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 2025
ARTH 600
Advanced Professional Seminar
Prof. Chriscinda Henry
Tuesdays, 2:35pm-5:25pm
ARTH 618
Matters of Nature and Hand: Materiality in Premodern Chinese Art
Prof. Jeehee Hong
Thursdays, 11:35pm-2:25pm
ARTH 645
Medieval Art and Archaeology - Treasures
Prof. Cecily Hilsdale
Thursdays, 11:35pm-2:25pm
Winter 2026
ARTH 653 (CRN 1150)
Topics: Early Modern Visual Culture 1 (3 credits)
Making Worlds: Global Mobility, Invention, and Catastrophe in the Early Modern Period
Prof. Angela Vanhaelen
Fridays, 2:35pm-5:25pm
This seminar assesses the intersections of global mobility, planetary crisis, and artistic invention before the advent of the modern era (ca 1492-1700). We will investigate how the escalation of global capitalism, colonization, extraction, and exploitation generated innovative forms of art that were simultaneously creative and destructive. The focus of the class will be on worldmaking and the role of visual imagery, built environments, and material culture that advanced new understandings of the world as a human-made invention. We will take up questions raised by decolonial, anti-racist, and ecocritical approaches to art and art history and be attentive to conflicting and oppositional worldviews.
Potential research topics include (but are not limited to):
· in-between spaces: the sea, gardens, plantations, ports, markets, coastal areas, ships, menageries, curiosity collections, utopias, heterotopias
· extraction: mining, quarrying, fishing, logging, hunting, monocropping
· labour: practices of enslavement and exploitation, colonialism and anticolonialism, patronage systems, resistance, opposition, and rebellion
· Indigenous knowledges and lifeways
· visual and material forms that embody, employ, or contribute to transformation, degradation and/or renewal
· phenomena that challenge human experience: mountains, waterfalls, ice, caves, storms, forests, rainbows, earthquakes, etc., and aesthetic responses (wonder, horror, the sublime)
· tools, processes, technologies, media, and systems of managing, transforming, collecting, and classifying materials, animals, plants, artifacts, and ‘curiosities’
· transportation, transplantation, and commodification: people, animals, insects, birds, trees, plants, waters, minerals, rocks, soil, etc.
ARTH 675 (CRN 1151)
Methods in Art History 1 (3 credits)
Contemporary Art’s Historical Past
Prof. Mary Hunter
Wednesdays, 11:35am-2:25pm
This seminar will explore how contemporary artists have engaged with historical artworks. By examining how artists have looked to art historical precedents for centuries, this course will question the concepts of artistic ‘progress’, ‘influence’ and ‘movements’. The first half of the course will analyze art from the 1870s to the present, with a focus on how current artists have embraced or critiqued works by key figures in late nineteenth-century French art (the so-called ‘modern masters’). The second half will take a broader approach by encouraging students to look at how artworks from their area of expertise (the focus of their MA or PhD projects) have informed contemporary practice, or for those studying contemporary art, how living artists have turned to specific artists, artworks or styles from the past.
ARTH 725 (CRN 1155)
Methods in Art History 1 (3 credits)
Archives, Ethics, and Inquiry
Prof Reilley Bishop-Stall
Tuesdays, 11:35-2:25pm
The field of art is dependent upon the existence of and engagement with archives. 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.
Deanna Bowen, installation view of Abolition in Black Drones in the Hive, 2020. Inkjet prints on archival paper. Courtesy of the artist and the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. Photo: Toni Hafkensheid.