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This course centers artistic traditions marginalized in Western academia such as pre-historic paintings, Byzantine mosaics, mosques and palaces of the Islamicate world, pre-contact art and architecture of the Americas, ancient ziggurats in modern Iraq, Egyptian pyramids and temples, and Native American art. We engage with these traditions through phenomenology, exploring the multi-sensorial modes coded in the cultural experience of these structures and objects. We also engage with the art of Greece and Rome but we de-center their position and uncover the principles that govern their sensorial experience. Experiencing Early Global Art uncovers shared themes that underscore the premodern artistic production. These themes include bodies and performance; archive and memory; sustainability and repurposing; fluidity and permanence; conversion and mobility. "Early" relates to time conceptualized from a non-western-centric perspective and avoids the pejorative associations with backwardness of the term "premodern." The adoption of the term "Early Global" here is inspired by the recent conceptual work done by UCLA in renaming their research center of Medieval and Renaissance Studies into Center for Early Global Studies.

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.

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.

This course surveys modern African arts in the contexts of colonialism, decolonization, and the global Cold War. Modernism developed in Sub-Saharan Africa as early as the 1920s and '30s among scattered independent practitioners, and in workshops run by colonial educators. Following World War II, a new generation of artists and critics rose to prominence in conjunction with the transnational Negritude movement. By the 1960s and '70s, modernism flourished in some parts of the continent with support from new national governments, and African socialist regimes often sought to intensively modernize local art practices, even as alarms sounded over new patterns of authoritarianism, corruption, and foreign intervention. Because classificatory orders in Africa were never so commanding as they tend to be in the West, modern African art can be productively studied through a cross-genre and multi-media lens. Such a lens examines drawing, painting, and sculpture alongside performance, photography, and film, and it registers how "high" and "popular" cultural forms frequently merged or became blurred.

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.

What might Hilma af Klimt teach us about physics? How might studying a rock help us think about modern sculpture? How can we think science fiction and science together? What is the relationship between the art museum and the laboratory? Co-taught by an art historian and physicist, this class explores the dynamic intersections of the arts, humanities, and sciences. Course topics include: Sci-Fi and fate; the fourth dimension and occultism; AI art; earth and environment; craft and technology; colonialism and restitution; speculative futures and queerness; techno-orientalism. Classes will include visits to various sites where science and art are made, as well as guided object study and object making.

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.

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.

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.