| 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 | MUSE 329 | 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 0143-401 | The Past Preserved: Conservation In Archaeology | Lynn A Grant | MUSE 190 | TR 3:30 PM-4:59 PM | This course explores the scientific conservation of cultural materials from archaeological contexts. It is intended to familiarize students with the basics of artifact conservation but is not intended to train them as conservators. The course will cover how various materials interact with their deposit environments; general techniques for on-site conservation triage and retrieval of delicate materials; what factors need to be considered in planning for artifact conservation; and related topics. Students should expect to gain a thorough understanding of the role of conservation in archaeology and how the two fields interact. | ANTH3235401, ANTH5235401, CLST3315401, CLST5315401, NELC4955401 | ||||||||
| ARTH 0339-401 | Sacred Stuff: Religious Bodies, Places, and Objects | Donovan O Schaefer | MEYH B4 | TR 5:15 PM-6:44 PM | Does religion start with what's in our heads? Or are religious commitments made, shaped and strengthened by the people, places, and things around us? This course will explore how religion happens in the material world. We'll start with classical and contemporary theories on the relationship of religion to stuff. We'll then consider examples of how religion is animated not just by texts, but through interactions with objects, spaces, bodies, monuments, color, design, architecture, and film. We'll ask how these material expressions of religion move beyond private faith and connect religion to politics and identity. | ANTH1120401, RELS1020401 | ||||||||
| ARTH 0501-401 | Spiegel-Wilks First Year Seminar: Art and Reflection in Medicine: Barnes Foundation Curatorial Semin | Aaron Levy | 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. This Spiegel-Wilks seminar focuses exclusively on contemporary art. | ENGL0365401 | Arts & Letters Sector (all classes) | |||||||||
| ARTH 1020-401 | World Art: 1400 to Now |
Ivan Drpic Sonal Khullar |
COLL 200 | WF 12:00 PM-12:59 PM | This course is an introduction to the visual arts in a global context over the period from the early 1400s to the present. The content of the class varies according to the expertise of the instructors but will introduce students to selected and significant moments in artistic production in both the Western and Eastern hemispheres. Offering a broad historical overview of key techniques, movements, and artists, this course will cover aspects of art production around the world during an era of increasing economic exchange, colonization, and industrialization. Looking at painting, sculpture, architecture, and prints, as well as new media such as photography and film, the course will respond to the following questions: How does artistic practice change in this period? Who owns art? What is the role of the artist in society, and where is art made, exhibited, and consumed? Other topics to be covered are art's crucial role in the period's political debates and social transformations, including modernization and technological advances, as well as art criticism's import in forming public opinion. An introduction to art history, this course offers a wholly new perspective on the arts and cultures in this era of artistic innovation. This course fulfills Sector III: Arts and Letters and counts towards the History of Art major and minor requirements. | VLST2320401 | Arts & Letters Sector (all classes) | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do | ||||||
| ARTH 1070-401 | Television and New Media | Peter Decherney | ANNS 110 | MW 3:30 PM-4:59 PM | How and when do media become digital? What does digitization afford and what is lost as television and cinema become digitized? As lots of things around us turn digital, have we started telling stories, sharing experiences, and replaying memories differently? What has happened to television and life after New Media ? How have television audiences been transformed by algorithmic cultures of Netflix and Hulu? How have (social) media transformed socialities as ephemeral snaps and swiped intimacies become part of the "new" digital/phone cultures? This is an introductory survey course and we discuss a wide variety of media technologies and phenomena that include: cloud computing, Internet of Things, trolls, distribution platforms, optical fiber cables, surveillance tactics, social media, and race in cyberspace. We also examine emerging mobile phone cultures in the Global South and the environmental impact of digitization. Course activities include Tumblr blog posts and Instagram curations. The final project could take the form of either a critical essay (of 2000 words) or a media project. | CIMS1030401, COML1031401, ENGL1950401 | ||||||||
| ARTH 1070-402 | Television and New Media | Anat Dan | ANNS 111 | W 5:15 PM-8:14 PM | How and when do media become digital? What does digitization afford and what is lost as television and cinema become digitized? As lots of things around us turn digital, have we started telling stories, sharing experiences, and replaying memories differently? What has happened to television and life after New Media ? How have television audiences been transformed by algorithmic cultures of Netflix and Hulu? How have (social) media transformed socialities as ephemeral snaps and swiped intimacies become part of the "new" digital/phone cultures? This is an introductory survey course and we discuss a wide variety of media technologies and phenomena that include: cloud computing, Internet of Things, trolls, distribution platforms, optical fiber cables, surveillance tactics, social media, and race in cyberspace. We also examine emerging mobile phone cultures in the Global South and the environmental impact of digitization. Course activities include Tumblr blog posts and Instagram curations. The final project could take the form of either a critical essay (of 2000 words) or a media project. | CIMS1030402, COML1031402, ENGL1950402 | ||||||||
| ARTH 1080-401 | World Film History to 1945 | Hugo Salas | BENN 401 | TR 12:00 PM-1:29 PM | This course surveys the history of world film from cinema's precursors to 1945. We will develop methods for analyzing film while examining the growth of film as an art, an industry, a technology, and a political instrument. Topics include the emergence of film technology and early film audiences, the rise of narrative film and birth of Hollywood, national film industries and movements, African-American independent film, the emergence of the genre film (the western, film noir, and romantic comedies), ethnographic and documentary film, animated films, censorship, the MPPDA and Hays Code, and the introduction of sound. We will conclude with the transformation of several film industries into propaganda tools during World War II (including the Nazi, Soviet, and US film industries). In addition to contemporary theories that investigate the development of cinema and visual culture during the first half of the 20th century, we will read key texts that contributed to the emergence of film theory. There are no prerequisites. Students are required to attend screenings or watch films on their own. | CIMS1010401, COML1011401, ENGL1900401 | Arts & Letters Sector (all classes) | |||||||
| ARTH 1080-601 | World Film History to 1945 | Joseph M Coppola | MCNB 150 | TR 5:15 PM-6:44 PM | This course surveys the history of world film from cinema's precursors to 1945. We will develop methods for analyzing film while examining the growth of film as an art, an industry, a technology, and a political instrument. Topics include the emergence of film technology and early film audiences, the rise of narrative film and birth of Hollywood, national film industries and movements, African-American independent film, the emergence of the genre film (the western, film noir, and romantic comedies), ethnographic and documentary film, animated films, censorship, the MPPDA and Hays Code, and the introduction of sound. We will conclude with the transformation of several film industries into propaganda tools during World War II (including the Nazi, Soviet, and US film industries). In addition to contemporary theories that investigate the development of cinema and visual culture during the first half of the 20th century, we will read key texts that contributed to the emergence of film theory. There are no prerequisites. Students are required to attend screenings or watch films on their own. | CIMS1010601, COML1011601, ENGL1900601 | Arts & Letters Sector (all classes) | |||||||
| ARTH 1090-401 | World Film History 1945-Present | Meta Mazaj | BENN 401 | MW 3:30 PM-4:59 PM | Focusing on movies made after 1945, this course allows students to learn and to sharpen methods, terminologies, and tools needed for the critical analysis of film. Beginning with the cinematic revolution signaled by the Italian Neo-Realism (of Rossellini and De Sica), we will follow the evolution of postwar cinema through the French New Wave (of Godard, Resnais, and Varda), American movies of the 1950s and 1960s (including the New Hollywood cinema of Coppola and Scorsese), and the various other new wave movements of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s (such as the New German Cinema). We will then selectively examine some of the most important films of the last two decades, including those of U.S. independent film movement and movies from Iran, China, and elsewhere in an expanding global cinema culture. There will be precise attention paid to formal and stylistic techniques in editing, mise-en-scene, and sound, as well as to the narrative, non-narrative, and generic organizations of film. At the same time, those formal features will be closely linked to historical and cultural distinctions and changes, ranging from the Paramount Decision of 1948 to the digital convergences that are defining screen culture today. There are no perquisites. Requirements will include readings in film history and film analysis, an analytical essay, a research paper, a final exam, and active participation. | CIMS1020401, COML1022401, ENGL1901401 | Arts & Letters Sector (all classes) | |||||||
| ARTH 1090-402 | World Film History 1945-Present | Filippo Trentin | BENN 401 | W 12:00 PM-2:59 PM | Focusing on movies made after 1945, this course allows students to learn and to sharpen methods, terminologies, and tools needed for the critical analysis of film. Beginning with the cinematic revolution signaled by the Italian Neo-Realism (of Rossellini and De Sica), we will follow the evolution of postwar cinema through the French New Wave (of Godard, Resnais, and Varda), American movies of the 1950s and 1960s (including the New Hollywood cinema of Coppola and Scorsese), and the various other new wave movements of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s (such as the New German Cinema). We will then selectively examine some of the most important films of the last two decades, including those of U.S. independent film movement and movies from Iran, China, and elsewhere in an expanding global cinema culture. There will be precise attention paid to formal and stylistic techniques in editing, mise-en-scene, and sound, as well as to the narrative, non-narrative, and generic organizations of film. At the same time, those formal features will be closely linked to historical and cultural distinctions and changes, ranging from the Paramount Decision of 1948 to the digital convergences that are defining screen culture today. There are no perquisites. Requirements will include readings in film history and film analysis, an analytical essay, a research paper, a final exam, and active participation. | CIMS1020402, COML1022402, ENGL1901402 | Arts & Letters Sector (all classes) | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do | ||||||
| ARTH 1500-401 | Eye, Mind, and Image |
Shira N Brisman Ian F Verstegen |
MCNB 286-7 | TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | Visual Studies 101 provides an introduction to the collaboration of eye, mind, and image that produces our experience of a visual world. How and what do we see? How do we perceive color, space, and motion? What is an image? Does seeing vary across cultures and time? What can art tell us about vision? Is there a 21st-century form of seeing? This course combines different approaches to the study of vision, drawing from psychology, cognitive science, philosophy, history of art, and fine art. Professors representing two or three disciplines present lectures that demonstrate the methods of their disciplines and draw connections across fields. This course combines different approaches to the study of vision, drawing from psychology, cognitive science, philosophy, history of art, and fine art. Professors representing two or three disciplines present lectures that demonstrate the methods of their disciplines and draw connections across fields. | VLST1010401 | Hum & Soc Sci Sector (new curriculum only) | |||||||
| ARTH 2094-401 | Dress and Fashion in Africa | Ali B Ali-Dinar | WILL 27 | TR 3:30 PM-4:59 PM | 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 2240-401 | Art of Mesopotamia | Holly Pittman | JAFF 104 | TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | Visual expression was first developed in Mesopotamia in the same environment as the invention of writing. This lecture class will introduce the arts of the major periods of Mesopotamian History ending with the "cinematic" effects achieved by the Assyrian artists on the walls of the royal palaces. The strong connection between verbal and visual expression will be traced over the three millennia course of Mesopotamian civilization from the earliest periods through the imperial art of the Assyrians and Babylonians of the first millennium BCE. The class and the assignments will regularly engage with objects in the collections and on display in the galleries of the Penn Museum. | AAMW6240401, ARTH6240401, NELC0060401, NELC6060401 | ||||||||
| ARTH 2260-401 | Hellenistic and Roman Art and Artifact | Ann L Kuttner | JAFF B17 | TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | This lecture course surveys the political, religious and domestic arts, patronage and display in Rome's Mediterranean, from the 2nd c. BCE to Constantine's 4th-c. Christianized empire. Our subjects are images and decorated objects in their cultural, political and socio-economic contexts (painting, mosaic, sculpture, luxury and mass-produced arts in many media). We start with the Hellenistic cosmopolitan culture of the Greek kingdoms and their neighbors, and late Etruscan and Republican Italy; next we map Imperial Roman art as developed around the capital city Rome, as well as in the provinces of the vast empire. | AAMW6260401, ARTH6260401, CLST3402401, CLST5402401 | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do | |||||||
| ARTH 2400-401 | Medieval Art | Sarah M Guerin | JAFF B17 | TR 12:00 PM-1:29 PM | 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 2670-401 | Latin American Art |
David Young Kim Gwendolyn D Shaw |
VANP 625 | WF 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | The numerous traditions of Latin American art have been formed from the historical confluence of Indigenous, European, African, and Asian cultural traditions, each one impacting the others. This lecture course serves as an introduction to these hybrid New World art forms and movements by both providing a large chronological sweep (1492-present) and focusing on several specific countries, including Brazil, Mexico, Cuba, Peru, and Argentina. | AFRC2670401, ARTH6670401, LALS2670401, LALS6670401 | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do | |||||||
| ARTH 2730-401 | History of Photography | Gregory M Vershbow | JAFF 113 | TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | A history of world photography from 1839 to the present and its relation to cultural contexts as well as to various theories of the functions of images. Topics discussed in considering the nineteenth century will be the relationship between photography and painting, the effect of photography on portraiture, photography in the service of exploration, and photography as practiced by anthropologists; and in considering the twentieth century, photography and abstraction, photography as "fine art", photography and the critique of art history, and photography and censorship. | ARTH6730401 | ||||||||
| ARTH 2850-601 | Modern Art in Africa and Europe | Stephanie M Gibson | WILL 220 | TR 5:15 PM-6:44 PM | The history of modern art is closely tied to and largely unfolds from the history of Western Imperialism. While the technologies made possible by colonial resource extraction produced new ways of looking, modern conceptions of the nation and how to represent it, developed in dialogue with racialized notions of the other. This course focuses on encounters between the cultures of Africa and Europe, from 1880 to 1960, and on the artistic practices that emerged on both continents as a result. Topics of special interest will include racial difference and the ramifications of colonialism, colonial masquerade, post-colonial monuments and memorials, the African influence on Dada and surrealism, Negritude and interwar Paris, colonial arts education, and the South African built environment under and after Apartheid. | AFRC2850601 | ||||||||
| ARTH 2889-401 | Fashion and Modernity | Jean-Michel Rabate | BENN 231 | TR 12:00 PM-1:29 PM | In this class we will study the emergence of the Modernist concept of the "new" as a term also understood as "new fashion." We will move back and forth in time so as to analyze today’s changing scene with a view to identify contemporary accounts of the "new" in the context of the fashion industry. Our texts will include poetry, novels, and films. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. | COML1072401, ENGL1071401, FREN1071401, GRMN1065401 | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do | |||||||
| ARTH 2910-401 | East Asian Cinema | Chenshu Zhou | ANNS 109 | MW 3:30 PM-4:29 PM | This survey course introduces students to major trends, genres, directors, and issues in the cinemas of East Asian countries/regions, including Japan, Korea, China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Charting key developments over more than a hundred years from the early twentieth century to the present, this course examines films as aesthetic objects, asking questions about film form, narrative, and style. It also pays attention to the evolution of cinema as an institution (e.g. modes of production, circulation, and exhibition) in different cultural and political contexts. Weekly course materials will include both films (primary sources) and analytical readings (secondary sources). By the end of the course, students are expected to gain broad knowledge of East Asian cinema, develop skills of film analysis, and apply these skills to perform historically informed and culturally sensitive analysis of cinema. Prior knowledge of East Asian languages is NOT required. | CIMS2910401, EALC1116401 | ||||||||
| ARTH 2930-401 | Cultural Studies Seminar | James English | BENN 138 | TR 12:00 PM-1:29 PM | 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 2950-401 | Global Film Theory |
Meta Mazaj Karen E Redrobe |
BENN 401 | MW 10:15 AM-11:14 AM | This course will provide an introduction to some of the most important film theory debates and allow us to explore how writers and filmmakers from different countries and historical periods have attempted to make sense of the changing phenomenon known as "cinema," to think cinematically. Topics under consideration may include: spectatorship, authorship, the apparatus, sound, editing, realism, race, gender and sexuality, stardom, the culture industry, the nation and decolonization, what counts as film theory and what counts as cinema, and the challenges of considering film theory in a global context, including the challenge of working across languages. There will be an asynchronous weekly film screening for this course. No knowledge of film theory is presumed. | ARTH6950401, CIMS2950401, COML2950401, ENGL2900401, GSWS2950401 | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do | |||||||
| ARTH 2960-401 | Contemporary Art | Gwendolyn D Shaw | JAFF 104 | WF 12:00 PM-12:59 PM | Many people experience the art of our time as bewildering, shocking, too ordinary (my kid could do that), too intellectual (elitist), or simply not as art. Yet what makes this art engaging is that it raises the question of what art is or can be, employs a range of new materials and technologies, and addresses previously excluded audiences. It invades non-art spaces, blurs the boundaries between text and image, document and performance, asks questions about institutional frames (the museum, gallery, and art journal), and generates new forms of criticism. Much of the "canon" of what counts as important is still in flux, especially for the last twenty years. And the stage is no longer centered only on the United States and Europe, but is becoming increasingly global. The course will introduce students to the major movements and artists since 1980, with emphasis on social and historical context, critical debates, new media, and the changing role of the spectator/participant. | ARTH6960401 | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do | |||||||
| ARTH 3000-301 | Undergraduate Methods Seminar | Huey Gene Copeland | JAFF B17 | M 12:00 PM-2:59 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 |
Nancy E Ash Thomas J Primeau |
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. | Perm Needed From Instructor | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do | |||||||||
| ARTH 3070-401 | The Rise of Image Culture: History and Theories | Tanya A Jung | WILL 301 | W 3:30 PM-6:29 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 | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do | |||||||
| ARTH 3120-401 | Indian Painting, 1100-Now | Sonal Khullar | JAFF 113 | W 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | This seminar addresses topics in the art of India 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 painting, 1100-now; history and theory of museums in the colony, 1750-1950; photography, cinema, and performance art in South Asia; and art, ecology, and environment in 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. | SAST3120401 | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do | |||||||
| ARTH 3621-401 | Prints and Politics: From the Early Modern Era to Our Times | Shira N Brisman | JAFF 113 | T 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | By the late fifteenth century, mechanically reproducible images were reshaping the social world. Connecting new audiences across geographies through access to the same visual information, prints launched propagandistic missions, fomented rebellion against authorities, and built networks of progressive thinkers who could envision alternative futures. Prints played a key role in developing what constituted news. Mass-distributed images delivered the mistreatment of the “Indians” by the Spanish and portrayed the packing of Africans on a slave ship. Goya’s etchings protested the repression of the Second of May uprising, while the silkscreens of Andy Warhol repeated the image of police dogs attacking civil rights activists in Birmingham. Covering a five-hundred-year history, this course will focus on how printed images created communities and acted as exclusionary devices. We will train our eyes on examples from local collections. | ENGL2621401 | ||||||||
| ARTH 3890-401 | Cinema and Politics | Rita Barnard | BENN 322 | TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | This course explores an aspect of film studies intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. | CIMS0590401, COML0590401, ENGL0590401 | Arts & Letters Sector (all classes) | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do | ||||||
| ARTH 5130-401 | Ukiyo-e: Beyond the Great Wave | Julie N Davis | CANCELED | 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 | Perm Needed From Department | ||||||||
| ARTH 5200-401 | Aegean Bronze Age Art Seminar: Minoan, Cycladic, and Mycenaean Architecture | Elizabeth Shank | JAFF 113 | W 10:15 AM-1:14 PM | 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. From this time, we have the first evidence of complex society in Greece with three geographically and materialistically distinct groups of people located on the Greek Mainland, the Cycladic islands, and the island of Crete. Topics will vary from semester to semester, but 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. | AAMW5200401 | ||||||||
| ARTH 5241-401 | Courtly Life in Mesopotamia, Persia, and the Mediterranean |
Holly Pittman Ludovico Portuese |
MUSE 419 | R 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | Who could approach and speak with the Sumerian Queen? What rules governed a banquet with the Persian king? What was the most elegant way to drink wine? Where were the women in the Assyrian court? With hundreds of people crammed into a palace, was hygiene important? How were court guests treated? What games were played at court? Is the stereotypical image of the “Oriental” court characterized by lust, backstairs intrigue, flatteries, and secrets sustainable in the light of new evidence and theoretical approaches? The court at the same time is considered as a large amorphous body in a physical location or an institution, or a group of people, or even to particular events. This seminar style course considers Middle Eastern courts from the Sumerians through the Assyrian and Persian empires articulating shared and diverse features. Textual, visual, material and archaeological sources are considered through sociological and anthropological theories and core concepts such as groups, individuals, ultrasociality, proxemics, sociopetal, sociofrugal and purity to name a few. Comparisons with later courts in the Middle East are welcome. | AAMW5241401, NELC5054401 | ||||||||
| ARTH 5250-401 | Borderlines: Art and Artifact in the Roman Empire | Ann L Kuttner | WILL 205 | W 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | What made art and artifacts `Roman', or not, in a Roman world? `Roman provincial art` is an active scholarly category. This seminar reframes it, to test productive models to understand visual culture outside the empire’s Italian heartland from the Late Republic into Late Antiquity, in the Roman polity’s interactions with many peoples in situations of diaspora, colonization, hegemony, conflict, economic exchange, and religious interaction. As `Rome’ expanded, cultural relations across many borderlines – social, ethnic, territorial - potentially became cultural politics. A traditional topic for that has been Roman interaction with Greek culture. This seminar extends that range, while tackling `Hellenization’, as we reflect on models of `Romanization’, globalism and identity formation within the imperium’s boundaries in its provinces and client kingdoms, and also at its frontier zones. Various disciplines apply: art history, archaeology, history, and more. Case studies, evolved with students, may range from Britain to Iran, northern Africa to the Black Sea in space and, in time, from interactions with the Hellenistic East and West and with Iron Age Europe, to the age of Germanic, Sasanian and Ummayad conquests of Roman terrain, ca 3rd c. BCE-7th c. CE. The market in art and artifact, the nature and status of makers, and conditions of patronage and viewing are key considerations. Private and public objects, images, architecture and urbanism, and landscapes can all concern us, as we try out disciplinary approaches that take in eg cultural appropriation, translation and hybrity, creolization, discrepant experience, object agency, and communities of taste and style. `Ethnicity’ is a loaded concept in ancient Mediterranean studies, as is `race;’ our course must engage those, and the ways in which things and styles have been made to serve those terms. And who owns, is heir to, the cultural legacies we look at, and how to name them, are problems that tangle with current national identity formation, and academic and museum practice. Our own Museum's holdings can make topics. Students are welcome to bring in interests in language and text cultures, in disciplines outside art history and archaeology, and in other world cultures and epochs. | AAMW5250401, ANCH7403401, CLST7403401 | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do | |||||||
| ARTH 5431-401 | Visualizing Science |
Nicholas Herman Elly Truitt |
VANP 625 | W 12:00 PM-2:59 PM | This seminar focuses on the intersection of visuality and natural knowledge in the pre-modern world. It is open to graduate students and undergraduate students with permission of the instructor. | HSSC5431401 | ||||||||
| ARTH 5760-401 | The Panorama Experience | Vance Byrd | VANP 626 | T 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | Painted panoramas were one of the nineteenth century’s signature popular entertainments. Since its invention in 1787, audiences from cities and towns around the world have admired these circular landscape representations of nature, cities, and battles, which provide an opportunity to escape everyday life by witnessing scenes from the past and far-away places from an unfamiliar perspective. In this seminar, we will consider the phenomenon of the panorama, above all, as a political art form. We will examine the ways in which European and American artists since the nineteenth century have turned to panoramic forms to tell and call into question stories about empire and colonialism, enslavement and freedom struggles, the mastery of natural environments, as well as military victory and loss. As we debate the politics of panoramic forms, we will gain familiarity with a set of related topics from visual and material culture, including vedute, transparencies, magic lantern projections, panoramic wallpaper, dioramas, cartographic representation, history painting, illustrated print culture and pictorial journalism, travel literature and guidebooks, accordion folds and gatefolds, stereoscopes, panoramic photography, panoramic shots in cinema, and immersive environments. In addition to enriching your knowledge of nineteenth-century media history and how to conduct media archaeological research in libraries, archives, and museums, this seminar will offer an overview of approaches to visual culture from social history, gender, race, colonialism, museum studies, print history, sound studies, transnational history, and digital art history, which will be of use for work in a number of interdisciplinary fields. Students with a background in disciplines, such as architecture, literature, history, cinema studies, gender and sexuality studies, Africana Studies, and material texts, are welcome. | GRMN5760401 | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do | |||||||
| ARTH 5800-401 | Sexuality of Postmodernism | Jonathan D Katz | BENN 344 | R 5:15 PM-8:14 PM | This course is fundamentally concerned with why so many of the defining artists of the postwar generation were queer, indeed such that one could plausibly claim that postmodernism in American art was a queer innovation. Centrally, most of these artists raise the problem of authoriality and its discontents. Deploying a combination of social-historical and theoretical texts, we will approach the problem of the disclaiming of authoriality in post war American art, focusing on the works of John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Robert Indiana, Louise Nevelson, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Leon Polk Smith and not least Andy Warhol. Central to this course will be the continuing salience of the "death of the author" discourse, pioneered in literature by Barthes and Foucault, and in art by every one of the artists we will be examining. What, in short, is the relationship between the rise of an anti-biographical, anti-authorial theoretical framework, and the lived histories of so many queer authors? In asking this question, we are of course self-consciously violating the very premise of one key strand of postmodernist critique--and in so doing attempting to historicize a theoretical frame that is strikingly resistant to historical analysis. (Undergraduates interested in the course should contact Professor Katz.) | GSWS5780401 | ||||||||
| ARTH 5830-401 | Art, Sex and the Sixties | Jonathan D Katz | WILL 205 | M 5:15 PM-8:14 PM | With a distinct emphasis on performance, film, installation art, video and painting, this course explores the explosion of body-based, nude and erotic work from the 1950 to the 1970s, with particular focus on the 1960s. And it seeks to explore this dynamic not only within the familiar confines of North America and Europe but within Latin America and Asia, too, in what was a nearly simultaneous international emergence of the erotic as a political force in the art world. Reading a range of key voices from Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse, to performance artists Carolee Schneemann and Yoko Ono, Neo-Freudian theorist Norman O. Brown and Brazilian theorist and poet Oswald de Andrade, we will examine how and why sexuality became a privileged form of politics at this historical juncture in a range of different contexts across the globe. We will pay particular attention to how and why an art about sex became a camouflaged form of political dissidence in the confines of repressive political dictatorships, as were then rising in Brazil, Argentina. and ultimately Chile. Students interested in feminist, gender or queer theory, Latin American Studies, social revolution, performance studies, post war art and Frankfurt School thought should find the course particularly appealing, but it assumes no background in any of these fields. | CIMS5830401, GSWS5200401, LALS5830401 | ||||||||
| ARTH 5940-401 | Media, Platform, Experience |
Rahul Mukherjee Chenshu Zhou |
JAFF 104 | R 10:15 AM-1:14 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 6240-401 | Art of Mesopotamia | Holly Pittman | JAFF 104 | TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | Visual expression was first developed in Mesopotamia in the same environment as the invention of writing. This lecture class will introduce the arts of the major periods of Mesopotamian History ending with the "cinematic" effects achieved by the Assyrian artists on the walls of the royal palaces. The strong connection between verbal and visual expression will be traced over the three millennia course of Mesopotamian civilization from the earliest periods through the imperial art of the Assyrians and Babylonians of the first millennium BCE. The class and the assignments will regularly engage with objects in the collections and on display in the galleries of the Penn Museum. | AAMW6240401, ARTH2240401, NELC0060401, NELC6060401 | ||||||||
| ARTH 6260-401 | Hellenistic and Roman Art and Artifact | Ann L Kuttner | JAFF B17 | TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | This lecture course surveys the political, religious and domestic arts, patronage and display in Rome's Mediterranean, from the 2nd c. BCE to Constantine's 4th-c. Christianized empire. Our subjects are images and decorated objects in their cultural, political and socio-economic contexts (painting, mosaic, sculpture, luxury and mass-produced arts in many media). We start with the Hellenistic cosmopolitan culture of the Greek kingdoms and their neighbors, and late Etruscan and Republican Italy; next we map Imperial Roman art as developed around the capital city Rome, as well as in the provinces of the vast empire. | AAMW6260401, ARTH2260401, CLST3402401, CLST5402401 | ||||||||
| ARTH 6400-401 | Medieval Art | Sarah M Guerin | JAFF B17 | TR 12:00 PM-1:29 PM | An introductory survey, this lecture course investigates architecture, painting, sculpture, and the "minor arts" of the Middle Ages. Students become familiar with selected major monuments of the Romanesque and Gothic periods, primarily in Western Europe as well as relevant sites around the Mediterranean. Analysis of works emphasizes the cultural context, the thematic content, and the function of objects and monuments. Discussions focus especially on several key themes: the role of luxury in the medieval west; the theological role of images; the revival of classical models and visual modes; social rituals such as pilgrimage and crusading; the cult of the Virgin and the status of women in art; and, more generally, the ideology of visual culture across the political and urban landscapes. | AAMW6400401, ARTH2400401 | ||||||||
| ARTH 6670-401 | Latin American Art |
David Young Kim Gwendolyn D Shaw |
VANP 625 | WF 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | The numerous traditions of Latin American art have been formed from the historical confluence of Indigenous, European, African, and Asian cultural traditions, each one impacting the others. This lecture course serves as an introduction to these hybrid New World art forms and movements by both providing a large chronological sweep (1492-present) and focusing on several specific countries, including Brazil, Mexico, Cuba, Peru, and Argentina. | AFRC2670401, ARTH2670401, LALS2670401, LALS6670401 | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do | |||||||
| ARTH 6730-401 | History of Photography | Gregory M Vershbow | JAFF 113 | TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | A history of world photography from 1839 to the present and its relation to cultural contexts as well as to various theories of the functions of images. Topics discussed in considering the nineteenth century will be the relationship between photography and painting, the effect of photography on portraiture, photography in the service of exploration, and photography as practiced by anthropologists; and in considering the twentieth century, photography and abstraction, photography as "fine art", photography and the critique of art history, and photography and censorship. | ARTH2730401 | ||||||||
| ARTH 6950-401 | Global Film Theory |
Meta Mazaj Karen E Redrobe |
BENN 401 | MW 10:15 AM-11:14 AM | This course will provide an introduction to some of the most important film theory debates and allow us to explore how writers and filmmakers from different countries and historical periods have attempted to make sense of the changing phenomenon known as "cinema," to think cinematically. Topics under consideration may include: spectatorship, authorship, the apparatus, sound, editing, realism, race, gender and sexuality, stardom, the culture industry, the nation and decolonization, what counts as film theory and what counts as cinema, and the challenges of considering film theory in a global context, including the challenge of working across languages. There will be an asynchronous weekly film screening for this course. No knowledge of film theory is presumed. | ARTH2950401, CIMS2950401, COML2950401, ENGL2900401, GSWS2950401 | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do | |||||||
| ARTH 6960-401 | Contemporary Art | Gwendolyn D Shaw | JAFF 104 | WF 12:00 PM-12:59 PM | Many people experience the art of our time as bewildering, shocking, too ordinary (my kid could do that), too intellectual (elitist), or simply not as art. Yet what makes this art engaging is that it raises the question of what art is or can be, employs a range of new materials and technologies, and addresses previously excluded audiences. It invades non-art spaces, blurs the boundaries between text and image, document and performance, asks questions about institutional frames (the museum, gallery, and art journal), and generates new forms of criticism. Much of the "canon" of what counts as important is still in flux, especially for the last twenty years. And the stage is no longer centered only on the United States and Europe, but is becoming increasingly global. The course will introduce students to the major movements and artists since 1980, with emphasis on social and historical context, critical debates, new media, and the changing role of the spectator/participant. | ARTH2960401 | ||||||||
| ARTH 7400-401 | Medieval Art Seminar |
Sarah M Guerin David Young Kim |
VANP 625 | W 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | Alternating specific topic from year to year, this advanced graduate seminar surveys methodological issues concerning the art of the European Middle Ages, broadly conceived. Seminars take advantage of the rich resources of the Philadelphia area. This course is open to graduate students only. | AAMW7400401 |