History of Art & Architecture

  • GRS AH 699: Teaching College History of Art & Architecture I
    The goals, contents, and methods of instruction in the history of art & architecture. General teaching- learning issues. Required of all teaching fellows.
  • GRS AH 716: African Diaspora Arts in the Americas
    Study of the transmission of African artistry in the Caribbean, South America, and the United States from the period of slavery to the present. Topics include Kongo and Yoruba arts and their influence on the arts of Santería, Vodun, and carnival. Also offered as GRS AA 716.
  • GRS AH 726: Colloquium in Japanese Art
    The arts of Japan from prehistory through the twentieth century. Painting, calligraphy, sculpture, and architecture (including landscape architecture) are emphasized, but attention is also paid to wood block prints, ceramics, lacquer, and metalwork.
  • GRS AH 733: Colloquium in Greek Art and Architecture
    Greek architecture, painting, sculpture, and minor arts. Emphasis on developments in Athens and on the creation of the classical style in art and architecture.
  • GRS AH 745: Colloquium in Early Medieval and Romanesque Art
    Art and architecture of medieval Europe from the Early Christian Catacombs to the great Gothic cathedrals. Topics include piety, the cult of relics, the Virgin, monasticism, and secular monuments such as medieval European castles and the Bayeux Tapestry.
  • GRS AH 769: American Vernacular Architecture
    This seminar provides an opportunity to examine influential interpretive frameworks employed in the study of American building and the historic landscape, examples of the approach known as vernacular architecture. Also offered as GRS AM 765.
  • GRS AH 776: American Vernacular Architecture
    Study of interpretive approaches known as Vernacular Architecture, as they are employed in the study of American buildings and the historic landscape. Emphasis on the role of social and cultural forces in the production, use, and understanding of the built environment. Also offered as GRS AM 765.
  • GRS AH 779: American Art and Culture in the Nineteenth Century
    Explores the visual arts of painting, sculpture, photography, and popular media, through their interplay with persistent political and social questions that defined nineteenth-century America and continue to shape life in the twenty-first century. Themes include heroes, citizenship, war, imperialism, cosmopolitanism, consumerism.
  • GRS AH 782: Colloquium in Nineteenth-Century Architecture in Europe and America
    Dilemma of style in nineteenth-century architecture; study of the relationship of architectural theory to the changing philosophy and aesthetic theory of the period. Development of functionalist theory.
  • GRS AH 786: Colloquium in Twentieth-Century American Painting
    The colloquium, which accompanies the lecture course for CAS AH 386, focuses on critical and theoretical readings that relate to twentieth-century American painting, photography, sculpture, installation and performance art, and criticism.
  • GRS AH 798: Colloquium in Twentieth-Century Architecture
    In conjunction with the CAS AH 398 lecture course, this colloquium focuses on main figures, events, artifacts of twentieth-century architectural history.
  • GRS AH 802: Seminar: A-H Writing
    This seminar will consider the history and methods of art history through the writings of Vasari, Bellori, Winkelmann, Kant, Hegel, Wolfflin, Riegel, Warburg, Panofsky, Gombrich, among others.
  • GRS AH 812: Seminar: Portraiture
    Topic for Fall 2012: Portraiture from 1300-1600. Topics include the influence of ancient art and literature, tropes of animation (especially the "speaking portrait"), the visualization of identity, and the relationship between biography and art history.
  • GRS AH 820: Seminar: Asian Art
    Topic for Spring 2012: Kyoto: Art, Architecture, and Urbanism. Analysis of major artistic and architectural projects sponsored by successive generations of emperors, aristocrats, warriors, and priests in Kyoto, from the eighth to the end of the nineteenth century. Discussions and readings emphasize issues of lineage, heritage, and tradition.
  • GRS AH 822: Seminar: African Art
    In-depth discussion of special topics in the study of African art and architecture. Topic for Fall 2011: Material Journeys: Contact Zones and Borderlands in Africa and Its Diaspora. Considers art produced at contact zones to rethink concepts of tradition, authenticity, diaspora, and commodity. Focuses on northwestern Africa and the Caribbean from the fifteenth century to present. Sapi-Portuguese ivories, Islamic architecture in West Africa, and Berber art are addressed.
  • GRS AH 846: Seminar: Romanesque and Gothic Art
    Detailed study of the castles, cathedrals, and works of art produced in Anglo-Norman England. Topics include contemporary attitudes toward images, monastic art, allegory, nostalgia, symbolism, parody, the grotesque, building techniques, and patronage. Among the works studied are Canterbury Cathedral, Durham Cathedral, the Tower of London, and the Bayeux Tapestry.
  • GRS AH 853: Seminar: Renaissance Art and Architecture
    Topic for Fall 2010: The Renaissance Studiolo.
  • GRS AH 863: Seminar: Baroque Art and Architecture
    Topics vary annually. Topic for Spring 2012: Rembrandt. Exploration of Rembrandt's art and career within the context of his social and cultural worlds through a variety of art historical approaches.
  • GRS AH 867: Material Culture
    Introduction to the theory and practice of the interdisciplinary study of material culture, which includes everything we make and use, from food and clothing to art and buildings. Explores contemporary scholarship from a range of disciplines. Also offered as GRS AM 867.
  • GRS AH 886: Seminar: American Painting
    Topic for Spring 2012: Visual Culture of the Civil War Era (1840-1870). American visual culture from 1850 to 1870. Slavery, Sectionalism, Civil War, Emancipation, the death of Lincoln, and Reconstruction in painting, sculpture, book illustration, the illustrated weeklies, photography, exhibitions, and organized urban spectacles.

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