Currently Subject to Changes
Expand the sections below to explore our Spring 2025 course descriptions.
Undergraduate Courses
CAS AH112: Renaissance to Today
This course explores 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.
Effective Spring 2023, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness, Teamwork/Collaboration.
M|W|F 11:15-12:05 Cranston / Ribner
plus a discussion section – see the academic planner on MyBU for section times.
CAS AH210: Learning to See
This course strengthens your ability to describe and analyze the visual world. From fundamentals such as color and composition to the design of advertisements, propaganda, and appliances.
A lab component provides opportunities for direct engagement with objects, images, and the built environment.
Effective Fall 2018, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness, Critical Thinking.
M|W|F 9:05-9:55 Ribner
plus a discussion section – see the academic planner on MyBU for section times
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. Effective Fall 2018, 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 Zhang
CAS AH240: Medieval Art in Europe
This course covers roughly one thousand years of art and architecture in Europe, Western Asia, and the Mediterranean from the Late Roman Era to the Renaissance. A broad range of media from stained glass to sculpture, gem encrusted metalwork, mosaics, ivories, manuscript illumination, lavish textiles, and other types of visual culture are examined.
Effective Fall 2018, this course fulfills a single unit in the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness.
M|W|F 10:10-11:00 Kahn
CAS AH251: Ancient Maya Civilization
An exploration of the Maya civilization of Mexico and Central America, including its origins, intellectual achievements, city-state rise and collapse cycles, and the cultural endurance of the Maya people of today. This course carries humanities divisional credit in CAS.
Effective Fall 2021, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Historical Consciousness, Social Inquiry I.
M|W|F 10:10-11:00 Chase
CAS AH316: African Diaspora Arts
This course introduces arts of the African diaspora in the Caribbean, South America, and the United States by examining aesthetic, religious, and philosophical systems. Examines artistic forms including Santería altars, Haitian architecture, Caribbean masquerading, and contemporary African-American artists.
M|W|F 10:10-11:00 Smythe-Johnson
CAS AH325: Art, Media, and Buddhism
Examines how textual, visual, and material forms of religious expressions have been conceptualized by Buddhists as well as how Buddhist objects are understood and re- contextualized in the West. Topics include: self- immolation; museums; war propaganda, and pop culture.
Effective Fall 2018, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness, Teamwork/Collaboration.
T|R 2:00-3:15 Hughes
CAS AH333: Classic Greek Art
Examines architecture, sculpture, painting, and metalwork of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. in their original contexts. Addresses such larger issues as development of portraiture; tension of “real” and “ideal”; roles and shifting iconographies of myth; and political use of monuments.
Effective Spring 2024, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Ethical Reasoning, Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness.
M|W|F 9:05-9:55 Martin
CAS AH365: Baroque Arts in Northern Europe
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.
Effective Fall 2018, this course fulfills a single unit in the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness.
T|R 11:00-12:15 Zell
CAS AH386: Modern American Art
This class explores the diverse and contested field of modern art in the United States, examining the broad range of artists and art practices that laid claim to aesthetic modernism in the years between 1890 and 1945.
Effective Fall 2018, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness.
T|R 2:00-3:15 Prince
CAS AH387: Boston Architecture and 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.
Effective Spring 2020, 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
CAS 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 Brown
CAS AH398: Global Modern and Contemporary Architecture
This course introduces major developments in architecture and urban planning from the 19th century to the present. It challenges canonical history of architecture by showcasing global perspectives on and struggles for/against modernity, colonialism, decolonization, nationalism, and more. Effective Fall 2018, this course fulfilled a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Historical Consciousness, Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy.
Effective Spring 2025, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Critical Thinking, Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy, Historical Consciousness.
T|R 9:30-10:45 Alnajada
CAS AH486: Architecture Capstone
This course guides senior and eligible junior architectural studies majors through a capstone experience, which may be an internship or a research project. Open only by application.
Interested students must contact Professor Abramson by Nov. 1, 2024.
Effective Spring 2020, 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
Seminars for Undergraduate & Graduate Students
CAS AH500 A1: A Global History of Camps: 19th Century to the Present
The image of the camp dominates contemporary representations. This course examines this spatial device from a global historical perspective, tracing a genealogy from colonial camps, Nazi camps, Soviet gulags, US internment camps to contemporary detention camps, refugee camps, border camps.
R 12:30-3:15 Alnajada
CAS AH500 B1: Artistic Encounter and Exchange in the Qing Empire
This seminar delves into the complex challenges that art historians face when navigating cultural interactions, encompassing visual, linguistic, and philosophical dimensions. Our primary focus will be on the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), the last imperial dynasty of China, ruled by the minority Manchus. We will explore the appropriation and translation of visual schemes and artistic technologies between China and Europe, as well as with East, Central, and South Asia, and the Americas. Throughout the course, we will engage with a variety of interdisciplinary scholarly readings that present innovative perspectives on the movement of ideas and visual forms across cultures. These discussions will provide a rich context for understanding artistic innovation and how art reveals underlying beliefs, values, and power dynamics.
W 2:30-5:15 Zhang
CAS AH521: Curatorship
Students research and prepare for an upcoming exhibition at the MFA on Rembrandt and Dutch Jews in the seventeenth century. Conducted primarily at the MFA’s Center for Netherlandish Art (CNA), classes introduce students to curatorial strategies and the pragmatics of exhibition-making through discussion, readings, hand’s-on engagement with artworks, and interactions with MFA curators, scholars, conservators, and staff. Students also contribute to the digital publication CNA Studies.
R 3:30-6:15 Zell
CAS AH525: American Cultural Landscape
This seminar provides an introduction to analyzing and interpreting American cultural landscapes and acquaints students with the historiography of interdisciplinary study of the built environment.
Also offered as CAS AM 525.
T | R 12:30-1:45 Moore
CAS AH527 A1: Making and Meaning in Medieval Art
Religious proscription and the development of a culture of copying guided the evolution of early medieval art. These topics will be addressed by examining artistic technique, the evolution of iconography and the development of style within the culture of piety, adherence to authority and retrospection through the study of a wonderful range of buildings and images.
T 12:30-3:15 Kahn
CAS AH527 B1: Black Feminist Art and Performance
This course looks at a selection of Black artists from across the African Diaspora whose work engages with feminist concerns around identity, ecology and power. We cover artists working in a variety of mediums, including painting, sculpture, photography, new media, dance, and performance.
M 2:30-5:15 Smythe-Johnson
CAS AH574: Topics in African Art
This seminar focuses on visual art produced in African urban settings from the 1960s to the present. We look at how independence movements coincided with the migration to cities. Urban areas became centers for social change, activism, and artistic production. We consider cities as centers for incredible cultural production in Africa and beyond. Once a month we visit a museum, gallery space, or studio to consider how African and African Diaspora art is displayed and how it interacts with Boston’s urban environment.
R 3:30-6:15 Becker
Graduate Courses
GRS AH733: Greek Art and Architecture
This graduate-level colloquium will critically examine issues of Greek Classical art and architecture covered in AH333 Arts of Classical Greece. It fulfills the art-historical methodologies requirement for MA students. (Students must also register for required co-requisite CASAH 734.)
M 12:20-2:05 Martin
GRS AH805: 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. Graduate Prerequisites: completion of PhD oral exam.
M 10:10-11:55 Barrett
GRS AH853: The Living Image in Early Modern Art
This seminar explores the early modern concept of art as a living thing through a consideration of likeness, illusion, automata, anatomy, wonders, and monsters. Attention will also be given to the role of thing theory, phenomenology, and artificial intelligence in art history.
M 12:20-2:05 Cranston
GRS AH895: Contemporary Art, Politics and Activism
From AIDS activism of the 1980s to the anti-globalization protests of the 1990s, from the Arab Spring to the Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements of the past decade, contemporary artists have developed wide-ranging forms of political resistance. In the process, both artists and members of their audience have been called upon to speak, rally, and organize. This seminar addresses global art practices that link protest, performance, and activism in order to expand art’s role in fostering social and political change.
W 4:30-6:15 Williams
Spring 2025 Registration Dates
Registration for Spring 2025 opens based on your academic class standing.
Details about specific registration dates and times can be found at https://www.bu.edu/reg/calendars/registration/