Expand the sections below to explore our Spring 2022 course descriptions.
Undergraduate Courses
AH112: Introduction to Art in Europe and the United States from the Renaissance to Post- Modernism
Major monuments and artists in Europe and the United States from the Renaissance to Post-Modernism. Sequential development of major styles in architecture, sculpture, painting, and photography. Relationship of visual art to social and cultural forces.
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 Cranston/Ribner
AH215: Arts of Africa and Its Diaspora
Exploration of a diversity of visual and performing arts from Africa, including royal regalia, masquerades, and contemporary painting. Examines how the dispersal of Africans, due to the transatlantic slave trade and immigration, contributed to the cultural richness of the Americas.
This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy, Critical Thinking.
T, R 12:30 – 1:45 Auslander
AH240: Medieval Art in Europe
This course will cover roughly one thousand years of European art and architecture from the Fall of Rome to the Renaissance. In addition to the grand cathedrals and castles of medieval Europe, a broad range of media from stained glass to sculpture, gem encrusted metalwork, ivories, manuscript illumination and lavish textiles will be examined. Monuments treated will include the Book of Kells, Chartres Cathedral and Giotto’s Arena Chapel in Padua. Topics such as the role of women, the crystallization of a persecuting society, iconoclasm, humor and the grotesque will be considered.
This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness
M, W, F 3:35 – 4:25 Dello Russo
AH242: Latin American Art Since Contact
Course surveys Latin American art from the colonial period to present and relates it to imperial, state, institutional, and private agendas. Course interrogates both notions of art within colonial / neo-colonial contexts and changing roles of artists over past half-millennia.
This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness.
M, W, F 12:20 – 1:10 Reyes
AH379: Nineteenth Century American Art
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.
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
AH387: Boston Architecture & Urbanism
This class presents a history of Boston from the seventeenth through twenty- first centuries, as seen through the region’s architectural and urban history. Major buildings, architects, and urban planning schemes are examined in terms of economic, political, social, and institutional histories.
This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Social Inquiry I, Oral and/or Signed Communication, Teamwork/Collaboration.
M, W 2:30 – 5:15 Abramson
AH392: Twentieth Century Art: 1940 to 1980
Explores major currents in art produced around the world during the tumultuous middle decades of the 20th century. The following topics, among others, are examined in relation to postwar culture and Cold War politics: realism vs. abstraction, global pop art and conceptual art, new materials and technologies, international artists’ networks, and performative art practices.
M,W,F 1:25 – 2:15 Williams
AH395: History of Photography
An introduction to the study of photographs. The history of the medium in Europe and America from its invention in 1839 to the present. After lectures on photographic theory and methodology, photographs are studied both as art objects and as historical artifacts.
Effective Fall 2018, 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 Sichel
AH399: History & 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.
This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Writing- Intensive Course, Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy, Aesthetic Exploration.
T, R 9:30 – 10:45 Haenraets
CAS AH404: Museum Seminar
Art museums are at a point of inflection under pressures from the global pandemic, economic crisis, and renewed calls for social justice. This course examines the unique challenges and opportunities museums face in these present times to ensure a more equitable future. While providing an overview of various museum operations, the course invites students to critically engage in reimagining our cultural organizations to function better and serve more widely. Topics include mission and ethics, governance and transparency, collections and hierarchies, exhibitions and authority, audience development and programming, community and digital strategies, finances and budgets. The course’s goal is not only to prepare students for the museum field today but equip them to reimagine our cultural institutions of tomorrow.
AH486: Architecture Capstone
This course guides senior and qualified junior architectural studies majors through a capstone experience as an internship or research project. It focuses on integrating competencies gained through the major and BU Hub, and on developing post-graduate directions. Contact Professor Abramson about admittance to the course.
This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: The Individual in Community, Ethical Reasoning.
T 12:30 – 3:15 Abramson
500 Level Seminars for Undergraduate & Graduate Students
AH500A1: Global Perspectives on Modern Architecture and Urbanism
This seminar challenges the idea of a central, singular and canonic modernism, and reviews the emerging scholarship on modern architecture and urbanism across a broader geography from Asia and Latin America to the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Through weekly discussions of selected texts and contexts, it explores the role of architecture in the making (and continuous re-negotiation) of modern national identities outside Europe and North America, from the colonial/imperial legacies of these peripheral regions, to the building of post-colonial/ post-imperial nation states in the 20th century. The overall objective is to critically map the field, identify theoretical and methodological issues common to such trans-national studies, and discuss their larger historiographical significance.
R 12:30 – 3:15 Bozdoǧan
AH 521: Curatorship
This course examines the evolving roles and responsibilities of curators in arts institutions with an emphasis on the production of knowledge through practices of collecting, exhibition, and display. Through critical readings and case studies as well as on-site visits to museums and guest speakers, students will be introduced to different curatorial methodologies and gain an understanding of the relationship between theory and practice, both the why and how of curatorship.
R 12:30 – 3:15 C. Clarke
AH563: Global Baroque: Art and Power in the Seventeenth Century
Investigates the interaction between art and structures of power in 17th-century Europe, with particular attention to its global dimensions. Focus on Rubens, Rembrandt, Velazquez, and Bernini but also other forms of cultural production that circulated through global trade.
W 2:30 – 5:15 Zell
AH589: The Age of Napoleon
This seminar addresses an era of high creativity, in which artists, writers, and musicians were certain of nothing except – in the words of the poet John Keats – “the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of the imagination.” Offering a foundation in major European artistic currents of the 1770s through the mid-nineteenth century, the course considers the work of Géricault, Delacroix, Ingres, Goya, Turner, Constable, Blake, Friedrich, Runge, and others in the context of political and industrial revolution, nationalism, and religious revival.
W 8:00 – 10:45 Ribner
Graduate Courses
Graduate Courses
AH742: Latin American Art Colloquium
Case studies designed to explore the main aesthetic, social, and historical discourses surrounding image production in Latin America while familiarizing students with main scholars in the field and their methodologies.
F 2:30 – 5:15 Reyes
AH887 A1: Visual Cultures of the American City, 1790-1910
This course will examine the ways that American artists interpreted urban life in the years between 1790 and 1910, a period that saw rapid urbanization, the dramatic growth of city populations, and the deepening stratification and fragmentation of urban communities.
F 12:20-2:05 Barrett
AH887 B1: Art and Race in the Public Sphere
This seminar centers on the historical development of and recent debates surrounding monuments and public art
in the United States (with particular attention to the Boston area) that touch on issues of race. The course will examine these objects as fundamental and contested sites both of public memory, and of civic, regional, national, and racial identities. Later meetings will address contemporary challenges to monuments’ underlying ideological frameworks, with special attention to so-called “counter-monuments” that question or overturn the very possibility either of defining community and nation, or of commemorating the past.
T 12:30-2:15 Ott
Click here to view a gallery page of our Spring 2022 course offering posters.
Spring 2022 Registration Dates
Registration for Spring 2022 courses opens based on your academic class standing as follows:
| Academic Class Year: | Start Date: | Start Time (ET): |
| Graduate Students in COM, LAW, MET, SAR, SHA, SPH, SSW and STH | Sat, Oct 23 | 9:00 a.m. |
| Graduate Students in CFA, EGS, ENG, GRS, MED, QST, SDM and SED | Sun, Oct 24 | 9:00 a.m. |
| MET Evening Undergraduate Degree Students | Sun, Oct 31 | 9:00 a.m. |
| Seniors* | Sun, Oct 31 | 9:00 a.m. |
| Juniors* | Sun, Oct 31 | 12:00 p.m. |
| Sophomores* | Sun, Nov 7 | 9:00 a.m. |
| Freshmen* | Sun, Nov 14 | 9:00 a.m. |
| Non-Degree Students | Tue, Nov 16 | 9:00 a.m. |