Expand the sections below to explore our Fall 2021 course descriptions.
Undergraduate Courses
CAS AH111: From Pyramids to Cathedrals- An Introduction to Ancient and Medieval Art
A chronological examination of the fundamentals of art and architectural history, this course introduces students to major monuments and works of art in their social, religious and historical contexts.
This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness.
T, R 11:00 – 12:15 plus Discussion Section Martin/Kahn
CAS AH201: Understanding Architecture
Introduces a range of approaches to understanding architecture in a historical perspective. Learn how architects and others have interpreted meaning through rubrics of art, nature, and culture, focused upon European and American architecture from 1400 to the present.
This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness, Research and Information Literacy.
T, R 2:00 – 3:15 Abramson
CAS AH210: Learning to See
Strengthens your ability to describe and analyze the visual world. Starting with design fundamentals, such as color and composition, the course advances to analysis of advertisements, propaganda, and appliances. Larger questions regarding making and experiencing art are also explored. A lab component provides opportunities for direct engagement with objects, images, and the built environment.
AH 210 fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness, Critical Thinking. No background in art history is required. Recommended for students in visual arts, science, engineering, and management.
M, W, F 9:05 – 9:55 Ribner
CAS AH225: Arts of Asia
Surveys of the major artistic traditions of Asia. Important monuments are examined analytically in order to explain why certain forms and styles are characteristic of specific times and places, and how these monuments functioned in their cultural contexts. Carries humanities divisional credit in CAS.
This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness, Research and Information Literacy.
M, W, F 9:05 – 9:55 Tseng
CAS AH232/AR232: The Archaeology of Ancient Egypt The technology, economy, social life, political organization, religions, art, and architecture of Egypt from Predynastic times through the Roman period, based on archaeological and historical sources. Emphasis on the period of the pharaohs (ca. 3000-323 BCE). Carries humanities divisional credit in CAS. Also offered as CAS AR 232.
This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness.
M, W, F 2:30 – 3:20 Taronas
CAS AH251/AR251: Ancient Maya Civilization
This course fosters knowledge of and appreciation for diversity in our world’s cultures by introducing you to the study of Classic Maya art and archaeology. The term begins with a culture-historical lecture overview in order to orient you in time and space. The remainder of the course emphasizes salient concerns that are both relevant to today’s society and observable through hieroglyphic inscription, iconographic representation, and archaeological excavation. These topics include gender, gender inequalities, and sexuality; household vs. state level economies; philosophies and religious practices; sacred ecologies, animate beings, and embodied places; ethnic identity, politics, and stereotyping; sacrifice, war, conquest, imperialism, and colonialism; and subordination, class disparities, and the naturalization of inequality. The following weeks will be dedicated to discussion of these issues, organized into three overarching themes: identity, political economy, and cosmogonies. We end with a discussion on current work that aims to decolonize the production of knowledge as it pertains to the Classic Maya.
M, W, F 1:25 – 2:15 Clarke
CAS AH257: Italian Renaissance Art
Survey of the arts in the Renaissance in Italy from the communes of the early fifteenth century to the courts of the sixteenth century.
This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness, Critical Thinking.
T, R 11:00 – 12:15 Baldasso
CAS AH284: Arts in America
A survey of art and visual culture made in North America between the early colonial period and World War I, exploring the ways that painters, sculptors, photographers, and graphic artists navigated major aesthetic debates, political conflicts, and economic crises. Carries humanities divisional credit in CAS.
This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness.
M,W,F 10:10 – 11:00 Barrett
CAS AH317: From Morocco to Timbuktu: Art and Architecture at the Saharan Crossroads
Cultural exchange between North and West Africa, and its impact on art and architecture from the medieval period to the present; the interaction between Islam and other modes of African religious practice and how this interaction influenced African aesthetic expression.
This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy, Digital/Multimedia Expression, Creativity/Innovation.
M, W, F 2:30-3:20 Becker
CAS AH323: Utopian Modernismos: Avant-Garde Practices in Latin America
This course studies avant-garde practices and the utopian role assigned to visual arts in Latin America during the twentieth century. We will study vanguard movements including Social Realism, Indigenism, Mexican Muralism, Geometric Abstraction, Mass-Mediatic interventions, and Art-ivism, among others.
T, R 11:00 – 12:15 Reyes
CAS AH365: Baroque Arts in Northern Europe
This course explores the rich artistic traditions of the northern (Dutch) and southern (Flemish) Netherlands from the late sixteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Emphasis on major artists such as Rubens, Van Dyck, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, and Vermeer. Visits to the MFA’s new Center for Netherlandish Art, conditions permitting.
M, W, F 11:15-12:05 Zell
CAS AH367/AM367: Living in a Material World: History Through Consumer Goods
What can whale oil lamps and IKEA bookshelves tell us about modern life? This class uses a series of iconic consumer goods to explore how diverse groups of Americans navigated social transformations including the formation of an Atlantic world economy, industrialization, the emergence of mass culture, and globalization.
M, W, F 10:10-11:00 Lennard
CAS AH380: The Age of Napoleon
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.
This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness.
M, W, F 1:25-2:15 Ribner
CAS AH391: 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, Dali, and their contemporaries is examined in relation to major issues in European culture and politics.
This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness, Research and Information Literacy.
M, W, F 10:10-11:00 Sichel
CAS AH393/GRS AH693: Contemporary Art from 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.
This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness.
T, R 3:30-4:45 Goldman
CAS AH398: 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 buildings, actors and theoretical texts analyzed in their historical, cultural and political context.
This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Historical Consciousness, Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy.
T, R 9:30-10:45 Bozdoǧan
CAS AH404: Contemporary Exhibition Practices
This course examines developments in contemporary exhibition practices from the 1980s to the present. Taking a global perspective, the course considers how curators, artists, and scholars have sought to expand and decentralize the art world through transnational and multicultural approaches to exhibition-making, including large-scale exhibitions and biennials.
T 12:30-3:15 Cooney
500 Level Seminars for Undergraduate & Graduate Students
CAS AH500 B1: American Art and the Civil War
This course will explore the ways that Northern and Southern painters, sculptors, photographers, illustrators, and popular image makers interpreted slavery and sectional strife in the years surrounding the Civil War.
F 11:15- 2:00 Barrett
CAS AH520: The Museum and The Historical Agency
History, present realities, and future possibilities of museums and historical agencies, using Boston’s excellent examples. Issues and debates confronting museums today examined in the light of historical development and changing communities. Emphasis on collecting, display and interpretation.
R 12:20-3:15 Hall
CAS AH527 A1: Castles and Cathedrals
Castles and cathedrals with their splendid treasures from gold and gem-studded shrines to vast stained-glass windows, textiles and illuminated manuscripts will be explored against their social, political, religious and cultural background. The course aims to help students develop the ability to analyze secular and ecclesiastical monuments, learn the basics of medieval iconography, and understand the function of images as props for the faithful, as didactic tools and a source of entertainment in medieval society.
R 3:30-6:15 Kahn
CAS AH527 B1: The Art of the U.S. in Black & White
The fields of African American Art History and the Art History of the United States occupy distinct disciplinary terrain and all too infrequently intersect. As critics have long noted, this arrangement affords greater visibility for Black artists, but also arguably perpetuates the continued segregation and marginalization of histories of cultural production by U.S. artists of African descent. This seminar examines efforts to integrate these two intellectual traditions in ways that neither perpetuate the center-periphery topographies of the discipline nor elide questions of race in pursuit of a disingenuously colorblind art history. Individual meetings explore attempts to relocate figures strongly associated with one field in the context of the other, examine artists of different ethnicities in tandem, address artworks that depict racial integration, or take up examples of interracial collaboration, whether on particular artworks, exhibitions, or institutions.
T 3:30-6:15 Ott
CAS AH532: Japanese Print Culture
This seminar focuses on print cultures in Japan from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. “Prints” and “printing” are broadly defined, and formats to be studied include: woodblock prints, picture books, photographs, illustrated novels and magazines, postcards, posters, print advertisements, and manga. The course roughly follows the chronological development of print technology alongside contemporaneous historical, cultural, and social phenomena, such as Edo-period leisure pursuits and travel boom, Meiji-period modernization and westernization, Taishō-period domestic reforms and gender (re)definitions, and Shōwa-period wartime propagandistic efforts and postwar recovery. A central exploration of this course is the function of print(ed) imagery as both artistic expression and instruments of mass communication. Key features and issues related to Japanese prints and printmaking to be considered are manual and mechanical processing, reproduction and multiplication, originality, uniqueness, collaborative creation, mass circulation, and popular consumption.
M 2:30-5:15 Tseng
CAS AH533: Greek Painting
Painting was the most esteemed genre of ancient Greek art, famed for its beauty and ability to delight—or even fool—the eye. We will investigate Greek painting and the use of color from the emergence of free painting in the Aegean to the acme of illusionism in the Hellenistic Mediterranean. We will study panel and wall painters, colorists who collaborated with sculptors and architects, and craftsmen who produced figure-decorated pottery. Fulfill Hub units in Oral Communication, Writing Intensive, and Research and Information Literacy. 4 credits. Prerequisite: First-Year Writing Seminar (e.g., WR 100 or WR 120)
W 2:30-5:15 Martin
CAS AH543: Latin American Art and the Cold War
Course studies Latin American artistic practices in relation to Cold War political frameworks, such as development and dependency discourses, the impact of the Cuban Revolution, U.S. and Soviet cultural policies, and the rise of numerous political dictatorships.
F 2:30-5:15 Reyes
CAS AH554: Boston Architecture Workshop: Brighton Project
Explore the architectural and urban transformation of Brighton from agricultural fields, country estates, and Boston’s primary nineteenth-century cattle market and meat packing district into a dense neighborhood. We scrutinize sources that cultivate the rich history of urban form and settlement.
W 2:30 – 5:15 Bluestone
CAS AH557: Drawing in Early Modern Italy
This seminar will consider the role of drawings in workshop practice, the transition to drawings as autonomous artworks, and the relationship between invention and sketches. Attention also will be given to the history of materials and connoisseurship, as well as to the mobility of drawings as artworks.
F 11:15-2:00 Cranston
CAS AH582: Historic House Museums in Boston and Beyond
Boston and New England have numerous house museums. From circa 1850, such buildings were saved internationally. But why? Do they address contemporary audiences? Uses case studies and visits; contextualizes international movement. Considers group memory, invented traditions, civic-national identities, romantic nationalism.
T 12:30-3:15 Hall
Graduate Courses
Graduate Courses
GRS AH805: Professional Development and Placement Seminar
Offers advanced PhD students the opportunity to present and discuss works-in-progress and structured guidance for the tasks involved in academic and curatorial job applications.
W 4:30-6:15 Becker
GRS AH863: Johannes Vermeer
Vermeer is one of the most celebrated artists of all time but also one of the least prolific and most enigmatic painters of seventeenth-century Holland. his seminar explores Vermeer’s art and career through various perspectives and methods of art history,and attempts to situate his astonishingly small production of about 35 paintings within the cultural and social worlds for which they were created. hemes and issues that will guide our discussions include: Vermeer’s place within Delft’s artistic culture; the rise of genre painting in the canon of Dutch art; interpretive debates surrounding Dutch genre painting; women and domesticity in Dutch art and society; the poetics and gender of the gaze; making and marketing artworks in the Dutch Republic; patronage, collecting and the display of art; optics, scientific instruments, mapmaking and picture-making; the development of the cityscape; seventeenth-century artistic theory and practice; and Vermeer’s reputation and critical reception.
W 2:30-4:15 Zell
GRS AH891: The Photographic Book
This seminar will examine the photographic book throughout the years from 1839 to the present. We will concentrate on the book as a unique form for the medium, and study image/text relationships, narrative structures, cultural constructions of the book’s message, the serial quality of grouped images, and the differences and similarities between literary and photographic languages.
M 12:20-2:05 Sichel
GRS AH893: Histories of Modern Architecture
The historiography of modern architecture focused upon classics published since the 1920s by Pevsner, Giedion, Scully, Banham, Tafuri, and others. Accompanied by philosophies of history by Foucault, White, Kellner, and others. Learn to think critically about all constructions of history.
W 10:10-11:55 Abramson
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Fall 2021 Registration Dates
Registration for Fall 2021 courses opens based on your academic class standing as follows:
| Academic Class Year: | Start Date: | Start Time: |
| Graduate Students in COM, LAW, MET, SAR, SHA, SPH, SSW and STH | Sat, Apr 10 | 9:00 am |
| Graduate Students in CFA, EGS, ENG, GRS, MED, QST, SDM and SED | Sun, Apr 11 | 9:00 am |
| MET Evening Undergraduate Degree Students | Sun, Apr 18 | 9:00 am |
| Seniors* | Sun, Apr 18 | 9:00 am |
| Juniors* | Sun, Apr 18 | 12:00 pm |
| Sophomores* | Sun, Apr 25 | 9:00 am |
| Freshmen* | Sun, Apr 25 | 9:00 am |
| Non-Degree Students | Tue, Apr 27 | 9:00 am |