Fall 2011
ARTH 600 Advanced Pro-Seminar (CRN 3400)
Prof. Vanhaelen, W, 1135-1425, Arts W-220.
This advanced pro-seminar introduces art historical methodologies and historiographies. Each session will be led by a different faculty member and will address critical debates in the field. These sessions will focus on issues, ideas, and trends central to the current practice of the discipline and its historical formation.
As an orientation both to the field and to the department, two sessions are devoted to professionalization issues. Week three (Sept 21) is dedicated to grant writing and will prepare students for specific funding applications, with an emphasis on the SSHRC grant. Students will draft research statements according to the SSHRC guidelines, which will then undergo peer review in class (further details will be given in advance of the session). In week 10, we will explore the futures of Art History from a professional standpoint. We will discuss career opportunities, conference participation, publication strategies, and we will also go over key resources for the field.
At its core this seminar is intended to prepare students for a productive and engaged graduate career. Three key skills, all central to advanced art historical research, will be developed:
I. Close and careful reading and analysis. For every assigned reading it is essential to consider how the author constructs an argument. What kind of evidence is being marshaled and in support of what larger claim? What are the broader implications of the text and where and how are they being articulated? In order to hone your reading and writing skills, you are asked to respond in writing to the assigned reading on a regular basis.
II. Clear and critical written exposition. This is a writing intensive seminar. In addition to the grant proposal, students will produce two critical essays in response to departmental lectures and a final paper due at the end of the seminar on December 7th
III. Confident oral participation and presentation skills. Oral participation in every class is mandatory. Come to class with views, opinions, points for discussion and questions about the sources used.
As in most graduate seminars, students will lead a research presentation in advance of the final paper. Student presentations are scheduled for the last 2 classes of the semester, Nov 23 & 30.
ARTH 606 Research Paper Preparation (CRN 7027)
ARTH 608 Research Paper 1 (CRN 8957) (6 credits)
ARTH 630 Directed Reading 1 (CRN 5256)
Advisor approval required.
ARTH 661 Contemporary Art&Criticism 2 "Perception as Something We Do: Recent Approaches to Spectatorship in Contemporary Art and Art History" (CRN 12261)
Prof. Ross, T, 1135-1425, Arts W-220.
The seminar will be confronting four pivotal, relatively recent publications dealing with questions of vision and visuality in art history and visual studies: Jessica Evans & Stuart Hall, eds., Visual Culture: A Reader (London: Sage Publications, 1999), W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), and Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), with a special emphasis on Whitney Davis’s A General Theory of Visual Culture (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011). The main objective of the seminar is to bridge spectatorship studies elaborated in different fields—art history, philosophy of the mind and cognitive science— , while investigating their productivity in assessing mobile forms of spectatorship in contemporary installation/environment/mixed-reality art. Special focus will be given to: (1) the establishment of perceptual models that complicate the understanding of installational/environmental media spectatorship, through the exploration of “extended” and “enactive” cognitive approaches to perceptual experience; (2) the empirical understanding of these models in relation to specific case studies; and (3) the connecting of cognitive enquiries with “visual culture” enquiries, assuming that media arts and art history are major actors in the overall questioning of pure vision and considering that the cultural dimension of perception is not accounted for in cognitive science.
ARTH 678 Topics:19th-C Art&Architec 2 "'Sun and Sea': The Visual Culture of Natural Therapeutics, c.1860-1940" (CRN 13948)
T. Woloshyn, M, 1135-1425, Arts W-5.
This course will explore visual representations of health and hygiene, invalidism and convalescence, as pursued and experienced through natural means, c.1860-1940. Readings and weekly classes will focus on a diverse yet interconnected array of topics, including notions of 'healthy' or therapeutic landscapes, health and sunlight, physical culture, racial health and Eugenics, health tourism, and advertisements of natural remedies. While primarily concentrating on western European cases, the course will also discuss practices and representations within North America and colonized 'exotic' spaces. In doing so it will investigate shared perceptions amongst international networks of modern artists, physicians and tourists in the aesthetic and therapeutic powers of nature - in air, light and water - during a period of enormous technological innovation and change. The course opens up discussions about intersections between the history of modern art and the history of modern medicine, with both theoretical and practical, professional aims in mind: as part of the assessment, the graduate student will design his/her own exhibition, pitching a relevant topic that will require the student not only to write an exhibition guide/essay but also to present plans for the selection and display of its visual material, from the Osler Library for the History of Medicine. The Osler possesses a rich collection of visual material on a vast array of subjects in the history of medicine, and much of the course will be spent discovering and researching the library's books, images and ephemera.
ARTH 701 Ph.D. Comprehensive Exam (CRN 3402)
ARTH 730 course description not available "Self and Other in Chinese Pictorial Art" (CRN 13949)
Prof. Lidu Yi, M, 1435-1725, Arts W-220.
Winter 2012
ARTH 607 Research Paper Proposal (CRN 7305)
ARTH 609 Research Paper 2 (CRN 8029)
ARTH 630 Directed Reading 1 (CRN 7429)
Advisor's approval required.
ARTH 645 Medieval Art and Archaeology "Visual Cultures of the Medieval Mediterranean." (CRN 10919)
Prof. Hilsdale, M, 1435-1725, Arts W-220.
ARTH 646 Topics:Chinese Visual Culture "Beliefs made Visible: Arts in Buddhist Temples and Caves" (CRN 10266)
Prof. Lidu Yi, W, 1435-1725, Arts W-220.
ARTH 658 course description not available (CRN 10268)
Prof. Nelson, TH, 1135-1425, Arts W-220.
ARTH 660 Contemporary Art&Criticism 1 "Identity and Visual Representation" (CRN 8146)
Prof. Jones, T, 1135-1425, Arts W-220.
Tentative description: this graduate seminar explores the charged relationship between identity and visual representation by focusing on three aspects:
1. the way in which objects and images considered works of art in Euro-American culture have, since the Renaissance, been understood to stand in for "identities" (usually, the subject of the artist, sometimes a patron, or a person depicted or sculpted in the piece); we will explore the differences among visual media in terms of these beliefs about identity
2. the way in which we form beliefs about identity through visuality (for example, the idea that race or gender is “visible” as rendered on and through the body); we will look at works by artists and filmmakers commenting on this belief in visibility
3. the impact of identity politics in the post-WWII period on the making, displaying, circulation, and interpretation of works of art.
ARTH 673 course description not available "Liquid Intelligence: Thinking the Watery Image in the Long Eighteenth Century" (CRN 8868)
Prof. Matthew Hunter, F, 1135-1425, Arts W-5.
In an influential essay, contemporary artist Jeff Wall has sketched a suggestive genealogy linking chemical photography to a range of wet, atavistic processes and their modes of “liquid intelligence.” Using Wall’s model as point of departure, this seminar explores how liquid intelligence might be expanded and deployed as a broader category of art-historical investigation. What, we will ask, can be revealed by applying the analytical solvent of liquid intelligence to an expanded field of visual production? How might doing so enable us to reciprocally reconsider relations between photography and other visual media? Drawing upon a rangeof theoretical perspectives, novels and film, this seminar takes its focus from artists and visual practitioners of the early modern period and long eighteenth century (possibly including Leonardo, Cellini, Hooke, Rembrandt, Reynolds, Turner, Fox Talbot, Courbet, and Whistler) who engage significantly with the problematic of making and thinking watery images. We will also consider their work in light of historical dynamics of maritime empire, the sciences of water (geology, chemistry, fluidmechanics among others) and shifting conceptions of intellectual liquidity itself.
ARTH 701 Ph.D. Comprehensive Exam (CRN 2935)
Instructor's approval required.