Please note that room locations and schedules are subject to change and all details should be confirmed before the start of the class.
Fall 2025
ARTH 502 (CRN 1727)
Prof. Matthew Hunter
Tuesdays, 11:35am-2:25pm, Arts W-220
The Artistic Family: Critical Perspectives
From the brothers Carracci to Kiki Smith, many artists have been siblings, children or otherwise related to other artists. “Brotherhood” has denoted many artists’ collectives; the conceit that the work of art is the maker’s “child” has been massaged for rhetorical effect since classical antiquity. This seminar asks questions such as: should the family be seen as a construct either invented or hopelessly compromised by heteronormative patriarchy? Might kin be queered or otherwise restructured to afford insights into practices and practitioners otherwise invisible? Drawing upon feminist, Black, queer, Indigenous, and other perspectives, this seminar aims to explore the possibilities, limitations, and entailments of the artistic family for knowledge-making in art history and beyond.
ARTH 600 (CRN 1728)
Tuesdays, 2:35pm-5:25pm, Ferrier 230
Prof. Chriscinda Henry
Advanced Pro-Seminar: Art History Today
This graduate pro-seminar introduces key concepts and practices of art history through guided discussions of issues, ideas, and trends central to the current practice of the discipline and its historical formation. Class sessions will be led by McGill faculty members from AHCS as well as museum professionals who will address critical questions and debates in the field. Providing orientation to the field and to the department, this course also emphasizes key skills and issues of professionalization. One week will be dedicated to the essential art of grant writing, preparing you for specific funding applications. As the semester progresses, we will also discuss research methods, career opportunities, conference participation, publication strategies, and essential resources for success in the field.
ARTH 618/EAST 503 (CRN 1729)
Prof. Jeehee Hong
Thursdays, 11:35am-2:25pm, Arts W-220
Matters of Nature and Hand: Materiality in Premodern Chinese Art
One of the most persistent challenges in approaching the classical art of China derives from the modern viewer’s tendency to divorce the image from its material components and their workings in the creation process. Reduced as the static aesthetic field of form, style, and/or motif, the image's material roots are often taken for granted as if they simply existed, awaiting and ready to be used by the image-maker. The artist's creating hand, however, is always commanded by the materiality of matters, be it bronze, jade, wood, stone, gold, lacquer, clay, paper, silk, ink, or water.
This seminar surveys some of the most fundamental matters and substances recognized, adopted, and maneuvered by image-makers in traditional China. We will pay close attention to each material's specific ways to respond to technical and ecological conditions, as well social contexts in specific moments of history. By encouraging organic relations between the matter, the maker's hand, and the materialization of their workings, the seminar provides a venue for exploring dynamic roles of the matter as active participants in the image-making that goes beyond the stylistic or iconographical dimensions.
ARTH 645 (CRN 1731)
Prof. Cecily Hilsdale
Wednesdays, 11:35am-2:25pm, Arts W-220
Treasure
In The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages (2018), François-Xavier Fauvelle defines treasure as “what remains when everything else has disappeared.” This insight prompts us to think more critically about the survival of material fragments of empires long gone, and to remind us that treasure fundamentally indexes power: Who inherited, lost, or buried it? Who claimed, discovered, or stole it?
This seminar pursues these questions by focusing on treasure as a category of object whose rarity and value contributed to its likely loss—to be plundered, liquidated, or buried for safekeeping. In this way, treasure exposes a tension between intrinsic and extrinsic value: that is, between bullion potential and historical significance or heirlooms to be guarded and passed down through generations as inalienable possessions. Whenever a treasure is discovered today it is a poignant reminder of failure: whoever buried it was unable to retrieve it.
In this seminar we will look at late antique and medieval buried treasures and their discovery, dissemination (licit and illicit), and repatriation (demanded and sometimes realized). We will also consider key “treasuries” that served as repositories for both wealth that could be liquidated easily (gold and silver ars sacra) and also less convertible curiosities that index global flow of coveted materials and traditions (unicorn horns, ostrich eggs, coconuts). More theoretically, we will think about the conditions of visibility and invisibility and address questions of alienation and patrimony.
Although a basic understanding of ancient and medieval art is desirable, this seminar is intended for all graduate students invested in theorizing objecthood, possession, and patrimony.
The Traprain Law treasure (Photo: National Museums Scotland)
Winter 2026