Art History

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024
How do mechanisms of perception structure responses to visual art? What is at stake when words describe images? By means of intensive looking, thinking, speaking, and writing, this course introduces the student to a series of problems and issues in the description and analysis of works of art. Because the course is also an introduction to the historical study of art, it is intended for students with no previous course work in the field. Satisfies the second half of the Reading and Composition requirement.
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
An introduction to the art of Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the European Middle Ages. Works of painting, sculpture, and architecture are presented chronologically and interpreted within their particular historical circumstances. The course focuses on themes such as the social and ideological functions of art, strategies of realism and abstraction, rhetorics of the material and immaterial, patronage and the construction of viewing, etc. It enables students to acquire the perceptual and critical skills to enjoy, interpret, and question works of art. Like 11, this course is recommended for potential majors and for students in other disciplines, both humanities and sciences.
Introduction to Western Art: Ancient to Medieval: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2014 10 Week Session, Spring 1992, Fall 1988
An historical survey of selected works of painting, sculpture, and architecture from the Renaissance to the present. Stress is placed on the acquistion of perceptual and critical skills, the analysis and interpretation of style and meaning, and the ability to relate works to a broader visual tradition and historical context.
History of Western Art: Renaissance to Modern: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 1998 10 Week Session
An introduction to the art of ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the European Middle Ages. Painting, sculpture, and architecture are presented chronologically and considered in relation to their historical and cultural circumstances. The course aims to provide students with a basic knowledge of how artworks balance past tradition with innovation; how people actually looked at artworks and what they valued in them; how works of art were commissioned and displayed; how artists went about their work; and how genre and medium affected an artwork's appearance. The question of artistic quality will be central to the course. In the process, the student will acquire a critical vocabulary for thinking and writing about art. Recommended both for potential majors and for students with a general interest in the topic.
Introduction to Western Art: Ancient to Medieval: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2019, Spring 2018, Spring 2017
Teaching you how to see; how to see historically; how to see like others see; how to see art’s politics of gender and race and class. Teaching you how to describe what you see with words. An introduction to the history of art in Europe and the U.S. since the 14th century focusing primarily on painting and sculpture. Explores how art can function as a stabilizing force but also how it can contribute to social and political transformation, even revolution.
Introduction to European and American Art from the Renaissance to the Present: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
Teaching you how to see; how to see historically; how to see like others see; how to see art’s politics of gender and race and class. Teaching you how to describe what you see with words.
An introduction to the history of art in Europe and the U.S. since the 14th century focusing primarily on painting and sculpture. Explores how art can function as a stabilizing force but also how it can contribute to social and political transformation, even revolution.
Introduction to European and American Art from the Renaissance to the Present: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2018 Second 6 Week Session
This course is an introduction to the visual arts of Europe and the USA from the 14th century to the present day. This course will attempt to situate works of art into long, general trends in art practice of the Western tradition, though it will prioritize sustained focus on single case-studies which punctuate the five centuries of art for which this course offers a historical account; attention will also gather around particular representative artists’ careers. We’ll explore how the fine arts can be considered as part of wider visual culture(s) in the Western tradition, and the ways art within such a broad tradition can function both as a stabilizing and as a transformative force within social/political/religious/racial/etc contexts.
Western Art from the Renaissance to the Present: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2009 10 Week Session, Summer 2009 First 6 Week Session, Summer 2008 First 6 Week Session
A historical survey of selected works of painting, sculpture, and architecture from the Renaissance to the present. Stress is placed on the acquisition of perceptual and critical skills, the analysis and interpretation of style and meaning, and the ability to relate works to a broader visual tradition and historical context.
History of Western Art: Renaissance to Modern: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2018
This course will explore ways in which the “the origins of art”—of human creativity in the visual and spatial arts—have been considered by a variety of artists, critics, and scholars.

The Origins of Art: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2019, Fall 2017
This course introduces students to the rich museum culture of London. Through lectures, seminars, and visits to museums we will explore how museums create histories of art, society, and national identity. The course draws on the approaches of several disciplines–art, social, and cultural history, anthropology, social geography, and critical theory–to interrogate the ways that museums reflect and shape what we know and how we see. Exploring a selection of sites dating from the 18th century to the present day, we will consider the historical context in which these museums came about, the nature of their collections, and debates on current presentation, considering issues of museology, curatorial practice, and the construction of knowledge.
London Museums: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2023, Spring 1996
"Extinction and Visual Culture” explores the evolutionary, planetary, and anthropogenic causes, processes, and events of biological extinction in relation to visual-material culture historically and in terms of mass extinction amid degradation of the biosphere and biodiversity loss. What does extinction look like, what is its material evidence? How do the visual arts, performance, and exhibition represent disappearance, absence, looming loss—and address the grief and fear of extinction? What are extinction’s “visualities,” its social and political contexts and systems of visual expression and reception? Can visual images empower response to human ecological violence, help mitigate extinction?
Extinction and Visual Culture: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2020
This course is open to students with majors/interests in history, art history, law, anthropology, film studies, art practice, business, the sciences, and beyond. There is no prerequisite. It introduces the study of art not simply in terms of artists, periods, content, and style, but in relation to acts of looting/theft, iconoclasm/vandalism, and forgery—behaviors that seem contradictory to the importance of art in human culture. Global in its range, the course addresses important episodes of taking, breaking, and faking from the ancient world to the present. It also introduces related topics such as empire, image destruction and revolution, cultural heritage, international treaties and art law, and the question of authenticity.
Art--Take, Break, and Fake It: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
What can art, architecture, sustainable design, urban planning, cinema, and performance practices
contribute to current debates on environmental justice and climate change? Taking the visual politics of
climate change as a starting point, we will build toward understanding the global climate crisis through
studying histories of (neo)colonialism, anthropocentrism, and natural resource extraction from the 1500s
to the present while developing critical interdisciplinary alternatives for the future through creative hands-
on workshops and field trips to museums, botanical gardens, and the city of Berkeley. As part of the
Pathways program, the course serves as a hub for a course cluster on “Art, Environment, and Economic
Policy.”
Art and Climate Change: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2019, Spring 2019
This course is an exercise in thinking about human perception and knowing in relation to the history of Islamic art and visual culture. It tracks the expression of theories of beauty and truth in great works of art and architecture, spanning from the seventh century CE to the present day, and including sites across the Middle East, Asia, North Africa, East Africa, Europe, and the United States. Equally, it aims to examine our own contemporary habits of assessing beauty and truth, and their fit (or lack thereof) when confronted with an amazing diversity of art, made in distinct historical conditions of belief, interpretation and education, patronage, production, circulation, gender and sexuality, displacement and migration, and more.

Beauty and Truth in Islamic Art: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2021, Spring 2020, Fall 2018
The Freshman Seminar Program has been designed to provide new students with the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member in a small-seminar setting. Freshman Seminars are offered in all campus departments, and topics may vary from department to department and semester to semester. Enrollment limited to fifteen freshman.
Freshman Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2022, Spring 2020
Rather than follow a master chronology that would attempt to contain Africa’s multiple cultural formations in a single narrative, this course will introduce students to African art through an investigation of a range of aesthetic traditions and movements across sub-Saharan Africa that are meaningfully reinvigorated in contemporary artistic production and popular visual culture. Our continual return to the cultural politics of the present will provide an anchor and roadmap for our inquiry; we will see contemporary visual culture as staging interventions that push at Western ideas of “primitive African tradition,” while bringing to the fore conventions that, when tracked, reveal alternative traditions legible within an art historical context.
Visual Cultures of Africa: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2019, Fall 2014, Fall 2012
The course offers an introduction to the art and architecture of South and Southeast Asia from ca. 2500 BCE to the colonial period. Proceeding in a chronological order, we will engage with key moments of artistic production in the region. We will locate art and architecture within the larger world of political economies, religion and philosophy, gender and sexuality, urbanity, and state formations to generate the depth and context required for understanding South and Southeast Asia through a historical frame. Thus, we will study Buddhism and Hinduism in the early Common Era, early modern Islamic art, and encounters with Europe fueled by colonialism. We will also develop critical skills to study art and architecture more broadly.
Introduction to the Art and Architecture of South and Southeast Asia: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2003 10 Week Session, Summer 2001 10 Week Session
This course surveys the artistic traditions of China, Korea, and Japan over six millennia. Through lectures and readings, students are introduced to themes central to the development of art in East Asia. We begin with the form, meaning, and function of archaeological remains, then turn to consider the role of art in Buddhist ritual and worship. Lectures on secular painting will focus on the complex interactions of text and image, and on alternative modes of visualizing exeamplary conduct. Theoretical issues and visual analysis of individual works will be introduced through weekly guided discussions.
Arts of East Asia: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2022, Fall 2010, Summer 2010 Second 6 Week Session
This course will introduce the arts and culture of Korea from the prehistoric period through the early twentieth century. Significant examples of painting, ceramics, sculpture, metalwork, and photography will be closely examined in their political, social, and cultural contexts. Korean art will also be presented in its East Asian context and compared to Chinese and Japanese art. No prior knowledge of Korean art or history, or Chinese or Korean languages, is expected.
The Arts of Korea: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2004 10 Week Session, Summer 2002 10 Week Session, Summer 2000 10 Week Session
A survey of Buddhist art and architecture of Asia from 566 B.C.E. to the 19th century, including India, China, Japan, Tibet, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia. How works of art and architecture reflect or engage with the doctrine and practice of different schools of Buddhism. Topics include the making of "the Buddha image," the relationship between patronage, styles, and the ritual use of arts, the notion of sacred space, and the political usage of Buddha images. Discussion of issues such as the body, gender, and sexuality in the light of Buddhist arts and cultural context.
Buddhist Art of Asia: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2020, Spring 2015
An introduction to the arts of China, designed for newcomers to the history of art or to the study of Chinese culture. Lectures will survey six millennia of Chinese art thematically and chronologically, including the burial arts of the Neolithic period through the Tang dynasty (4th M. BCE-10th C. CE), Buddhist and Daoist ritual arts, and painting and calligraphy. Lectures, readings, and discussions will introduce students to various systems of Chinese thought, modes of visual analysis, and art historical method.
Arts of China: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Fall 2015, Fall 2013
This course is an introduction to art and architecture in Japan. It is intended for newcomers to the history of art and/or to the study of Japanese history and culture. Lectures will proceed chronologically, beginning with the archaeological objects and tumuli of neolithic Japan and ending with the popular graphic arts of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries and modern transformations of art.
Art and Architecture in Japan: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2021, Fall 2017
This course is an introduction to the art and architecture of modern South, Southeast, and East Asia. Using a comparative perspective, each week will focus on a set of case studies—the work of particular artists and art movements or the architecture of specific Asian cities—to reconstruct an expansive history of modern art and architecture in Asia from 1800 to the present. Class lectures will be completed by a close examination of modern Asian art collections on campus and in the Bay Area. We will also engage with numerous diasporic Asian artists who live and work in the area.

ASIA MODERN: Art + Architecture, 1800-present: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2022, Fall 2021, Summer 2021 First 6 Week Session
This course offers an overview of contemporary art and architecture from South, Southeast, and East Asia. Paying special attention to new avant-garde and experimental art and architecture from 1945 to the contemporary, the lectures trace the emergence of abstraction, pop, conceptualism, video and photography, performance, multi-media installations, new media and video art, feminist and queer practices, postmodernism, site-specific projects, participatory practices, and art, urbanism, and architecture after globalization more broadly. Regions covered include Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Philippines, Myanmar, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand.

Contemporary Art + Architecture from Asia, ca. 1945-present: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2023 Second 6 Week Session, Spring 2020
This course introduces the arts of Asia, premodern to modern-contemporary, in relation to the ecocritical humanities. It surveys specific visual and material objects, structures and sites, and performances in Asia in interrelationship with planetary geo/biological systems, culture, and the politics of Humanity and Nature. Its topics include the fundamental materiality of artworks and responses to water, geology, and biology as much as ideas and beliefs; hand and machine-working of earthly material; nonhuman species in human cultures, in terms of ecology as well as representation; responses to the accelerating climate cataclysm; and the meeting of the sciences and the arts in recognition of our multispecies planetary inter-reliance.
Eco Art History in Asia: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester. Enrollment limits are set by faculty, but the suggested limit is 25.
Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2009, Fall 2008, Fall 2007
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester. Enrollment limits are set by faculty, but the suggested limit is 25.
Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester. Enrollment limits are set by faculty, but the suggested limit is 25.
Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester. Enrollment limits are set by faculty, but the suggested limit is 25.
Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester. Enrollment limits are set by faculty, but the suggested limit is 25.
Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2012
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester. Enrollment limits are set by faculty, but the suggested limit is 25.
Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2013
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester. Enrollment limits are set by faculty, but the suggested limit is 25.
Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2019, Fall 2016
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester. Enrollment limits are set by faculty, but the suggested limit is 25.
Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester. Enrollment limits are set by faculty, but the suggested limit is 25.
Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester. Enrollment limits are set by faculty, but the suggested limit is 25.
Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester. Enrollment limits are set by faculty, but the suggested limit is 25.
Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester. Enrollment limits are set by faculty, but the suggested limit is 25.
Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester. Enrollment limits are set by faculty, but the suggested limit is 25.
Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester. Enrollment limits are set by faculty, but the suggested limit is 25.
Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester. Enrollment limits are set by faculty, but the suggested limit is 25.
Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester. Enrollment limits are set by faculty, but the suggested limit is 25.
Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester. Enrollment limits are set by faculty, but the suggested limit is 25.
Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester. Enrollment limits are set by faculty, but the suggested limit is 25.
Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester. Enrollment limits are set by faculty, but the suggested limit is 25.
Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester. Enrollment limits are set by faculty, but the suggested limit is 25.
Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester. Enrollment limits are set by faculty, but the suggested limit is 25.
Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester. Enrollment limits are set by faculty, but the suggested limit is 25.
Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester. Enrollment limits are set by faculty, but the suggested limit is 25.
Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester. Enrollment limits are set by faculty, but the suggested limit is 25.
Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester. Enrollment limits are set by faculty, but the suggested limit is 25.
Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester. Enrollment limits are set by faculty, but the suggested limit is 25.
Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester. Enrollment limits are set by faculty, but the suggested limit is 25.
Freshman/Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2017, Fall 2011
An introduction to the major works, themes, and agendas of Greek and Roman art and architecture. Participants will learn to acquire the perceptual and critical skills necessary for understanding these works; to analyze and interpret them; and to relate them to broader visual traditions, historical contexts, and social/cultural issues. Wherever possible, newly discovered work will be illustrated and discussed.
Introduction to Greek and Roman Art: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2012, Spring 2005, Spring 2004
A selective, thematic exploration of the visual arts from the decline of the Roman empire to the beginnings of Early Modern period. The emergence of new artistic media, subject matter, and strategies of making and viewing will be discussedagainst the ever-shifting historical circumstances of medieval Europe. Emphasis will be placed on the methods of interpreting the works, especially in relation to then-current social practices and cultural values.
Introduction to Medieval Art: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2016, Fall 2015, Fall 2014
Using a few selected examples drawn from Florence, Rome, Milan, and Venice, this course will introduce most types of art and architecture produced in the Italian Renaissance--including city squares, churches, palaces and libraries, and their painted and sculptural decoration. Special attention will be paid to various approaches used in interpreting works of art.
Introduction to Italian Renaissance Art: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2019

Using a few selected examples drawn from Florence, Rome, Milan, and Venice, this course will introduce most types of art and architecture produced in the Italian Renaissance--including city squares, churches, palaces and libraries, and their painted and sculptural decoration. Special attention will be paid to various approaches used in interpreting works of art.

Introduction to Italian Renaissance Art: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2003 10 Week Session
The West's "modern" era had its beginnings in the 15th and 16th centuries. Social and economic organization, religious and political thought, were reconfigured into forms we recognize today. Within these configurations, art took on new roles: a commodity in a nascent capitalist society, a vehicle of propaganda by church and state, an expression of an individual's genius. In aesthetic terms, it took on properties which defined the modern. Italy and the Netherlands each contributed to the revolution in pictorial expression. This course investigates those contributions and considers how art expressed the world view of this age.
Arts of the Renaissance and Reformation: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2023 First 6 Week Session, Summer 2021 Second 6 Week Session, Summer 2020 Second 6 Week Session
An introduction to the major movements, themes, and artists of modern art, starting with its origins in the nineteenth century. Close attention will be paid to exhibition histories, the development of new forms of media, and shifts in visual culture within the context of the rise of modernity and modernization. No previous knowledge of the subject is presumed; students will be exposed to various modes of art historical interpretation and formal analysis.
Introduction to Modern Art: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2018 First 6 Week Session, Summer 2017 Second 6 Week Session
An introduction to the major movements, themes, and artists of modern art, starting with its origins in the nineteenth century. Close attention will be paid to exhibition histories, the development of new forms of media, and shifts in visual culture within the context of the rise of modernity and modernization. No previous knowledge of the subject is presumed; students will be exposed to various modes of art historical interpretation and formal analysis.
Introduction to Modern Art: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2017
This class introduces the diverse visual cultures of the geographic area now known as California. It considers how space and race are culturally represented and reproduced over a broad span of time and across California’s shifting political designations, including its Native American, Spanish, Mexican, and United States periods. 
The long history of California includes encounter, domination, solidarity, coexistence, and revolution. Through consistent historical examination, the course will explore visual and material culture as a site in which many of these ways of managing life together occurred, were facilitated, or are preserved. Course sessions will be organized around chronological case studies of diverse subjects made in varied media
Visual Cultures of California: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2024 Second 6 Week Session, Fall 2016, Fall 2014
An introduction to the arts and visual culture of Latin America from the earliest monumental art traditions of prehistory to the present. The course is not a comprehensive survey of all traditions of art in Latin America, but rather a sampling of critical moments that is designed to serve as an introduction to this field of study. We will take a long view of enduring traditions as well as periods of rupture and crisis. Lecture and discussion will frequently center on the active roles of the arts in society, religion, and politics from the earliest Pre-Columbian settings to the present day. No prior knowledge of Latin American art history is expected. This course is designed for both majors and non-majors in the humanities and sciences.
Arts of Latin America: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
A historical introduction to digital images. This class explores how computers store, process, and display visual information, and the cultural impact that these technologies have had since the dawn of the computer age. Special attention will be given to the ways in which this information differs from direct inputs to the human visual system--that is, how digital images differ from “what we really see”, as well as the differences between modern computer graphics techniques and prior analog notational systems. Basic computational literacy will be developed during coding assignments in section; students will learn how to transform and edit their own images.
The Image as Data: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Spring 2022
Instruction for a small group of students on a topic initiated by those students.
Directed Group Study for Freshmen and Sophomores: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2020, Summer 2020 Second 6 Week Session
How art has been studied in the past and how it is currently studied, its historiography and methodology. Consideration of the earliest writers (Pliny, Vasari) but also modern approaches, from traditional style analysis and connoisseurship through the "founders" of modern art history (Panofsky, Riegl) to more recent approaches, e.g. psychoanalysis, feminism, social history, anthropology, semiotics, etc.
Theories and Methods of Art History: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2024 Second 6 Week Session, Summer 2023 Second 6 Week Session, Summer 2021 Second 6 Week Session
How art has been studied in the past and how it is currently studied, its historiography and methodology. Consideration of the earliest writers (Pliny, Vasari) but also modern approaches, from traditional style analysis and connoisseurship through the "founders" of modern art history (Panofsky, Riegl) to more recent approaches, e.g., psychoanalysis, feminism, social history, anthropology, semiotics, etc.
Theories and Methods of Art History: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
The purpose of this lecture course is to provide students with a toolbox for writing art history in many periods in a global field. We will proceed systematically, learning how to describe and analyze objects, do bibliographic research, use different methodological approaches, and learn to apply them with specific objects/works selected by the student.
Theories & Methods for a Global History of Art: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2002 10 Week Session
A consideration of historical and theoretical issues posed for visual media by attention to issues of gender. Previous course work in art history recommended. Detailed descriptions of current and future offerings available in 416 Doe Library.
Gender and Representation: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2021
The course offers a global history of ecologically conscious art, architecture, cinema, sustainable design, and urban planning. Case studies range from North American indigenous arts, Asian gardens, colonial medicine, and Renaissance experiments in botany to eco-activism in the Global South, biotech, urban planning, and contemporary green infrastructure. Key ecological concepts such as energy, waste, sustainability, environmental justice, and conservation are considered alongside economic, political, religious, engineering, and scientific experiments with the ecosystem from the prehistory to the present. Designed for both humanities and science students. No prior courses in art history or environmental science required.
Eco Art: Art, Architecture, and the Natural Environment: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2022
Taught by faculty from the Departments of Art Practice, Geography, and History of Art, this Big Ideas course is a space where we collectively study, think, and make art about the cataclysmic ecological crises that threaten our planet today. Examining possible notions of the animal, the botanic, the oceanic, the geologic, and the atmospheric, among other themes, the course prompts embodied responses to this urgent moment through complex, experimental, scholarly, and practice-based interventions. The aim is to read human interactions with the planet in relation to the past, present, and future of earthly environments, as shaped by historical processes, resonances, interruptions, and movements.
Art and Ecology: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
This course explores issues at the intersection of the law and the visual arts. What is the relationship between the law and the visual arts? Does the law constrain the creation of art, or does it establish conditions under which artists can exercise their creativity more freely? When and how should the legal system be employed to promote or curtail the creation, display, or preservation of works of art?
Images and the Law: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2017 First 6 Week Session
This course explores issues at the intersection of the law and the visual arts. What is the relationship between the law and the visual arts? Does the law constrain the creation of art, or does it establish conditions under which artists can exercise their creativity more freely? When and how should the legal system be employed to promote or curtail the creation, display, or preservation of works of art?
Images and the Law: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023, Spring 2022
The study of various urban centers at particular times in relation to the art produced there. Emphasis may be placed on the rise of artistic centers and professional communities, the representation of places of power, learning or recreation, the construction of urbanity, the reaction to cities, etc. Detailed descriptions of current and future offerings available in room 416 Doe Library.
Cities and the Arts: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2017
“Digital humanities” describes how digital formats and tools can be used to produce knowledge about cultural materials. This course introduces students to techniques used to study visual culture and related disciplines, possibly including mapping, network analysis, digital (re)construction of objects and environments; digital editions of texts or online exhibitions; digital manipulation of images; and content-management systems and structured data. The class also provides a framework to help students think critically about the values that underpin existing DH projects.

Digital Humanities, Visual Cultures: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2017
“Digital humanities” describes how digital formats and tools can be used to produce knowledge about cultural materials. This course introduces students to techniques used to study visual culture and related disciplines, possibly including mapping, network analysis, digital (re)construction of objects and environments; digital editions of texts or online exhibitions; digital manipulation of images; and content-management systems and structured data. The class also provides a framework to help students think critically about the values that underpin existing DH projects.

Digital Humanities, Visual Cultures: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2019
Conversion often refers to changing religions. This process can be personal or historical, involve a single individual or entire groups, such as at the moment of colonization of the Americas, when thousands of indigenous people were forcibly or willingly converted to Christianity. But what does it mean to convert? Is it a one-time event by which change gets effected and is final, or, does it involve multiple negotiations? Does the converter become curious about and affected by the beliefs of those he tries to gain over to his religion? What implications does this have for art, technology, thought? We will look at how this concept gets represented in different media and divergent forms of literacy: textual, pictorial, ritual.
Conversion and Negotiation: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
For millions of years, hominid creatures quite like us made nothing like what we now take to be images or ornaments-"art." Why not? Between 32,000 and 26,000 BC, images and ornaments appear and proliferate. Why? When a workman shovels dirt, the pile is mere garbage. An artist exhibits an identical pile in a gallery as "art." What makes the difference? Detailed examination of paleolithic & prehistoric arts, children's drawings, & some contemporary practices.
The "Origins" of Art: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2011, Fall 2006
The art and architecture of early Mesopotamia will be explored in terms of the social, political, and cultural context of ancient Sumer, Babylonia, and Assyria during the period of urbanization and early kingdoms. The course provides an integrated picture of the arts of Mesopotamia and neighboring regions from 3500-1000 BCE with an emphasis on the development of visual narrative, the use of art in the expression of authority and legitimacy, and artistic interconnections between cultures. Collections on campus or in the area will be incorporated whenever possible.
The Art of Ancient Mesopotamia: 3500-1000 BCE: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2022, Fall 2021, Fall 2020
The royal art and architecture of later Mesopotamia will be explored in terms of the social, political, and cultural context of the great empires of Assyria, Babylon, and Persia. The course provides an integrated picture of the arts of Mesopotamia and neighboring regions from 1000-330 BCE with an emphasis on the development of visual narrative, the use of art in the expression of authority and legitimacy, and artistic interconnections between cultures. Collections on campus or in the area will be incorporated whenever possible.
The Art of Ancient Mesopotamia: 1000-330 BCE: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2015, Fall 2013
The course will treat in depth topics in Islamic architecture and topics in Islamic art. Subjects addressed may include painting, calligraphy, and book production.
Topics in Islamic Art: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 1996 10 Week Session
A survey of the arts of black sub-Saharan Africa, including aspects of the Caribbean. Emphasizes major aesthetic/cultural complexes such as the Yoruba, the Manding, and the Kongo. The tension between "traditional arts" and contemporary studio practices, as well as all artistic traditions will be discussed within their social context. Aspects of mythology, history, social values, music, and dance as they relate to artistic traditions included. Films which emphasize this interaction to be shown.
The Arts of Africa: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2015, Spring 2013, Spring 2010
Chinese art of the Neolithic and Bronze Age. From the earliest period to the end of the Han dynasty (early third century A.D.), especially ceramics, bronzes, jade, and lacquer.
Early Chinese Art, Part I: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2021, Spring 2020, Fall 2017
The history of the visual arts as used in Chinese religious practice, from the third century C.E. through the late imperial period. The course explores different modes of giving visible form to the sacred, expecially in the Daoist and Buddhist traditions, and tracks the movement of objects and visual concepts across Asia and between Daoists and Buddhists, monasteries, the imperial court, and elite and popular lay groups.
Sacred Arts in China: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2021, Spring 2018
The history of the art of painting in China from the third century C.E. through the late imperial period. The course takes a chronological and thematic approach to the classical tradition of Chinese painting and other arts of the brush expressed in a variety of elite and popular genres, considering them in the context of aesthetic and narrative theory, biography, economic history, social life, and politics.
The Classical Painting Tradition in China: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2012
The history of Chinese art from the end of the Qing dynasty in 1912 to the present, including the reformist movements of the early 20th century; the new urbanism and its visual articulation in advertising, photography, and popular arts; national style; politicized painting and woodblock prints in the Western style; Communist socialist realism; and the meaning of the avant-garde as both Communist ideological movement and anti-authoritarian concept.
Art and Propaganda in Modern China: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Spring 2022
This course focuses on modern and contemporary Asian American art and architecture from the mid-1800s to the present. Using a comparative perspective, each week utilizes case studies—works by particular artists, architects, or art groups—to examine what Asian American art looked like at specific historical junctures and what it meant to be an Asian American artist. A range of material practices, including painting, sculpture, installation, performance, new media, architecture, and graphic illustration are considered.
AsiaAmerica: Asian American Art and Architecture: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2014, Spring 2012
Primarily the architecture and sculpture of Japanese Buddhist temples, 7th to 13th centuries.
Topics in Buddhist Art and Architecture: Buddhist Temple Art & Architecture in Japan: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2018, Fall 2014, Spring 2012
This course introduces the study of Buddhist icons in Japan, principally paintings and sculpture but also texts, within broader Buddhist ritual and visual cultures from ca. 500 CE to the early 20th century.
Topics in Buddhist Art and Architecture: Buddhist Icons in Japan: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2019, Spring 2015
This course explores representations of the Buddha and other Buddhist detities in the modern and contemporary world, including pre-modern works of painting and sculpture, images made by contemporary artists, and images within popular culture.
Topics in Buddhist Art and Architecture: Buddhist Art in the Modern/Contemporary World: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2015
Beginning with the earliest remains of cities, towns, and palaces in the Indus Valley region in present day India and Pakistan, this course traces the production of art and architecture in South Asia from 2500 BCE to 1200 CE. Focusing on the painting, sculpture, and architectural traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, we will examine the aesthetic conventions, theological ideals, and political formations that emerged in early South Asia.
South Asian Art: Ancient: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2010, Spring 2009, Spring 2006
South Asian art, architecture, calligraphy, painting, and urban cultures in the early modern period. Emphasis will be placed on interactions with the Islamic world and Europe.
South Asian Art: Early Modern: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2013, Fall 2009, Spring 2007
A selective survey of major developments in Muslim and Rajput painting from 1350 to the present.
The Art of India: 1350 A.D. to the Present: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2010, Fall 2007, Fall 2004
The art of Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Burma, and Indonesia focusing on the period from 400 to 1500 A.D. Sculpture and architecture will be considered as a balance of Indian and indigenous elements.
The Art of Southeast Asia: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2010, Fall 2005
This course analyzes the art, architecture, and archaeology of prehistoric Greece, concentrating on the Minoan and Mycenaean palatial arts of the Bronze Age (3000-1200 BCE). The evocative yet still enigmatic remains of palaces and funerary complexes, frescoes and vase paintings, and precious worked pieces will be closely examined in terms of their forms and cultural contexts. The place of prehistoric Greece in the international world of the eastern Mediterranean will also be explored.
Minoan and Mycenaean Art: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2015, Spring 2010, Spring 2007
The early development of the major genres of Greek art in the era of the emerging city-states.
The Art of Ancient Greece: Archaic Greek Art and Architecture (750-480 B.C.): Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2018, Fall 2016, Spring 2011
The maturity of the major genres of Greek art in Periclean Athens and the other leading centers.
The Art of Ancient Greece: Classical Greek Art and Architecture (500-320 B.C.): Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2019, Spring 2015, Spring 2012
A survey of the major genres of Greek art in the Hellenic world from Italy to India.
The Art of Ancient Greece: Hellenistic Art and Architecture (330-30 B.C.): Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2006 10 Week Session, Summer 2005 10 Week Session, Summer 2004 10 Week Session
A training school for those with no previous experience in archaeology or ancient art. Volunteers are taught the elements of modern field archaeology, with discussion sessions on site stratigraphy, pottery, and other artifacts. Evening lectures on Israeli, Greaco-Roman, and Near Eastern archaelogy.
Introduction to Archaeology: The Tel Dor Excavation: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2009, Fall 2008, Fall 2007
The art of Rome and of the Roman Empire, from its sources in the Republican era to the Age of Constantine the Great.
Roman Art: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2016
This course presents the surviving evidence for a wide range of pictorial representation in the Roman world, and addresses the many functions of painting in Roman life.
Roman Painting: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Important individuals in Greek and Roman society were commemorated both in honorific portraits—bronze and marble statues set up in public places—and in biographies written to record for posterity their lives and achievements. We will be reading a selection of Greek and Latin biographical texts (in translation) and comparing them with statuary monuments that represent the same individuals. We will be seeking to elicit the points of contact between the two commemorative traditions, visual and literary, and to understand the sometimes similar functions they serve. But we will also be attempting to bring out the differences in the way that biographical texts and portrait images operate, and the consequences this has for historians.
Ancient Portraiture and Biography: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2017
This course presents surviving evidence of pictorial representation in the Roman world. Including the earliest remains from the city of Rome; the suites of painted rooms in the houses of Pompeii and Herculaneum on the Bay of Naples; and Roman mosaics from Italy, North Africa, and the eastern Mediterranean.
Topics: ‘four styles’ of Pompeian interior decoration; the architect Vitruvius’ denunciation of contemporary painting in the early Augustan period; the reproduction of Greek ‘old master’ paintings from pattern books; the surviving paintings of the Domus Aurea, the emperor Nero’s ‘Golden House’ in Rome; the painting of marble statues and reliefs; and the colored mummy portraits preserved by the sands of the Egyptian desert.

Pictorial Representation in the Roman World: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2021, Spring 2018, Spring 2016
Imperial art from Gallienus through the collapse of the western empire. Christian art from the beginning around 200 through the age of Justinian. Revivals in the seventh and eighth centuries. A look back from the court of Charlemagne and contemporary Constantinople.
Art in Late Antiquity: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2015
A survey of the visual arts in Europe from about 800-1400 A.D. This lecture course explores the origins and transformations of Christian pre-modern visual culture. This class will analyze the revival of monumental sculpture in the context of liturgy, architecture, materiality of the minor arts and reliquaries, as well as medieval theories on perception. Emphasis is placed upon the broad artistic influence of the monastic, pilgrimage, and crusading movements.The elaboration of new iconographic themes and the influence of small scale precious works will receive special attention.
Relics, Reliquaries and Cult Images: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2002
Gothic art and architecture from its origins in France about 1130. Emphasis on the related developments of architecture, sculpture, and stained glass at the major cathedrals, the impact of the early universities and scientific study, and the political role of the visual arts in the early nation states.
Gothic Art in Northern Europe: 1150-1270: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2020 Second 6 Week Session
This course will widely explore fashion, art, and society, while focusing on the problem of clothing. Students will embark on a journey in search of the objects that the contemporary luxury industry seems to have buried under piles of glossy magazines, social media pages of so-called influencers, and fashion weeks’s calendars: clothing. What is a piece of clothing? How is it made? Who makes it? And for whom? To answer these questions, students will look at a variety of case-studies from modern and contemporary art, cinema, design, and, of course, fashion.
Art and Science: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2013
This course explores the intersections of art and science in medieval, modern, and contemporary history. It focuses on the ways in which artistic and scientific practices have shaped and legitimated each other through the ages. The course takes the form of an overview that spans from the awakening of European culture through the reception of new knowledge from the Near East to the most recent encounters between art and technoscience in the 21st century.
Art and Science: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2014
In this course we explore the intersections of art and science in medieval, modern, and contemporary history. Our aim is twofold. First, to explore the close interaction between these two fields, and the way in which they have shaped each other through the ages. Second, to focus our attention on specific instances of art/science interaction, using them as prisms through which one can reach a fuller understanding of major historical transformations.
Art and Science: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2013, Spring 2009, Fall 2005
A selective survey of major developments in Florentine Renaissance painting, sculpture, and architecture organized by genre. Particular emphasis on the relationship between art and religion and the ideology of Florentine republicanism and ducal absolutism. Issues of gender, the status of artists, and the function, audience, and patronage of art will also be considered.
Renaissance Art in Florence 1400-1600: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2010, Spring 2010, Spring 2007
A selective survey of major developments in Roman Renaissance painting, sculpture, and architecture organized by genre. Particular emphasis on the relationship between art and religion and the ideology of a theocratic papacy. Issues of gender, the status of artists, and the function, audience, and patronage of art will also be considered.
Renaissance Art in Rome 1400-1600: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Fall 2010, Spring 2008
A selective survey of major developments in Venetian Renaissance painting, sculpture, and architecture organized by genre. Particular emphasis on the relationship between art and religion and the ideology of the Venetian commune. Issues of gender, the status of artists, and the function, audience, and patronage of art will also be considered.
Renaissance Art in Venice 1400-1600: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2011, Fall 2006, Fall 1999
The great age of Netherlandish art, from its roots in manuscript illumination through the masters of panel painting (Van Eyck, Van der Weyden, Bosch, Brueghel) up to the time of the iconoclasm of 1566. Focus on the relation of painting to the beholder; iconic vs. narrative images; rise of genres; art's expression of social and economic ideals; and class and gender issues.
Van Eyck to Brueghel: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2016, Fall 2012
The Elizabethan Renaissance course will review texts, minor arts, costume, self-presentation, performance, pageantry, architecture, decoration, and other non-traditional routes of addressing issues of visual culture and representation, and their political and social meanings. The courses's goals are to explore the role of visuality in Renaissance England, and to develop research skills. Students learn to analyze primary sources, both visual and written, and to read secondary sources critically.
Elizabethan Renaissance: Art, Culture, and Visuality: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Spring 2021, Spring 2018
The major artists (among them Caravaggio, Bernini, Velazquez, and Poussin) and the major concerns (including genres such as history painting, landscape, low-life, and notions of imitation and illusionism) of seventeenth century art in Italy, France, and Spain.
Southern Baroque Art: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2022, Fall 2018, Fall 2015
The mutual impact of European conquest on the visual and material cultures of Spain and Colonial Latin America. Paintings by El Greco, Velazquez, Zurburan, and Ribera are discussed in relation to the trans-Atlantic transmission of material objects including Mexican pictorial codices, European prints, architecture, screen paintings (biombos), featherwork, and enconchados.
Visual Culture in Early Modern Spain and Colonial Latin America: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2013, Spring 2011, Fall 2007
The rise of a rich visual culture in 17th-century Holland that expressed the ideals, aspirations, and identity of the first bourgeois capitalist society. Rembrandt, Vermeer, and others in the context of contemporary aesthetic concerns (realism, optics) and social issues (domestic values, poverty and wealth, colonialism, national identity).
The Dutch Golden Age: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2014, Spring 2005, Spring 2003
The culture of early 17th-century Europe as it was known (and created) by Sir Peter Paul Rubens, painter, scholar, and diplomat. Begins in Flanders and travels (with Rubens) to Italy, Spain, France and England, examining politics, religion and visual culture in each place. Key issues include the concept of artistic tradition; art and politics; crafting social status; workshop practice.
The Age of Rubens: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
A general study of Netherlandish painting of the seventeenth century organized according to the genres or types of painting done at the time. The historical and social as well as the art historical contexts for the development in the Netherlands of such genres as history painting, portraiture, landscapes, still-life, and low-life and the kinds of meanings with which they were endowed.
Types of Dutch and Flemish Painting in the 17th Century: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2016, Fall 2013
French art from the 16th century to the mid 18th century. Beginning with the architecture, painting, prints, and decorative arts of the School of Fontainebleau, the course addresses the development of the Royal Academy and its interaction with popular culture, which culminates in the display of ambitious art in the public space of the pre-revolutionary Salon exhibition.
Visual Culture in Early Modern France: Renaissance to Enlightenment: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2001 10 Week Session
The story of art in 18th-century Britain involves the struggle to develop a national artistic identity which was distinct from the artistic traditions of Italy, Holland, and France. This course will address the meaning and function of history painting, portraiture, marine painting, and landscapes in relation to a rapidly expanding art market, taking into account the way that gender, class, and race played into the visual marking of status and power. We will also look at the ways in which visual culture helped to shape Britain's national identity as an emerging imperial power.
Eighteenth-Century British Art: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2021, Spring 2013, Spring 2010
Topics in late 18th- and early 19th-century European art, either focusing on a pertinent theme and/or nation (e.g. Romanticism and gender in France) or introducing the art of Europe as a whole during this tumultuous period of revolution and reaction.
Nineteenth-Century Europe: Age of Revolution: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2022, Spring 2020
Visual arts in the later 19th century. Impressionism and after. The nature of avant-garde culture and its relation to emerging consumer culture. May emphasize Paris, or the struggle for cultural mastery in Europe.
Nineteenth-Century Europe: The Invention of Avant-Gardes: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2002 10 Week Session
Topics in late 18th- and early 19th- century European art, either focusing on a pertinent theme and/or nation (e.g., Romanticism and gender in France) or introducing the art of Europe as a whole during this tumultuous period of revolution and reaction.
19th-Century Europe: Age of Revolution: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 1998 10 Week Session
This course studies 19th-century art's search for a new visual language with which to represent the body. It explores ways in which sculptural and painted bodies convey, hide, and displace sexuality to create or prohibit desire, and how they produce different notions of femininity and masculinity. Artists to be discussed: Manet, Monet, Gauguin, Degas, Renoir, Pissarro, Morrisot, Cassatt, Rodin, Carpeaux, Cezanne, Millet, Courbet, Daumier, Claudel.
The Body in Avant-Garde French Art: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2010 First 6 Week Session, Summer 2009 10 Week Session, Summer 2009 Second 6 Week Session
Visual arts in the later 19th century. Impressionism and after. The nature of avant-garde culture and its relation to emerging consumer culture. May emphasize Paris or the struggle for cultural mastery in Europe.
Nineteenth-Century Europe: The Invention of Avant-Gardes: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2004 10 Week Session, Summer 1999 10 Week Session, Summer 1997 10 Week Session
Introduction to French art from the Revolution to the First World War. Proceeds chronologically, putting visual art in the context of French political and social development.
French Art of the 19th Century: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2021 Second 6 Week Session, Summer 2020 First 6 Week Session, Fall 2013
Topics in 19th- and 20th-century histories of photography; for example, photography in relation to modernism, gender, pictorial genres, or consumerism.
Histories of Photography: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2018 Second 6 Week Session, Summer 2017 Second 6 Week Session, Summer 2016 Second 6 Week Session
Topics in 19th- and 20th-century histories of photography, for example, photography in relation to modernism, gender, pictorial genres, or consumerism.
Histories of Photography: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2008, Fall 2007, Fall 2000
Consideration of the relationship between visual representation and conquest, colonialism and imperialism. Topics include the history of visual ethnographies, representations and constructions of "race," exoticism, orientalism, and primitivism.
Art and Colonialism: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
The focus of this course will be significant works by American art-makers, analyzed in the context of the dramatic transformations which occured in American Art from the 1860's to the 1940's. Emphasis will be placed on the analysis of both indigenous and adopted modes of representation within their historical and art historical contexts. Students will be encouraged to acquire the ability to closely "read" and interpret visual images as primary historical "texts."
American Painting and Photography from the Civil War to WW II: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2001 10 Week Session, Summer 1987 10 Week Session
Study of major artists and movements in European art from 1860-1930. Will begin with Modernism in the work of Manet and proceed to an examination of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, and early abstract art. Directions in the 20th century such as Dadaism and Surrealism will be addressed. Art will be considered in the cultural, political, social, and aesthetic contexts in which it was made. Emphasis is on painting, but important sculptors will be included.
From Manet to Mondrian: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2023, Fall 2019, Fall 2014
Looking at major developments in architecture, decorative arts, photography, and painting from Romanticism to post-modernism, this course addresses art and its social context over the last two centuries in what is now the United States. Issues include patronage, audience, technology, and the education of the artist as well as style and cultural expression. Field trips.
American Art (1800-Present): Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2018, Spring 2009, Fall 2005
Taking as a point of departure specific exemplary houses, both vernacular and high-style architectural forms are studied from the perspectives of the history of style, of technology and of social use. Both the class as a whole and the student research projects take a case-study approach. Field trips.
American Architecture: Domestic Forms: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Spring 2022, Fall 2020
“The Transatlantic Gilded Age and Its Discontents” considers the arts of the United States, England, and France 1865-1918 looking at the Salon and the Louvre; the École des Beaux Arts; the Arts and Crafts movement; and international expositions in Chicago, Paris, Vienna and San Francisco. Focus is on the arts & institutions of the wealthy and bourgeoisie, as well as on works designed to critique the architecture, manners, & activities of the transatlantic elite. Authors, architects, & artists include Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Thorstein Veblen, John Ruskin, Jacob Riis, Henry James, Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, John Ruskin, William Morris, Augustus St. Gaudens, Edmonia Lewis, & more.
The Transatlantic Gilded Age and Its Discontents: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2002 10 Week Session, Summer 2001 10 Week Session
In-depth study of visual culture in America, from 1960 to the present day, with particular attention to theoretical issues and the intersections of art with the culture at large. Previous course work in history of art recommended.
Contemporary American Art: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2023, Summer 2022 First 6 Week Session, Spring 2021
A consideration of major issues in art of the early 20th century. May focus on a particular place and period (e.g., Art in Paris or 1900-1914) or on a major artistic problem (e.g., Abstraction and Figuration).
Art in the Early 20th Century: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2019, Fall 2017, Fall 2015
A consideration of major issues in art of the present day. Emphases may include conceptual, video, performance, installation and digital art, as well as painting, sculpture and experimental practices.
Art in the Later 20th Century: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2010 10 Week Session, Summer 2010 First 6 Week Session, Summer 2007 Second 6 Week Session
This course will take a close look at some of the art produced in Europe and America in the decades following the Second World War. In addition to painting, sculpture, and photography, we will also examine video, performance, and intermedia art. Of particular interest will be defining the balance of concerns demonstrated by artists during this time between form and content, abstraction and representation, and the intersection of their artworks with culture at large--including issues of technology, the body, commercial economy, and public space. Along with a wide range of images, our discussions will consider theoretical and critical texts.
Art in the Later 20th Century: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Summer 2019 First 6 Week Session, Fall 2016
The course examines a series of artistic formations and critiques of racial, ethnic, gender, class and religious identity among the diverse collection of individuals, cultures, and institutions that compose the United States. Material, formal, social, and political contexts will all be considered as we address a wide range of art practices and media.
Race and Representation in the Twentieth Century in the United States: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2013
In this course, students will examine how Latin American artists have utilized local indigenous traditions as well as global avant-grade innovations within the context of specific national histories and landscapes. Additionally, students will look at murals, painting, photography, printmaking, street actions, and new media from Colombia, Cuba, Guatemala, and Mexico, as well as contemporary Californian Chicano artistic practices.
Latin American Art: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2019, Spring 2017, Spring 2014
This course presents the indigenous artistic traditions of parts of what is now Latin America, from the earliest monuments of the formative periods (e.g. Olmec and Chavín), through acclaimed eras of aesthetic and technological achievement (e.g. Maya and Moche), to the later Inca and Mexica (i.e. Aztec) imperial periods. Our subject encompasses multiple genre including painting and sculpture, textiles and metalwork, architecture and performance. More than a recitation of periods, styles, and monuments, the course will assess the varieties of evidence available for interpretations of artworks that were created in diverse social, religious, and political settings.
Latin American Art: Before Columbus: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2019 Second 6 Week Session
Under the violence of dictatorial regimes, social repression, and foreign intervention, artists across Latin America have turned to art and craft practices to protest and give visibility to the injustices plaguing their communities. In light of recent scholarship and exhibitions that have recently focused on the political and social climate in Latin America during the late twentieth century, this course surveys the ways in which art functioned as a form of resistance, critique, and empowerment during the 1960s through the 1990s. Within this context, the course aims to foreground and critically engage with the practices of women artists working during this period, focusing on case studies across different regions.
Art and Resistance across Latin America (1960-1990s): Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2007, Summer 2001 10 Week Session
This course will consider museums from historical, practical, and contemporary ethical perspectives. We will visit four of the museums on the Berkeley campus, and from the various viewpoints of humanities, social science, and natural science, we will examine collecting, exhibition, research, and audience in the early 21st-century museum setting. The course will require reading, discussion, four short writing assignments, and one final exam.
Museums: An Introduction to the History and Practice of Collecting and the Public View: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2012, Spring 2011, Spring 2007, Fall 2004
The American forest will be examined in terms of its ecology, history, and representations in paintings, photographs, and literary essays. This examination seeks to understand the American forest in its scientific and economic parameters, as well as the historic, social, and ideological dimensions which have contributed to the evolution of our present attitudes toward the forest.
The American Forest: Its Ecology, History, and Representation: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2021, Fall 2016, Spring 2013
Topics explore themes and problems, often reflect current research interests of the instructor, and supplement regular curricular offerings. Open to all interested students, including graduate students. Some background in art history desirable. For specific questions concerning preparation for a 190 course, please see individual instructor. Detailed descriptions of current and future offerings in this series available in 416 Doe Library.
Special Topics in Fields of Art History: Asian: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023
Topics explore themes and problems, often reflect current research interests of the instructor, and supplement regular curricular offerings. Open to all interested students, including graduate students. Some background in art history desirable. For specific questions concerning preparation for a 190 course, please see individual instructor. Detailed descriptions of current and future offerings in this series available in 416 Doe Library.
Special Topics in Fields of Art History: Ancient: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2022 Second 6 Week Session, Spring 2014, Spring 2010
Topics explore themes and problems, often reflect current research interests of the instructor, and supplement regular curricular offerings. Open to all interested students, including graduate students. Some background in art history desirable. For specific questions concerning preparation for a 190 course, please see individual instructor. Detailed descriptions of current and future offerings in this series available in 416 Doe Library.
Special Topics in Fields of Art History: Medieval: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2008, Spring 2005
Topics explore themes and problems, often reflect current research interests of the instructor, and supplement regular curricular offerings. Open to all interested students, including graduate students. Some background in art history desirable. For specific questions concerning preparation for a 190 course, please see individual instructor. Detailed descriptions of current and future offerings in this series available in 416 Doe Library.
Special Topics in Fields of Art History: 15th-16th Century: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
An introduction to methods of digital imaging and computational visualization that are relevant to art historical investigation. Topics may include digital photography, modeling/rendering, and network visualization. Some background in art history desirable. For specific questions concerning preparation, please contact the instructor.
Digital Humanities for Art Historians: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2019, Fall 2014
Topics explore themes and problems, often reflect current research interests of the instructor, and supplement regular curricular offerings. Open to all interested students, including graduate students. Some background in art history desirable. For specific questions concerning preparation for a 190 course, please see individual instructor. Detailed descriptions of current and future offerings in this series available in 416 Doe Library.
Special Topics in Fields of Art History: 17th-18th Century: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Spring 2022
Topics explore themes and problems, often reflect current research interests of the instructor, and supplement regular curricular offerings. Open to all interested students, including graduate students. Some background in art history desirable. For specific questions concerning preparation for a 190 course, please see individual instructor.
Special Topics in Fields of Art History: 19th-20th Century: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2019, Fall 2018, Spring 2015
Topics explore themes and problems, often reflect current research interests of the instructor, and supplement regular curricular offerings. Open to all interested students, including graduate students. Some background in art history desirable. For specific questions concerning preparation for a 190 course, please see individual instructor. Detailed descriptions of current and future offerings in this series available in 416 Doe Library.
Special Topics in Fields of Art History: American/British: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Summer 2022 First 6 Week Session, Spring 2022
Topics explore themes and problems, often reflect current research interests of the instructor, and supplement regular curricular offerings. Open to all interested students, including graduate students. Some background in art history desirable. For specific questions concerning preparation for a 190 course, please see individual instructor. Detailed descriptions of current and future offerings in this series available in 416 Doe Library.
Special Topics in Fields of Art History: Contemporary: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2022, Spring 2021, Spring 2020
Topics explore themes and problems that often reflect current research interests of the instructor, and supplement regular curricular offerings. Open to all interested students, including graduate students. Some background in art history desirable. For specific questions concerning preparation for a 190 course, please see individual instructor. Detailed descriptions of current and future offerings in this series available in 416 Doe Library.
Special Topics in Fields of Art History: Global Modernism: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
Topics explore themes and problems, often reflect current research interests of the instructor, and supplement regular curricular offerings. Open to all interested students, including graduate students. Some background in art history desirable. For specific questions concerning preparation for a 190 course, please consult individual instructor. Detailed descriptions of current and future offerings in this series available on arthistory.berkeley.edu.
Course may be repeated for credit when topic changes. Final exam not required.
Transcultural: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2010 First 6 Week Session, Summer 2009 First 6 Week Session
Topics explore themes and problems, often reflect current research interests of the instructor, and supplement regular curricular offerings. Open to all interested students, including graduate students. Some background in art history desirable. For specific questions concerning preparation for a 190 course, please see individual instructor. Detailed descriptions of current and future offerings in this series available in 416 Doe Library.
Special Topics in Fields of Art History: Asian: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2007 First 6 Week Session, Summer 2006 10 Week Session, Summer 1997 10 Week Session
Topics explore themes and problems, often reflect current research interests of the instructor, and supplement regular curricular offerings. Open to all interested students, including graduate students. Some background in art history desirable. For specific questions concerning preparation for a 190 course, please see individual instructor. Detailed descriptions of current and future offerings in this series available in 416 Doe Library.
Special Topics in Fields of Art History: Ancient: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 1996 10 Week Session
Topics explore themes and problems, often reflect current research interests of the instructor, and supplement regular curricular offerings. Open to all interested students, including graduate students. Some background in art history desirable. For specific questions concerning preparation for a 190 course, please see individual instructor. Detailed descriptions of current and future offerings in this series available in 416 Doe Library.
Special Topics in Fields of Art History: Medieval: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2012 10 Week Session, Summer 2012 Second 6 Week Session
Topics explore themes and problems, often reflect current research interests of the instructor, and supplement regular curricular offerings. Open to all interested students, including graduate students. Some background in art history desirable. For specific questions concerning preparation for a 190 course, please see individual instructor. Detailed descriptions of current and future offerings in this series available in 416 Doe Library.
Special Topics in Fields of Art History: 15th-16th Century: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2018 First 6 Week Session, Summer 2003 10 Week Session, Summer 1997 10 Week Session
Topics explore themes and problems, often reflect current research interests of the instructor, and supplement regular curricular offerings. Open to all interested students, including graduate students. Some background in art history desirable. For specific questions concerning preparation for a 190 course, please see individual instructor. Detailed descriptions of current and future offerings in this series available in 416 Doe Library.
Special Topics in Fields of Art History: 17th-18th Century: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2007 10 Week Session, Summer 2007 First 6 Week Session, Summer 2006 10 Week Session
Topics explore themes and problems, often reflect current research interests of the instructor, and supplement regular curricular offerings. Open to all interested students, including graduate students. Some background in art history desirable. For specific questions concerning preparation for a 190 course, please see individual instructor. Detailed descriptions of current and future offerings in this series available in 416 Doe Library.
Special Topics in Fields of Art History: 19th-20th Century: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Topics explore themes and problems, often reflect current research interests of the instructor, and supplement regular curricular offerings. Open to all interested students, including graduate students. Some background in art history desirable. For specific questions concerning preparation for a 190 course, please see individual instructor. Detailed descriptions of current and future offerings in this series available in 416 Doe Library.
Special Topics in Fields of Art History: American/British: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Topics explore themes and problems, often reflect current research interests of the instructor, and supplement regular curricular offerings. Open to all interested students, including graduate students. Some background in art history desirable. For specific questions concerning preparation for a 190 course, please see individual instructor. Detailed descriptions of current and future offerings in this series available in 416 Doe Library.
Special Topics in Fields of Art History: Precolumbian/Latin American: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2023
Concentration on specific problems or works in a particular area of art history. Assigned readings, discussion, and a substantial paper. For specific topics and enrollment, see listings outside 416 Doe Library.
Undergraduate Seminar: Problems in Research and Interpretation: Asian: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2020, Fall 2008, Fall 2003
This seminar will look at specific case studies of the production and use of architecture, paintings, and quilting within specific communities in what is now the United States. We will look, for instance, at Shaker watercolors and design; Puritan painting and city planning; Amish, Hawaiian, and Hmong quilting; the ledger drawings and domestic structures of specific Native American groups; and the sacred architecture of the Hispanic southwest. Our timeframe spans four centuries but our "geographies" will be very focused. We will consider vernacular or folk production within the context of politics and economics as well as aesthetic and social theory.
Undergraduate Seminar: Folk Art in America: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023, Fall 2022
Concentration on specific problems or works in a particular area of art history. Assigned readings, discussion, and a substantial paper. For specific topics and enrollment, see listings outside 416 Doe Library.
Undergraduate Seminar: Problems in Research and Interpretation: Ancient: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2015, Spring 2013, Fall 2012
Concentration on specific problems or works in a particular area of art history. Assigned readings, discussion, and a substantial paper. For specific topics and enrollment, see listings outside 416 Doe Library.
Undergraduate Seminar: Problems in Research and Interpretation: Medieval: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Fall 2022
Concentration on specific problems or works in a particular area of art history. Assigned readings, discussion, and a substantial paper. For specific topics and enrollment, see listings outside 416 Doe Library.
Curators are actively engaged in museum related affairs, which might include: research on museum collections, matters of administration and policy, donors, approval of loans and exchanges. In addition, curators are expected to share their research with the public and community through exhibitions and publications.
Undergraduate Seminar: Problems in Research and Interpretation: Curatorial: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Fall 2022
Concentration on specific problems or works in a particular area of art history. Assigned readings, discussion, and a substantial paper. For specific topics and enrollment, see listings outside 416 Doe Library.
Undergraduate Seminar: Problems in Research and Interpretation: 15th-16th Century: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2019, Fall 2018, Spring 2017
An introduction to digital modeling and rendering as forms of art-historical investigation. A series of case studies will allow students to explore the research possibilities presented by this new medium. Students will construct their own digital models as part of a research project.
Undergraduate Seminar: Digital Imaging and Forensic Art History: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2021
Concentration on specific problems or works in a particular area of art history. Assigned readings, discussion, and a substantial paper. For specific topics and enrollment, see listings outside 416 Doe Library.
Undergraduate Seminar: Problems in Research and Interpretation: 17th-18th Century: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2021, Fall 2020
Concentration on specific problems or works in a particular area of art history. Assigned readings, discussion, and a substantial paper. For specific topics and enrollment, see listings outside 416 Doe Library.
Undergraduate Seminar: Problems in Research and Interpretation: 19th-20th Century: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2023
Problems in American and British art, architecture, design of the 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th, or 21st centuries; art institutions, collecting, or related topics.
Undergraduate Seminar: Problems in Research and Interpretation: American Art, Architecture, & Design: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Spring 2023, Spring 2020
This undergraduate semiar examines the resurgence of craft within contemporary art and theory. In a time when much art is outsourced--fabricated by large stables of assistants--what does it mean when artists return to traditional, and traditionally laborious, methods of handiwork such as knitting, ceramics, or woodworking? Our readings will consider historical and theoretical questions of process, materiality, skill, bodily effort, gendered labor, and alternative economies of production.
Undergraduate Seminar: Problems in Research and Interpretation: Modern/Contemporary Art: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024
This seminar investigates foundational principles of digital humanities though art history, cultural heritage and material preservation, with a particular focus on emerging threats to historic sites and objects. We will explore and engage with innovative technologies utilized to confront a variety of global challenges and provide ‘hands-on’ practical experience in laser scanning, photogrammetry, and digital mapping and much more. The seminar is thus a “journey” of sorts, a dialogue with technology, art, materiality and historicities in an attempt to fully engage with cultural heritage issues through a twenty-first century lens. At the end of the semester, we will create an online portfolio/course website which showcases our work.
Digital Art History and Cultural Heritage: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2018, Fall 2015, Spring 2015
This seminar will focus on a particular theme or corpus of art and visual culture from the Pre-Columbian, colonial, and/or modern and contemporary periods of areas of what is now Latin America. Topics will vary with each offering.
Undergraduate Seminar: Latin American: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2021, Spring 2021
This seminar will focus on a particular theme or corpus of art and visual culture from a cross-cultural perspective within a modern context. Topics will vary with each offering. Assigned readings, discussion, and a substantial paper. For specific topics and enrollment, see listings outside 416 Doe Library.
Undergraduate Seminar: Problems in Research and Interpretation: Global Modernism: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2023, Spring 2023
Concentration on specific problems in art history as a transcultural inquiry, across multiple or varying cultural contexts. Assigned readings, discussion, and a substantial paper. For specific topics and enrollment, see listings on arthistory.berkely.edu.
Undergraduate Seminar: Problems in Research and Interpretation: Transcultural: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2022, Spring 2017
Intended for advanced undergraduates wishing to continue research on topics already begun in a lecture or seminar or to pursue at a high level specialized topics not ordinarily covered in the curriculum. Usually results in a substantial paper. For general independent study see 199; for honors research, see H195.
Directed Research: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2023, Fall 2022, Spring 2022
Study and practical professional experience, usually for no fewer than 10 hours per week, involving a substantial project of a curatorial nature. Jointly supervised by a member of the professional staff of the participating museum and a faculty member. Internships ordinarily must be arranged well in advance; for further information, inquire at 416 Doe Library.
Museum Internship: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024
Directed study leading to the completion of the honors thesis. Consult the description of the Honors Program in Art History.
Special Study for Honors Candidates in the History of Art: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021, Spring 2021, Fall 2020, Spring 2020, Fall 2019, Spring 2019, Fall 2018, Fall 2016, Spring 2016, Spring 2015, Spring 2014, Spring 2013, Fall 2012, Spring 2012
This course is the UCDC letter-graded core seminar for 4 units that complements the P/NP credited internship course UGIS C196B. Core seminars are designed to enhance the experience of and provide an intellectual framework for the student's internship. UCDC core seminars are taught in sections that cover various tracks such as the Congress, media, bureaucratic organizations and the Executive Branch, international relations, public policy and general un-themed original research.
UCDC Core Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021, Spring 2021, Fall 2020, Spring 2020, Fall 2019, Spring 2019, Fall 2018, Fall 2016, Spring 2016, Spring 2015, Spring 2014, Spring 2013
This course provides a credited internship for all students enrolled in the UCDC and Cal in the Capital Programs. It must be taken in conjunction with the required academic core course C196A. C196B requires that students work 3-4 days per week as interns in settings selected to provide them with exposure to and experienc in government, public policy, international affairs, media, the arts or other areas or relevance to their major fields of study.
UCDC Internship: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2021, Spring 2020, Spring 2019, Fall 2016, Spring 2016, Fall 2015, Spring 2015, Fall 2014, Spring 2014, Spring 2013
Students work in selected internship programs approved in advance by the faculty coordinator and for which written contracts have been established between the sponsoring organization and the student. Students will be expected to produce two progress reports for their faculty coordinator during the course of the internship, as well as a final paper for the course consisting of at least 35 pages. Other restrictions apply; see faculty adviser.
Special Field Research: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2023, Fall 2022, Spring 2022
Instruction for a small group of students on a topic initiated by those students.
Supervised Group Study: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023
For students wishing to pursue an interest not represented in the curriculum by developing an individual program of study supervised by a faculty member. Study may involve readings, projects, papers, fieldwork, etc. For continuing or advanced research projects, see 193.
Supervised Independent Study: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2023 10 Week Session, Summer 2022 10 Week Session, Summer 2011 10 Week Session
For students wishing to pursue an interest not represented in the curriculum by developing an individual program of study supervised by a faculty member. Study may involve readings, projects, papers, fieldwork, etc. For continuing or advanced research projects, see 193.
Supervised Independent Study: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
An introduction to the fundamentals of art history, including traditional and innovative perspectives designed for candidates for higher degrees. Offerings vary from year to year. Students should consult the department's "Announcement of Classes" for offerings before the beginning of the semester.
Graduate Proseminar in the Interpretation of Art Historical Materials: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2018, Fall 2014, Spring 2012
This seminar looks at both material culture theory and the practice of interpreting objects in the West and in Asia. It draws on the practices and inquiries of multiple disciplines including archaeology, anthropology, cultural geography, and art history . We will consider the variety of ways and contexts in which objects have been understood to "speak" as aesthetic vehicles and as cultural texts. Taught by two faculty members who have extensive experience as museum curators--one of American Art, the other of Asian Art, this class will combine theory with hands-on learning.
Seminar in Material Culture: The Interpretation of Objects: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2019, Fall 2015, Spring 2012
This seminar is intended to introduce graduate students--both archaeologists and non-archaeologists--to the discipline of classical archaeology, history, and evolution, and its research tools and bibliography. Since it is both impossible and undesirable to attempt to cover the entire discipline in one semester, after two introductory lectures on the history of the field, we will address a selection of topics that seems representative of its concerns.
Proseminar in Classical Archaeology and Ancient Art: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2012
Seminar on critical aspects of Middle Eastern art requiring intensive study and presentation of a research paper. Topics vary from semester to semester.
Seminar in Middle Eastern Art: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2020, Spring 2017

Seminar in Chinese Art: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2019, Fall 2016, Fall 2015

Seminar in Japanese Art: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2019, Spring 2018, Fall 2015

Seminar in the Art of India: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Fall 2011, Fall 2010

Seminar in Greek Art: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2013, Spring 2010, Spring 2007

Seminar in Late Medieval Art in Northern Europe: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2019, Fall 2016, Spring 2013

Seminar in Italian Renaissance Art: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2015, Fall 2013, Spring 2012

Seminar in European Art: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2014
Mimesis, Greek for "imitation" is a key term in recent debates in a number of disciplines. However, what is at its core is often astonishingly undefined, open and ambivalent. Starting with antique and medieval works addressing key moments of mimesis we will also explore modern theories of mimesis. Crossing the threshold between pre-modern and modern examples will help us to understand the premises for the visual culture involving the rise of naturalism, and more generally the nature of representation in medieval and early modern culture.
Seminar in European Art: Mimesis: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2021, Spring 2017, Spring 2016

Seminar in Baroque Art: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2017, Spring 2016, Fall 2013

Seminar in 19th-Century Art: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2021, Fall 2020

Seminar in 20th-Century Art: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2009, Fall 2008, Fall 2007

Seminar in 20th-Century Painting and Sculpture: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
This seminar focuses on artworks made by migrating peoples chronicling their journeys (Hmong storycloths, Aztec codices), and artworks made by others who made migration a major theme (Dorothea Lange photographer of dustbowl migrants to California, Jacob Lawrence chronicler of the migration north of African Americans). Also, we focus on the arts of traditional communities that base their artifact production on longstanding, ecologically localized and distinctive practices. Issues include nostalgia, memory, trauma; cultural heritage the selection of what is to be seen, remembered, recoiled from, embraced, what is to be taught to future generations/outsiders concerning fear, courage, pride, self-definitions, accusations, and authenticity.
The Arts of Migration, Vernacular Arts: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2020, Fall 2018

Seminar in American Art: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024
Topics explore themes and problems, often reflect current research interests of the instructor, and supplement regular curricular offerings. Detailed descriptions of current and future offerings available in 416 Doe Library.
Special Topics in Fields of Art History: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2019
This course explores site-specific themes, topics, and problems, reflects current research interests of the instructor(s), and suppplements regular curricular offerings. Detailed descriptions of current and (where known) future offerings available in 416 Doe Library.
Judith Stronach Graduate Travel Seminar in Art History: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2018, Fall 2017, Spring 2017
Independent study open to qualified students directly engaged upon the doctoral dissertation.
Directed Dissertation Research: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2021, Spring 2020
Directed group discussion for graduate students, focused on selected books, articles, problems, primary sources, and/or works of art. Usually but not necessarily offered as preparation for a travel seminar or other supervised fieldwork.
Group Study for Graduate Students in the History of Art: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2023, Fall 2019

Special Study for Graduate Students in the History of Art: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2023
Weekly meetings with the instructor to discuss the methods and aims of the course, to plan the content and presentation of the material for the discussion sections, and to set standards and criteria for grading and commenting upon papers and exams. In addition, after visiting sections early in the semester, the instructor will discuss with each GSI individually his or her performance and make any necessary recommendations for improvement.
Supervised Teaching of History of Art: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2021
This pedagogical seminar introduces graduate students to methods and theories of teaching history of art. The course has two primary goals: (1) to train new graduate student instructors to assist in teaching History of Art classes at UCB; and (2) to introduce students to techniques of designing and teaching their own classes. The seminar may be taken concurrently with the first teaching assignment or in the semester before beginning teaching.
Seminar in History of Art Teaching: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2023
Individual study in consultation with the graduate adviser.
Individual Study for Master's Students in the History of Art: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
Individual study, in consultation with the graduate adviser, intended to provide an opportunity for qualified students to prepare themselves for the various examinations required of candidates for the Ph.D. degree.
Individual Study for Doctoral Students in the History of Art: Read More [+]