HSAR 500a, First-Year Colloquium  Pamela Lee

The focus of the first-year colloquium is to analyze and critique the history of art history and its methodology from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The seminar discusses foundational texts as well as new methods relevant to the study of the history of art and architecture today, notably those concerned with issues of race, gender, and representation. It also engages with debates about museums and the ethics of collecting and display. The seminar is structured around selected readings and includes workshops with guest speakers. It also includes an option to conduct in-person research in the Yale University Art Gallery.
T 9:25am-11:15am

HSAR 506a, Teaching Art History  Jacqueline Jung

Directed seminar on pedagogy focused on the genre of the introductory lecture course in the history of art. Topics include how to teach visual analysis and close looking, how to encourage participation, grading and giving written feedback, and addressing student concerns and contingencies. By invitation of the instructor only.
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

HSAR 520a / EAST 512a / EMST 710a, Chinese Art Modernity  Quincy Ngan

This seminar uses the visual and material cultures of China to examine the notion of “modernity” and the relations among the “medieval,” “early modern,” and “modern” periods. By comparing these concepts with the historiographical frameworks of “Song-Yuan-Ming transition” and “late imperial China,” we will become familiar with the methodological concerns and contradictions that complicate these relativized temporal frameworks. Works by Craig Clunas, Jonathan Hay, and Wu Hung, along with the insights from historians, inform our discussions of Chinese prints, paintings, ceramics, and other decorative objects in the long-term development of global art history. This class is most suitable for graduate students who have background in Asian art history, the history of China, East Asian studies, or early modern studies.
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

HSAR 529b / AMST 630b / RLST 819b, Museums and Religion: The Politics of Preservation and Display  Sally Promey

This interdisciplinary seminar focuses on the tangled relations of religion and museums, historically and in the present. What does it mean to “exhibit religion” in the institutional context of the museum? What practices of display might one encounter for this subject? What kinds of museums most frequently invite religious display? How is religion suited (or not) for museum exhibition and museum education? Enrollment is by permission of the instructor; qualified undergraduates are not only welcome but also encouraged to join us. There are no set prerequisites, but, assuming available seats, permission is granted on the basis of response to three questions: Why do you wish to take this course? What relevant educational or professional background/experience do you bring to the course? How does the course help you to meet your own intellectual, artistic, or career aspirations?
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

HSAR 540a, The Decorative Threat  Joanna Fiduccia

“Decoration is the specter that haunts modern painting,” Clement Greenberg once claimed; it is modernism’s “symptomatic shadow,” wrote Peter Wollen. This course seeks to understand these statements by exploring the role of decoration in modernist aesthetics and modern ideology, in which the decorative was entangled with motifs of excess and desire, truth and deception, and gendered labor and space, along with Orientalist fantasies, bourgeois reveries, socialist aspirations, and metaphors for the interiority of the modern subject. Beginning with readings on the significance of ornamentation and decoration at the origins of modern art history, we examine the relationship between theories of modernism and the development of the decorative arts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The course concludes by considering the cultural and political legacies of the decorative threat in art and art history today. Readings include Alois Riegl, John Ruskin, Gottfried Semper, Theodor Adorno, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Gertrude Stein, Clement Greenberg, Caroline Arscott, Gülru Necipoğlu, Oleg Grabar, Peter Wollen, Rae Beth Gordon, Partha Mitter, Whitney Davis, Nancy Troy, Tag Gronberg, Anne Cheng.
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

HSAR 564a / ANTH 531a / CLSS 815a / EALL 773a / HIST 502a / JDST 653a / NELC 533a / RLST 803a, Archaia Seminar: Law and Society in China and Rome  Noel Lenski and Valerie Hansen

An introduction to the legal systems of the Roman and post-Roman states and Han- and Tang-dynasty China. Emphasis on developing collaborative partnerships that foster comparative history research. Readings in surviving law codes (in the original or English translation) and secondary studies on topics including slavery, trade, crime, and family. This course serves as an Archaia Core Seminar. It is connected with Archaia's Ancient Societies Workshop (ASW), which runs a series of events throughout the academic year related to the theme of the seminar. Students enrolled in the seminar must attend all ASW events during the semester in which the seminar is offered.
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

HSAR 593b / MDVL 593b, The Body in Medieval Art  Jacqueline Jung

This seminar explores the manifold approaches to the human body in the art and culture of medieval Europe (from ca. 500–ca. 1500 CE, though with an emphasis on the later end of the period). Through close consideration of works in various media—mediated to us through readings, digital images/renderings, and at least one excursion to a museum—we consider both the role represented bodies played in the social life and religious imagination of medieval communities and the implications such representations had for beholders’ sense of their own embodied status. Reading knowledge of French and German is highly recommended but not required.
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

HSAR 605a, Russian Realist Literature and Painting  Molly Brunson

An interdisciplinary examination of the development of nineteenth-century Russian realism in literature and the visual arts. Topics include the Natural School and the formulation of a realist aesthetic; the artistic strategies and polemics of critical realism; narrative, genre, and the rise of the novel; the Wanderers and the articulation of a Russian school of painting; realism, modernism, and the challenges of periodization. Readings include novels, short stories, and critical works by Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Goncharov, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and others. Painters of focus include Fedotov, Perov, Shishkin, Repin, and Kramskoy. Special attention is given to the particular methodological demands of inter-art analysis.
W 9:25am-11:15am

HSAR 613a / ARCH 3110a, Architecture and Print: Techniques, Formats, Methods  Craig Buckley

Architectural culture is unthinkable without the medium of print. Indeed, today architecture is printed in more and different ways than ever before. At the same time, we live at a moment when the demise of print is routinely proclaimed. Against the grain of such claims, this seminar highlights the specificity of print within the broad and multimodal communication landscape in which architects have operated. This research seminar introduces students to some of the key formats and techniques operative across 250 years of architectural publishing, beginning in the eighteenth century and continuing to the 1970s. The seminar investigates various approaches to the relationship between print history and architectural culture and asks students to develop their own approaches through the close examination of printed matter. The goal is to think critically about what role changing techniques and formats of printing played in the emergence of new concepts within architectural culture and new publics concerned with the built environment. The seminar also invites students to consider how the study of printed media might open new conceptual and material approaches to design culture today, together with new methodologies for engaging architectural history. The seminar is conducted as a semester-long course using special collections at the Beinecke Library, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Haas Library, among others. Due to collections usage, this class is capped at ten students. Priority is given to students in Ph.D. programs in the History of Art and the School of Architecture.
Th 9:25am-11:15am

HSAR 615a / EAST 514a, Mapping and Translating Spaces, Cultures, and Languages (1500–1700)  Angelo Cattaneo

This course combines the methods of history with those of linguistics and translation studies to promote an innovative interdisciplinary analysis of the processes of cultural (mis)communication and (mis)translation among communities across the Iberian Empires and Royal Patronages between 1500 and 1700. This course has three main objectives: 1) mapping the emergence of multilingual communities in early modernity involving cultures and languages that were previously unknown in Europe; (2) drawing up a comprehensive typological catalogue of overlooked, dispersed metalinguistic and multilingual sources (reports, letters, Christian doctrines, maps, word lists, lexicons, grammars, visual material which described linguistic practices and\or display bilingual or three-lingual evidence) produced mostly in missionary contexts; and (3) within this broad “horizontal” survey, highlighting specific area studies to carry out an in-depth “vertical” comparative analysis of cultural-linguistic contacts and translations in America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia, specifically chosen because they were paradigmatic, coeval, and sometimes antithetical cases detailing the different shades of cultural translations in colonial, imperial, and missionary contexts. The integration of two working strategies—the extensive typological mapping of intercultural multilingual sources and the analysis of case studies—allows us to undertake a comparative analysis of the processes related to the learning, imposing or rejection of cultures and languages in the “troubled pasts” of missionary and colonial contexts. The course aims to document the largest possible corpora of translations in early modernity and offers new ideas on the relevance of linguistic and cultural interactions and on our multicultural and multilingual “troubled present.” Participants also have the opportunity to analyze a selection of historical multilingual and metalinguistic documents (dictionaries, grammars, doctrines, maps) in the John Carter Brown Library collections, in Providence, RI, to discover how these documents have variously embodied cultural lenses, religious beliefs, and political concerns.
W 3:30pm-5:20pm

HSAR 620a / EMST 720a, The Mind of the Book  Marisa Bass

This seminar offers an art-historical approach to the early modern book from the dawn of the printing press through the seventeenth century. We cover the interrelation of manuscript and print, collaborations among publishers, authors, and artists, and major early modern genres of visual and intellectual production (such as emblem books, natural history treatises, and cartographic atlases). Topics include the role of frontispieces, paratexts, illustration, annotation, and the idea of the book as a “body” of thought. All meetings are in Beinecke Library and centered on close firsthand study of the books themselves. The focus is on early modern Europe, but students are welcome to pursue research topics on early modern books from any cultural sphere.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

HSAR 639a / CLSS 846a, Approaching Sacred Space: Places, Buildings, and Bodies in Ancient Italy  Alexander Ekserdjian

This graduate-level seminar approaches sacred space in ancient Italy (ca. 500 BCE–100 CE) from several evidential and methodological perspectives. The class probes how different kinds of sacred artifacts (places, buildings, and bodies) textured ritual space, forming its recognizable character then and now. While assessing the available evidence (material, literary, epigraphic) for each of these categories, we devote time to untangling the ways that modern scholars and Roman authors have written about ancient holy places. The emphasis on “approach” also provides an avenue to begin to reconstruct the lived experiences of sacred space, moving from the realia of locations, structures, and objects to the possible responses of ancient people.
Th 9:25am-11:15am

HSAR 660a, Writing the Object, Writing the World  Jennifer Raab

What does it look like to place an object at the center of inquiry, to develop modes of narration that revolve around and evolve with that object, to write history from a visual and material nexus? This course explores the paradigm and possibilities of crafting a text focused on a single object. We spend the first part of the course reading such texts (books, essays, articles) to think about method, voice, and structure. We consider ekphrasis and description, archives and ghosts, fabulation and biography, history and ethics. The second part of the course is devoted to developing student projects, research practices, and object-centered writing, with workshops of paper proposals and drafts, as well as final presentations, enabling ample feedback and emphasizing constructive, collaborative discussion and critique. This course is open to all humanities Ph.D. students whose work foregrounds objects, whether in history of art or in allied fields. Those who are already undertaking dissertation work (and are still in residence) are also considered. Instructor permission required.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

HSAR 668b / ENGL 979b / FREN 668b, Ekphrasis and Art Criticism  Carol Armstrong

Ekphrasis in its ancient Greek sense refers to the vivid description of an object, animal, person, place, scene, or event undertaken as an exercise in oral rhetoric. In that original context, the practice of ekphrasis was meant to “paint” a picture in the mind of the listener, and thus pointed to both the imagistic capacities of verbal language, and the integral link between the image and the imagination. In the twentieth century, ekphrasis acquired a narrower meaning: poetry addressed to or modeled on works of visual art. While informed by both of those understandings, this seminar considers ekphrasis both more broadly, in terms of genre, and more narrowly, in relation to a partial history of art criticism as a modern form of writing in the anglophone and European worlds, with a focus on the eighteenth through the twentieth century. It treats the different writerly modes now understood to be embraced by the term ekphrasis: not only poetry, but also the prose poem and the novel, as well as the Salon and art review. It also touches on such issues as the Renaissance inversion of the phrase ut pictura poesis; the competition between the arts of word and image; the presence or absence of illustrations; the modern relations between genres and mediums and the question of mediation; and the address of the different arts to the subjectivity of the reader/spectator. In addition to weekly presentations, a short preliminary paper, and a final research paper, students organize and contribute to a workshop on ekphrasis based on their own ekphrastic exercises, undertaken in the Yale Art Gallery. (Some class time is devoted to those exercises.) This seminar is the second of two (the first is HSAR 667); our hope is that students from both seminars will collaborate on this final event.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

HSAR 670a, Karkhana: Process and Collaboration  Kishwar Rizvi

Karkhana, or workshop, is a collaborative seminar that considers how we think, write, and make in community. As we study historical and theoretical texts on drawings and buildings, as well as sketching and maintaining a palimpsest drawing over the course of the semester, the aim of the course is to consider how embodied practice affects cultural production. A second aim is to consider how the collaborative process may render new explorations in how one writes/makes and for whom.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

HSAR 714a, Globalization of Modern Craft  Edward Cooke

This seminar explores the development of self-conscious craft in the condition of modernity. Emerging from the work of the English designer-writer William Morris, modern craft has been intertwined with issues of identity (national and personal), class, and politics. Its intellectual foundation in the writings of Morris has also permitted modern craft to spread throughout the globe, taking root in different ways and at different times. The seminar investigates this geographic and temporal spread in a comparative fashion.
W 9:25am-11:15am

HSAR 720a / AMST 805a / RLST 699a / WGSS 779a, Sensational Materialities: Sensory Cultures in History, Theory, and Method  Sally Promey

This interdisciplinary seminar explores the sensory and material histories of (often religious) images, objects, buildings, and performances as well as the potential for the senses to spark contention in material practice. With a focus on American things and religions, the course also considers broader geographical and categorical parameters so as to invite intellectual engagement with the most challenging and decisive developments in relevant fields, including recent literatures on material agencies. The goal is to investigate possibilities for scholarly examination of a robust human sensorium of sound, taste, touch, scent, and sight—and even “sixth senses”—the points where the senses meet material things (and vice versa) in life and practice. Topics include the cultural construction of the senses and sensory hierarchies; investigation of the sensory capacities of things; and specific episodes of sensory contention in and among various religious traditions. In addition, the course invites thinking beyond the “Western” five senses to other locations and historical possibilities for identifying the dynamics of sensing human bodies in religious practices, experience, and ideas. The Sensory Cultures of Religion Research Group meets approximately once per month at 7 p.m. on Tuesdays; class participants are strongly encouraged, but not required, to attend. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor; qualified undergraduates are not only welcome but encouraged to join us. There are no set prerequisites, but, assuming available seats, permission will be granted on the basis of response to three questions: Why do you wish to take this course? What relevant educational or professional background/experience do you bring to the course? How does the course help you to meet your own intellectual, artistic, or career aspirations?
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

HSAR 764a / EMST 744a, Advanced Topics in Italian Renaissance Art  Morgan Ng

This seminar explores recent scholarship on Italian visual culture and architecture, c. 1400–1600. Potential themes include the relationship between art and the environment; transmedial approaches that exceed conventional definitions of painting, sculpture, and architecture; artistic production, patronage, and reception in relation to dynamics of gender, race, labor, and class; the movement of artists and materials; and expanding notions of artistic geography both within and beyond the peninsula. While sessions focus on secondary literature from recent decades, they also put newer scholarship in dialogue with longer historiographic traditions and primary sources. The course is a chance for graduate students not only to inform themselves about trends in the field but also to debate and situate their own voices in relation to them.
F 1:30pm-3:20pm

HSAR 814b, Japan’s Global Baroque  Mimi Yiengpruksawan

The intersection of art, science, and diplomacy at Kyoto and Nagasaki in the time of Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch cultural and mercantile interaction in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with attention to the entangled political relations linking the shogun Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Philip II of Spain, Jesuit missionaries such as Alessandro Valignano, and the Christian daimyō of Kyushu and the Inland Sea. Focus on Japanese castle architecture, nanban screens, world maps, arte sacra, and tea ceremony practices as related to the importation of European arte sacra, prints and drawings, scientific instruments, and world atlases such as Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. Includes inquiry into back-formations such as “baroque” and “global” to describe and/or interpret sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cultural productions.
W 9:25am-11:15am

HSAR 841a and HSAR 842b / ANTH 963a and ANTH 964b / HIST 963a and HIST 964b / HSHM 691a and HSHM 692b, Topics in the Environmental Humanities  Staff

This is the required workshop for the Graduate Certificate in Environmental Humanities. The workshop meets six times per term to explore concepts, methods, and pedagogy in the environmental humanities, and to share student and faculty research. Each student pursuing the Graduate Certificate in Environmental Humanities must complete both a fall term and a spring term of the workshop, but the two terms of student participation need not be consecutive. The fall term each year emphasizes key concepts and major intellectual currents. The spring term each year emphasizes pedagogy, methods, and public practice. Specific topics vary each year. Students who have previously enrolled in the course may audit the course in a subsequent year. This course does not count toward the coursework requirement in history. Open only to students pursuing the Graduate Certificate in Environmental Humanities.  ½ Course cr per term
M 11:30am-1:20pm