| Title | Instructor | Location | Time | All taxonomy terms | Description | Section Description | Cross Listings | Fulfills | Registration Notes | Syllabus | Syllabus URL | Course Syllabus URL | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ARTH 100-301 | Origins of Sculpture: A Western Tradition | Sarah M. Guerin | W 03:30 PM-06:30 PM | The primary goal of the freshman seminar program is to provide every freshman the opportunity for a direct personal encounter with a faculty member in a small sitting devoted to a significant intellectual endeavor. Specific topics be posted at the beginning of each academic year. Please see the College Freshman seminar website for information on current course offerings https://www.college.upenn.edu/node/403. |
Course is available to Freshmen. Freshman Seminar |
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| ARTH 102-401 | World Art: 1400 To Now |
Sonal Khullar David Young Kim |
WF 12:00 PM-01:00 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. | VLST232401 | Arts & Letters Sector (all classes) | Registration also required for Recitation (see below) | |||||||
| ARTH 103-401 | Art & Civ in East Asia | Nancy R S Steinhardt | MW 10:15 AM-11:15 AM | Introduction to major artistic traditions of China and Japan and to the methodological practices of art history. Attention given to key cultural concepts and ways of looking, in such topics as: concepts of the afterlife and its representation; Buddhist arts and iconography; painting styles and subjects; and more broadly at the transmission of styles and cultural practices across East Asia. Serves as an introduction to upper level lecture courses in East Asian art history cultures. If size of class permits, certain sessions will be held in the Penn Museum or the Philadelphia Museum of Art. | VLST233401, EALC013401 | Arts & Letters Sector (all classes) | Registration also required for Recitation (see below) | |||||||
| ARTH 106-001 | Architect and History | Mantha Zarmakoupi | TR 12:00 PM-01:00 PM | The built environment shapes our lives and this course tackles its underpinning design principles and qualities as well as social and cultural contexts. It is an interpretative look at the built environment or, more precisely, at the ways in which monuments and cities are designed, represented, perceived and construed over time. It introduces students to the interrelated fields of architecture, art history, and urbanism and explores great architectural monuments and cities from the modern to the ancient period, from the US across Europe and from the Mediterranean to Asia. We will assess the built environment as culturally meaningful form and examine a body of historical and cultural material relevant to its interpretation. In doing so, the course seeks to foster a critical understanding of the cultural and artistic processes that have influenced architectural and urban design. The focus will be on understanding these works as results of skilled workmanship as well as social and cultural products. We will tackle ancient and modern perceptions of these monuments and cities by analyzing form, design, structure and by addressing their perceptual qualities through 3D reconstructions and virtual environments, as well as sketchbook assignments. This course fulfills Sector IV, Humanities and Social Sciences. It cannot be taken pass/fail and must be taken for a regular grade. All assignments (6 sketchbook assignments and 2 papers) have to be completed and both exams attended, in order to pass the course. | Hum & Soc Sci Sector (new curriculum only) |
Humanities & Social Science Sector Registration also required for Recitation (see below) |
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| ARTH 107-401 | Television and New Media | W 01:45 PM-04:45 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. | COML099401, CIMS103401, ENGL078401 | ||||||||||
| ARTH 107-402 | Television and New Media | William D Schmenner | TR 03:30 PM-05:00 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. | COML099402, ENGL078402, CIMS103402 | |||||||||
| ARTH 108-401 | World Film Hist To 1945 | Ian Fleishman | TR 03:30 PM-05:00 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. | CIMS101401, COML123401, ENGL091401 | Arts & Letters Sector (all classes) | Crse Online: Sync & Async Components | |||||||
| ARTH 108-601 | World Film Hist To 1945 | William D Schmenner | M 05:15 PM-08:15 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. | CIMS101601, COML123601, ENGL091601 | Arts & Letters Sector (all classes) | ||||||||
| ARTH 109-401 | World Film Hist '45-Pres | Julia Alekseyeva | MW 03:30 PM-05:00 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. | CIMS102401, COML124401, ENGL092401 | Arts & Letters Sector (all classes) |
Course is available to Freshmen and Upperclassmen. Crse Online: Sync & Async Components |
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| ARTH 109-402 | World Film Hist '45-Pres | Filippo Trentin | TR 12:00 PM-01:30 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. | CIMS102402, COML124402, ENGL092402 | Arts & Letters Sector (all classes) | Crse Online: Sync & Async Components | |||||||
| ARTH 218-401 | Art & Architr Anc Egypt | David P Silverman |
M 01:45 PM-03:15 PM W 01:45 PM-03:15 PM |
This course will be an introduction to the art, architecture and minor arts that were produced during the three thousand years of ancient Egyptian history. This material will be presented in its cultural and historical contexts through illustrated lectures and will include visits to the collection of the University Museum. | NELC068401, NELC668401, ARTH618401, AAMW618401, ANCH068401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 273-401 | History of Photography | Gregory M. Vershbow | TR 10:15 AM-11:45 AM | A history of photography and theories of photography from 1839 to the present. Photography's origins are rooted both in artistic desire and technological ingenuity. Some of photography's inventors identified more as artists than engineers. At many points in the history of the medium, the question remains open whether new forms of artistic expression are driven by new technologies, or whether new technologies emerge to fulfill the desires of artistic imagination. This class will address photography's relationship with painting, print, and drawing. It will examine the effect of photography on portraiture, landscape, depictions of motion, and abstraction. We will also investigate the changing cultural perception of photography as an artistic medium from the 19th to the 21st century. | ARTH673401, VLST273401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 276-401 | Impressionism | Andre Dombrowski | TR 05:15 PM-06:45 PM | Impressionism opened the pictorial field to light, perception, science, modernity, bourgeoise leisure and famously the material qualities of paint itself. This course will survey the movement's major contexts and proponents--Manet, Monet, Morisot, Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Rodin--from its origins in the 1860's to its demise in the 1890's, as well as its subsequent adaptions throughout the world until World War I. Particular attention is paid to the artists' critical reception and the historical conditions which allowed one nation, France, to claim the emergence of early Modernism so firmly for itself. The course also analyzes the effects of the rapidly changing social and cultural fabric of Paris, and its affects on artistic developments. We also look outside of France's borders to Germany and Britain. | ARTH676401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 285-601 | Africa and Europe | Hilary R Whitham | MW 05:15 PM-06:45 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 self 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 visual practices that emerged on both continents as a result. Topics of special interest will include racial difference and the birth of photography, colonial masquerade, impressionism, symbols of power in royal arts, cubism, mass marketing and colonial self-fashioning, West African studio photography, world's fairs and the Musee de l'Homme, Dada and surrealism, Negritude and interwar Paris, anti-aesthetics, colonial arts education, National art schools in the age of African independence, humanism and South African photography under Apartheid. | AFRC283601 | |||||||||
| ARTH 289-401 | Topics Film Studies: Romantic Comedy | Meta Mazaj | TR 03:30 PM-05:00 PM | This course is an exploration of multiple forces that explain the growth, global spread and institutionalization of international film festivals. The global boom in film industry has resulted in an incredible proliferation of film festivals taking place all around the world, and festivals have become one of the biggest growth industries. A dizzying convergence site of cinephilia, media spectacle, business agendas and geopolitical purposes, film festivals offer a fruitful ground on which to investigate the contemporary global cinema network. Film festivals will be approached as a site where numerous lines of the world cinema map come together, from culture and commerce, experimentation and entertainment, political interests and global business patterns. To analyze the network of film festivals, we will address a wide range of issues, including historical and geopolitical forces that shape the development of festivals, festivals as an alternative marketplace, festivals as a media event, programming/agenda setting, prizes, cinephilia, and city marketing. Individual case studies of international film festivals-Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Rotterdam, Karlovy Vary, Toronto, Sundance among others-will enable us to address all these diverse issues but also to establish a theoretical framework with which to approach the study of film festivals. For students planning to attend the Penn-in-Cannes program, this course provides an excellent foundation that will prepare you for the on-site experience of the King of all festivals. | CIMS202401, ENGL292401, COML292401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 292-401 | Tpcs Digital/New Media: Environmental Media | Rahul Mukherjee | W 05:15 PM-08:15 PM | Topic varies. Spring 2015: Documents are written texts, evidence, inscriptions, and much more. Documentary films have been used to tell stories, share experiences, spread propaganda, resist exploitation, invoke memories, and much more. How can we think of information and meaning in relation to the shared histories of document and documentary? Database management systems based on digital technologies have technically transformed ways of classifying, storing, and aggregating data, but have they really changed our experiences of mediating with our past, present, and future? Issues of agency, memory, representation, performativity, interactivity, and posthumanism are entangled in discussions of databases and archives and our engagement with them. In this course we will relate and juxtapose readings connecting documents, documentaries, and archives. We will read media and cultural theorists such as Lisa Gitelman, Akira Lippit, and Wendy Chun alongside novelists like Franz Kafka and Ismail Kadare. Assignments include one assigned/selected report from field visits to libraries and museums, one reading presentation and blogging assignment, and a final paper or practice-based art project. | ENGL278401, CIMS278401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 293-401 | Topics Cultural Studies: British Cinema | James English | TR 01:45 PM-03:15 PM | This topic course explores aspects of Film Cultural Studies intensively. Specific course topics vary from year to year. See the Cinema Studies website at <http://cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu/> for a description of the current offerings. | ENGL295401, CIMS295401, COML295401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 299-401 | "The Arts of Rebellion": 21st Century Creative/Critical Latinx Production | Ricardo Bracho | TR 03:30 PM-05:00 PM | This course examines intersections of artistic production and radical politics in the 20th and 21st centuries. It addresses art from across a wide array of media: street art, film, theater, poetry, performance art, fiction, graphic arts, digital media, and urban interventions. We will examine artistic movements and artists from across the Americas, including revolutionary Latin American theater, film, and literature; the art of Black Liberation in the U.S.; the Chicano art movement and its queer dissidents; street performance and protest produced in the context of dictatorship; anticolonial performance art and alternative reality gaming; and activist art, political theater, and cinema from the 21st century. Through its focus on the relationship between art and politics, this course also introduces students to foundational concepts related to the relationship between culture and power more broadly. | CIMS073401, LALS073401, ENGL073401, COML073401, THAR073401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 300-301 | Undergrad Methods Sem | Ivan Drpic | M 03:30 PM-06:30 PM | Topic varies. 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 306-301 | Southwest Native Art in Community | Lucy Fowler Williams | R 01:45 PM-04:45 PM | Topic varies from semester to semester. For the Spring 2022 semester, the topic will be: Southwest Native Art In Community. This undergraduate seminar looks closely at the impacts of settler colonialism to uncover Pueblo and Navajo art's enduring engagement in supporting health and wellbeing among its practitioners and home communities. Study and discussion will be oriented around the new exhibition of Albert Barnes' Southwest Native art at the Barnes Foundation, Water, Wind, Breath: Southwest Native Art in Community (February 20 - May 15, 2022) and related collections in the Penn Museum of archaeology and anthropology. The course explores Navajo and Pueblo pottery, textiles and jewelry within the historical and contemporary socio-political contexts of its making and use. Students will learn to look closely at art and materials, artistic practice, and histories in Native community contexts. Topics will explore indigenous perspectives, practices, and values, anthropological perspectives, Native American history, Native American resistance and reclamation, representation, and art sovereignty. Guest artists will be a part of the course instruction. Some classes will meet at the Barnes Foundation and we will take full advantage of scheduled exhibit programs. Some classes will be held at the Penn Museum where students will engage in hands-on learning with Native American art. The course is taught by Dr. Lucy Fowler Williams, Associate Curator in the American Section of the Penn Museum and Co-curator of the Barnes' 2022 exhibition. She is a cultural anthropologist. Some video lecture segments will likely be prepared in advance and available asynchronously and augmented by group discussion and in person meetings. | Objects-Based Learning Course | |||||||||
| ARTH 320-301 | Aegean Bronze Age Art: Religion | Elizabeth Shank | T 10:15 AM-01:15 PM | Topics vary from semester to semester. For the Spring 2022 semester, the topic will be: Religion. Religion in the Aegean Bronze Age is an extremely evocative topic in the study of Prehistoric Greek society, and in this class we will examine what art and architecture can tell us about religion in a prehistoric culture. Several questions will help to frame our exploration: 1) How does religion evolve in Greece from 3,000-1,100 BC? 2) In what ways do the Minoan palaces and Mycenaean citadels function as religious centers? 3) What can iconographically rich scenes from wall paintings, carved seals, ivory, stone vessels, and gold signet rings tell us about religious activities? 4) How can burial practices reveal important themes in the lives and beliefs of the living? We will also study theories that have been proposed about Aegean Bronze Age religion, including the first appearances of later Classical Greek gods and goddesses. Readings will be assigned for each class to help fuel topics for discussion. Students will write and present two papers to the class. The papers will examine an aspect of Aegean Bronze Age Religion (circa 15-25 pages long with footnotes, a bibliography, and images. You will turn these papers in when you present them to the class. Images in the paper should be illustrated with PowerPoint. | ||||||||||
| ARTH 324-401 | Dress & Fashion in Afrca: Dress and Fashion in Africa | Ali B. Ali-Dinar | TR 03:30 PM-05:00 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 s influenced by the surrounding forces. | AFRC324401, ANTH342401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 328-301 | The Parthenon: the Many Lives of A Monument | Mantha Zarmakoupi | W 12:00 PM-03:00 PM | This seminar focuses on the Parthenon, the centerpiece of Pericles' building programme on the Athenian Acropolis, to address its design and history, its aftermath as a ruin, its anastylosis as a monument as well as its meaning as national and cultural symbol in the modern period. The Parthenon is arguably a monument of perfection - the culmination of the search for the ideal proportions in Doric temple design in the 5th century BCE - and the course will analyze its architecture to shed light on its design and construction processes, including its architectural refinements. We will also address the history of the building as a ruin and the important work of its restoration as a monument after the 19th century, thereby tackling the aesthetics of "purity" intertwined in the planning of interventions on ancient ruins and elucidating the ways in which such interventions are entwined with national and supra-national debates about cultural identity in the discourses of modernity. The seminar will spend a week in Athens in order to study the Parthenon as well as the current work of the Acropolis Restoration Service, whose recent work has shed light on the design and construction of the monument. Finally, the course also aims to map the intellectual agenda of contemporary art practices that engage with the Parthenon and the Athenian Acropolis. |
Permission Needed From Department Penn Global Seminar |
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| ARTH 333-401 | Material Christianities: the First Millennium |
Ivan Drpic Reyhan Durmaz |
T 01:45 PM-04:45 PM | What can objects tell us about Christianity? How might a lavish mosaic, a withered body part, a dark crypt, or a pilgrim's oil lamp challenge and complicate visions of the past extracted from texts? This course investigates the first thousand years of Christianity through the lens of material culture. The history of Christianity - from its nebulous beginnings in Palestine to its recognition as the official religion of the Roman Empire and subsequent expansion - is often narrated from a perspective that privileges the writings of elite men. To capture the rich diversity in Christian experience and expression, we will turn to the material practices of religion and explore how things, places, and bodily acts shaped what it meant to be Christian. Building on insights drawn from archaeology, art history, anthropology, and religious studies, we will seek to recover the experiences of diverse and often marginalized subjects and communities, and in the process, will problematize the categories of religion, authority, and identity. Regular visits to the Penn Museum and other collections in Philadelphia will complement lectures and group discussions. | RELS333401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 339-401 | Sacred Stuff | Donovan O Schaefer | TR 05:15 PM-06:45 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. | RELS102401, ANTH112401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 375-301 | Topics in 19th-Cent Art: World's Fairs | Andre Dombrowski | W 03:30 PM-06:30 PM | Topic varies from semester to semester. For the Spring 2022 semester, the topic will be: World's Fairs. This seminar will study the manifold novelties first displayed at the nineteenth and early-twentieth century World's Fairs, stretching from 1851 to 1915. Such events-first held in cities like London and Paris, but eventually all over the world-chronicled the period's innovations in art, technology, ethnography, and science. Many of the most crucial inventions were first shown to the public at World's Fairs: electricity, the telephone, and the bicycle, among other innovative artistic techniques and everyday objects. The fairs brought a community of millions of tourists from all over the world together, thereby encoding complex structures of empire and international relations within a pretense to entertainment. The "global" ambitions of universal expositions, and the image of the "world" they helped construct, will come under close scrutiny for its frequent imperial overreach, not least in the controversial practice of human displays. We will also test the thesis that the universal expositions engendered new ways of seeing and engaging with the material world. Finally, we will study the period definitions of "innovation" in industrial production promoted by such large-scale events. | ||||||||||
| ARTH 379-401 | Global Media: Global Tv | Rahul Mukherjee | R 03:30 PM-06:30 PM | This course explores a broad media landscape through new critical and conceptual approaches. It is designated as a Benjamin Franklin Seminar. This course maps the footprints of television at a global scale. Adopting comparative approaches, we will be studying TV's formation of national and global discourses, and thereby recognizing not only television's impact on processes of globalization, but also the ability of television to matter globally. Working through concepts of "broadcasting," "flow," "circulation," and "circumvention," the course examines the movement of (and blocks encountered by) television programs and signals across national borders and cultures. The course particularly focuses on how global television cultures have been transformed due to shifts from broadcasting technologies to (Internet) streaming services? Navigating from United States and Cuba to India and Egypt, the readings in the course illuminate how particular televisual genres, institutions, and reception practices emerged in various countries during specific historical periods. We shall be addressing a range of questions: what kind of global phenomenon is television? Can we study television in countries where we do not know the existing local languages? In what different ways (through what platforms, interfaces, and screens) do people in different continents access televisual content? What explains the growing transnational exports of Turkish and Korean TV dramas? What is the need to historically trace the infrastructural systems like satellites (and optical fiber cables) that made (and continue to make) transmission of television programming possible across the world? How do fans circumvent geo-blocking to watch live sporting events? Assignments include submitting weekly discussion questions and a final paper. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. | CIMS378401, ENGL378401 | Benjamin Franklin Seminars | ||||||||
| ARTH 381-401 | Cinema and Socialism |
Julia Alekseyeva Chenshu Zhou |
M 12:00 PM-03:00 PM | Films from socialist countries are often labeled and dismissed as "propaganda" in Western democratic societies. This course complicates this simplistic view, arguing for the value in understanding the ties between socialist governments, the cinematic arts, and everything in between. We will examine films from past and present socialist countries such as the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and Cuba, as well as films made with socialist aspirations. As this course will argue, the formal features of socialist films cannot be understood without reference to how cinema as an institution is situated: both in relation to socialism as ideology, and the lived experiences of socialism. We will consider topics such as socialist cultural theory, film exhibition, and reception, tracing over 100 years of film history: from 1917 to the present day. This course connects different global traditions of socialism, as well as disparate global regions, arguing for a transnational and transhistorical connection that cuts against the grain of most North American cultural discourse. | CIMS310401, ENGL310401, EALC104401, REES269401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 391-401 | Topics Film History: Film Festivals | Meta Mazaj | TR 12:00 PM-01:30 PM | Specific course topics vary from year to year. See the Cinema Studies website at <http://cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu/> for a description of the current offerings. | CIMS201401, ENGL291401, COML201401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 505-640 | Art, Plague, and the Renaissance Imagination | Sheila Carol Barker | This MLA course in the history of art explores an aspect of Art History and Theory, specific course topics vary. Please see the College of Liberal and Professional Studies Course Guide for a description of current offerings. | |||||||||||
| ARTH 510-401 | Buddhism and Film | Justin Mcdaniel | M 01:45 PM-04:45 PM | This is an advanced course for upper level undergraduates and graduate students on various issues in the study of Buddhist texts, art, and history. Each semester the theme of the course changes. In recent years themes have included: Magic and Ritual, Art and Material Culture, Texts and Contexts, Manuscript Studies. | RELS571401, EALC718401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 536-401 | Manuscript Arts in the Islamic World | Marianna Simpson | W 10:15 AM-01:15 PM | This hands-on seminar will explore the long tradition of manuscript-making and manuscript-makers in the Islamic world, using the extensive collections of Arab, Persian, Turkish and Indian volumes at the University of Pennsylvania and the Free Library of Philadelphia. These include copies of the Qur'an (Islam's holy text) and other religious, scientific, historical and literary texts. Emphasis will be placed on traditional materials and artistic techniques, specifically calligraphy, binding, illumination and illustration, as well as on production methods and the historical, social, and economic contexts in which manuscripts were made, used and collected from early Islamic times to the early modern period. Also at issue will be the ways that Islamic manuscripts were transformed over the centuries as they journeyed from their diverse places of origin (Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Iran, India, etc.) to Philadelphia. The goal is the art historical skills involved in the study of Islamic codices, through close examination, discussion and presentation, and to recognize that every manuscript has a story. Most of the class sessions will be held either at the Kislak Center in Van Pelt Library or at the Free Library on the Parkway. | NELC538401 |
Undergraduates Need Permission Objects-Based Learning Course |
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| ARTH 540-301 | Topics in Medieval Art: Facing Fragments | Sarah M. Guerin | T 10:15 AM-01:15 PM | Topic varies from semester to semester. For the Spring 2022 semester, the topic will be: Facing Fragments. So many traces of the medieval past come to us in fragmentary form, either literally broken, partial and incomplete, or figuratively, having been ripped from its program or findsite and shipped across the world. This course focuses on the strategies art historians and curators adopt to confront the realities of decontextualized museum collections - of how to face fragments. Considering approaches that range from research methodologies, conservation, installation, and preservation, we will also touch upon questions of restitution and ethics. Co-taught between Penn and the PMA, this course will constitute much hands-on learning. |
Undergraduates Need Permission Objects-Based Learning Course |
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| ARTH 543-301 | Topics Medieval/Ren Art: Manuscript Illumination | Nicholas Herman | M 10:15 AM-01:15 PM | Topic varies from semester to semester. For the Spring 2022 semester, the topic will be: Manuscript Illumination. This course will provide an overview of the history, materials, and techniques of manuscript illumination through the lens of Philadelphia's rich and varied holdings. The course will also chart the sometimes surprising means by which such objects arrived in North American collections from the nineteenth century through to the present. Handling sessions will form a key part of the course. We will begin by examining items at the Kislak Center before venturing to other local institutions including the Free Library and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with possible study-day excursions to New York and Baltimore. Student research assignments will involve the close individual study of a single illuminated manuscript. | Objects-Based Learning Course | |||||||||
| ARTH 568-401 | 18th-Century "Visual Cultures of Race and Empire | Chi-ming Yang | R 12:00 PM-03:00 PM | This course approaches the Western history of race and racial classification (1600-1800) with a focus on visual and material culture, natural history, and science that connected Atlantic and Pacific worlds. Across the long eighteenth century, new knowledges about human diversity and species distinctions emerged alongside intensifications of global trade with Asia. The course will include case studies of chinoiserie textiles, portraits of consuming individuals, natural history prints and maps, Chinese export porcelain and furnishings, and "blackamoor" sculpture. Objects of visual and material culture will be studied alongside readings on regional and world histories that asserted universal freedoms as well as hierarchies of human, animal, and plant-kind. Keeping in mind that the idea of race continues to be a distributed phenomenon - across color, gender, class, religion, speech, culture - we will explore changing vocabularies of difference, particularly concerning skin color, across a range of texts and images. Knowledge often does not take written or literary form, and for this reason, we will study examples of visual and material culture as well as forms of technology that were critical to defining human varieties, to use the eighteenth-century term. Although we will be reading texts in English, some in translation, we will also account for European and non-European knowledge traditions - vernacular, indigenous - that informed scientific and imaginative writings about the globe. Topics may include cultural and species distinction, global circulations of commodities between the East and West Indies, the transatlantic slave trade, the casta system of racial classification in the Americas, religious and scientific explanations of blackness and whiteness, and visual representations of non-European people. | ENGL544401, COML541401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 569-401 | Inside the Archive | Liliane Weissberg | T 01:45 PM-04:45 PM | What is an archive, and what is its history? What makes an archival collection special, and how can we work with it? In this course, we will discuss work essays that focus on the idea and concept of the archive by Jacques Derrida, Michel de Certeau, Benjamin Buchloh, Cornelia Vismann, and others. We will consider the difference between public and private archives, archives dedicated to specific disciplines, persons, or events, and consider the relationship to museums and memorials. Further questions will involve questions of property and ownership as well as the access to material, and finally the archive's upkeep, expansion, or reduction. While the first part of the course will focus on readings about archives, we will invite curators, and visit archives (either in person or per zoom) in the second part of the course. At Penn, we will consider four archives: (1) the Louis Kahn archive of architecture at Furness, (2) the Lorraine Beitler Collection of material relating to the Dreyfus affair, (3) the Schoenberg collection of medieval manuscripts and its digitalization, and (4) the University archives. Outside Penn, we will study the following archives and their history: (1) Leo Baeck Institute for the study of German Jewry in New York, (2) the Sigmund Freud archive at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., (3) the German Literary Archive and the Literturmuseum der Moderne in Marbach, Germany, and (4) the archives of the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem. | GRMN577401, ENGL671401, COML573401, JWST577401 |
Undergraduates Need Permission All Readings and Lectures in English |
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| ARTH 572-640 | Mla Seminar in Visual Studies: Medusa and the Power of Vision | Christopher Pastore | W 05:15 PM-07:55 PM | Topic varies. | VLST540640 | |||||||||
| ARTH 583-401 | Art Sex and the Sixties | Jonathan D Katz | W 07:00 PM-10:00 PM | With a distinct emphasis on post World War II performance, film, sculpture and painting, this course explores the conjunction of the period's systematic revamping of our social/sexual schema with the equally revolutionary ascendancy of an artistic postmodernity. And it seeks to explore this dynamic not only within the familiar confines of North America and Europe but towards Latin America and Asia, too, in what was a nearly simultaneous emergence of the erotic as a political force in the 60s. Reading a range of key voices from Brazilian theorist and poet Oswald de Andrade to Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse, performance artists Carolee Schneemann, and Yoko Ono, Neo-Freudian theorist Norman O. Brown and lesbian feminist author Monique Wittig, we will examine how and why sex became a privileged form of politics at this historical juncture in a range of different contexts across the globe. Students interested in feminist, gender or queer theory, 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. | GSWS520401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 586-301 | Andy Warhol and the Mirror of Culture | Jonathan D Katz | T 03:30 PM-06:30 PM | Topic varies from semester to semester. For the Spring 2022 semester, the topic will be: Andy Warhol and the Mirror of Culture. Arguably the most significant artist of the last half of the 20th century, Warhol revolutionized fields far beyond the fine arts. In his magazines, books, concerts, TV programs, films, advertisements, computer-generated imagery, installations, paintings, sculptures, and, not least, persona, Warhol promoted an ever thinner divide between art and life. But in so doing, he claimed that he wasn't advocating his own particular take on the culture of his moment, but rather the exact obverse, that he was a blank, merely mirroring what existed all around him. Indeed, his most famous quote is perhaps "People are always calling me a mirror and if a mirror looks into a mirror what is there to see?" In this seminar we will both historicize and contextualize Warhol's mirror claim, while exploring the contiguity between his mirroring and the legal and discursive expectations for queers before Stonewall - all towards understanding how an ostensible passivity became the most aggressive social and cultural position of Warhol's time. | Undergraduates Need Permission | |||||||||
| ARTH 591-401 | Cinema and the Museum | Chenshu Zhou | R 12:00 PM-03:00 PM | Cinema and the museum are both important modern cultural institutions that have global relevance. How do cinema and the museum interact with each other conceptually, artistically, and spatially? In this graduate seminar, we will cross the disciplinary boundaries between film and media studies, museum studies, visual studies, and art history. A wide range of phenomena at the intersection of cinema and the museum will be considered, including the museum in films, the museum as an institution of cinema, video arts and moving images in museums, museum exhibitions that interrogate the cinematic medium, and film museums. Examples will be drawn from diverse historical periods and cultural contexts. This course is supported by Spiegel-Wilks funding and will include at least one class field trip. | CIMS591401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 618-401 | Art & Architr Anc Egypt | David P Silverman |
M 01:45 PM-03:15 PM W 01:45 PM-03:15 PM |
This course will be an introduction to the art, architecture and minor arts that were produced during the three thousand years of ancient Egyptian history. This material will be presented in its cultural and historical contexts through illustrated lectures and will include visits to the collection of the University Museum. | NELC068401, NELC668401, ARTH218401, AAMW618401, ANCH068401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 673-401 | History of Photography | Gregory M. Vershbow | TR 10:15 AM-11:45 AM | A history of photography and theories of photography from 1839 to the present. Photography's origins are rooted both in artistic desire and technological ingenuity. Some of photography's inventors identified more as artists than engineers. At many points in the history of the medium, the question remains open whether new forms of artistic expression are driven by new technologies, or whether new technologies emerge to fulfill the desires of artistic imagination. This class will address photography's relationship with painting, print, and drawing. It will examine the effect of photography on portraiture, landscape, depictions of motion, and abstraction. We will also investigate the changing cultural perception of photography as an artistic medium from the 19th to the 21st century. | VLST273401, ARTH273401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 676-401 | Impressionism | Andre Dombrowski | TR 05:15 PM-06:45 PM | Impressionism opened the pictorial field to light, perception, science, modernity, bourgeoise leisure and famously the material qualities of paint itself. This course will survey the movement's major contexts and proponents--Manet, Monet, Morisot, Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Rodin--from its origins in the 1860's to its demise in the 1890's, as well as its subsequent adaptions throughout the world until World War I. Particular attention is paid to the artists' critical reception and the historical conditions which allowed one nation, France, to claim the emergence of early Modernism so firmly for itself. The course also analyzes the effects of the rapidly changing social and cultural fabric of Paris, and its affects on artistic developments. We also look outside of France's borders to Germany and Britain. | ARTH276401 | |||||||||
| ARTH 701-401 | Proseminar in Methods | David Young Kim | R 08:30 AM-11:30 AM | This course is designed to build skills of analysis and argumentation essential to the conduct of creative and responsible work in History of Art. Its goals include presenting the history of the field in a manner attentive to the complexities of its institutional and professional formations, purposes, and effects; encouraging appreciation of historiography, specifically the time, place, and political and social circumstances in which a given text was composed; promoting awareness of the ethics of scholarship (inclusive and expansive in every sense); familiarizing students with the strengths and weaknesses of distinct methodological traditions that have shaped the field; considering the audiences served by art historical scholarship (the academy, the museum, local and global publics) and the forms scholarship might take to effectively reach those audiences. The course is required for first-year graduate students in History of Art and open to others with permission of the instructor. | AAMW701401 |