ages and to engage students in creative projects that will satisfy either the Ways-Creative Expression requirement or Ways-Engaging Difference. NOTE: for AY 2018-19 HISTORY 115D Europe in the Middle Ages, 300-1500 counts for DLCL 123.
Last offered: Spring 2020
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 306:
Byzantine Art and Architecture, 300-1453 C.E. (ARTHIST 106, CLASSICS 171)
This course explores the art and architecture of the Eastern Mediterranean: Constantinople, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch, Damascus, Thessaloniki, and Palermo, 4th-15th centuries. Applying an innovative approach, we will probe questions of phenomenology and aesthetics, focusing our discussion on the performance and appearance of spaces and objects in the changing diurnal light, in the glitter of mosaics and in the mirror reflection and translucency of marble.
Last offered: Spring 2021
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 310:
French Painting from Watteau to Monet (ARTHIST 110, FRENCH 110, FRENCH 310)
This course offers a survey of painting in France from 1700 to around 1900. It introduces major artists, artworks, and the concepts used by contemporary observers and later art historians to make sense of this extraordinarily rich period. Overarching themes discussed in the class will include the dueling legacies of coloristic virtuosity and classical formalism, new ways of representing visual perception, the opposing artistic effects of absorption and theatricality, the rise and fall of official arts institutions, and the participation of artists and artworks in political upheaval and social change. The course ends with an interrogation of the concept of modernity and its emergence out of dialogue and conflict with artists of the past. Students will learn and practice formal analysis of paintings, as well as interpretations stressing historical context.
Last offered: Winter 2019
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 314A:
The Dome: From the Pantheon to the Millennium (ARTHIST 114A, CLASSICS 121, CLASSICS 221)
This course traces the history of the dome over two millennia, from temples to the gods to Temples of the State, and from cosmic archetype to architectural fetish. The narrative interweaves the themes of the dome as image of the Cosmos, religious icon, national landmark, and political monument. It examines the dome not only as a venue for structural innovation, but also metaphysical geometry and transcendent illusionism.nIndividual case studies will familiarize you with major architects from Hadrian to Richard Rogers and historical milestones from the Dome of the Rock to the Capitol in Washington DC. May be repeat for credit.
Last offered: Autumn 2020
| Units: 4-5
| Repeatable
for credit
ARTHIST 315:
The Italian Renaissance, or the Art of Success (ARTHIST 115, ITALIAN 115A, ITALIAN 315A)
How come that, even if you have never set foot in Italy, you have heard of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael? What made them so incredibly famous, back then as well as today? This course examines the shooting of those, and other, artists to fame. It provides in-depth analyses of their innovative drawing practices and the making of masterpieces, taking you through a virtual journey across some of the greatest European and American collections. At the same time, this course also offers a study of the mechanics of success, how opportunities are created and reputations managed, and what role art plays in the construction of class and in today's national politics.
Last offered: Autumn 2021
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 319:
Love at First Sight: Visual Desire, Attraction, and the Pleasures of Art (ARTHIST 119, FRENCH 149, FRENCH 349, ITALIAN 149, ITALIAN 349)
Why do dating sites rely on photographs? Why do we believe that love is above all a visual force? How is pleasure, even erotic pleasure, achieved through looking? While the psychology of impressions offers some answers, this course uncovers the ways poets, songwriters, and especially artists have explored myths and promoted ideas about the coupling of love and seeing. Week by week, we will be reflecting on love as political critique, social disruption, and magical force. And we will do so by examining some of the most iconic works of art, from Dante's writings on lovesickness to Caravaggio's Narcissus, studying the ways that objects have shifted from keepsakes to targets of our cares. While exploring the visual roots and evolutions of what has become one of life's fundamental drives, this course offers a passionate survey of European art from Giotto's kiss to Fragonard's swing that elicits stimulating questions about the sensorial nature of desire and the human struggle to control emotions.
Last offered: Summer 2021
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 320:
Superhero Theory (AMSTUD 120B, ARTHIST 120, FILMEDIA 120, FILMEDIA 320)
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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 342A:
The Architecture of Thought: Artists and Thinkers Design for Themselves (ARTHIST 142A)
This course investigates houses, hideaways, and studios that artists and thinkers have designed for themselves with varying degrees of self-consciousness, from subconscious images of the self to knowing stages for the contemplative life. Case studies range from antiquity to the present, from the studio-house of Peter Paul Rubens to that of Kurt Schwitters; from the house-museum of Sir John Soane to the Vittoriale of Gabriele D'Annunzio; from the philosophical dwelling of the Emperor Hadrian to that of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Last offered: Spring 2021
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 343A:
American Architecture (AMSTUD 143A, ARTHIST 143A, CEE 32R)
A historically based understanding of what defines American architecture. What makes American architecture American, beginning with indigenous structures of pre-Columbian America. Materials, structure, and form in the changing American context. How these ideas are being transformed in today's globalized world.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 344:
Contemporary Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (ARTHIST 254, ARTSINST 242, EASTASN 242)
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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 347:
Modernism and Modernity (ARTHIST 147)
This course focuses on European and American art and visual culture between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. We will begin and end in Paris, exploring visual expressions of modernism as they were shaped by industrialization and urban renewal, the fantasies and realities of Orientalism and colonial exploitation, changing gender expectations, racial difference, and world war. Encompassing a wide range of media, the course explores modernism as a compelling dream of utopian possibilities challenged by the conditions of social life in the context of diversity and difference.
Last offered: Spring 2021
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 351:
Migration and Diaspora in American Art, 1800-Present (AMSTUD 151, ARTHIST 151, ASNAMST 151D, CSRE 151D)
This lecture course explores American art through the lens of immigration, exile, and diaspora. We will examine a wide range of work by immigrant artists and craftsmen, paying special attention to issues of race and ethnicity, assimilation, displacement, and political turmoil. Artists considered include Emmanuel Leutze, Thomas Cole, Joseph Stella, Chiura Obata, Willem de Kooning, Mona Hatoum, and Julie Mehretu, among many others. How do works of art reflect and help shape cultural and individual imaginaries of home and belonging?
Last offered: Winter 2019
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 359B:
American Photography Since 1960 (AMSTUD 159B, ARTHIST 159B)
Since the publication of Robert Frank's THE AMERICANS (1958), many distinguished American photographers have emerged, creating a density and power of expression that arguably rivals and even surpasses the extraordinary achievements of earlier photographers in this country. Garry Winogrand's street photography, Diane Arbus's portraits, Ralph Eugene Meatyard's grotesque masks, Danny Lyon's impassioned social outsiders, William Eggleston's deadpan sidewalks and suburban tables, and on to photographers of our moment--these are just a few of the topics the course will cover. Careful attention to individual pictures; careful consideration of what it is to be an artist, and a critic.
Last offered: Spring 2020
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 362:
Visual Arts Cuba (1959 - 2015) (ARTHIST 162)
The evolution of culture in post-1959 Cuba, with a strong focus on visual arts in all media and film will be introduced in this course. Historical examples will be discussed through lectures, readings and the presentation of audiovisual material. Students will develop their research, critical thinking, and writing through assignments, discussions, and the completion of a final paper. This is a discussion-heavy course, so come prepared to read, write and talk.
Last offered: Spring 2020
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 364:
History of World Cinema III: Queer Cinemas around the World (ARTHIST 164, CSRE 102C, CSRE 302C, FEMGEN 100C, FEMGEN 300C, FILMEDIA 100C, FILMEDIA 300C, GLOBAL 193, GLOBAL 390, TAPS 100C, TAPS 300C)
Provides an overview of cinema from around the world since 1960, highlighting the cultural, political, and economic forces that have shaped various film movements over the last six decades. Specific topics may vary by term/year/instructor. This term's topic, Queer Cinemas around the World, engages with a range of queer cinematic forms and queer spectatorial practices in different parts of the world, as well as BIPOC media from North America. Through film and video from Kenya, Malaysia, India, The Dominican Republic, China, Brazil, Palestine, Japan, Morocco, the US etc., we will examine varied narratives about trans experience, same-sex desire, LGBTQI2S+ rights, censorship, precarity, and hopefulness. This course will attune us to regional cultural specificities in queer expression and representation, prompting us to move away from hegemonic and homogenizing understandings of queer life and media. Notes: Screenings will be held on Fridays at 1:30PM in Oshman Hall. Screening times will vary slightly from week to week.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 3-5
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 10 units total)
ARTHIST 366:
Blackness/Gender/Sexuality & Dis-ease: HIV/AIDS Art History (ARTHIST 466A, CSRE 366A, FEMGEN 466A)
Since the emergence of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS), artists have been central to the fight against the state's violence and neglect of those with HIV/AIDS. In this story, however, race and gender are marginalized as frameworks that shape this arts activism. This course takes up black art production that responds to the HIV/AIDS crisis to provide a longer, fuller, and more vital cultural narrative. By centering blackness in this story, we can ask how does dis-ease,referencing both infection and an aesthetically and structurally anxious relation to death,shape black art practices and lives? How have race and gender been used to conceptualize disease? And how do filmmakers, abstract painters, photographers, and poets help us to better comprehend blackness, gender, and sexuality under the threat of disease? After providing an overview of the relation between blackness, sexuality, and dis-ease and the emergence of the AIDS crisis, we will consider canonical works from the height of the crisis produced by filmmaker Marlon Riggs and poet Essex Hemphill. From there, we will move to themes of black art and mourning, black women's under cited activism, the controversial use of documentary photography in the crisis, black masculinity, diasporic responses, and the urgency and erasure of the ongoing crisis. Each week we will focus on a cultural text (film, painting, photograph, poem), a reading to provide historical context, and critical theories that will illuminate the art works' formal qualities and importance for our now.
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 382B:
Cultures in Competition: Arts of Song-Era China (ARTHIST 182B)
The Song dynasty (mid-10th to late 13th c.) was a period of extraordinary diversity and technical accomplishment in Chinese painting, ceramics, calligraphy, architecture and sculpture. Artistic developments emerged within a context of economic dynamism, urban growth, and competition in dynastic, political, cultural and social arenas ¿ as between Chinese and formerly nomadic neighboring regimes, or between reformers and conservatives. This course will consider major themes and topics in Song art history, including innovations in architectural and ceramic technologies; developments in landscape painting and theory; the rise of educated artists; official arts and ideologies of Song, Liao and Jin court regimes; new roles for women as patrons and cultural participants; and Chan and popular Buddhist imagery.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 385:
Arts of China in the Early Modern World, 1550-1800 (ARTHIST 185)
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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 388:
Imperial Collecting, Patronage, and Taste in China and Japan (ARTHIST 188)
Explores how the imperial courts collected and censored art in China and Japan ca. 1000-1800. The imperial control over art collecting activities shaped the way in which court painters represented the world. The imperial court dictated art creations and occasionally threatened the lives of art collectors through violent art confiscations. Students learn how institutional mechanisms form the underlying force behind art creation and circulation in imperial China and Japan. Students also discover the confluence of art, politics, and cultural transmission as imperial patronage shaped transnational networks.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 388B:
From Shanghai Modern to Global Contemporary: Frontiers of Modern Chinese Art (ARTHIST 188B)
Chinese artistic developments in an era of revolution and modernization, from Shanghai Modern and New National Painting though the politicized art of the Cultural Revolution and post-Mao era re-entry into international arenas.
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 401:
World War Two: Place, Loss, History (GERMAN 343)
A consideration of how the Second World War still goes on today in the form of haunted absences and vivid representations. Studying literature and art in detail, the seminar will center on some of the places where those absences and representations gather: Portbou, Pearl Harbor, Auschwitz, Guadalcanal, London, Berlin, Hamburg, Rome, Omaha Beach, Peleliu, Monte Cassino, Hollywood. Writers and artists include: James Jones, Georges Didi-Huberman, Walter Benjamin, Eduardo Cadava, W.G. Sebald, Rachel Whiteread, Ingeborg Bachman, Wis¿awa Szymborska, Eugene Sledge, Hans Erich Nossack, Jorie Graham, Gerhard Richter, Dani Karavan, Tom Lea, W. Eugene Smith, Val Lewton, and Terrence Malick.
Last offered: Winter 2021
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 405:
Enchanted Images: Medieval Art and Its Sonic Dimension (ARTHIST 205, CLASSICS 113, CLASSICS 313, MUSIC 205, MUSIC 405)
Explores the relationship between chant and images in medieval art. Examples are sourced from both Byzantium and the Latin West including the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, Ste. Foy at Conques, and Santiago de Compostela. We will explore how music sharpens the perception of the spatial, visual programs and liturgical objects.
Last offered: Autumn 2021
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 405A:
Graduate Pedagogy
This course is designed for graduate students in Art History and Film Studies preparing to work as teaching assistants in the Department of Art and Art History. The seminar will focus on a range of theoretical and practical concerns pertaining to the successful conceptualization, organization, and execution of class lectures and discussion sections. Students will be exposed to a variety of perspectives and strategies related to quality teaching at the college level.
Last offered: Autumn 2022
| Units: 2
ARTHIST 406:
The Alchemy of Art: Substance and Transformation in Artistic Practice (ARTHIST 206)
This seminar considers materiality and processes of material transformation as core elements of artistic practice and the history of making, largely from Sumer (3rd Millennium BCE) until the Early Modern period (18th Century in the West), but with several modern comparisons. Major points of focus will include pre-modern perceptions of the elemental properties of materials as matter, the reflexive relationship between materials and imagination, and the diverse ways in which societies have associated specific substances with social and cultural values. Humanistic perspectives on such issues are augmented by complementary insights from the physical sciences, and references are made to current ideas regarding material agency, affordances, and the imperfect separability of nature and culture. Indeed, a central question underlying all the readings is how to distinguish natural from synthetic: where does nature end and art begin, or maybe where does nature stop?
Last offered: Winter 2021
| Units: 3
ARTHIST 406A:
Persian Poetry: Text, Space, and Image (ARTHIST 206A, COMPLIT 126, COMPLIT 226)
Featuring several sessions led by distinguished artist Ala Ebtekar, this course traces the nexus of word and image across a millennium of Persian poetry. Our aim is to look at how texts have been represented through images and enacted in public performances, from the tenth century to the present. Topics will range from high to popular culture and include the visual representation of narrative in illuminated manuscripts, the function of calligraphy on sacred and profane buildings, the performance of poetry in mediaeval courts, the use of images in dramatic tellings of the national epic, and the practice of divination by books. What kinds of space are created in these different instances of text and image coming together? What does it mean for our understanding - and experience - of history if verses from the 13th or 14th century are inscribed on the interior of taxi cabs that navigate through the contemporary Iranian city? And how does an ancient text come alive in a performance that seeks to recreate the space of its origin? These are some of the questions that will be explored through an examination of primary sources (both texts and images) as well as theoretical analyses.
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 406B:
Audiovision in the Medieval Cult of Saints
Medieval art is silent in modern times. Often displayed in sterile museum galleries, it is presented without analytical consideration of the intended envelope of sound, chant, prayer, and recitation. Stripped of this aural atmosphere, the objects have lost the power to signify and to elicit affect. This course, in response, restores aspects of the original soundscape to explore the entanglement of chant and image in medieval times. It is the first to engage with the impact of AudioVision in experiencing medieval art in its original historical context, focusing on the golden statue of Ste. Foy at Conques in Auvergne, France, and its eleventh-century public worship. ARTHIST 206B (the undergraduate version of the course) fulfills DLCL 122: Medieval Manuscripts: Digital Methodologies core course for the Medieval Studies Minor.
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 407:
The Resurrected Body: Animacy in Medieval Art (ARTHIST 207)
This course explores the relationship of spirit and matter in medieval art and architecture, more specifically how the changing appearance of objects and spaces evokes the presence of the metaphysical as glitter, reverberation, and shadow. We will engage objects and monuments across the Mediterranean, studying the way they were staged in order to produce the perception of liveliness. The phenomenology of liveliness will be tied to the development of the theology of resurrection of the body.
Last offered: Autumn 2019
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 407B:
The Art of Travel: Medieval Journeys to the Unknown (ARTHIST 207B)
In many ways, the reasons that medieval people traveled are not unlike our own: to see new sights, make new connections, and return home to regale others with their exploits. Of course, travel was also a more complicated affair, limited to those who could afford the time and money to leave home. Focusing on three famous medieval travelers the pilgrim Egeria, the businessman Benjamin of Tudela, and the invented traveler John Mandeville this course will explore the visual and cultural landscape of global travel in the premodern age.
Last offered: Autumn 2021
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 407D:
Race and Ethnicity in Premodern Europe (ARTHIST 207D, HISTORY 215B, HISTORY 315B)
How do historians, art historians, and literary historians of premodern Europe shape their research and their teaching around questions of race? How do current debates on race theory shape our perception of the past and deepen historical inquiry? This graduate colloquium focuses on the most recent publications on race in medieval and early modern studies to reflect on such questions while examining the challenges that race studies put on historical definitions, research methodologies, as well as teaching institutions.
Last offered: Winter 2021
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 407E:
Sacred Play: The Material Culture of Christian Festivals (ARTHIST 207E)
The twentieth-century American poet and esotericist Robert Duncan once called for a return of the medieval calendar, citing its many feast days as an antidote to the modern 'weekend.' Indeed, the medieval Christian calendar was built on festivals, multimedia affairs that took place both within and outside of the purview of the Roman Catholic church, involving visual art, theatrical performances, and religious devotion. Festivals also played a vital role in the spread of Roman Catholicism across the world, especially in colonial contexts, where these spectacular events reveal tensions between colonizers and indigenous populations. This seminar examines the material culture of Catholic festivals from antiquity to the present, exploring how these elaborate events created spaces of both conformity and resistance.
Last offered: Winter 2022
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 408:
Hagia Sophia (ARTHIST 208, CLASSICS 173, CLASSICS 273)
This seminar uncovers the aesthetic principles and spiritual operations at work in Hagia Sophia, the church dedicated to Holy Wisdom in Constantinople. Rather than a static and inert structure, the Great Church emerges as a material body that comes to life when the morning or evening light resurrects the glitter of its gold mosaics and when the singing of human voices activates the reverberant and enveloping sound of its vast interior. Drawing on art and architectural history, liturgy, musicology, and acoustics, this course explores the Byzantine paradigm of animation arguing that it is manifested in the visual and sonic mirroring, in the chiastic structure of the psalmody, and in the prosody of the sung poetry. Together these elements orchestrate a multi-sensory experience that has the potential to destabilize the divide between real and oneiric, placing the faithful in a space in between terrestrial and celestial. A short film on aesthetics and samples of Byzantine chant digitally imprinted with the acoustics of Hagia Sophia are developed as integral segments of this research; they offer a chance for the student to transcend the limits of textual analysis and experience the temporal dimension of this process of animation of the inert.
Last offered: Winter 2022
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 408A:
Abject Subjects and Divine Anamorphosis in Byzantine Art (ARTHIST 208A, CLASSICS 119, CLASSICS 319)
Entering the space of the church immediately interpellated the medieval subject, transforming him/her into an abject self, marred by sin. This psychological effect of pricking the conscience was enhanced by the architectural panopticon channeled through the icon of Christ the Judge in the dome confronting the faithful. The texts recited and chanted during the liturgy further helped streamline the process of interpellation: these homilies and chants were structured as a dialogue implicating the sinful self. This course will explore the ecclesiastical space as a divine anamorphosis, an image of God that envelops the subject, transforming him/her into the object of the divine gaze.
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 408B:
The Art of Medieval Spain: Muslims, Christians, Jews (ARTHIST 208B)
The seminar reveals the religious and ethnic hybridity of the art medieval Spain, where the lives, material cultures, and artistic practices of Muslims, Christians, and Jews were more intertwined than any other region of the medieval world. We work thematically rather than strictly chronologically in order to build a model of engagement with medieval art in which the movement of ideas and objects between the three major religions is in itself a focus of study.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 408D:
Virginity and Power: The Mother of God and Visions of Empire (ARTHIST 208D)
Mary has been the most influential female figure in Christianity. Her powers stem from her paradoxical virginal motherhood. Victory over nature means indomitable power. She was perceived as the general of the Christian armies and the protector of cities, states, and rulers. Mary inherited and combined the functions of the ancient goddesses of war, victory, and maternity and offered an enduring Christian equivalent. This course explores images, relics, chants, and processions in the public and private expressions of the Marian cult.
Last offered: Autumn 2022
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 409:
Theories of the Image: Byzantium, Islam and the Latin West (ARTHIST 209C, CLASSICS 158, CLASSICS 258, REES 409)
This seminar explores the role of images in the three major powers of the medieval Mediterranean: the Umayyads, the Carolingians, and the Byzantines. For each the definition of an image- sura, imago, or eikon respectively-became an important means of establishing religious identity and a fault-line between distinct cultural traditions. This course troubles the identification of image with figural representation and presents instead a performative paradigm where chant or recitation are treated as images. As such, students will be able to see the connections between medieval image theory and contemporary art practices such as installation.
Last offered: Spring 2021
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 409A:
Image, Icon, Idol: Theories and Practices in Byzantium, Islam, and the Latin West
This course explores the phenomenon of iconoclasm, iconophobia, and aniconism as markers of a vast and profound cultural transformation of the Mediterranean in the period from the seventh to the ninth centuries. As the Arabs established the Umayyad caliphate in the seventh century, quickly conquering Holy Land, Egypt, and advancing all the way to Spain, they perpetrated an identity crisis in the region. By the seventh century three large political entities formed in the Mediterranean ¿ the Umayyads, the Carolingians, and the Byzantines ¿ each competed for legitimacy; all three emerged from the ashes of Late Antique culture, yet each tried to carve out an identity out of this common foundation. In this parting of the ways, the three cultures took among others the issue of what constituted an image and what role it played in devotion. Eik¿n, imago, ¿ura became the basis on which to built differences and accuse the other political players of idolatry.
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 410:
The Masters: Raphael
Five hundred years after Raphael mysteriously died (April 6, 1520), this seminar reflects on his contributions to the arts. Raphael's art is often defined as a negation of death. He painted eternal myths, unearthly saints, and timeless beauties. His sketches served as exemplars and the very paragon of drawing for hundreds of years. So much so that art historians have done little more than admire his art. How come Raphael has resisted criticism for half a millennium? What does his unremitting fame tell us about the state of art history? While studying eight of Raphael's masterpieces in depth, this course also reflects on the shortcomings and potentials of art history as a critical discipline. [Undergraduate enrollment with consent of one of the instructors].
Last offered: Spring 2020
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 411:
Childish Enthusiasms, Perishable Manias (FILMEDIA 411)
Universities are sites of gravitas, but what of levitas -- a lighter, more playful category? Does intellectually credible work depend upon a â¿¿critical distanceâ¿ between scholar and object of study? Can we take something seriously without imposing a seriousness that it may not possess (or want)? How to retain (or recover) the intensely pleasurable relation to objects that we were allowed when younger? The seminar is predicated upon the proposition that effective scholarship need not suck the joy from the world.
Last offered: Winter 2020
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 412:
Desiring Machines: Buildings, Maps, and Clouds (ARTHIST 212, COMPLIT 212A, COMPLIT 312A, ILAC 212A, ILAC 312A)
Focus is on early modern machines as tools for experience and action. In their break with Freudian psychoanalysis, French theorists Deleuze and Guattari speak of the machine as a tool of desire and attraction itself as "machinic" rather than desire for something that is missing. The goal of this course is to equip students with a different way of thinking by exploring a large group of objects from the early modern world (poems, buildings, costumes, maps, nets, and clouds) that help us to approach the period in a new way.
Last offered: Winter 2022
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 417:
Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth (ARTHIST 217)
This course examines global origin myths for architecture, for example cosmic symbolism (e.g. the Mandala/dome), and the magic of technologies (e.g. the "petrification" of the wooden hut in permanent architecture). Examples range from Ethiopian rockcut churches, to the Parthenon, to the Ise Grand Shrine, to Fire Temples, and Navajo lodges. The course concludes with the modern mythology of industrialisation and the mechanised building.
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 417B:
Architectural Design Theory (ARTHIST 217B)
This seminar focuses on the key themes, histories, and methods of architectural theory -- a form of architectural practice that establishes the aims and philosophies of architecture. Architectural theory is primarily written, but it also incorporates drawing, photography, film, and other media. nnOne of the distinctive features of modern and contemporary architecture is its pronounced use of theory to articulate its aims. One might argue that modern architecture is modern because of its incorporation of theory. This course focuses on those early-modern, modern, and late-modern writings that have been and remain entangled with contemporary architectural thought and design practice. nnRather than examine the development of modern architectural theory chronologically, it is explored architectural through thematic topics. These themes enable the student to understand how certain architectural theoretical concepts endure, are transformed, and can be furthered through his/her own explorations.nCEE 32B is a crosslisting of ARTHIST 217B/417B.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 418:
Fashion and Other Disasters (ARTHIST 218)
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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 418A:
Michelangelo: Gateway to Early Modern Italy (ARTHIST 218A, HISTORY 237B, HISTORY 337B, ITALIAN 237, ITALIAN 337)
Revered as one of the greatest artists in history, Michelangelo Buonarroti's extraordinarily long and prodigious existence (1475-1564) spanned the Renaissance and the Reformation in Italy. The celebrity artist left behind not only sculptures, paintings, drawings, and architectural designs, but also an abundantly rich and heterogeneous collection of artifacts, including direct and indirect correspondence (approximately 1400 letters), an eclectic assortment of personal notes, documents and contracts, and 302 poems and 41 poetic fragments. This course will explore the life and production of Michelangelo in relation to those of his contemporaries. Using the biography of the artist as a thread, this interdisciplinary course will draw on a range of critical methodologies and approaches to investigate the civilization and culture of Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Course themes will follow key tensions that defined the period and that found expression in Michelangelo: physical-spiritual, classical-Christian, tradition-innovation, individual-collective.
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 421:
Art and Visual Culture in Europe: The 1920s and 30s
This seminar focuses attention on European art institutions, exhibitions, journals, and movements, most of which intersected with one another across national borders during the interwar period, including Cubism, De Stijl, Purism, Art Deco, the Bauhaus, and Surrealism. Media include painting, architecture, photography, film, fashion and (graphic) design. We will examine period sources in Stanford library special collections and visit the permanent collection at SFMOMA.
Last offered: Winter 2020
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 422A:
Image Technologies in the 19th Century: Reproductions, Revivals, and Revolutions (ARTHIST 222A)
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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 424:
Architecture as Performance from Antiquity to the Enlightenment (ARTHIST 224)
This seminar examines the nature of architectural representation in the western tradition, from antiquity until the 18th century. It considers the ancient theatre as an icon of representation and the afterlife of the stage building as a model for western architecture, including ephemera. It concludes a distinction between the theatrical and the more recent concept of the theatrical.
Last offered: Autumn 2019
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 426:
New Landscapes of China: Ecologies, Media, Imaginaries (ARTHIST 226)
An exploration of new forms of landscape art in China's contemporary era, 1980s-present. Studies of new media platforms for landscape related imagery, imagined landscapes, and expanded concepts of landscape in an era of heightened ecological consciousness.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 430:
Cinema and Ideology (FILMEDIA 430)
The relationship between cinema and ideology from theoretical and historical perspectives, emphasizing Marxist and psychoanalytic approaches. The practice of political filmmaking, and the cinema as an audiovisual apparatus and socio-cultural institution. Topics include: dialectics; revolutionary aesthetics; language and power; commodity fetishism; and nationalism. Filmmakers include Dziga Vertov, Jean-Luc Godard, Bruce Conner, and Marco Ferreri. Theoretical writers include Karl Marx, Sergei Eisenstein, and Slavoj Zizek. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
Last offered: Autumn 2019
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 430B:
Image and Text in the Arts in China (ARTHIST 230B, CHINA 230, CHINA 430)
An examination of many types of interactions between images and texts in Chinese painting. These include poetic lines inscribed on paintings (as response or as a theme given to the artist to paint), paintings that emulate or transform ancient poetic couplets, or illustrate poetic and literary narratives, and calligraphic inscriptions. Attention will be given both to comparative perspectives and to the special aesthetic and intellectual consequences that the conjunction of the literary and visual modes give to Chinese artistic expression. [Undergraduate enrollment with consent of one of the instructors.]
Last offered: Autumn 2022
| Units: 3-5
| Repeatable
4 times
(up to 20 units total)
ARTHIST 431:
Leonardo's World: Science, Technology, and Art (ARTHIST 231, HISTORY 231, HISTORY 331, ITALIAN 231, ITALIAN 331)
Leonardo da Vinci is emblematic of creativity and innovation. His art is iconic, his inventions legendary. His understanding of nature, the human body, and machines made him a scientist and engineer as well as an artist. His fascination with drawing buildings made him an architect, at least on paper. This class explores the historical Leonardo, considering his interests and accomplishments as a product of the society of Renaissance Italy. Why did this world produce a Leonardo? Special attention will be given to interdisciplinary connections between religion, art, science, and technology.
Last offered: Autumn 2018
| Units: 4-5
ARTHIST 433:
Censorship in American Art (ARTHIST 233, CSRE 233)
This seminar examines the art history of censorship in the United States. Paying special attention to the suppression of queer, Black, and Latinx visual and performance art, including efforts to vandalize works and defund institutions, students will explore a variety of writing such as news articles, manifestos, letters, protest signs, scholarly texts, and court proceedings. The course approaches censorship as an act to restrict freedom of expression and, however unwittingly, as a mode of provocation and publicity.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 434:
Race & Abstraction
TBD
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 435:
The Art of Paul Klee
The Swiss artist Paul Klee (1879-1940) is known for his small drawings, intricate motifs, and fantastical themes. His drawn and painted marks are personal hieroglyphs defying easy description. Drawing and painting in an age of epochal transformations (world war, economic collapse, the rise of Fascism), he persisted in an art of the small. Aligned with childhood, mental illness, and marginality in general, Klee's work still raises questions about the importance of unimportant art?a kind that pursues the private valor of an enchanted obscurity. Drawing on brilliant recent scholarship about Klee by Annie Bourneuf, as well as critical readings on childhood and modernism, mental illness and modernism, and the high melancholy theory of Walter Benjamin (whose Theses on the Philosophy of History derives from Klee's Angelus Novus, which Benjamin owned), the seminar will explore the value of the small and obscure not only in Klee's art and times but in our own.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 440:
Millennium Approaches: The Art of the 1990s (ARTHIST 240)
This seminar will examine the art historical legacy of the 1990s, the decade of Bill Clinton, Beavis and Butthead, and Y2K. By placing art in conversation with music, popular culture, and political events, we will explore the dark underbelly of the decade's facade of sunny optimism. Key topics will include the the end of the Cold War, multiculturalism, American interventionism, the AIDS crisis, and early internet culture. Artists covered will include Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Kim Gordon, Mike Kelly, the Young British Artists, Gregg Bordowitz, Lorna Simpson, Zoe Leonard, Byron Kim, and Glenn Ligon. What is the relationship between art, popular culture, and history? How did the 1990s help shape our current culture?
Last offered: Autumn 2019
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 441:
Overlooked/Understudied
This seminar focuses on overlooked artists and understudied artworks in the U.S. from the late 19th century to the present. Rather than reclaiming marginality for its own sake, we will consider how the practice of looking at the overlooked art changes familiar narratives of canonical art.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 442:
Art History in the First Person (ARTHIST 242A)
This seminar considers the use of the first person voice in a wide range of writings about art, from fiction to criticism to scholarship. Insofar as graduate students have typically been discouraged from using the first person voice in their scholarly work, we will question the benefits and drawbacks of doing so in particular cases. To what ends have different writers put the first person voice and how do they integrate it with others strategies of written expression? How might we distinguish among different forms of speaking from the position of 'I' in art-historical writing? What kind of 'I' is at stake, personal, professional, intellectual, imaginary, or otherwise. Requirements: Students will be required to attend all seminar meetings and participate actively in discussion. They will submit two types of writing assignments: The first, which each student will prepare on a rotating basis, will be a 2-page response to a selected reading that will serve to launch discussion of that text in seminar. The second, longer paper (12-15 pages) will involve original research on a selected object or exhibition and the writing of a paper that adopts the first person voice to some degree or explains its necessary rejection.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 443:
Networks: A Visual History
Networks are maps for thinking. They illustrate connections while shaping mental journeys, transforming our self-reflexivity along the way. In this course, we will study the metamorphoses of networks, from medieval genealogies to Renaissance cartographic systems and from modern mnemotechnic diagrams to today's visualizations of brain connectivity to ask questions about the politics of connectivity, the deceptions of graphic simplicity, and the capacity of infographics to turn into art.
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 444:
Counter-Institution: Performance and Institutional Critique (TAPS 342)
Out of 100 members of the current US Senate, only one has a college degree in arts. In the House of Representatives, the situation is even bleaker: while some ten representatives, out of 435, have experience in some kind of artistic practice (music, writing, or video design), again only one holds an art-related degree. On state level, the situation is better, but not much. Is this severe under-representation of artists among elected officials the result of their lack of interest in institutional position of the arts? How would arts policies in the US look if more elected officials had background in the arts and actual stakes in this sector? 'Counter-Institution' brings together artistic practice and policy. On the one hand, we will explore the 'institutional critique' of artists such as Andrea Fraser, Hito Steyerl, and Fred Wilson, and on the other, we will investigate government initiatives that affected the arts, from the New Deal in the 1930s to the severe defunding of the National Endowment for the Arts in the 1990s, to increasing privatization of art institutions in the first decades of the new millennium.
Last offered: Spring 2021
| Units: 3
ARTHIST 446:
Duchamp Then and Now (ARTHIST 246)
This seminar provides an opportunity to explore not only the familiar though endlessly fascinating episodes of Duchamp's career (Nude Descending a Staircase; the readymade; the Large Glass; the Boite-en-valise; the persona of Rrose Sélavy, his films and exhibition designs, for example), but also works such as Etant Donnés, which has received renewed attention in what is now an extensive recent literature on this work and on Duchamp more generally that will provide a platform for drawing connections with issues, media, critical literatures and artists of students' own choosing.
Last offered: Winter 2022
| Units: 4-5
ARTHIST 447:
Russia in Color (ARTHIST 247, SLAVIC 131, SLAVIC 331)
This course explores the application, evolution, and perception of color in art, art history, literature, and popular culture - in (Soviet) Russia and emigration. Working closely with the Cantor Arts Center collection at Stanford, this course pairs artifacts art with theoretical and cultural readings (media theory, philosophy, literature, science). With a particular focus on Russian and East European objects (including those by Russian icons, Soviet posters, and prints by Wassily Kandinsky and Marc Chagall), the course will include a basic introduction to color terminology, guest lectures on the technologies color printing, the science of color perception, and a hands-on practicum in color mixing/pigmentation. In addition to direct encounters with material and artifact, our course will also seek to better understand the digital experience of art objects in general, and color in particular. No knowledge of Russian is required.
Last offered: Winter 2022
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 448:
The Body in Film and other Media (FILMEDIA 448)
In this seminar, we will consider the body on screen as well as the body before the screen i.e. the spectator but also the profilmic body of the actor to examine corporeal performance and reception. The dancing body, the comic body, dead and live bodies, the monstrous body, the body in pain, the virtual body all raise questions about embodiment, liveness, and performance. We will read the body in audiovisual culture through an engagement with affect theory, focusing on the labor of performance, the construction of stardom, spatial and temporal configurations of the performing body, and the production of affect and sensation in the spectating body. Through a discussion of make-up, fashion, the labor of producing the idealized star body from the meat-and-bones body of the actor, or body genres where the spectator's body is beside itself with sexual pleasure, fear and terror, or overpowering sadness, we will inquire into ideologies of discipline and desire that undergird mediatized bodies. nnNo prior engagement with film studies is required. Students are encouraged to write seminar papers that build on current research interests.nnNOTE: Instructor consent required for undergraduate students (only seniors may enroll). Please contact the instructor for permission to enroll if you're an undergraduate senior.
Last offered: Winter 2020
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 449:
Latinx Art: Exhibition History and Theory (ARTHIST 249, CHILATST 249)
This seminar examines exhibitions of art made by Latinas/es/os/xs in the United States, including Chicanos, Nuyoricans, and other Black, Brown, and Indigenous artists. While exploring exhibitions, students will consider curators' and artists' relationships to identity, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Students will also study how practitioners have responded to and challenged discrimination, institutional exclusion, and national debates through their work. The course will include guest curator talks and will result in final projects that comprise either research papers that critically look at exhibitions or proposals for exhibitions of Latinx art.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
ARTHIST 450A:
Printing Protest: The Artist as Social Critic (ARTHIST 250A)
This seminar explores the history of print and protest. From books to newspapers to posters, printed materials have generated and circulated political and social messages for centuries. The seminar takes a transhistorical and transnational approach to the history of print to consider its role in shaping public consciousness and producing social change from the fifteenth century to today. Attending to both medium and message, this course will address printing techniques and examine the graphic works of artists such as Francisco Goya, Käthe Kollwitz, Ester Hernandez, and Ebony Patterson in various collections on Stanford's campus. Seminar participants will also contribute to a course-related exhibition at the Cantor Arts Center where they will assist in various aspects of exhibition organization, such as selecting artworks and writing wall labels. This is a unique opportunity to combine the classroom study of art history with hands-on curatorial experience.
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 4-5
ARTHIST 451:
Warhol's World (ARTHIST 251)
Andy Warhol's art has never before been more widely exhibited, published, or licensed for commercial use, product design, and publication than it is today. For all Warhol's promiscuous visibility and global cachet at the current moment, there is much we have yet to learn about his work and the conditions of its making. This course considers the wide world of Warhol's art and life, including his commercial work of the 1950s, Pop art and films of the 1960s, and celebrity portraiture of the 1970s and 80s. Of particular interest throughout will be Warhol's photography as it reflects his interest in wealth and celebrity on the one hand and on the everyday life of everyday people on the other.
Last offered: Autumn 2021
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 453:
Aesthetics and Phenomenology (ARTHIST 253, FILMEDIA 253, FILMEDIA 453)
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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 455:
Cultural Heritage and Urban Space in Cairo and Istanbul (ARTHIST 250, ISLAMST 250C)
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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 4-5
ARTHIST 456:
What Was Photography? (ARTHIST 256)
Digital imaging has largely replaced darkroom work over the past quarter century, yet analog practices still dominate theories of photography. Working closely with the Capital Group Foundation Collection at the Cantor, this class will explore how those theories relate to vintage photographic prints and whether they are still relevant to the photography being produced today. Students will select one photographer within the Collection and create a set of writings that help contemporary viewers see these mid-century American artists through diverse contemporary perspectives.
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 460:
Decolonization and Decoloniality: Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy (FILMEDIA 460, TAPS 460)
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.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 460A:
Histories of the Museum: Collecting, Preserving, and Exhibiting Art (ARTHIST 260A)
Museums have a history. This course questions how museums have shaped and been shaped by society, from their origins in early modern cabinets of curiosity to their contemporary transformation into virtual galleries and online exhibitions. Incorporating visits to Stanford¿s diverse collections, this seminar considers the histories of museums as public institutions and explores key concepts guiding the acquisition and display of art.
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 465:
Media Technology Theory (COMM 384, FILMEDIA 465A)
This course surveys major theoretical approaches to the study of media technologies, including Frankfurt School critical theory, media archaeology, actor network theory, science and technology studies, platform studies and theories of critical making. By the end of the course, students should have a rich familiarity with the literature in this area, as well as with exemplary empirical studies conducted within each tradition. Preference to Ph.D. students in Communication and Art and Art History. Consent of instructor required for non-PhD students.
Last offered: Spring 2020
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 465A:
Word and Image (ARTHIST 265A, COMPLIT 225, ITALIAN 265, ITALIAN 365)
What impact do images have on our reading of a text? How do words influence our understanding of images or our reading of pictures? What makes a visual interpretation of written words or a verbal rendering of an image successful? These questions will guide our investigation of the manifold connections between words and images in this course on intermediality and the relations and interrelations between writing and art from classical antiquity to the present. Readings and discussions will include such topics as the life and afterlife in word and image of Ovid's "Metamorphoses," Dante's "Divine Comedy," Ludovico Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso," and John Milton's "Paradise Lost;" the writings and creative production of poet-artists Michelangelo Buonarroti, William Blake, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti; innovations in and correspondences between literature and art in the modern period, from symbolism in the nineteenth century through the flourishing of European avant-garde movements in the twentieth century.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 466A:
Blackness/Gender/Sexuality & Dis-ease: HIV/AIDS Art History (ARTHIST 366, CSRE 366A, FEMGEN 466A)
Since the emergence of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS), artists have been central to the fight against the state's violence and neglect of those with HIV/AIDS. In this story, however, race and gender are marginalized as frameworks that shape this arts activism. This course takes up black art production that responds to the HIV/AIDS crisis to provide a longer, fuller, and more vital cultural narrative. By centering blackness in this story, we can ask how does dis-ease,referencing both infection and an aesthetically and structurally anxious relation to death,shape black art practices and lives? How have race and gender been used to conceptualize disease? And how do filmmakers, abstract painters, photographers, and poets help us to better comprehend blackness, gender, and sexuality under the threat of disease? After providing an overview of the relation between blackness, sexuality, and dis-ease and the emergence of the AIDS crisis, we will consider canonical works from the height of the crisis produced by filmmaker Marlon Riggs and poet Essex Hemphill. From there, we will move to themes of black art and mourning, black women's under cited activism, the controversial use of documentary photography in the crisis, black masculinity, diasporic responses, and the urgency and erasure of the ongoing crisis. Each week we will focus on a cultural text (film, painting, photograph, poem), a reading to provide historical context, and critical theories that will illuminate the art works' formal qualities and importance for our now.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 469:
Drugs and the Visual Imagination (FILMEDIA 469)
Drugs have profoundly shaped human culture across space and time, from ancient cave paintings to the psychedelic Sixties and contemporary opioid epidemic. This seminar explores the relationship between visual culture and "drugs," broadly conceived, asking how consciousness-altering substances have been understood and represented in various contexts. We will examine how drugs blur boundaries between nature and culture and describe major symbolic, narrative, and aesthetic structures by considering representations of drug use across media. This interdisciplinary seminar integrates perspectives from art, literature, popular culture, theory, film, philosophy, and science. Topics include perception, subjectivity, addiction, deviancy, capitalism, politics, technology, globalization, and critical approaches to race, class, sexuality, and gender. Limited to graduate students; undergraduates must contact instructor for permission (seniors only).
Last offered: Spring 2021
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 472:
Feminist Avant-Garde Art in Germany and Beyond (1968-2019) (ARTHIST 272, FEMGEN 280, GERMAN 280)
In "Woman's Art: A Manifesto" (1972), the artist, performer and filmmaker Valie Export (1940) proposed the transfer of women's experience into an art context and considered the body "a signal bearer of meaning and communication." In reconceptualizing and displaying "the" body (her body) as an aesthetic sign, Export's groundbreaking work paves the way towards questioning the concepts of a "female aesthetic" and a "male gaze" (L. Mulvey). Beginning with Export, we will discuss art informed by and coalescing with feminism(s): the recent revival of the 1970s in all-women group shows, the dialectic of feminist revolution, the breakdown of stable identities and their representations, point(s) of absorption of commodified femininities. Particular attention will be paid to German-language theory and its medial transfer into art works. For students of German Studies, readings and discussions in German are possible. Online discussions will be organized with contemporary artists and curators. Emphasis will be on: the relationship between (female?) aesthetics and (gender) politics, between private and public spheres, between housework and artwork; conceptions of identity (crises) and corporeality in visual culture and mass media; categories of the artist´s self in relation to the use of media (video, photography, film, collage, installation art). This course will be taught by Professor Elena Zanichelli, a Berlin-based art historian, critic, and curator. She is junior professor for Art History and Aesthetic Theory at IKFK (Institute for Art History - Film History - Art Education) at the University of Bremen.
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 473:
Couture Culture (ARTHIST 273, FRENCH 173, FRENCH 373)
Fashion, art, and representation in Europe and the US between 1860 and today. Beginning with Baudelaire, Impressionism, the rise of the department store and the emergence of haute couture, culminating in the spectacular fashion exhibitions mounted at the Metropolitan and other major art museums in recent years. Students participate actively in class discussion and pursue related research projects.
Last offered: Autumn 2021
| Units: 4-5
ARTHIST 474:
Wonder: The Event of Art and Literature (ARTHIST 274, JEWISHST 274)
What falls below, or beyond, rational inquiry? How do we write about the awe we feel in front of certain works of art, in reading lines of poetry or philosophy, or watching a scene in a film without ruining the feeling that drove us to write in the first place? In this course, we will focus on a heterogeneous series of texts, artworks, and physical locations to discuss these questions. Potential topics include The Book of Exodus, the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin and of Elizabeth Bishop, the location of Harriet Tubman's childhood, the poetry and drawings of Else Lasker-Schüler, the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, the art of James Turrell, and the films of Luchino Visconti.
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 474A:
The Art of the Uncanny (ARTHIST 274A)
From murderous dolls to evil doppelgängers, humanoid doubles haunt the Western cultural imagination. Beginning with an in-depth look at the contested concept of the "uncanny", the seminar traces the history of anxiety about non-human humans in the West. An interdisciplinary inquiry, this course draws its sources from art, film, literature, psychology, and science.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 475:
Media Cultures of the Cold War (COMM 386)
The intersection of politics, aesthetics, and new media technologies in the U.S. between the end of WW II and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Topics include the aesthetics of thinking the unthinkable in the wake of the atom bomb; abstract expressionism and 'modern man' discourse; game theory, cybernetics, and new models of art making; the rise of television, intermedia, and the counterculture; and the continuing influence of the early cold war on contemporary media aesthetics. Readings from primary and secondary sources in art history, communication, and critical theory.
Last offered: Winter 2021
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 481:
Chinese Portraiture (ARTHIST 281)
Exploration of recent studies of Chinese portraiture, with a focus on modern and contemporary eras. Portrait practices in treaty port cities; photographic portraits, portraits and modernity; political portraits in public arenas, self-erasure in contemporary portraiture, women's self-portraits, and experimental video portraits will be among the potential topics of discussion.
Last offered: Spring 2020
| Units: 4
ARTHIST 484:
Material Metonymy: Ceramics and Asian America (AMSTUD 284, ARTHIST 284, ASNAMST 284)
This course explores the rich history and contemporary state of ceramic production by Asian American/diasporic makers. It is also about the way history, culture, and emotion are carried by process, technique, and materials. Taught by an art historian and a physicist/ceramist, the course will privilege close examination of works of art at the Cantor Arts Center, and will also include artist studio visits, discussions with curators and conservators, demonstrations of and experimentation with technical processes of studio ceramics. This course is designed for students with interests in making, art history, engineering, intellectual history, and Asian American studies. Limited enrollment with applications due on Wed 8 March 2023; to receive application instructions please email the course instructors.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 487X:
Pictures of the Floating World: Images from Japanese Popular Culture (ARTHIST 287, JAPAN 287)
Printed objects produced during the Edo period (1600-1868), including the Ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating world) and lesser-studied genres such as printed books (ehon) and popular broadsheets (kawaraban). How a society constructs itself through images. The borders of the acceptable and censorship; theatricality, spectacle, and slippage; the construction of play, set in conflict against the dominant neo-Confucian ideology of fixed social roles.
Last offered: Winter 2019
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 491:
Riot: Visualizing Civil Unrest in the 20th and 21st Centuries (AFRICAAM 291, AFRICAAM 491, ARTHIST 291, CSRE 290, CSRE 390, FILMEDIA 291, FILMEDIA 491)
This seminar explores the visual legacy of civil unrest in the United States. Focusing on the 1965 Watts Rebellion, 1992 Los Angeles Riots, 2014 Ferguson Uprising, and 2020 George Floyd Uprisings students will closely examine photographs, television broadcasts, newspapers, magazines, and film and video representations of unrest. Additionally, students will visually analyze the works of artists who have responded to instances of police brutality and challenged the systemic racism, xenophobia, and anti-Black violence leading to and surrounding these events.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 4-5
ARTHIST 492:
Romancing the Stone: Crystal Media from Babylon to Superman (ARTHIST 292, FRENCH 292, FRENCH 392)
This seminar investigates the importance of rock crystal and its imitations as material, medium, and metaphor from antiquity until modernity. The objects examined include rings, reliquaries, lenses, and the Crystal Aesthetic in early twentieth-century architecture and even Superman's Fortress of Solitude. The texts range from Pliny to Arabic Poetry to Romance Literature to modern manifestos.
Last offered: Spring 2020
| Units: 3-5
ARTHIST 493:
The Art of Punk: Sound, Aesthetics and Performance (ARTHIST 293B, CSRE 393)
This seminar explores the sonic and visual aesthetics of punk rock since the 1970s. While studying music, videos, zines, and album covers, students will examine the convergence of art with politics among artists, such as Lydia Lunch and Vaginal Davis, and bands, including Crass and Los Illegals, as well as punk subgenres, like No Wave, Riot Grrrl, and Queercore. Likewise, students will consider how issues of identity, race, gender and sexuality informed artists and their work.
Last offered: Spring 2023
| Units: 4-5
ARTHIST 494:
Complicating Minimal Art: Racializing, Queering, and Politicizing a Canon (CSRE 394)
This seminar focuses on the contributions people of color, women, and queer artists have made to Minimalism, a popular and influential style of art defined by sleek geometric forms. Students will critically engage canonical texts, which often privileged the work of white male artists, and consider how race, gender, and sexuality have informed these narratives. Students will also examine the understudied historical events that have influenced artists and their work, such as the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam War, and AIDS Epidemic.
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 4-5
ARTHIST 497:
American Mystics
This seminar will consider the role of mysticism in American art and culture. Long denigrated as irrational or escapist, mysticism in fact offers a site from which to investigate and challenge entrenched assumptions of linear time, historical positivism, hierarchies of taste, and rationality that remain the epistemic grounding of art history. Topics covered will include Transcendentalism¿s debt to Buddhism; the Aesthetic Movement; Aleister Crowley, Kenneth Anger, and occultism; Rastafarianism; Afrofuturism; psychedelia, drugs, and the counterculture, among many others. Readings will include work by Max Weber; Theodor Adorno; Sylvia Wynter; Toni Morrison; Marcel Mauss; and Ashon Crawley. Special attention will be paid to issues of race, ethnicity, and decolonizing methodologies.
Last offered: Spring 2020
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 498:
Sensory Spaces, Tactile Objects: The Senses in Art and Architecture
This course examines the role of the senses in art and architecture to move beyond conceptions of art history that prioritize vision. While the experience of art is often framed in terms of seeing, the other senses were crucially involved in the creation of buildings and objects. Textiles and ceramic vessels invite touch, gardens involve the smell of flowers, sacred spaces were built to amplify the sound of prayers and chants. The focus will be on the medieval and early modern Mediterranean, which forays into other regions. Readings will range from medieval poetry and multisensory art histories to contemporary discussions of the senses in design and anthropology.
Terms: Win
| Units: 4-5
ARTHIST 499:
Graduate Workshop: Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (FEMGEN 299)
Required for PhD Minors in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (FGSS). The Fall Phd Minor Workshop will explore theory and methods in anti-racist and feminist pedagogy through selected readings and discussion.
Terms: Win
| Units: 1-3
| Repeatable
6 times
(up to 18 units total)
ARTHIST 502:
Methods and Debates
This course introduces graduate students to a range of interpretive methods within art history and visual culture studies. In addition to scrutinizing multiple schools of thought and critical debates within the field, the seminar pays particular attention to the style and strategies of writing taken up by individual critics and scholars. How and to whom does the art historian's voice speak in different moments, visual contexts, and interpretive communities?
Terms: Aut
| Units: 5
ARTHIST 600:
Art History Bibliography and Library Methods
Last offered: Autumn 2019
| Units: 1
ARTHIST 600A:
Art History Proseminar
N/A
Last offered: Winter 2020
| Units: 1
ARTHIST 601:
IMBY (In My Backyard): Faculty Scholarship in Art History and Film/Media Studies
This seminar links first- and second-year Ph.D. students to faculty members in Art History and Film/Media Studies at Stanford. On a rotating basis, 5 faculty members in the Department discuss their most recent book or essay, which we will be read in advance. We also read texts that have been important to the visitor in shaping their work.Graduate students in this seminar will grapple with the intellectual, methodological, and political stakes of faculty scholarship "in their own backyard."
Last offered: Spring 2022
| Units: 2
| Repeatable
2 times
(up to 4 units total)
ARTHIST 610:
Teaching Praxis
Terms: Aut, Win
| Units: 1-5
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Blessing, P. (PI);
Bukatman, S. (PI);
Denson, S. (PI);
Iyer, U. (PI);
Kwon, M. (PI);
Levi, P. (PI);
Lugli, E. (PI);
Ma, J. (PI);
Maxmin, J. (PI);
Meyer, R. (PI);
Nemerov, A. (PI);
Oeler, K. (PI);
Pentcheva, B. (PI);
Salseda, R. (PI);
Vinograd, R. (PI)
ARTHIST 620:
Qualifying Examination Preparation
For Art History Ph.D. candidates. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 5-8
| Repeatable
3 times
(up to 24 units total)
Instructors: ;
Blessing, P. (PI);
Bukatman, S. (PI);
Denson, S. (PI);
Iyer, U. (PI);
Kwon, M. (PI);
Levi, P. (PI);
Lugli, E. (PI);
Ma, J. (PI);
Maxmin, J. (PI);
Meyer, R. (PI);
Nemerov, A. (PI);
Oeler, K. (PI);
Pentcheva, B. (PI);
Salseda, R. (PI);
Vinograd, R. (PI)
ARTHIST 640:
Dissertation Proposal Preparation
(Staff)
Terms: Aut, Win, Sum
| Units: 5
Instructors: ;
Blessing, P. (PI);
Bukatman, S. (PI);
Denson, S. (PI);
Iyer, U. (PI);
Kwon, M. (PI);
Levi, P. (PI);
Lugli, E. (PI);
Ma, J. (PI);
Maxmin, J. (PI);
Meyer, R. (PI);
Nemerov, A. (PI);
Oeler, K. (PI);
Pentcheva, B. (PI);
Salseda, R. (PI);
Vinograd, R. (PI)
ARTHIST 650:
Dissertation Research
(Staff)
Terms: Aut, Win, Sum
| Units: 5
| Repeatable
3 times
(up to 24 units total)
Instructors: ;
Blessing, P. (PI);
Bukatman, S. (PI);
Denson, S. (PI);
Iyer, U. (PI);
Kwon, M. (PI);
Levi, P. (PI);
Lugli, E. (PI);
Ma, J. (PI);
Maxmin, J. (PI);
Meyer, R. (PI);
Nemerov, A. (PI);
Oeler, K. (PI);
Pentcheva, B. (PI);
Salseda, R. (PI);
Vinograd, R. (PI)
ARTHIST 660:
Independent Study
For graduate students only. Approved independent research projects with individual faculty members.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 1-15
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Blessing, P. (PI);
Bukatman, S. (PI);
Denson, S. (PI);
Iyer, U. (PI);
Kwon, M. (PI);
Levi, P. (PI);
Lugli, E. (PI);
Ma, J. (PI);
Maxmin, J. (PI);
Meyer, R. (PI);
Nemerov, A. (PI);
Oeler, K. (PI);
Pentcheva, B. (PI);
Salseda, R. (PI);
Vinograd, R. (PI)
ARTHIST 660E:
Extended Seminar
May be repeated for credit. (Staff)
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr
| Units: 4
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Blessing, P. (PI);
Bukatman, S. (PI);
Denson, S. (PI);
Iyer, U. (PI);
Kwon, M. (PI);
Levi, P. (PI);
Lugli, E. (PI);
Ma, J. (PI);
Maxmin, J. (PI);
Meyer, R. (PI);
Nemerov, A. (PI);
Oeler, K. (PI);
Pentcheva, B. (PI);
Salseda, R. (PI);
Vinograd, R. (PI)
ARTHIST 670:
Dissertation Seminar
For graduate students writing and researching dissertations and dissertation proposals. How to define research projects, write grant proposals, and organize book-length projects.
Terms: Win, Spr
| Units: 1-2
| Repeatable
5 times
(up to 5 units total)
Instructors: ;
Blessing, P. (PI);
Kwon, M. (PI);
Levi, P. (PI);
Lugli, E. (PI);
Maxmin, J. (PI);
Meyer, R. (PI);
Nemerov, A. (PI);
Pentcheva, B. (PI);
Salseda, R. (PI);
Vinograd, R. (PI)
ARTHIST 680:
Curricular Practical Training
CPT course required for international students completing degree. Prerequisite: Art History Ph.D. candidate.
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 1-3
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Bukatman, S. (PI);
Denson, S. (PI);
Iyer, U. (PI);
Kwon, M. (PI);
Levi, P. (PI);
Lugli, E. (PI);
Ma, J. (PI);
Maxmin, J. (PI);
Meyer, R. (PI);
Nemerov, A. (PI);
Oeler, K. (PI);
Pentcheva, B. (PI);
Salseda, R. (PI);
Vinograd, R. (PI)
ARTHIST 802:
TGR Dissertation
Terms: Aut, Win, Spr, Sum
| Units: 0
| Repeatable
for credit
Instructors: ;
Bukatman, S. (PI);
Denson, S. (PI);
Iyer, U. (PI);
Kwon, M. (PI);
Levi, P. (PI);
Lugli, E. (PI);
Ma, J. (PI);
Maxmin, J. (PI);
Meyer, R. (PI);
Nemerov, A. (PI);
Oeler, K. (PI);
Pentcheva, B. (PI);
Salseda, R. (PI);
Vinograd, R. (PI)
