Ranging from ancient architecture to contemporary art and cultural studies, the broad scope of faculty specialization within the Department of Art History exhibits the diversity of approaches and topics that students can explore during their MAPH year. Those who wish to supplement their study in Art History with coursework in other areas often take classes in Cinema and Media Studies, Classics, Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, English Language and Literature, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Latin American Studies, and Visual Arts.
Selected Faculty
Sample Courses
ARTH 30304 - Ancient Stones in Modern Hands (Seth Estrin and Alice Goff)
This course explores intimate histories of private ownership of antiquities as they appear within literature, visual art, theater, aesthetics, and collecting practices. Focusing on the sensorial, material, and affective dimensions of collecting, we will survey histories of modern classicism that span from the eighteenth century to the present, from the Mediterranean to the Pacific. In addition to primary source materials readings will include scholarship from the fields of gender studies, art history, and the history of emotions.
ARTH 31325 - Monochrome Multitudes (Orianna Cacchione and Christine Mehring)
This seminar traces modern monochrome art as a fundamental if surprisingly expansive artistic practice. Discussions will center on artworks in the eponymous fall 2022 exhibition at the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art curated by the instructors. We will revisit classic North American Modernism—“essentialist” flatness, idealized form, and color theories—while opening monochrome art up to culturally resonant color, a range of media, and global influence. Student research will enrich and expand existing histories of “the monochrome” by articulating cultural, political, racial, or gendered meanings of monochrome art, emphasizing the significance of materials and media, and engaging North American art in a global dialogue. Students will have the opportunity to contribute their research and writing to the exhibition’s web-based audio app as well as to a research symposium and possible publication.
ARTH 33312 - Visual Art and Technology: From the Historical Avant Garde to the Algorithmic Present (Talia Shabtay)
This course tracks the entanglements of visual art and “technology,” a term which took on an increasingly expanded set of meanings beginning in the early decades of the twentieth century. We consider cases from the art historical avant gardes, the impact of cybernetics and systems thinking on architecture and visual perception, midcentury collectives that sought to institutionalize collaborations between artists and engineers, as well as more subtle exchanges between art and technology brewing since the Cold War. Students will gain historical insights into the relation between visual art and technology, develop analytical tools for critically engaging with the present-day interface of art, science, and engineering, and consider the implications for the futures we imagine.
ARTH 30603 - Image and Text in Mexican Codices (Claudia Brittenham)
In most Mesoamerican languages, a single word describes the activities that we would call “writing” and “painting.” This seminar will investigate the interrelationships between image and text in Central Mexico both before and immediately after the introduction of alphabetic writing in the 16th century.
ARTH 39800 - Approaches To Art History (Leah Pires, Jessica Landau, and Alexandra Fraser)
This seminar examines a range of methods for doing the work of art history with an eye toward strengthening your own original contributions to the field. Through close reading and discussion of recently published scholarship, we will interrogate how art historians generate novel ways of seeing and understanding the objects that they study. This course will be structured around the framework of scale. What is the scale of art historical analysis? Moving from macro to micro, we will traverse units ranging from canons, empire, and environments to art scenes, institutions, and audiences, to the artist, the art object, and the fragment. We will examine how scholars constitute the objects of their criticism, the breadth and explanatory force of their arguments, and the ethics of their endeavors. This approach traverses perspectives from feminism and queer theory, post- and decolonial thought, Black studies, material culture, social history, and critical theory.
For an extended listing of classes and descriptions, visit the Art History course page.
Curatorial Option
Art history students may also be interested in the Curatorial Option, which allows MAPH students to focus specifically on the object-driven research and skills that are central to the discipline of Art History as well as to professional or scholarly careers in museums, collections, and exhibition spaces.
Recent Art History Thesis Projects
"From Coast to Coast: Uncovering Fictions and Creating Modernity Through the Visual Culture of Japanese Immigration to South America"
JoyAngelica Chan, MAPH '20
Advisor: Claudia Brittenham
"The Distracted Painting: Perception Models in Eighteenth-Century French Art and Art Criticism"
Ze Tan, MAPH '21
Advisor: Andrei Pop
"On an Erotics of Materiality: Reading Contemporary Art Through Sontag"
Wanting Jin, MAPH '21
Advisor: Megan Sullivan