Courses

• CAS AH 369: American Folk Art
  Explores the objects that collectors and museums identify as "American Folk Art." Examines how this label developed throughout the twentieth century; familiarizes students with major collections and genres including painting, sculpture, textiles, and other media. Also offered as CAS AM 369.
• CAS AH 376: Housing America
  What do dwellings say about the diversity of American experience? For over four centuries and across a continent, wealth and poverty, family and community, taste and technology have all shaped the meaning of home. Illustrated lecturers supplemented by field trips. Also offered as CAS AM 376.
• CAS AH 377: American Furniture and Allied Arts, 1630-1830
  Survey of furniture and related arts-- painting, architecture, and silver-- with an emphasis on aesthetics and quality, sources, style changes, regional differences, materials, and construction.
• CAS AH 379: 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.
• CAS AH 380: Romanticism in Europe
  In-depth exploration of art in the age of revolution, nationalism, colonial expansion, and religious revival. Development of new attitudes toward history, nature, and the imagination in the work of Friedrich, Goya, Delacroix, Gericault, Ingres, Turner, Constable, Blake, and others.
• CAS AH 382: Nineteenth-Century Architecture
  Survey of European and American architecture from 1750 to 1910. Explores issues in architecture, landscape architecture and city planning, and examines style, technology, and architectural theory.
• CAS AH 385: American Buildings and Landscapes
  An introductory analytic survey of American buildings and landscapes within their historical and cultural contexts. Students examine forces that have shaped the American built environment. Topics range from Indian mounds to commercial strips, Spanish missions to skyscrapers. Also offered as CAS AM 385.
• CAS AH 386: Twentieth-Century American Painting
  Realist and avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, including New York dada, early abstraction, regionalism, art and politics during the depression years, abstract expressionism, pop art and minimal art, performance art, feminist art, and recent developments in postmodernism.
• CAS AH 389: Impressionism
  Impressionism, its sources, and its aftermath: from the painting of modem life and leisure by Manet, Monet, Morisot, Renoir, and Degas to the evocation of spirituality, pain, and desire in the work of Van Gogh, Gauguin, Rodin, and Munch.
• CAS AH 391: Twentieth-Century Art to 1940
  A study of the key tendencies in European art between the 1880s and World War II. The work of van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse, Dalí, and their contemporaries is examined in relation to major issues in European culture and politics.
• CAS AH 392: Twentieth-Century Art from 1940 to 1980
  Explores major currents in European and American art made between 1940 and 1980. Examines the following movements and media in relation to postwar culture and politics: abstract expressionism, pop art, minimalism, conceptual art, earthworks, performance, and video.
• CAS AH 393: Contemporary Art: 1980 to Now
  Explores the terms of debate, key figures, and primary sites for the production and reception of contemporary art on a global scale since 1980. Painting, installation art, new media, performance, art criticism, and curatorial practice are discussed.
• CAS AH 398: Twentieth-Century Architecture
  This course provides an introduction to the major developments in architecture and urban planning from ca. 1900 to the present. It traces the proliferation of modernist thought through key projects but also to everyday buildings and landscapes.
• CAS AH 399: History and Theory of Landscape Architecture
  Explores man's relationship with nature by a study of selected built environments from antiquity to the present. Focus on both the private garden and the public park--here considered as works of art--and their changing forms, meaning, and interpretations.
• CAS AH 438: Seminar: Pompeii
  An in-depth study of Pompeii and the other towns buried by Mount Vesuvius. All aspects of the Vesuvian cities are examined, including urban planning and public architecture, private domestic and funerary architecture, mural painting, mosaics, and sculpture. Also offered as CAS AR 438.
• CAS AH 444: Seminar: Medieval Art
  In-depth examination of varying topics in the study of Medieval Art. Topic for Fall 2015: The Rebirth of Sculpture in Europe 1000-1250. Monumental architectural sculpture ceased to be produced after the Fall of Rome. This seminar examines prohibitions against carved imagery and the rebirth of sculpture around the year 1000. Focus on the invention and development of the grand church entrance.
• CAS AH 462: Seminar: Baroque Art
  Topic for Spring 2015: Global Baroque: Art and Power in the Seventeenth Century. Investigates the interaction between art and structures of power in seventeenth-century Europe, with particular attention to the global dimensions of this phenomenon. Focus on Rubens, Rembrandt, and Velázquez; also other forms of cultural production that circulated through global trading networks.
• CAS AH 495: Seminar: Twentieth Century Art
  Examines major artists and artistic currents of the twentieth century. Topics vary each year. Some background in the history of modern art is recommended. Topic for Fall 2014: Picasso. This seminar explores more than eight decades of incessant art making by Pablo Picasso. How his friends, his lovers, and his preoccupation with eroticism and death affected his imagery.
• CAS AH 497: Seminar: Contemporary Art
  Topic for Fall 2016: Contemporary Art: 1980 to Now. Explores the terms of debate, key figures, and primary sites for the production and reception of contemporary art on a global scale since 1980. Painting, installation art, new media, performance, art criticism, and curatorial practice are discussed.
• CAS AH 501: Practicum in Museum Studies
  Centered on an internship, which must comprise a supervised project approved in advance by the Director of Museum Studies. Stamped approval prior to the internship is necessary for registration in the course. Internships in Boston-area museums, galleries, historical agencies, and houses arranged for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, 10-12 hours per week (150 hours per semester) at the host institution, with written report.

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