Please note that room locations and schedules are subject to change and all details should be confirmed from Minerva Class Schedule Listings before the start of the class.
Fall 2026
ARTH 600 (CRN 1663)
Advanced Professional Seminar: Art, Nature & Materiality (3 credits)
Prof. Chriscinda Henry
Mondays, 11:35pm-2:25pm, Arts W-220
Art historians have paid heightened attention to the natural world, embodied knowledge practices, and ecological approaches to the study of art, architecture, and material culture over recent decades. This iteration of the graduate pro-seminar addresses the resulting scholarship and its connections to the so-called “material turn” in Art History, and investigates the new materialist, object, and process-centered approaches that have become central to the practice of art history. While the weekly topics and readings for this course focus on the historiography of the western tradition from the ancient through early modern periods, students are encouraged to pursue research projects related to their own areas of interest and specialization. The material turn has been impactful across Art History and is nothing new to histories of Indigenous art based in traditional ways of place-based knowing and making that are deeply connected to land and ecology. On a practical level, the pro-seminar also provides an orientation to the discipline and to the department, emphasizing key skills and issues of professionalization. Two sessions will be dedicated to the essential art of project development and grant writing, preparing you for specific funding applications. As the semester progresses, we will also discuss research methods, conference participation, publication strategies, career opportunities, and essential resources for success in the field.
ARTH 618 (CRN 1664)
Art History - 1400-1900 1: Affective Matter: Materiality in Premodern Chinese Art (3 credits)
Prof. Jeehee Hong
Thursdays, 11:35pm-2:25pm, Arts W-220
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 to 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 of responding to technical and ecological conditions, as well as 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 the dynamic roles of the matter as active participants in the image-making process that goes beyond stylistic or iconographical dimensions.
ARTH 654 (CRN 1667)
Topics: Early Modern Visual Culture 2 (3 credits)
Making Worlds: Global Mobility, Invention, and Catastrophe in the Early Modern Period
Prof. Angela Vanhaelen
Wednesdays, 11:35pm-2:25pm, Arts W-220
This seminar assesses the realignment of art, labour, and global capitalism during a period of systemic change (ca. 1492-1700). The transition from feudalism to capitalism precipitated new divisions of labour as the muscle power of humans and animals was deemed essential to the accumulation of profits. While we will consider the proto-industrial exploitation of bodies, we also will approach labour as invention, especially focusing on the often-overlooked contributions made by Indigenous, Black, and female workers. The theoretical approach accordingly will take up questions raised by decolonial, anti-racist, feminist, Marxist, and ecocritical methods, and be attentive to conflicting and oppositional practices of world making.
ARTH 725 (CRN 1672)
Methods in Art History 1 (3 credits)
Buddhist Modernism
Prof Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol
Tuesdays, 11:35pm-2:25pm, FERR 230
Among the world religions, Buddhism is often claimed to be uniquely compatible with science, rationalism, and secular modernity. The seminar investigates how this narrative of “Buddhist modernism” was constructed, with particular attention to the exorcism of the supernatural and animistic from image practices. We will trace this reformation of the image not only through a critical history of Buddhism since the nineteenth century, but also through the emergence of modern art and art history as discursive fields premised on the purification of artistic media from unruly mediumship. Our case studies will center on Siam-Thailand, a polity that, despite escaping formal European colonization, reproduced imperial taxonomies through its own programs of internal colonization. Throughout, we will ask how the categories of art and religion came to take root, and what comes into view when we consider practices that trouble those distinctions.
Winter 2027
ARTH 501 (CRN 1150)
Advanced Topics in Art History and Visual Culture (3 credits)
Modern and Contemporary Thai Art
Prof Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol
Fridays, 2:35pm-5:25pm, FERR 230
In anticipation of the opening of the National Art Gallery, Thailand, this seminar will explore new areas of scholarship related to modern and contemporary Thai art. Departing from dominant concerns around style and social movements, we will consider an expanded empirical and theoretical matrix. This will include an exploration of the relationship of Thai art to such fields as the history of Chinese trade painting, fascist neo-classicism, Buddhist pan-Asianism, and global cities. Our focus will be on object-oriented inquiry, with the aim of generating new directions in art historical research and exhibition making that can inform future museum programs.
ARTH 645 (CRN 1152)
Medieval Art and Archaeology (3 credits)
Art Between Empires: The Making of Inter-Imperial Worlds
Prof Cecily Hilsdale
Wednesdays, 2:35pm-5:25pm, Arts W-220
This seminar offers a cross-cultural and diachronic perspective on the visual dimension of empire building. Artistic production was shaped by overlapping claims to sovereignty across Rome, Persia, Byzantium, and the Islamic caliphates, among other imperial formations. Within this broad and varied arena, and through the close study of monuments, portable objects, and primary sources, this seminar asks how artistic production navigates competing histories and claims to legitimacy, making visible relationships of power and their contingency. Literary scholar Laura Doyle’s framework of “inter-imperiality” will serve as our methodological point of departure. Doyle reads empires as relational rather than autonomous, co-emerging through ongoing dynamics of rivalry, emulation, and asymmetrical exchange across the globe and over the longue durée. Approaching the art of empire through an inter-imperial lens is especially productive for art historians because it shifts attention away from fixed or bounded traditions toward the interactions through which imperial cultures crystalized. It enables us to see claims to universality and their systems of representation not as self-contained expressions of power but as products of cultural encounter. Throughout the seminar, we will consider how works of art simultaneously asserted difference and articulated shared visual languages, revealing the imperial imagination itself to be fundamentally relational, contested, and historically contingent.
ARTH 724 (CRN 1157)
Art Criticism 2 (3 credits)
Contemporary Art’s Historical Past
Prof. Reilley Bishop-Stall
Tuesdays, 11:35am-2:25pm, Arts 385
Archival research is integral to the field of art history. Access to and management of archival collections, their organization and evolution, their political affiliations, and their spatial and temporal orientations are the subject of critical inquiry by philosophers, artists, communities and cultural groups. Archives are both physical repositories and conceptual entities and they are linked not only to the arts and museum sectors, but to government, educational, research and judicial institutions. The control and management of archival collections and the power to grant or deny access to their holdings is a common subject of critique. This course will examine some of the most pressing theoretical and ethical questions concerning archives and archival studies from exclusionary practices to issues of visibility and absence; from ambiguous acquisitions to the politics of deaccession and requests for repatriation/rematriation of materials. This student-led seminar will include analyses of key writing in the field, close examination of artists who make archives the subject of their work, and engagement with local and virtual collections.
ARTH 731 (CRN 1159)
Current Problems in Art History 2 (3 credits)
Global Indigenous Artists and the Archive
Prof. Gloria Bell
Tuesdays, 2:35-5:25pm, Arts W-220
This course will look at the power and sovereignty of Indigenous Artists across Turtle Island and the globe and engage in archival studies, material culture studies and memory studies.