| Title | Instructor | Location | Time | All taxonomy terms | Description | Section Description | Cross Listings | Fulfills | Registration Notes | Syllabus | Syllabus URL | Course Syllabus URL | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ARTH 0127-401 | The Material Past in a Digital World | Jason Herrmann | TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | The material remains of the human past -objects and spaces- provide tangible evidence of past people's lives. Today's information technologies improve our ability to document, study, and present these materials. But what does it mean to deal with material evidence in a virtual context? In this class, students will learn basic digital methods for studying the past while working with objects, including those in the collections of the Penn Museum. This class will teach relational database design and 3D object modeling. As we learn about acquiring and managing data, we will gain valuable experience in the evaluation and use of digital tools. The digital humanities are a platform both for learning the basic digital literacy students need to succeed in today's world and for discussing the human consequences of these new technologies and data. We will discuss information technology's impact on the study and presentation of the past, including topics such as public participation in archaeological projects, educational technologies in museum galleries, and the issues raised by digitizing and disseminating historic texts and objects. Finally, we will touch on technology's role in the preservation of the past in today's turbulent world. No prior technical experience is required, but we hope students will share an enthusiasm for the past. | ANTH1303401, CLST1303401, HIST0871401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 0141-401 | Museums, Monuments, and Social Justice | Megan Crandal Kassabaum | MW 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | Monuments, museums, and heritage are all critical parts of the world that we have created and are shaped by. These institutions and sites often claim to represent our past, who we imagine ourselves to be today, and how we might define our futures. We often rely on museums and monuments to frame history and history’s relationship to our current social and cultural systems. However, in recent years, social, racial, and economic justice movements have pushed us to rethink the function of monuments, museums, and heritage. In particular, these social movements have helped us understand how racism, sexism, and colonialism are responsible for the creation of monuments and museums. This course examines the echoes and continuities of colonial representations in museums and monuments. In addition, we will examine how new ways of commemorating and representing the past can result in a new vision for our future. By visiting a variety of local monuments and sites and by engaging in conversations about accountability and social justice, this course will challenge us to rethink the tangible and intangible ways that we weave the past into the present for the creation of the future. | ANTH1410401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 0500-301 | The Art of Forgery, from Cuneiform Tablets to Fake News | Nicholas Herman | R 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | The primary goal of the first-year seminar program is to provide every first-year student the opportunity for a direct personal encounter with a faculty member in a small setting devoted to a significant intellectual endeavor. Specific topics are posted at the beginning of each academic year. | Arts & Letters Sector (all classes) | |||||||||
| ARTH 1020-401 | Renaissance to the Present | David Young Kim | MW 10:15 AM-11:14 AM | This course is an introduction to the history of art in a global context from the early 1400s to the present. Lectures will introduce students to significant moments in artistic production in both the Western and Eastern hemispheres through focused studies on crucial aspects of exchange between cultures and continents. Covering an era of increasing economic transactions, imperial conquests, and industrialization, this course will build recursively through themes such as: the emergence of authorial identity and models of artistic collaboration, the traffic of artistic materials and techniques and their adaptation in different cultural settings, and the foregrounding of art to both document and initiate political change. Developing vocabularies to discuss painting, sculpture, architecture, and prints, as well as photography and film, students will learn to analyze art's decisive role during times of social transformation, including modernization, colonization, and technological advances. We will also examine the role of broad-reaching media and the advent of art criticism in forming public opinion. Assignments will encourage students to think widely across geographies and study intimately local examples in the Philadelphia museums. | VLST2320401 | Arts & Letters Sector (all classes) | ||||||||
| ARTH 1100-601 | What is Modern Art? | Sara Vakili | R 5:15 PM-8:14 PM | Modernism is not easily defined. For some, the word simply identifies Western art of the last two hundred-odd years. For others, modernism refers to forms of “advanced” visual art, whether the cubist distortions of Pablo Picasso or the allover abstractions of Jackson Pollock, that break with established representational conventions. For still others, the term singles out modes of artistic opposition to the ravages of capitalism, colonialism, industrialization, imperialism, and war that continue to define our world. Among its manifold practices, we find the rise of abstraction, paintings that pretend to show nothing but an instant, dreams and erotic desires set free for everyone to see, and everyday objects elevated to the status of sculpture. At key moments, "Art" itself was declared dead, then resurrected as the solution to the social problems of the era, forming a highly ambivalent relationship to the spheres of politics and history. We will cover the development of Modernism broadly, from the 1860s to the 1960s, introducing many of the best-known figures (like Monet, Van Gogh, Duchamp, and Picasso) and movements (like Impressionism, Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism). Europe and North America will be the focus, but we will frequently look to global developments as well and analyze art made in colonial and diasporic conditions. The standard narratives of Modernism will be questioned at every turn, and artists of color, diverse gender and sexual orientations, as well as national and economic backgrounds studied in depth as well. We will proceed more or less chronologically, doubling back or projecting forward when necessary to understand the determinative historical influences that have shaped the development of modernist idioms in particular times and places. In every instance, we will study works of art that have confronted our culture’s visual means—of life, death, consumption, and display—and attempted to work them over into critical form. | Arts & Letters Sector (all classes) | |||||||||
| ARTH 1500-401 | Eye, Mind and Image |
Hammam Aldouri Ian F Verstegen |
TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | Understanding the visual character of our natural and built environments involves both scientific and humanistic disciplines. While the various specialties involved require considerable effort to master, Visual Studies 1010, drawing on a subset of disciplines— neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, art history, and cinema studies—provides an initial guide through the many claims made about seeing art and seeing the world. Students weigh ideas and evidence about seeing through an interdisciplinary lens. Does seeing vary across cultures? What can art tell us about vision? How is it that combining green and red yields yellow? How do still movie frames produce an experience of motion? Is there a new, modern form of seeing? To address such questions, students gain knowledge of the eye and visual centers of the brain, basic principles of perception, the way in which psychological proclivities are utilized in the cultural sphere, the interaction between art and visual theory, and philosophical questions concerning the mind-brain relation, the value of art, and vision as a source of knowledge. They learn from lectures by an interdisciplinary set of Penn faculty, from hands on labs (for example, an eye dissection), and field trips (to the Dia Beacon Museum). | VLST1010401 | Hum & Soc Sci Sector (new curriculum only) | ||||||||
| ARTH 1800-401 | The Sexuality of Modern Art | Jonathan D Katz | MW 12:00 PM-1:29 PM | It's no exaggeration to note that queers have long been at the forefront of innovation in the arts, and that the arts, generally, have been a comfortable home for queers, even at moments when society at large was distinctly hostile. In fact the concepts of modern art and homosexuality that we use today are twins, for they were both founded in the third quarter of the 19th century and grew up together. Introduction to Queer Art thus begins with the coining of the word "homosexual" in 1869, and surveys how a range of mediums including painting, sculpture, poetry, music, and film shifted in response to new definitions of sexuality. Along the way, we will work towards answering two related questions: 1) Why were queer creators largely responsible for the introduction of modernity in the arts, and 2) why do we find so often that queer social and political dissent found form in, and as, aesthetic dissent as well? In creating new forms for art that often seem far removed from any traditional definition of sexuality, including non-objective and abstract art, queer artists pushed the boundaries of normativity, leading to new ways of seeing, hearing, feeling and thinking that often dared to encode queer meanings as part of their formal innovation. We will look into the politics of queer art, and how and why in the US, even amidst often dangerous homophobia, it was queer artists who represented America to itself. Thus, we will cover such key cultural figures such as Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, Georgia O'Keeffe, Frank O'Hara, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Agnes Martin. Throughout, new methods informed by queer, gender, and critical race theory will be utilized. | GSWS1800401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 1900-001 | What is Contemporary Art? | TR 12:00 PM-1:29 PM | What is contemporary art? When is contemporary art? For whom is contemporary art? Where is contemporary art? And… why does contemporary art matter? This survey introduces us to some central artists, themes, works, and debates currently comprising the history of contemporary art, with a particular focus on the social, racial, and political engagements that have informed artistic developments, as well as how they are historicized in relation to other art and geopolitical events, globally. We consider the ways in which artists have approached, contested, reflected, and reconfigured the problems and possibilities of institutions in order to find critical traction and build historical context. We also look at how globalization, technology, racialization, and capitalism have all shaped artistic production, art criticism, and the art market, while also reflecting upon the temporality of our present and what it is that is “contemporary” to our “now.” | |||||||||||
| ARTH 2094-401 | Dress & Fashion in Africa | Ali B. Ali-Dinar | TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | Throughout Africa, social and cultural identities of ethnicity, gender, generation, rank and status were conveyed in a range of personal ornamentation that reflects the variation of African cultures. The meaning of one particular item of clothing can transform completely when moved across time and space. As one of many forms of expressive culture, dress shape and give forms to social bodies. In the study of dress and fashion, we could note two distinct broad approaches, the historical and the anthropological. While the former focuses on fashion as a western system that shifted across time and space, and linked with capitalism and western modernity; the latter approach defines dress as an assemblage of modification the body. The Africanist proponents of this anthropological approach insisted that fashion is not a dress system specific to the west and not tied with the rise of capitalism. This course will focus on studying the history of African dress by discussing the forces that have impacted and influenced it overtime, such as socio-economic, colonialism, religion, aesthetics, politics, globalization, and popular culture. The course will also discuss the significance of the different contexts that impacted the choices of what constitute an appropriate attire for distinct situations. African dress in this context is not a fixed relic from the past, but a live cultural item that is influenced by the surrounding forces. | AFRC2324401, ANTH2024401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 2250-401 | Greek Art and Artifact | Ann L Kuttner | MW 12:00 PM-1:29 PM | This lecture course surveys Greek art and artifacts from Sicily to the Black Sea from the 10th century BCE to the 2nd century BCE, including the age of Alexander and the Hellenistic Kingdoms. Public sculpture and painting on and around grand buildings and gardens, domestic luxury arts of jewelry, cups and vases, mosaic floors, and cult artefacts are discussed. Also considered are the ways in which heroic epic, religious and political themes are used to engaged viewers' emotions and served both domestic and the public aims. We discuss the relationships of images and things to space and structure, along with ideas of invention and progress, and the role of monuments, makers and patrons in Greek society. | AAMW6250401, ARTH6250401, CLST3401401, CLST5401401 | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202710&c=ARTH2250401 | ||||||||
| ARTH 2400-401 | Western Medieval Art and Architecture | Sarah M. Guerin | TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | An introductory survey, this lecture course investigates architecture, painting, sculpture, and the "minor arts" of the Middle Ages. Students become familiar with major monuments of the Romanesque and Gothic periods, primarily in Western Europe as well as relevant sites around the Mediterranean basin. Analyses of works emphasize cultural contexts, thematic content, and the function of objects and monuments. Discussions focus such themes as: the circulation of artists, materials and techniques; the relationships between art and power; anthropogenic impact of art making on the environment; the theological role of images; the explosion of secular visual culture; and the role of art in an interconnected world. | AAMW6400401, ARTH6400401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 2680-401 | Art and Empire in India, 1750-1900 | Sonal Khullar | MW 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | This course surveys transformations in visual culture between the Mughal and British empires in India from the mid-eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries. We shall consider changes in artistic production, patronage, publics, and viewing protocols in the contexts of the court and bazaar. We shall examine the emergence of new technologies and its impact on visual forms, media, and genres, focusing on the interplay of photography, print, and painting. We shall explore the role of institutions -the art school, the museum, and the archeological survey- and the professions and practices they engendered. We shall analyze how architecture and urban planning created new built environments and social relationships in colonial India. We shall view objects first-hand in the Penn Museum, Penn Libraries, and Philadelphia Museum of Art. This is a reading- and writing-intensive course. Students with a background in related disciplines such as literature, history, religion, anthropology, and South Asian Studies are welcome. | ARTH6680401, SAST2680401, SAST6680401 | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202710&c=ARTH2680401 | ||||||||
| ARTH 2779-401 | Reckoning: Art and Monuments in Europe and the Americas (PD) | Vance Byrd | T 5:15 PM-8:14 PM | In this course, we will examine how commemorative traditions in Europe and the Americas have been invented and contested since the nineteenth century. We will discuss why certain events in the past rather than others have been the object of commemoration; what these creations stood for originally; how their meanings have changed over the time; and the lessons, if any, these commemorative practices continue to teach us today. We also will examine the ways in which Europeans and Americans have protested, torn down old monuments, erected new ones, and turned to a wide variety of artistic forms to call into question stories about empire, fascism, communism, westward expansion and settler colonialism, enslavement, as well as military victory and loss. To answer these questions, we will focus on the history and theory of public monuments and sculpture, painting, commemorative sites, museum exhibitions, and film. The lecture topics will range from the Napoleonic Wars and Occupation, the American Civil War, German Unifications, National Socialism and Fascism, Holocaust Memorials and Museums, the Disappeared in Argentina, Spanish Civil War and Post-Francoism, Refugees and Migrants in the Mediterranean, as well as works by individual artists who have reflected on these historical events. Taught in English. This is an SNF Paideia-designated course and is open to all Penn students, not only Paideia fellows. | ARTH6779401, GRMN1240401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 2810-401 | Modern Architecture, from the Enlightenment to the Present | Ana Ozaki | TR 10:15 AM-11:14 AM | In this introductory course, we will contextualize modern architecture beyond the 20th-century Western canon of modern architecture to examine the social, intellectual, and material life of buildings and movements from around the globe. Starting with the Enlightenment, this class’s weekly themes are structured chronologically around major historical events and across different geographies. Rather than a conventional survey, this class aims to offer students a global literacy regarding modern architecture and an understanding of the intertwined nature of architectural practice and historiography globally. That is, as opposed to trying to cover all architectural movements and theories, the course focuses on providing students with the tools to find and critically assess architecture’s multiple layers, including but limited to the actions of peoples, ideas, objects, technologies, images, and other forces, and how they have interacted in specific locations. Challenging architecture’s Western and male gaze and production, the lectures include less conventional spatial actors, especially those often marginalized by ideals of racial difference, gender and sexuality, class, and religion, among other factors. Informed by critical theory, ecology, gender, postcolonial, and critical race studies, the course will examine the political ground on which architecture stands and interferes, including land, property, capital, and patronage. We will establish architecture, therefore, as a contested and disputed practice, never neutral and constantly adapting to socio-political and environmental constraints. Focused on a capacious understanding of modern architecture, we will explore global connections and situated knowledge production methods that have shaped and disputed the logic of capital, fossilization, and colonialism. | ARTH6810401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 2930-401 | British Cinema | James English | TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | This course explores an aspect of cultural studies intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. | CIMS2420401, COML2420401, ENGL2420401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 2952-401 | The Global Film Theory Club | Karen E Redrobe | T 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | This device-free, seminar-style discussion class seeks to cultivate a film club community as we grapple with some key contemporary film theory debates, framed within the context of recent interventions as well as earlier critiques that seek to challenge film theory’s geopolitical biases and blind spots. Together, we will examine how film theorists as well as filmmakers from different countries, communities, and (primarily) 21st century moments have attempted to make sense of the changing phenomenon known as “cinema,” to think cinematically. Topics under consideration include: spectatorship, authorship, the apparatus, translation and subtitles, archives and preservation, festivals, blockbusters and the popular, animation, corporeality, virtuality, the national / transnational / global, decolonization, and what “counts” as film and film theory in different contexts. No knowledge of film theory is presumed. In the first part of the 3-hour class we will watch a film or some short films together and develop skills for taking notes on your responses to films while watching, with the goal of thinking actively across theoretical texts and the shared film experience. In the second part of the class, we will work through the assigned texts together using a variety of approaches to build skills and confidence with reading, writing, talking about and contextualizing film theory and to deepen our collective understanding of the films we watch together. | CIMS3300401, COML3303401, ENGL2902401, GSWS3300401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 3000-301 | Undergraduate Methods Seminar | Shira N. Brisman | T 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | Topic varies from semester to semester. This course, required for history of art majors, acquaints students with a wide variety of historical and contemporary approachees to studying art, architecture, material culture, and visual culture. | ||||||||||
| ARTH 3020-301 | Methods of Object-Study: Understanding Works of Art on Paper |
Christina Taylor Nancy E Ash Thomas J Primeau |
R 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | This immersive hands-on seminar introduces students to methods of analyzing the material, physical, and visual aspects of objects in a museum, gallery, or library context. Students will receive training in curatorial practices, close observational skills, and precise descriptive terminology for materials and techniques. They also will learn about essential tools of conservation and technical analysis. | ||||||||||
| ARTH 3070-401 | Rise of Image Culture | Hammam Aldouri | W 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | Today images are everywhere; two centuries ago, they were rare. This seminar considers key historical and theoretical contexts for this change and its social consequences. With the help of some of the strongest critics and theorists of image culture, we will consider five interrelated aspects of the rise of image culture. - First, we will explore how new media and mechanical reproduction has changed the idea of the image over in the free market. - Second, we will explore how images operate through the psyche and gaze and how that operation is tied to social and political power. - Third, we will examine how representations make meaning and form identity in coded systems. - Fourth, we will consider the relationship between visual space and concepts of reality. And finally, we will interrogate how the physical and digital material that images are made from affects their meaning. | VLST3030401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 3091-401 | Black Visual & Performance Arts in Latin America & the Caribbean | Odette Casamayor | W 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | This course offers an interdisciplinary study of Black visual and performance arts in Latin America and the Caribbean, examining these creative practices as critical sites of knowledge production, identity formation, social resistance, and diasporic worldmaking. Centering Afro-Latin American and Afro-Caribbean artists and performance practitioners, students will investigate how visual and embodied practices confront coloniality, articulate and dismantle constructions of race and gender, interrogate experiences of migration and memory, and envision speculative and liberatory futures. Course materials include painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, sculpture, installation, performance, and new media practices from across the Caribbean, Latin America, and diasporic communities in the United States and Europe. These works are studied in conversation with art criticism, aesthetic theory, and critical frameworks that illuminate the epistemological dimensions of Afro-diasporic creative expression. Bringing together historical and theoretical frameworks on slavery, colonialism, creolization, global Afro-diasporic circulation, and performance as epistemology, the course pairs conceptual grounding with in-depth case studies of key historical and contemporary artists. | AFRC4525401, AFRC5525401, ARTH5091401, COML4525401, COML5525401, LALS4525401, LALS5525401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 3200-301 | Aegean Bronze Age Art Seminar: Gender in the Aegean Bronze Age | Elizabeth Shank | In this class, we will explore the art and cultures of the Aegean Bronze Age in Greece, a period from roughly 3,300-1,100 BCE. The geographic regions of the Greek Mainland, the Cycladic islands, and the island of Crete were home to complex cultural groups that formed a unique Bronze Age society. Topics will vary from semester to semester, and may include and not be limited to the examination of the architecture, pottery, wall paintings, stone carvings, jewelry, seals, weapons and other metalwork, and the iconography of these prehistoric arts. We will also delve into issues of the organization of society and the distribution of power, the role of women and men, trade and the unique position of the (rather small) Aegean world as it existed between two huge powerhouses of the ancient Mediterranean: the Ancient Near East and Egypt. | |||||||||||
| ARTH 3699-301 | Wolf Humanities Seminar: Dissenting Subjects, Dissident Forms: Architecture in the Afro-Asian City | Shivani Shedde | W 10:15 AM-1:14 PM | The Wolf Humanities Center is Penn’s interdisciplinary humanities research center based in the School of Arts & Sciences. Each year the Wolf Humanities Center hosts postdoctoral scholars as they conduct research and teach one course on the center’s annual theme. | ||||||||||
| ARTH 3821-401 | From Movie Palaces to Netflix | Chenshu Zhou | MW 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | Cinema has always had an audience. From its first appearances in cafes, tea houses, and variety shows to today’s streaming platforms, cinema continues to exist in relation to different ways of looking and experiencing. This course examines how films have been shown and how audiences have watched films in diverse historical and cultural contexts such as in India, China, Nigeria, and the US. We will give special attention to streaming as the latest model for delivering films. How does exhibition shape both the films being shown and audiences’ moviegoing experiences? What kind of conceptions about cinema emerge through this process? How has the showing of films been related to modernization, colonialism, migration, gender relations, and other social issues? To answer these questions, this course introduces students to research methods such as archival research, oral history, and ethnography. Students will contribute to the collective research project “Moviegoing in Philadelphia” and organize a film screening for their final project. | CIMS3821401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 3860-301 | 20th Century Art in Europe Seminar: Abstraction, 1900s-1960s | Francesca Isabella Ferrari | T 5:15 PM-8:14 PM | Topics vary from semester to semester, but might include a focus on a particular medium, a particular locale, or a problematic/thematic including for example, decolonization, migration, art and war, gender, etc. | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202710&c=ARTH3860301 | |||||||||
| ARTH 3873-401 | History of Disney Animation | Linda R. Simensky | M 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | No organization has exerted as much influence on popular culture and the art form of animation as The Walt Disney Company. For decades, Disney films were the standard by which all other animated films were measured. This course will examine the biography and philosophy of founder Walt Disney, as well as The Walt Disney Company’s impact on animation art, storytelling and technology, the entertainment industry, and American popular culture. We will consider Disney's most influential early films, look at the 1960s when Disney’s importance in popular culture began to erode, and analyze the films that led to the Disney renaissance of the late 1980s/early 1990s. We will also assess the subsequent purchase of Pixar Animation Studios and the overall impact Pixar has had on Disney. The class will also look at recent trends and innovations, including live-action remakes and Disney+. | CIMS3203401, ENGL0593401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 3901-401 | Romantic Comedy | Meta Mazaj | TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | We may know what it is like to fall in love, but how do movies tell us what it is like? Through an exciting tour of American and World cinema, we will analyze the moods and swings, successes and failures of love in romantic comedy, one of the most popular but generally overlooked and taken for granted genres. We will turn a spotlight on it by examining what elements and iconography constitute the “romcom” genre, what specific qualities inform its sub-groupings such as screwball, sex comedy or radical romantic comedy, how they are related to their historical, cultural and ideological contexts, and what we can learn about their audiences. Watching classic as well contemporary examples of the genre, from City Lights (1931), It Happened One Night (1934) and Roman Holiday (1953), to Harold and Maude (1971), Annie Hall (1977), How to Lose A Guy in 10 Days (2003) and Her (2013), we will problematize this overly-familiar cinema to make it new and strange again, and open it up to creative analysis. | CIMS2021401, ENGL2942401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 3970-401 | Spiegel-Wilks Seminar: The Art of Care at the Barnes Foundation | Aaron Levy | M 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | Topic varies from semester to semester. While not having any specific pre-requisites, this seminar in contemporary art and curatorial practice is designed for junior and senior majors in art history with some knowledge in the field. When appropriate, it may feature special guests from the art world, international travel, and/or curatorial opportunities. | ENGL2663401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 5010-301 | Curatorial Seminar: Sexuality in Photography and Film | Jonathan D Katz | M 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | Curatorial seminars expose students to the complexity of studying and working with objects in the context of public display. With the guidance of faculty and museum professionals, students learn what it means to curate an exhibition, create catalogues and gallery text, and/or develop programming for exhibitions of art and visual/material culture. | ||||||||||
| ARTH 5091-401 | Black Visual & Performance Arts in Latin America & the Caribbean | Odette Casamayor | W 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | This course offers an interdisciplinary study of Black visual and performance arts in Latin America and the Caribbean, examining these creative practices as critical sites of knowledge production, identity formation, social resistance, and diasporic worldmaking. Centering Afro-Latin American and Afro-Caribbean artists and performance practitioners, students will investigate how visual and embodied practices confront coloniality, articulate and dismantle constructions of race and gender, interrogate experiences of migration and memory, and envision speculative and liberatory futures. Course materials include painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, sculpture, installation, performance, and new media practices from across the Caribbean, Latin America, and diasporic communities in the United States and Europe. These works are studied in conversation with art criticism, aesthetic theory, and critical frameworks that illuminate the epistemological dimensions of Afro-diasporic creative expression. Bringing together historical and theoretical frameworks on slavery, colonialism, creolization, global Afro-diasporic circulation, and performance as epistemology, the course pairs conceptual grounding with in-depth case studies of key historical and contemporary artists. | AFRC4525401, AFRC5525401, ARTH3091401, COML4525401, COML5525401, LALS4525401, LALS5525401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 5110-401 | Topics in South Asian Art: Monuments, Memorials, and Archives in South Asia | Sonal Khullar | M 10:15 AM-1:14 PM | This seminar engages topics in the history and theory of South Asian art from antiquity to the present emphasizing global connections and comparisons. Topics vary from year to year and might include the arts of the book in South Asia; Indian Ocean art worlds; and fragments, ruins, and traces in the art of South Asia. We shall explore objects in area collections and incorporate special excursions and programs when possible. A background in South Asian studies or languages is not required. Students from related disciplines such history, anthropology, literary studies, religious studies, feminist studies, cinema and media studies, and architecture are welcome. | COML5113401, SAST5110401 | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202710&c=ARTH5110401 | ||||||||
| ARTH 5130-401 | Ukiyo-e: Beyond the Great Wave | Julie N Davis | M 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | In this seminar we will take a closer look at the prints, paintings, and illustrated books produced in the genre known as "ukiyo-e," the "pictures of the floating world." We'll begin by asking how the "Great Wave" became a global icon and we'll bust the myth of prints being used as wrapping paper. As we learn the history of the genre, from 1600 to ca. 1850, we'll also make critical interventions into that narrative, asking how "ukiyo-e" became a genre within a larger artistic sphere; how publishers collaborated with designers to construct artistic personae; how illustrated books contributed to knowledge formations; and how concepts of authenticity and authorship remain critical to its understanding. This course will also consider how internet resources affect our understanding of the work of art. Students need not have any Japanese language skills, but should have taken related courses in art history or East Asian Studies. Advanced undergraduates and graduate students preferred. | EALC7141401 | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202710&c=ARTH5130401 | ||||||||
| ARTH 5252-401 | Late Antique Art and Artifact Seminar | Ann L Kuttner | T 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | What is 'Late Antiquity'? In 312 when Roman emperor Constantine inaugurated a Christian empire, 'Roman' culture was centuries old. The period ca. 200-650 CE saw profound transformations that launched Medieval, Byzantine and Islamic traditions. In this epoch of upheaval destruction was frequent but partial: Rome long survived, Constantine's 'new Rome,' Constantinople flourished, and around the Empire both proto-global visual culture and local forms prospered. Roman cultural models authorized both innovation and passion for tradition: we critique art-historical models for Late Antique 'decline', analyse habits of material reuse and curation, and look at new Christian and Jewish roles for Roman things as well as polytheist visual survival. Foreign allies and enemies interacted with Greco-Roman Late Antiquity; we visit them too, as in the early Islamic palaces. Media discussed include not just 'monumental' painting, mosaic, sculpture, but also silver, ceramic, ivory, figural textile, glass, painted books, jewelry, coins and more. We look too at Late Antique texts on art, objects, space and viewership. This seminar is open to graduate and undergraduate students. | AAMW5252401, CLST7405401 | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202710&c=ARTH5252401 | ||||||||
| ARTH 5940-401 | Media, Platform, Experience | Chenshu Zhou | R 12:00 PM-2:59 PM | This graduate seminar explores processes and sites of production, distribution, and consumption of audio-visual contents in the contemporary media environment with a focus on both platform logics and user interaction experiences. While “new” media, such as social media, cellphone apps, streaming platforms, video games, and drones increasingly dominate everyday life, “old” media including film, television, and books do not disappear but continue to be consumed and transformed in a new media ecology. Crossing the old/new divide, this course seeks to delineate a fuller picture of the choices, constraints, and experiences available for contemporary media users situated in both the Global North and South. We will attend to both the infrastructures and platforms shaping the circulatory dynamics of the current global media landscape as well as the phenomenological dimensions of media consumption by combining broad discussions of interface, algorithms, temporality, screen, and post-cinema, etc., with case studies that examine specific platforms (e.g. Netflix, Bilibili) and media forms (e.g. GIFs, reaction videos, etc.). | CIMS5940401, ENGL5991401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 6250-401 | Greek Art and Artifact | Ann L Kuttner | MW 12:00 PM-1:29 PM | This lecture course surveys Greek art and artifacts from Sicily to the Black Sea from the 10th century BCE to the 2nd century BCE, including the age of Alexander and the Hellenistic Kingdoms. Public sculpture and painting on and around grand buildings and gardens, domestic luxury arts of jewelry, cups and vases, mosaic floors, and cult artefacts are discussed. Also considered are the ways in which heroic epic, religious and political themes are used to engaged viewers' emotions and served both domestic and the public aims. We discuss the relationships of images and things to space and structure, along with ideas of invention and progress, and the role of monuments, makers and patrons in Greek society. | AAMW6250401, ARTH2250401, CLST3401401, CLST5401401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 6400-401 | Western Medieval Art and Architect | Sarah M. Guerin | TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | An introductory survey, this lecture course investigates architecture, painting, sculpture, and the "minor arts" of the Middle Ages. Students become familiar with major monuments of the Romanesque and Gothic periods, primarily in Western Europe as well as relevant sites around the Mediterranean basin. Analyses of works emphasize cultural contexts, thematic content, and the function of objects and monuments. Discussions focus such themes as: the circulation of artists, materials and techniques; the relationships between art and power; anthropogenic impact of art making on the environment; the theological role of images; the explosion of secular visual culture; and the role of art in an interconnected world. | AAMW6400401, ARTH2400401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 6680-401 | Art and Empire in India, 1750-1900 | Sonal Khullar | MW 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | This course surveys transformations in visual culture between the Mughal and British empires in India from the mid-eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries. We shall consider changes in artistic production, patronage, publics, and viewing protocols in the contexts of the court and bazaar. We shall examine the emergence of new technologies and its impact on visual forms, media, and genres, focusing on the interplay of photography, print, and painting. We shall explore the role of institutions -the art school, the museum, and the archeological survey- and the professions and practices they engendered. We shall analyze how architecture and urban planning created new built environments and social relationships in colonial India. We shall view objects first-hand in the Penn Museum, Penn Libraries, and Philadelphia Museum of Art. This is a reading- and writing-intensive course. Students with a background in related disciplines such as literature, history, religion, anthropology, and South Asian Studies are welcome. | ARTH2680401, SAST2680401, SAST6680401 | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202710&c=ARTH6680401 | ||||||||
| ARTH 6779-401 | Reckoning: Art and Monuments in Europe and the Americas (PD) | Vance Byrd | T 5:15 PM-8:14 PM | In this course, we will examine how commemorative traditions in Europe and the Americas have been invented and contested since the nineteenth century. We will discuss why certain events in the past rather than others have been the object of commemoration; what these creations stood for originally; how their meanings have changed over the time; and the lessons, if any, these commemorative practices continue to teach us today. We also will examine the ways in which Europeans and Americans have protested, torn down old monuments, erected new ones, and turned to a wide variety of artistic forms to call into question stories about empire, fascism, communism, westward expansion and settler colonialism, enslavement, as well as military victory and loss. To answer these questions, we will focus on the history and theory of public monuments and sculpture, painting, commemorative sites, museum exhibitions, and film. The lecture topics will range from the Napoleonic Wars and Occupation, the American Civil War, German Unifications, National Socialism and Fascism, Holocaust Memorials and Museums, the Disappeared in Argentina, Spanish Civil War and Post-Francoism, Refugees and Migrants in the Mediterranean, as well as works by individual artists who have reflected on these historical events. Taught in English. | ARTH2779401, GRMN1240401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 6810-401 | Modern Architecture, from the Enlightenment to the Present | Ana Ozaki | TR 10:15 AM-11:14 AM | In this introductory course, we will contextualize modern architecture beyond the 20th-century Western canon of modern architecture to examine the social, intellectual, and material life of buildings and movements from around the globe. Starting with the Enlightenment, this class’s weekly themes are structured chronologically around major historical events and across different geographies. Rather than a conventional survey, this class aims to offer students a global literacy regarding modern architecture and an understanding of the intertwined nature of architectural practice and historiography globally. That is, as opposed to trying to cover all architectural movements and theories, the course focuses on providing students with the tools to find and critically assess architecture’s multiple layers, including but limited to the actions of peoples, ideas, objects, technologies, images, and other forces, and how they have interacted in specific locations. Challenging architecture’s Western and male gaze and production, the lectures include less conventional spatial actors, especially those often marginalized by ideals of racial difference, gender and sexuality, class, and religion, among other factors. Informed by critical theory, ecology, gender, postcolonial, and critical race studies, the course will examine the political ground on which architecture stands and interferes, including land, property, capital, and patronage. We will establish architecture, therefore, as a contested and disputed practice, never neutral and constantly adapting to socio-political and environmental constraints. Focused on a capacious understanding of modern architecture, we will explore global connections and situated knowledge production methods that have shaped and disputed the logic of capital, fossilization, and colonialism. | ARTH2810401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 7322-401 | On the Wall: Mosaics and Frescoes | Ivan Drpic | T 5:15 PM-8:14 PM | This seminar examines the economy, technology, and aesthetics of monumental paintings and mosaics decorating church spaces in Byzantium and the larger Mediterranean world of the Middle Ages. We will explore these site-specific, wall-bound images in the context of their making and reception by attending to the issues of artistic labor and patronage, materiality and pictorial medium, visual communication and ideological programming, and viewership and ritual action. Special consideration will be given to methodology. We will critically assess the traditional and current approaches to the study of monumental pictorial art and, more importantly, seek to formulate new perspectives and methods. Open to graduate and undergraduate students. | AAMW7322401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 7811-301 | Architectural History Seminar: Tropical Otherness: Architecture in Brazil, Africa, and the Caribbean | Ana Ozaki | T 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | This course addresses architectural history as a global and contested field. Through different geographies and epistemologies, mainly from the South and their global connections, this class will focus on emerging topics in architectural history, including but not limited to histories of colonialism, empire, racial capitalism, labor and environmental exploitation, extraction, architecture's entanglements with the ongoing climate crisis, and histories of counter-conduct, resistance, collective action, and refusal. Using methods of architectural history in research and visual analysis, the class will assess a combination of primary and secondary sources weekly to contend with themes from political and architectural movements, postcolonial and decolonial critiques, and other theoretical frameworks from marginalized geographies and methods. |