Courses

• CAS AH 540: Europe and the Islamic World: Medieval and Early-Modern Cultural Exchange
  Cultural exchange between Europe and the Islamic world, and its impact on visual culture during the late medieval and early modern periods; the transmission of aesthetic concepts and visual traditions via specific patrons, artists, and works of art and architecture.
• CAS AH 541: Courtly Commissions: Ottoman Art and Architecture
  Explores the artistic patronage of the Ottoman court, fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. Questions of self-fashioning, artistic agency, courtly behavior, decorum, and the formation of an imperial style frame the discussion of specific works of art and architecture.
• CAS AH 553: Documenting Historic Buildings and Landscapes
  Seminar in architectural and landscape recording techniques involving readings, fieldwork, and writing; projects include research on individual buildings as well as groups of resources. Emphasis on research design and evaluation of evidence. Also offered as CAS AM 553.
• CAS AH 557: High Renaissance and Mannerist Art in Italy
  A study of High Renaissance and Mannerist art and architecture in Italy with special focus on the work of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Parmigianino, Rosso Fiorentino, and Pontormo. Attention to the role of literature and decorative arts in defining these period-styles.
• CAS AH 563: Alliance of Art and Power in the Baroque
  Explores the relationship between visual culture and political authority in seventeenth century Europe. Focus on painting, architecture, and sculpture by major artists of the period, including Rubens, Van Dyck, Velázquez, Rembrandt, and Bernini.
• CAS AH 570: Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century American Architecture
  Lectures and field trips explore American architecture and building from initial European contact through the end of the eighteenth century. Emphasis on New England, with discussion of architectural forms from other regions.
• CAS AH 571: African American Art
  Studies African American art and craft production from the early nineteenth century to the present against the background of the diaspora, reconstruction, and the modernist movements of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Also offered as CAS AA 571.
• CAS AH 572: Gilded Age America: Visual Culture from 1865-1900
  
• CAS AH 580: Architectural Technology and Materials
  An introduction to the history of architectural construction, technologies, and materials, and their consequences in the built environment. Students receive a practical understanding of the building process and of its social and cultural contexts.
• CAS AH 582: Historic Houses
  Studies the preservation of historic homes as museums, a phenomenom involving more than 26,000 houses throughout the U.S. since 1850. Considers Boston's excellent examples as works of architecture and design and as icons in debates about national and regional identities.
• CAS AH 583: English Country House and America's Cottages
  Explores architecture, interiors, furnishings, landscape design settings, and "preservation." Includes its influence on America's historic houses and cottages, and America's influence on the English Country House. Important examples from collections in the MFA.
• CAS AH 584: Greater Boston: Architecture and Planning
  Examines the buildings, development patterns, and open space planning of greater Boston, with particular emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Weekly visits to neighborhoods and buildings throughout the city are combined with independent research projects for each member of the seminar.
• CAS AH 585: Twentieth Century Architecture and Urbanism
  Two topics are offered Fall 2010. Students may take one or both for credit. Topic for Section A1: Green Design. Explores the historical context for sustainability and Green Architecture. The engagement of architecture with nature is charted through questions of landscape theory, public park making, suburbanization, adaptive re-use, and new green materials and methods of construction, among other topics. Topic for Section B1: Transnationalism and Architecture.
• CAS AH 589: Topics in Nineteenth Century Art
  Topic for Fall 2012: The seminar explores American landscape representation from 1800 to 1875 in terms of changing formal and thematic characteristics and the influence of new social formations, new cultural practices, and new technologies of vision (the panorama) and representation (photography).
• CAS AH 591: Seminar in Photographic History
  Topic for Fall 2012: Documentary Photography. Changing uses, definitions, and archives of documentary photography from 1839 to the present. Topics include urban photography, war imagery, topographical and survey landscapes, architectural records, social reform photography, New Deal imagery, and digital documents.
• CAS AH 596: Seminar: Contemporary Art
  Rotating topics in art, criticism and theory since 1960. Examines major themes such as formalism, minimalism, conceptual art, the neo-avant-garde, art and politics, postmodernism and globalization in their social and political contexts. Topic for Fall 2010: Contemporary Art and Globalization.
• CAS AH 597: The Baroque
  Examines seventeenth-century architecture, painting, music, poetry, and drama. The syllabus is organized both topically and topographically: issues of space, light, ornamentation, and theatricality are explored in relation to the cultural capitals of Rome, Paris, and London.
• CAS AM 200: Introduction to American Studies
  An exploration of the multi-faceted themes of American society and culture in selected historical periods using a variety of approaches to interpret such topics as American art, literature, politics, material culture, and the mass media. Required of majors and minors. Carries humanities divisional credit in CAS.
• CAS AM 250: American Arts and Society
  Investigates key issues and themes in American arts and letters. Topic for Spring 2011: Policing the Boundaries of American Identity: Anti-Immigration Movements in U.S. History to 1930. Examines how the trope of America as a ?Nation of Immigrants? has challenged and affected political and social policy, with a specific focus on the period of Second Wave immigration (1880?1925).
• CAS AM 301: Perspectives on the American Experience
  American history and society as viewed by those who made it. Topic for Fall 2011: American Spectacle: Melodramatic Theatre and Early Silent Film. Examines the intersections between theatre and early silent film covering the period between 1865 and 1920 and how these two forms overlapped with and frequently stole features from each other.

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