Title Instructor Location Time All taxonomy terms Description Section Description Cross Listings Fulfills Registration Notes Syllabus Syllabus URL Course Syllabus URL
ARTH 0141-401 Public Policy, Museums, and the Ethics of Cultural Heritage Richard M Leventhal TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM This course will focus upon and examine the ethics of international heritage and the role that Museums play in the preservation of identity and cultural heritage. The mission of this course will be to inform and educate students about the role of Museums within the 21st century. What is the role and position of antiquities and important cultural objects in Museums? How should Museums acquire these objects and when should they be returned to countries and cultural groups? Examples from current issues will be included in the reading and discussions along with objects and issues within the Penn Museum. ANTH1410401
ARTH 0221-401 Material World in Archaeological Science Marie-Claude Boileau
Deborah I Olszewski
Vanessa Workman 		TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM By focusing on the scientific analysis of inorganic archaeological materials, this course will explore processes of creation in the past. Class will take place in the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials (CAAM) and will be team taught in three modules: analysis of lithics, analysis of ceramics and analysis of metals. Each module will combine laboratory and classroom exercises to give students hands-on experience with archaeological materials. We will examine how the transformation of materials into objects provides key information about past human behaviors and the socio-economic contexts of production, distribution, exchange and use. Discussion topics will include invention and adoption of new technologies, change and innovation, use of fire, and craft specialization. ANTH2221401, ANTH5221401, CLST3302401, NELC2960401, NELC6920401
ARTH 0500-301 First-Year Seminar Gwendolyn D Shaw T 12:00 PM-2:59 PM The primary goal of the first-year seminar program is to provide every first-year student the opportunity for a direct personal encounter with a faculty member in a small setting devoted to a significant intellectual endeavor. Specific topics are posted at the beginning of each academic year. 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. The topic for this first-year seminar is: Portrait of the Artist. Beginning with the ancient Greeks, people have created specific biographical structures as a way to understand and explain the artistic process. Artists have often been labeled as natural prodigies possessing creative powers on par with the divine. This seminar will examine the role that biography plays in the assessment of visual art and the creative process over time and across European and American culture. During the semester we will read germinal texts and discuss recent biographically focused art history, as well as the historical and critical theory that has helped to shape the current cultural construction of the artist. Throughout the seminar we will discuss the underlying debates around these various approaches to biography. Arts & Letters Sector (all classes)
ARTH 0500-302 First-Year Seminar Ann L Kuttner W 1:45 PM-4:44 PM The primary goal of the first-year seminar program is to provide every first-year student the opportunity for a direct personal encounter with a faculty member in a small setting devoted to a significant intellectual endeavor. Specific topics are posted at the beginning of each academic year. 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. The topic for this first-year seminar is: What Happened to Classical Myths? The ancient Greek and Roman world that spanned from Iran to Britain, North Africa to the Black Sea, ended long ago. In it, words and images insistently conveyed widely shared stories - often erotic or violent or fantastic tales - about many gods, supernatural beings, and imagined men and women of a legendary past, the `age of heroes’. This legacy is what gets called, by some people living in the modern world, “Classical myth”; it is known from surviving ancient texts and things. From Byzantine and Islamic Late Antiquity to the global 21st century, a host of peoples and races have seized on these ancient Greco-Roman narratives to think through their own values, hopes, fears, achievements and disasters. Their own images have found varying meaning, always, in what can at first seem the same. This class will think about what makes a myth, who appropriates a `classic’, as we explore together how artists, patrons and viewers have engaged Classical mythology in many media, from illustrated books to statues, paintings, graphic art and filmic creations. Some surviving ancient mythological art has had a popular afterlife too that you will glimpse. Besides reading in some of the enduring ancient works that have inspired artists and audiences, like the Metamorphoses of Ovid or the Iliad of Homer, and of course looking at images in a classroom and on screen, you will also work directly with art in Philadelphia museums as well as Penn’s collections. In the end, this course asks you to ask yourself: what do your myths look like? Arts & Letters Sector (all classes) https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do
ARTH 0500-303 First-Year Seminar Ivan Drpic R 1:45 PM-4:44 PM The primary goal of the first-year seminar program is to provide every first-year student the opportunity for a direct personal encounter with a faculty member in a small setting devoted to a significant intellectual endeavor. Specific topics are posted at the beginning of each academic year. 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. The topic for this Fall 2022 first-year seminar is: Portraiture. What does it mean to depict a person? And how might culturally specific notions of individual identity inform the making of images we call portraits? This first-year seminar grapples with such questions through a wide-ranging exploration of portraiture as a genre in the Western tradition, from antiquity to the present. We will examine a variety of images, including marble busts and oil paintings, photographs and death masks, coins and religious icons, and of course, selfies, in order to gain a deeper understanding of the changing relationship between personhood and visual representation across history. While attending to the diverse forms, functions, and meanings of portraiture, we will also investigate issues surrounding the authority and agency of images; the concept of physiognomic likeness; self-fashioning and self-display; and the interconnections among gender, race, class, and identity. Arts & Letters Sector (all classes) https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do
ARTH 1010-001 World Art and Civilization Before 1400 Sarah M Guerin MW 10:15 AM-11:44 AM This course serves as a double introduction to the History of Art. First it is a survey of the ancient world that lays the foundation for the History of Art across the whole Eastern Hemisphere. Across this enormous timespan and geographical spread, an emphasis will be placed on moments of interaction, as well as analogies. Secondly, through this overview of the Ancient world up to around 1400, the basic skills that serve the student in the study of the History of Art will also be developed: close looking, understanding plans, the basics of iconography, questions of stylistic development, among others. This course fulfills Sector III: Arts and Letters and counts towards the History of Art major and minor requirements. Arts & Letters Sector (all classes)
ARTH 1060-001 Architect and History Antonios Thodis MW 12:00 PM-1:29 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. Hum & Soc Sci Sector (new curriculum only) https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do
ARTH 1070-401 Television and New Media Peter Decherney 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 1070-601 Television and New Media M 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. CIMS1030601, COML1031601, ENGL1950601
ARTH 1080-401 World Film History to 1945 Chenshu Zhou MW 1:45 PM-3:14 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 1080-402 World Film History to 1945 Joseph M Coppola TR 3:30 PM-4:59 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. CIMS1010402, COML1011402, ENGL1900402 Arts & Letters Sector (all classes)
ARTH 1090-401 World Film History 1945-Present Meta Mazaj TR 12:00 PM-1:29 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 TR 1:45 PM-3:14 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)
ARTH 1100-001 What is Modern Art? Huey Gene Copeland TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM Modernism is not easily defined. For some, the word simply identifies Western art of the last two hundred-odd years. For others, modernism refers to forms of “advanced” visual art, whether the cubist distortions of Pablo Picasso or the allover abstractions of Jackson Pollock, that break with established representational conventions. For still others, the term singles out modes of artistic opposition to the ravages of capitalism, colonialism, industrialization, imperialism, and war that continue to define our world. Among its manifold practices, we find the rise of abstraction, paintings that pretend to show nothing but an instant, dreams and erotic desires set free for everyone to see, and everyday objects elevated to the status of sculpture. At key moments, "Art" itself was declared dead, then resurrected as the solution to the social problems of the era, forming a highly ambivalent relationship to the spheres of politics and history. We will cover the development of Modernism broadly, from the 1860s to the 1960s, introducing many of the best-known figures (like Monet, Van Gogh, Duchamp, and Picasso) and movements (like Impressionism, Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism). Europe and North America will be the focus, but we will frequently look to global developments as well and analyze art made in colonial and diasporic conditions. The standard narratives of Modernism will be questioned at every turn, and artists of color, diverse gender and sexual orientations, as well as national and economic backgrounds studied in depth as well. We will proceed more or less chronologically, doubling back or projecting forward when necessary to understand the determinative historical influences that have shaped the development of modernist idioms in particular times and places. In every instance, we will study works of art that have confronted our culture’s visual means—of life, death, consumption, and display—and attempted to work them over into critical form.
ARTH 1800-401 Introduction to Queer Art Jonathan D Katz M 1:45 PM-4:44 PM It's no exaggeration to note that queers have long been at the forefront of innovation in the arts, and that the arts, generally, have been a comfortable home for queers, even at moments when society at large was distinctly hostile. In fact the concepts of modern art and homosexuality that we use today are twins, for they were both founded in the third quarter of the 19th century and grew up together. Introduction to Queer Art thus begins with the coining of the word "homosexual" in 1869, and surveys how a range of mediums including painting, sculpture, poetry, music, and film shifted in response to new definitions of sexuality. Along the way, we will work towards answering two related questions: 1) Why were queer creators largely responsible for the introduction of modernity in the arts, and 2) why do we find so often that queer social and political dissent found form in, and as, aesthetic dissent as well? In creating new forms for art that often seem far removed from any traditional definition of sexuality, including non-objective and abstract art, queer artists pushed the boundaries of normativity, leading to new ways of seeing, hearing, feeling and thinking that often dared to encode queer meanings as part of their formal innovation. We will look into the politics of queer art, and how and why in the US, even amidst often dangerous homophobia, it was queer artists who represented America to itself. Thus, we will cover such key cultural figures such as Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, Georgia O'Keeffe, Frank O'Hara, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Agnes Martin. Throughout, new methods informed by queer, gender, and critical race theory will be utilized. GSWS1800401
ARTH 2145-401 Reading Maya Culture: Decipherment and a New Window into the Ancient Americas Simon Martin R 1:45 PM-4:44 PM The past three decades have seen a revolution in the study of the Ancient Americas, one with far-reaching implications for how we understand indigenous society and culture on this continent. This course will take us on a journey of academic discovery—encompassing language, art, and materiality—that explains how the decipherment of a major writing system has revealed a previously hidden world. The Maya are one of the most distinctive and best-known of Mesoamerican peoples, who live today, as they did in ancient times, in the Yucatan Peninsula and a region that spans modern southern Mexico, the whole of Guatemala and Belize, and the westernmost fringes of Honduras and El Salvador. From as early as 1000 BCE they were erecting major architecture and flourished for twenty-five more centuries before the invasion of Europeans brought their independence to an end in the sixteenth century CE. Within their elaborate urban spaces, the Maya erected large stone monuments inscribed with imagery and hieroglyphic texts—most of them commissioned in the Classic Period that reaches from 150-900 CE—although the script is also found on many smaller and more intimate objects. For the first century of research these texts proved all but unintelligible, as faulty assumptions and lack of adequate sources left a deep pessimism that they could ever be understood. But beginning in the 1980s major progress in "cracking the code" took place and today we can read almost all inscriptions to some extent, a decent number in their entirety. This course will teach practical skills that allow students with no previous background to read Maya inscriptions and gain access to the history, politics, religious beliefs, and practical material culture they describe. The fabulous design of the hieroglyphs, that at first seem so impenetrable, will be broken-down to reveal not only language but an iconographic system that reveals much about the ancient Maya aesthetics and visual culture. ANTH2145401, LALS2145401
ARTH 2500-601 Michelangelo and the Art of the Italian Renaissance Sheila Carol Barker R 5:15 PM-8:14 PM An introduction to the work of the Renaissance artist Michelangelo (1475-1564)-his sculptures, paintings, architecture, poetry, and artistic theory-in relation to his patrons, predecessors, and contemporaries, above all Leonardo and Raphael. Topics include artistic creativity and license, religious devotion, the revival of antiquity, observation of nature, art as problem-solving, the public reception and function of artworks, debates about style, artistic rivalry, and traveling artists. Rather than taking the form of a survey, this course selects works as paradigmatic case studies, and will analyze contemporary attitudes toward art of this period through study of primary sources. ITAL2550601
ARTH 2610-401 Northern Renaissance Art Shira N Brisman TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM This course critically examines concepts traditionally associated with the Renaissance by focusing on the exchange of artistic ideas throughout the Holy Roman Empire and across different media, such as the altarpieces of Jan van Eyck, the expressive drawings of Albrecht Durer and Hans Baldung Grien, the peasant studies of Pieter Bruegel and the prints of satirists who wished to remain anonymous. The material is organized thematically around four topics: religious art as piety and politics; antiquity as a source of tradition and imagination; the formulation of a public discourse that exposed social threats; and the distinctiveness of artistic claims of individual achievement. A motif throughout the course is the question of how the survival of fragments may be presented in museum contexts as parts standing in for an absent whole. We will also consider how historians approach designs for works of art now lost or never completed. Encouraging encounters with art and artifacts around the city, assignments focus on objects in Philadelphia collections. ARTH6610401, GRMN1301401, GRMN5780401
ARTH 2679-401 Latinx Literature and Culture Jennifer Lyn Sternad Ponce De Leon MW 1:45 PM-3:14 PM This course offers a broad introduction to the study of Latinx culture. We will examine literature, theater, visual art, and popular cultural forms, including murals, poster art, graffiti, guerrilla urban interventions, novels, poetry, short stories, and film. In each instance, we will study this work within its historical context and with close attention to the ways it illuminates class formation, racialization, and ideologies of gender and sexuality as they shape Latinx experience in the U.S. Topics addressed in the course will include immigration and border policy, revolutionary nationalism and its critique, anti-imperialist thought, Latinx feminisms, queer latinidades, ideology, identity formation, and social movements. While we will address key texts, historical events, and intellectual currents from the late 19th century and early 20th century, the course will focus primarily on literature and art from the 1960s to the present. All texts will be in English. COML1260401, ENGL1260401, GSWS1260401, LALS1260401 https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do
ARTH 2750-401 Revolution to Realism: European Art, 1770-1870 Andre Dombrowski WF 12:00 PM-1:29 PM This course surveys the major trends in the arts of Europe and its colonies in the tumultuous decades stretching from the French and Haitian revolutions in the late-eighteenth century to the rise of realism in the mid-nineteenth. Starting with Jacques-Louis David's revolutionary history paintings, we study Napoleonic representations of empire, Goya's imagery of violence, romantic representations of madness and desire, the origins of both nationalist and ecocritical landscape painting, the aesthetics of the industrial revolution, as well as the politicized realism of Gustave Courbet. Some of the themes that will be addressed include: the revolutionary hero, the birth of the public museum, the specters of slavery and colonialism in modern representation, the anxious masculinity of romanticism, the rise of industry and bourgeois culture, the beginnings of photography and caricature, the quest for national identity and, not least, the origins of modernist painting. Throughout, we will strive to recover the original radicalism of art's formal and conceptual innovations at times of profound political and social crisis. ARTH6750401 https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do
ARTH 2810-401 Modern Architecture,1900-Present David B Brownlee MWF 10:15 AM-11:14 AM The architecture of Europe and America from the late nineteenth century until the present is the central subject of this course, but some time is also devoted to Latin American and Asian architecture and to the important issues of modern city planning. Topics discussed include the Arts and Crafts movement, Art Nouveau, Expressionism, Art Deco, the International Style, and Post-modernism. The debate over the role of technology in modern life and art, the search for a universal language of architectural communication, and the insistent demand that architecture serve human society are themes that are traced throughout the course. Among the important figures to be considered are Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, Robert Venturi, and Denise Scott Brown. The course includes weekly discussion sessions and several excursions to view architecture in Philadelphia. ARTH6810401 https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do
ARTH 2990-401 Radical Arts in the Americas Jennifer Lyn Sternad Ponce De Leon MW 3:30 PM-4:59 PM This course explores the complex and fruitful relationship between literature and the visual arts, including painting, sculpture, installations, and performance art. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. CIMS1261401, COML1261401, ENGL1261401, LALS1261401, THAR1261401 https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do
ARTH 3030-401 Introduction to Museums Ann Blair Brownlee
David B Brownlee 		R 1:45 PM-4:44 PM This course introduces students to the history, theory and modern practices of museums. Using the resources of the Penn Museum and other Philadelphia museums, students will study curatorial practice, education, exhibition design and conservation, while exploring the theoretical and ethical issues confronted by museums. Particularly relevant for those interested in archaeology, anthropology, art history, cultural heritage and public education. CLST3309401 https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do
ARTH 3060-301 Venice Biennale Spiegel-Wilks Seminar Jonathan D Katz F 10:15 AM-1:14 PM Founded in 1895, the Venice Biennale (La Biennale di Venezia) is one of the art world’s most prestigious venues for contemporary art. In this seminar, we will consider the history of the Venice Biennale, its curatorial process for group shows, the role of national pavilions, and related topics, within the larger frame of the international art world. How contemporary artists cross boundaries, challenge expectations, and respond to the site itself are also key issues. The seminar focus will be adapted in each iteration according to the expertise of the instructor, and students will be funded to travel with the instructor to Venice over fall break as part of this site seminar. This course is open to History of Art Juniors and Seniors, admission by permission only. Perm Needed From Instructor
ARTH 3071-401 What is an Image? Ian F Verstegen R 1:45 PM-4:44 PM The course explores various concepts of images. It considers natural images (as in optics), images as artifacts, virtual images, images as representations, and works of art as images. Themes to include: the image controversy in cognitive science, which asks whether some cognitive representations are irreducibly imagistic; the question of whether some images resemble what they represent; the development of the concept of the virtual image and of three-dimensional images; the notions of pictorial representation and non-representational images in art. Readings from C. S. Peirce, Nelson Goodman, Robert Hopkins, Dominic Lopes, W. J. T. Mitchell, John Kulvicki, and Mark Rollins, among others. VLST3050401, VLST5050401
ARTH 3850-401 Modernism Seminar Jean-Michel Rabate TR 12:00 PM-1:29 PM This course explores literary modernism as a global and cross-cultural phenomenon. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. COML2071401, ENGL2071401, GRMN1304401
ARTH 3873-401 The Animation Of Disney Linda R Simensky M 3:30 PM-6:29 PM No organization has exerted as much influence on popular culture and the art form of animation as The Walt Disney Company. For decades, Disney films were the standard by which all other animated films were measured. This course will examine the biography and philosophy of founder Walt Disney, as well as The Walt Disney Company’s impact on animation art, storytelling and technology, the entertainment industry, and American popular culture. We will consider Disney's most influential early films, look at the 1960s when Disney’s importance in popular culture began to erode, and analyze the films that led to the Disney renaissance of the late 1980s/early 1990s. We will also assess the subsequent purchase of Pixar Animation Studios and the overall impact Pixar has had on Disney. The class will also look at recent trends and innovations, including live-action remakes and Disney+. CIMS3203401, ENGL0593401, FNAR3184401
ARTH 3911-401 American Independents Meta Mazaj TR 3:30 PM-4:59 PM This topic course explores aspects of Film History intensively. Specific coursetopics vary from year to year. See the Cinema Studies website at <http://cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu/> for a description of the current This offerings. CIMS2011401, ENGL2911401
ARTH 3931-401 Participatory Community Media, 1970-Present Louis Joseph Massiah
Karen E Redrobe 		W 1:45 PM-4:44 PM What would it mean to understand the history of American cinema through the lens of participatory community media, collectively-made films made by and for specific communities to address personal, social and political needs using a range of affordable technologies and platforms, including 16mm film, Portapak, video, cable access television, satellite, digital video, mobile phones, social media, and drones? What methodologies do participatory community media makers employ, and how might those methods challenge and transform the methods used for cinema and media scholarship? How would such an approach to filmmaking challenge our understanding of terms like “authorship,” “amateur,” “exhibition,” “distribution,” “venue,” “completion,” “criticism,” “documentary,” “performance,” “narrative,” “community,” and “success”? How might we understand these U.S.-based works within a more expansive set of transnational conversations about the transformational capacities of collective media practices? This course will address these and other questions through a deep engagement with the films that make up the national traveling exhibition curated by Louis Massiah and Patricia R. Zimmerman, We Tell: Fifty Years of Participatory Community Media, which foregrounds six major themes: Body Publics (public health and sexualities); Collaborative Knowledges (intergenerational dialogue); Environments of Race and Place (immigration, migration, and racial identities unique to specific environments); States of Violence (war and the American criminal justice system); Turf (gentrification, homelessness, housing, and urban space); and Wages of Work (job opportunities, occupations, wages, unemployment, and underemployment). As part of that engagement, we will study the history of a series of Community Media Centers from around the U.S., including Philadelphia’s own Scribe Video Center, founded in 1982 by Louis Massiah, this course’s co-instructor. This is an undergraduate seminar, but it also available to graduate students in the form of group-guided independent studies. The course requirements include: weekly screenings, readings, and seminar discussions with class members and visiting practitioners, and completing both short assignments and a longer research paper. AFRC3932401, ARTH6931401, CIMS3931401, COML3931401, ENGL2970401, GSWS3931401 https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do
ARTH 3940-401 Chinese and Sinophone Cinemas Chenshu Zhou T 12:00 PM-2:59 PM This course is a survey of Chinese and Sinophone cinemas from the silent era to the present. The Sinophone refers to Sinitic film cultures both inside and outside the People’s Republic of China that have been in relatively marginalized positions against the Han-Chinese mainstream, such as Taiwanese, Hong Kong, Tibetan, and transpacific cinemas. One major goal of the course is to interrogate the national cinema framework and to show how the meaning of “Chineseness” has been problematized by filmmakers and critics throughout modern history. Students will learn about important film movements and trends such as leftist cinema from the 1930s, socialist cinema, Taiwanese and Hong Kong New Waves, the Fifth and Sixth Generation filmmakers, and contemporary transnational productions. Attention will be paid to both films known for awards and artistic achievements and popular genres including thrillers, horror, and wuxia (martial art). CIMS3940401, EALC1331401
ARTH 4400-401 African Art, 600-1400 Sarah M Guerin MW 5:15 PM-6:44 PM This course examines the flourishing civilizations of the African continent between the Fall of the Roman Empire and the dawn of the "Age of Discovery." Although material remains of the complex cultures that created exceptional works of art are rare, current archaeology is bringing much new information to the fore, allowing for the first time a preliminary survey of the burgeoning artistic production of the African continent while Europe was building its cathedrals. Bronze casting, gold work, terracotta and wood sculpture, and monumental architecture - the course takes a multi-media approach to understanding the rich foundations of African cultures and their deep interconnection with the rest of the world before the disruptive interventions of colonialism. AFRC4400401
ARTH 4980-004 Senior Thesis Shira N Brisman Students with a minimum GPA of 3.5 in the major at the end of the junior year are encouraged to write an honors thesis. Students who choose to write a thesis must meet with the Undergraduate Chair in spring of their junior year to discuss their topic. Research will begin in summer and continue into fall of their senior year, concluding with a paper in the spring term. Students will be registered for ARTH 398 in the Fall and Spring semesters of their senior year. All thesis writers are encouraged to apply for research and travel grants through the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships to support their work. Departmental honors are awarded to students whose thesis receives a grade of A- or higher. Students may also submit their theses in the annual competition for the College Alumni Society David M. Robb Prize in the History of Art. For more information, visit: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/arthistory/undergraduate/honors
ARTH 4980-008 Senior Thesis David B Brownlee Students with a minimum GPA of 3.5 in the major at the end of the junior year are encouraged to write an honors thesis. Students who choose to write a thesis must meet with the Undergraduate Chair in spring of their junior year to discuss their topic. Research will begin in summer and continue into fall of their senior year, concluding with a paper in the spring term. Students will be registered for ARTH 398 in the Fall and Spring semesters of their senior year. All thesis writers are encouraged to apply for research and travel grants through the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships to support their work. Departmental honors are awarded to students whose thesis receives a grade of A- or higher. Students may also submit their theses in the annual competition for the College Alumni Society David M. Robb Prize in the History of Art. For more information, visit: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/arthistory/undergraduate/honors
ARTH 4980-010 Senior Thesis Jonathan D Katz Students with a minimum GPA of 3.5 in the major at the end of the junior year are encouraged to write an honors thesis. Students who choose to write a thesis must meet with the Undergraduate Chair in spring of their junior year to discuss their topic. Research will begin in summer and continue into fall of their senior year, concluding with a paper in the spring term. Students will be registered for ARTH 398 in the Fall and Spring semesters of their senior year. All thesis writers are encouraged to apply for research and travel grants through the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships to support their work. Departmental honors are awarded to students whose thesis receives a grade of A- or higher. Students may also submit their theses in the annual competition for the College Alumni Society David M. Robb Prize in the History of Art. For more information, visit: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/arthistory/undergraduate/honors
ARTH 4980-014 Senior Thesis Karen E Redrobe CANCELED Students with a minimum GPA of 3.5 in the major at the end of the junior year are encouraged to write an honors thesis. Students who choose to write a thesis must meet with the Undergraduate Chair in spring of their junior year to discuss their topic. Research will begin in summer and continue into fall of their senior year, concluding with a paper in the spring term. Students will be registered for ARTH 398 in the Fall and Spring semesters of their senior year. All thesis writers are encouraged to apply for research and travel grants through the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships to support their work. Departmental honors are awarded to students whose thesis receives a grade of A- or higher. Students may also submit their theses in the annual competition for the College Alumni Society David M. Robb Prize in the History of Art. For more information, visit: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/arthistory/undergraduate/honors
ARTH 4980-017 Senior Thesis Ann L Kuttner Students with a minimum GPA of 3.5 in the major at the end of the junior year are encouraged to write an honors thesis. Students who choose to write a thesis must meet with the Undergraduate Chair in spring of their junior year to discuss their topic. Research will begin in summer and continue into fall of their senior year, concluding with a paper in the spring term. Students will be registered for ARTH 398 in the Fall and Spring semesters of their senior year. All thesis writers are encouraged to apply for research and travel grants through the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships to support their work. Departmental honors are awarded to students whose thesis receives a grade of A- or higher. Students may also submit their theses in the annual competition for the College Alumni Society David M. Robb Prize in the History of Art. For more information, visit: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/arthistory/undergraduate/honors
ARTH 4980-029 Senior Thesis Gwendolyn D Shaw Students with a minimum GPA of 3.5 in the major at the end of the junior year are encouraged to write an honors thesis. Students who choose to write a thesis must meet with the Undergraduate Chair in spring of their junior year to discuss their topic. Research will begin in summer and continue into fall of their senior year, concluding with a paper in the spring term. Students will be registered for ARTH 398 in the Fall and Spring semesters of their senior year. All thesis writers are encouraged to apply for research and travel grants through the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships to support their work. Departmental honors are awarded to students whose thesis receives a grade of A- or higher. Students may also submit their theses in the annual competition for the College Alumni Society David M. Robb Prize in the History of Art. For more information, visit: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/arthistory/undergraduate/honors
ARTH 4980-035 Senior Thesis Andre Dombrowski Students with a minimum GPA of 3.5 in the major at the end of the junior year are encouraged to write an honors thesis. Students who choose to write a thesis must meet with the Undergraduate Chair in spring of their junior year to discuss their topic. Research will begin in summer and continue into fall of their senior year, concluding with a paper in the spring term. Students will be registered for ARTH 398 in the Fall and Spring semesters of their senior year. All thesis writers are encouraged to apply for research and travel grants through the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships to support their work. Departmental honors are awarded to students whose thesis receives a grade of A- or higher. Students may also submit their theses in the annual competition for the College Alumni Society David M. Robb Prize in the History of Art. For more information, visit: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/arthistory/undergraduate/honors
ARTH 5050-640 Masters in Liberal Arts Seminar Christopher Pastore T 5:15 PM-8:14 PM This seminar satisfies a requirement in the Master of Liberal Arts Degree program through the College of Liberal and Professional Studies.
ARTH 5070-640 MLA Proseminar Gwendolyn D Shaw This MLA Proseminar course in the history of art explores an aspect of Art History and Theory; specific course topics vary. Proseminars are taught by Penn Standing Faculty and fulfill a core MLA Program requirement. Please see the College of Liberal and Professional Studies Course Guide for a description of current offerings.
ARTH 5110-401 Topics in South Asian Art Sonal Khullar R 1:45 PM-4:44 PM This seminar engages topics in the history and theory of South Asian art from antiquity to the present emphasizing global connections and comparisons. Topics vary from year to year and might include the arts of the book in South Asia; Indian Ocean art worlds; and fragments, ruins, and traces in the art of South Asia. We shall explore objects in area collections and incorporate special excursions and programs when possible. A background in South Asian studies or languages is not required. Students from related disciplines such history, anthropology, literary studies, religious studies, feminist studies, cinema and media studies, and architecture are welcome. UNDERGRADUATES CAN ENROLL WITH PERMISSION. This seminar engages topics in the history and theory of South Asian art from antiquity to the present emphasizing global connections and comparisons. Topics vary from year to year and might include the arts of the book in South Asia; Indian Ocean art worlds; and fragments, ruins, and traces in the art of South Asia. We shall explore objects in area collections and incorporate special excursions and programs when possible. A background in South Asian studies or languages is not required. Students from related disciplines such history, anthropology, literary studies, religious studies, feminist studies, cinema and media studies, and architecture are welcome. The topic for this Fall 2022 course is: Indian Ocean Art Worlds. This course considers Indian Ocean Art Worlds as a conceptual framework for global art history and a methodological provocation to reconsider boundaries between gift and commodity, ship and port, land and water, human and nonhuman actors. We shall explore the production and circulation of images, objects, and ideas in the Indian Ocean, an ancient ‘Monsoon Sea’ and modern ‘British Lake’ that has linked the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Australia to each other and to other world areas from antiquity through the present. Cross-cultural exchange was mediated by structures and systems, including but not limited to slavery, piracy, mercantile capitalism, and European colonialism. We shall read scholarship in art history and related humanistic disciplines and works of fiction and creative non-fiction to understand the architecture of ships and ports; categories and specific cases of export art, trade goods, and luxury objects, including furniture, textiles, porcelain, and ivory caskets; and contemporary art and exhibitions, including biennials in Lahore and Sharjah. We shall compare the Indian Ocean World to the Atlantic World and Pacific World as a site of confluence, conflict, and community. SAST5110401 https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do
ARTH 5200-401 Aegean Bronze Age Art Seminar Elizabeth Shank CANCELED 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. 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. The topic for this Fall 2022 semester will be: Minoan, Cycladic, and Mycenaean Architecture. The choices made by groups of people with regard to the structures that they build can be reflective of a society’s beliefs, practices, needs, and social structure. In this course, we will study the architecture of the people of the Prehistoric Aegean from the Early to the Late Bronze Age, circa 3,000-1,100 BCE. Homes, palaces, citadels, and shrines, as population centers will be examined with a focus on building techniques, the decoration and function of the structures, their place within the Bronze Age Mediterranean world, and what all of this tells us about the culture and art of the Minoans, Myceneans, and Cycladic people. Students will write two papers, and these papers will be presented to the class. Weekly reading assignments will be distributed for discussion. Two short papers based on class readings will be assigned. AAMW5200401
ARTH 5231-401 Archaeological Field Methods Holly Pittman M 1:45 PM-4:44 PM This seminar will prepare students for participation in the excavations at the site of ancient Lagash, modern Tell al-Hiba, in southern Iraq that are scheduled to take place in the fall semester. The topics to be considered are introduction to the recording methods, use of equipment, review of the ceramic sequence, methods of recording, drawing, photography. Permission of the instructor required for participation in the class. AAMW5231401 Perm Needed From Instructor
ARTH 5320-401 The Icon Ivan Drpic W 5:15 PM-8:14 PM This seminar explores the Byzantine icon and its legacy. Spanning nearly two millennia, from the emergence of Christian sacred portraiture to the reception of icon painting by the early twentieth-century Russian avant-garde, the seminar will introduce you to the history, historiography, and theories of the icon. While our focus will be on Byzantium and the wider world of Orthodox Christianity, especially in the Slavic Balkans and Eastern Europe, the seminar will also engage with fundamental questions concerning the nature, status, and agency of images across cultures. Topics to be addressed include iconoclasm and the problem of idolatry; the social and ritual lives of icons; authorship, originality, and replication; viewer response and the cultural construction of vision; the frontier between art and the sacred image; and the afterlife of the icon in modernity. Open to graduate and undergraduate students. AAMW5320401, RELS5022401 https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do
ARTH 5730-401 Topics in Criticism & Theory: Object Theory D. Brian Kim W 1:45 PM-4:44 PM Topics vary annually CIMS5730401, COML5730401, ENGL5730401, GRMN5730401, REES6683401
ARTH 5850-301 19th Century Art in Europe Seminar Andre Dombrowski R 5:15 PM-8:14 PM This seminar covers aspects of the arts, visual and material cultures of the long nineteenth century (c. 1789-1914) in Europe in a global context. Open to graduate and undergraduate students. Topics will vary from semester to semester. This seminar covers aspects of the arts, visual and material cultures of the long nineteenth century (c. 1789-1914) in Europe in a global context. Open to graduate and undergraduate students. Topics will vary from semester to semester. The topic for this Fall 2022 course is: Claude Monet. As life in the nineteenth century sped up, so did the century’s art. Painting in “fifteen minutes,” as the critic Jules Laforgue described Impressionism in 1883, characterized a novel kind of picture built of hectic, freewheeling signs. Impressionism, and Claude Monet’s art in particular, chronicled the profound cultural shifts of the industrial era, its blur and unfinished appearance making movement and a particularly modern sense of time, vision, and shock its chief subjects. This seminar seeks to understand these developments by establishing an account of Monet’s Impressionism that fits our current global, multimedial, and multidisciplinary forms of humanistic thought. To this end, we will read those recent scholars who place Impressionism within new contexts that include the history of science and technology (visual perception, psychology, evolution, chemistry), political and postcolonial history and theory (republicanism, revolution, colonialism, nationalism), and consumer culture (capitalism, fashion). We will also go back to the movement’s early critics (such as Laforgue, Octave Mirbeau, and Gustave Geffroy), in order to appreciate their strange metaphoric languages (which saw in Impressionism, for instance, the seeds of social upheaval or “the most advanced eye in human evolution”) and make them newly useful for a 21st-century interpretation of the style’s true intellectual heft and radical aesthetics. In the end, this course proposes to study the newest and most wide-ranging research on Monet and Impressionism available to date. https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do
ARTH 5933-401 Cinema and Media Studies Methods Karen E Redrobe M 1:45 PM-4:44 PM This proseminar will introduce a range of methodological approaches informing the somewhat sprawling interdisciplinary field of Cinema and Media Studies. It aims to equip students with a diverse toolbox with which to begin conducting research in this field; an historical framework for understanding methods in context; and a space for reflecting on both how to develop rigorous methodologies for emerging questions and how methods interact with disciplines, ideologies, and theories. The course’s written assignments will provide students with the opportunity to explore a particular methodology in some depth through the lenses of pedagogy, the conference presentation, and the written essay. Throughout, we will be cultivating practical skills for the academic profession. Although our work will sometimes require engagement with particular cinema and media objects, as, for example, when we consider working in film archives or multimodal research practices, much of this course will be textually based. Methods studied will emerge in dialogue with concepts including but not limited to: Archaeology; Archive; Area; Comparativism; Data; Decolonization; Elements and Environment; Ethnography; Experience; Gaps; History; Materiality; Moving Image Analysis; Multi-modality; Participation; Perception; Platform; Social Justice; Sound; Space; Technology; Timeframe; Transnationality; Translation; Virtuality. No prior experience needed. The course is also open to upper-level undergraduates with relevant coursework in the field by permission of instructor. Course Requirements: Complete assigned readings and screenings and actively participate in class discussion: 30% Annotated bibliography or course syllabus on a particular methodology: 20% SCMS methodology-focused conference paper proposal according to SCMS format: 10% Research paper (7,000-8,000 words) using the methodology explored in the syllabus or bibliography: 40% CIMS5933401, COML5940401, ENGL5933401, GSWS5933401
ARTH 5970-301 The Future of Arts Audiences Arthur Cohen R 10:15 AM-1:14 PM Demographic, political, social and generational changes in the U.S. have given rise to new and often unprecedented changes in the expectations audiences have for the role cultural organizations should play in society. Extending beyond traditional definitions of purpose rooted in the type of art or experience offered, cultural organizations are increasingly being held accountable to new or different standards of behavior, beliefs and engagement with the world in order to gain the support of the very audiences necessary for their survival. Adding to this complex combination of factors are the ongoing effects of recent health and social justice crises, including changes in technological usage and shifting patterns of social interaction. Using the latest audience research, and highlighted with first-person accounts from cultural leaders who will be guest speakers for this course, The Future of Arts Audiences will pose a series of challenging yet essential questions necessary for navigating the road ahead for arts participation. https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do
ARTH 6610-401 Northern Renaissance Art Shira N Brisman TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM This course critically examines concepts traditionally associated with the Renaissance by focusing on the exchange of artistic ideas throughout the Holy Roman Empire and across different media, such as the altarpieces of Jan van Eyck, the expressive drawings of Albrecht Durer and Hans Baldung Grien, the peasant studies of Pieter Bruegel and the prints of satirists who wished to remain anonymous. The material is organized thematically around four topics: religious art as piety and politics; antiquity as a source of tradition and imagination; the formulation of a public discourse that exposed social threats; and the distinctiveness of artistic claims of individual achievement. A motif throughout the course is the question of how the survival of fragments may be presented in museum contexts as parts standing in for an absent whole. We will also consider how historians approach designs for works of art now lost or never completed. Encouraging encounters with art and artifacts around the city, assignments focus on objects in Philadelphia collections. ARTH2610401, GRMN1301401, GRMN5780401
ARTH 6750-401 Revolution to Realism: European Art, 1770-1870 Andre Dombrowski WF 12:00 PM-1:29 PM This course surveys the major trends in the arts of Europe and its colonies in the tumultuous decades stretching from the French and Haitian revolutions in the late-eighteenth century to the rise of realism in the mid-nineteenth. Starting with Jacques-Louis David's revolutionary history paintings, we study Napoleonic representations of empire, Goya's imagery of violence, romantic representations of madness and desire, the origins of both nationalist and ecocritical landscape painting, the aesthetics of the industrial revolution, as well as the politicized realism of Gustave Courbet. Some of the themes that will be addressed include: the revolutionary hero, the birth of the public museum, the specters of slavery and colonialism in modern representation, the anxious masculinity of romanticism, the rise of industry and bourgeois culture, the beginnings of photography and caricature, the quest for national identity and, not least, the origins of modernist painting. Throughout, we will strive to recover the original radicalism of art's formal and conceptual innovations at times of profound political and social crisis. ARTH2750401
ARTH 6810-401 Modern Architecture,1900-Present David B Brownlee MWF 10:15 AM-11:14 AM The architecture of Europe and America from the late nineteenth century until the present is the central subject of this course, but some time is also devoted to Latin American and Asian architecture and to the important issues of modern city planning. Topics discussed include the Arts and Crafts movement, Art Nouveau, Expressionism, Art Deco, the International Style, and Post-modernism. The debate over the role of technology in modern life and art, the search for a universal language of architectural communication, and the insistent demand that architecture serve human society are themes that are traced throughout the course. Among the important figures to be considered are Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, Robert Venturi, and Denise Scott Brown. The course includes weekly discussion sessions and several excursions to view architecture in Philadelphia. ARTH2810401
ARTH 6931-401 Participatory Community Media, 1970-Present Louis Joseph Massiah
Karen E Redrobe 		W 1:45 PM-4:44 PM What would it mean to understand the history of American cinema through the lens of participatory community media, collectively-made films made by and for specific communities to address personal, social and political needs using a range of affordable technologies and platforms, including 16mm film, Portapak, video, cable access television, satellite, digital video, mobile phones, social media, and drones? What methodologies do participatory community media makers employ, and how might those methods challenge and transform the methods used for cinema and media scholarship? How would such an approach to filmmaking challenge our understanding of terms like “authorship,” “amateur,” “exhibition,” “distribution,” “venue,” “completion,” “criticism,” “documentary,” “performance,” “narrative,” “community,” and “success”? How might we understand these U.S.-based works within a more expansive set of transnational conversations about the transformational capacities of collective media practices? This course will address these and other questions through a deep engagement with the films that make up the national traveling exhibition curated by Louis Massiah and Patricia R. Zimmerman, We Tell: Fifty Years of Participatory Community Media, which foregrounds six major themes: Body Publics (public health and sexualities); Collaborative Knowledges (intergenerational dialogue); Environments of Race and Place (immigration, migration, and racial identities unique to specific environments); States of Violence (war and the American criminal justice system); Turf (gentrification, homelessness, housing, and urban space); and Wages of Work (job opportunities, occupations, wages, unemployment, and underemployment). As part of that engagement, we will study the history of a series of Community Media Centers from around the U.S., including Philadelphia’s own Scribe Video Center, founded in 1982 by Louis Massiah, this course’s co-instructor. This is an undergraduate seminar, but it also available to graduate students in the form of group-guided independent studies. The course requirements include: weekly screenings, readings, and seminar discussions with class members and visiting practitioners, and completing both short assignments and a longer research paper. AFRC3932401, ARTH3931401, CIMS3931401, COML3931401, ENGL2970401, GSWS3931401 Perm Needed From Instructor
ARTH 7010-301 Methods Seminar David Young Kim M 5:15 PM-8:14 PM 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.
ARTH 7150-401 Japanese Art Seminar Julie N Davis W 1:45 PM-4:44 PM This seminar engages specific topics in Japanese art history from 1600 to the present, with the specific focus varying from year to year. Previous topics have included: the concept of the artist; gender and its representation; the visualization of place from the early modern to the present; collecting, the market, modernity, and the construction of the field; print cultures; among others. Sessions will be conducted on site, in museums, galleries, and libraries, as available. Assignments vary depending upon the focus of the seminar. Japanese language ability useful but not necessary; curiosity and engagement required. EALC8140401
ARTH 7610-401 Nature and Labor in Early Modern Art Seminar Shira N Brisman R 1:45 PM-4:44 PM In the sixteenth century, the notion of nature as fecund spawned not only images of lushness but also analogies to the artist's mind as a fertile place. The idea of "natural law" was also appealed to as a presumably primal condition, one that established how the earth's resources were to be distributed among its people. Yet the taste for artistic objects in gold, silver, wax, and wood--materials that could be worked into shapes attesting to the owner's dominium over land--led to harvesting processes which met the awareness that nature's resources could run low or even run out. Untappable nature was a functional metaphor, but scarcity was a reality. As a collective effort to write the other side of the story of Renaissance abundance, this seminar will proceed by addressing the question of how the history of art might be told as a description of materials and their potential for the expenditure of natural and human resources. We will address this question by focusing on primary texts, theoretical interventions, and a selection of objects, images, and early books from collections near at hand. Open to graduate students only. DTCH6610401, GRMN6850401
ARTH 7880-301 20th Century American Art Seminar Huey Gene Copeland
Gwendolyn D Shaw 		T 3:30 PM-6:29 PM This seminar examines the history of art, artists, and artistic movements that emerged in the United States during the twentieth century. It may also engage with histories of visual culture, criticism, and the theory of art. Specific topics vary from semester to semester. This seminar examines the history of art, artists, and artistic movements that emerged in the United States during the twentieth century. It may also engage with histories of visual culture, criticism, and the theory of art. Specific topics vary from semester to semester. The topic for this Fall 2022 course is: Black Art Histories. The history of art by people of African descent on the continent and in the diaspora, what might be called Black art history, is one that is constantly being challenged, revised, and expanded. It encompasses many traditions and includes diverse communities throughout the world. As a field, Black art history has also been engaged by using a variety of methodological approaches and theoretical strategies. This graduate seminar will require that students familiarize themselves with the historiography of Black art while reading and discussing books and articles that have been published in the last few years. Graduate students only. Perm Needed From Department