For up to the minute changes, please refer to the Registrar's course page.
AAS 411/ART 471/AFS 411Art, Apartheid, and South Africa(LA)Apartheid, the political doctrine of separation of races in South Africa (1948-1990), dominated the (South) African political discourse in the second half of the 20th century. While it lasted, art and visual cultures were marshaled in the defense and contestation of its ideologies. Since the end of Apartheid, artists, filmmakers, dramatists, and scholars continue to reexamine the legacies of Apartheid, and the social, philosophical, and political conditions of non-racialized South Africa. Course readings examine issues of race, nationalism and politics, art and visual culture, and social memory in South Africa.Chika O. Okeke-Agulu
ARC 549/ART 586History and Theories of Architecture: 20th CenturyAn overview of the major themes running through the various strands of modern architecture in the twentieth century. While overarching in scope, the seminar is based on a close reading of selected buildings and texts by prominent figures of the modern movement and its aftermath. Special emphasis is given to the historiography and history of reception of modern architecture, as well as the cultural, aesthetic and scientific theories that have informed contemporary architectural debates, including organicism, vitalism, functionalism, historicism and their opposites.Spyridon Papapetros
ARC 571/ART 581Research in ArchitectureThis advanced pro-seminar explores architectural research techniques through collaborative investigation of a specific issue facing the field. Rather than study research methods in the abstract, students are asked to actively carry out detailed research in teams and reflect upon its limits and potentials. The research project of each semester is carried through to realization in the form of a book, a conference, or an exhibition organized by the students in subsequent semesters.Beatriz Colomina
ART 100Introduction to the History of Art: Ancient to Medieval(LA)An introduction to art and architecture from Antiquity to the late Middle Ages, including non-Western traditions. The course gives an overview of key monuments and works of art from diverse historical periods, regions, and cultures and introduces students to the basic interpretative tools of art historical research as well as to the history of the discipline.Christina T. Halperin
ART 102An Introduction to the History of Architecture(LA)A survey of architectural history in the west, from ancient Egypt to 20th-century America, stressing a critical approach to architecture through the analysis of context, expressive content, function, structure, style, building technology, and theory. Discussion will focus on key monuments and readings that have shaped the history of architecture.Daniel R. McReynolds
ART 206/HLS 206Byzantine Art and Architecture(LA)This course introduces the student to the art of the Byzantine Empire and its aftermath from ca. 800 to ca. 1600. Byzantine art has often been opposed to the traditions of western naturalism, and as such has been an undervalued or little known adjunct to the story of medieval art. In order to develop a more sophisticated understanding of our visual evidence, this course will stress the function of this art within the broader setting of this society. Art theory, the notions of empire and holiness, the burdens of the past and the realities of contemporary praxis will be brought to bear upon our various analyses of material from all media.Charles E. Barber
ART 210Italian Renaissance Painting and Sculpture(LA)Lectures will examine the birth, rise and flowering of Italian Renaissance art in Tuscany, Rome and Venice from about 1250 to 1600 A.D., with emphasis on the 15th and 16th centuries. Artists and works of art will be presented, whenever possible and relevant, within their cultural, political, social, technological and/or economic circumstances. Among the major artists to be studied: Giotto, Ghiberti, Donatello, Masaccio, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian.Lia R. Markey
ART 213Modernist Art: 1900 to 1950(LA)A critical study of the major movements, paradigms, and documents of modernist art from the Post-Impressionism to the "Degenerate" art show. Among our topics: primitivism, abstraction, collage, the readymade, machine aesthetics, photographic reproduction, the art of the insane, artists in political revolution, anti-modernism. Two lectures, one preceptorial.Hal Foster
ART 219Northern Renaissance Art(LA)The course surveys painting, prints, and art theory in the Netherlands, Germany, and France c. 1300-1550. Emphasis is upon the work and reception of major figures such as Van Eyck, Bosch, Dürer, and Bruegel.Christopher P. Heuer
ART 232/NES 232The Arts of the Islamic World(LA)A survey of the architecture and the arts of various Islamic cultures between northern Africa and the Indian subcontinent from its beginnings in the 7th to the 20th century. Emphasis will be on major monuments of religious and secular architecture, architectural decoration, calligraphy and painting. Background in Islam or Middle Eastern languages is not a prerequisite.Thomas F. Leisten
ART 260/AAS 260/AFS 260Introduction to African Art(LA)An introduction to African art and architecture from prehistory to the 20th century. Beginning with Paleolithic rock art of northern and southern Africa, we will cover ancient Nubia and Meroe; Neolithic cultures such as Nok, Djenne and Ife; African kingdoms, including Benin, Asante, Bamun, Kongo, Kuba, Great Zimbabwe, and the Zulu; Christian Ethiopia and the Islamic Swahili coast; and other societies, such as the Sherbro, Igbo, and the Maasai. By combining Africa's cultural history and developments in artistic forms we establish a long historical view of the stunning diversity of the continent's indigenous arts and architecture.Chika O. Okeke-Agulu
ART 267/LAS 267Intro to Mesoamerican Visual Culture(LA)This course explores the visual and archaeological world of ancient Mesoamerica, from the first arrival of humans in the area until the era of Spanish invasion in the early 16th century. Major culture groups to be considered include Olmec, Maya, and Aztec. Preceptorial sections will consist of a mix of theoretically-focused discussions, debate regarding opposing interpretations in scholarship, and hands-on work with objects in the collections of the Princeton University Art Museum.Bryan R. Just
ART 294/CLA 294/ANT 373Ancient Egyptian Archaeology(LA)Everyone knows of Ancient Egypt's monumental pyramids, temples and tombs. Yet it also had cities, fortresses, palaces, potters, and even trash. The archaeological record informs us greatly about Egyptian daily life, craft and economy. In this class students will study the archaeology of Egypt to learn about their history, culture, religion and society. Students will grapple with original material in their presentations of objects, tombs, houses and sites. Moreover students will engage with the collection of the Princeton Museum of Art in a semester long, hands-on project to identify scarab-shaped amulets. The class may also travel to museums.Joanna S. SmithKate Liszka
ART 309/CLA 309Roman Painting(LA)The course will briefly treat the development of Greek wall painting from the Classical and Hellenistic periods, and then focus on Roman developments - architectural styles and figural styles.The houses of Pompeii will be the main focus. Topics will include: the representation of Greek myths; historical subjects; the origins of still life.Michael Koortbojian
ART 315/ARC 315/HLS 315Medieval Architecture(LA)A survey of medieval architecture and urban design from ca. 300 to ca.1500 A.D. The aim will be to explore the major developments in religious and secular architecture in the West and in Byzantium from Early Christian times to the Renaissance. Various aspects of architecture will be considered (patronage, functional requirements, planning, form, structure, construction techniques, symbolism, decoration) with the aim of attaining as complete an understanding as possible of architectural developments and urban design in their historical context.Daniel R. McReynolds
ART 337/GER 337Court, Cloister, and City: Art and Architecture in Central and Eastern Europe(LA)Painting, sculpture, and architecture in Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Germany, and Russia, ca. 1450-1800. Special emphasis is placed on the changing roles of court, city, cloister, and aristocracy and the relation of local styles to international trends, including art elsewhere in Europe. One three-hour seminar.Thomas D. Kaufmann
ART 338/ECS 338Early Modern Media(LA)This course examines the idea of media in the European world, ca. 1400-1700. While attention will be directed towards specific technologies (e.g. reproductive engraving), we will also concern ourselves with media's relation to culture and history, probing the many modalities of (say) mechanical reproductions' role in shaping (or defying) early modern habits of mind.Christopher P. Heuer
ART 344/LAS 334/POR 367Topics in 20th-Century Art(LA)Art at its Limits: The 1960s in Brazil, Argentina and the US. This seminar investigates experimental art practices that emerged in Brazil, Argentina and the United States over the course of the 1960s. Through focused, cross-cultural case studies, we explore how artists sought to use strategies of play, protest, reflexivity, and intervention to expand and even dissolve the category of art. Topics addressed include spectator participation, bodily engagement, textual strategies, media interventions, and political activism.Irene V. Small
ART 350/EAS 356Chinese Cinema(LA)Thematic studies in Chinese film (Republic, People's Republic, Taiwan, Hong Kong), 1930s to the present with emphasis on recent years, viewed in relation to traditional and modern Chinese visual arts and literature, colonialism and globalism, Communist politics, gender and family values, ethnicity and regionalism, melodrama and the avant-garde, the cinematic market, artistic censorship, and other social issues.Jerome Silbergeld
ART 352/EAS 353Chinese Art in the Century of Revolution(LA)Chinese art in the 20th century, considered in terms of international influence and domestic struggles, cultural exhaustion and alternative modernities, state-dominated art and censorship, the Chinese cultural disapora, and the international success of Chinese art today.Jerome Silbergeld
ART 400Junior Seminar(LA)An introduction to a range of art-historical approaches and to the writings of key figures in the history of the discipline. Attention is also given to research and writing skills specific to the history of art.Brigid DohertyRachael Z. DeLue
ART 430/HLS 430/MED 430Seminar. Medieval Art(LA)This seminar considers the implications of contesting and destroying the work of art. We will seek to understand manifestations of these phenomena as historical and philosophical/theological events. As we do this, we will problematize the power of verbal discourse over visual materials and give thought to the sacredness of art. Our focus will be on the debates found in primary and secondary readings that address the origins and nature of Byzantine iconomachy. Research papers will be able to address other manifestations of iconoclasm, including those from: the Carolingian period, later Medieval Europe, the Reformation, and the Modern era.Charles E. Barber
ART 442Seminar. Old Master Drawings(LA)An introduction to the study of drawings taught entirely from original works of art. Intensive use will be made of the Princeton University Art Museum, with trips to an auction house, dealer, and museums in Washington, D.C. and New York City. Of interest to all planning a career in the arts or training their powers of visual analysis. For 2013 the focus will be on French drawings of the sixteenth to eighteenth century in Princeton.Thomas D. Kaufmann
ART 458/ECS 458/ARC 458Seminar. Modern Architecture(LA)This seminar studies the radical forms of urban renewal that altered the city of Paris during the heyday of Impressionism. The often violent redistribution of social classes across the urban territory and creation of new forms of infrastructure had a pronounced effect on citizens. So did its expanding colonial empire. Urban mobility, new forms of leisure and consumption, spatial segregation and class antagonisms all helped pave the way for new
cultures and counter-cultures. We shall analyze how notions of identity were being forged and reinvented as traditional class and gender roles changed.Esther da Costa Meyer
ART 460/LAS 460Theorizing the Archive in Latin American Art(LA)A practicum for developing critical approaches to the use and interpretation of archival materials, with emphasis on the way archives have been deployed to construct the idea of Latin American art in the 20th and 21st centuries. Departing from recent developments such as digital meta-archives, the display of historical archives within contemporary art exhibitions, and the construction of new documentation centers, the class considers specific case studies alongside theoretical texts that explore how archives constitute institutional authority, how they produce their objects of study, and how we can narrate absences within them.Irene V. Small
ART 500Proseminar in the History of ArtA course concerned both with the theoretical foundations of Western art history as a modern discipline and with the methodological innovations of the last few decades.Hal Foster
ART 513/CLA 518Seminar in Roman Art: The Historiated ColumnsThe seminar will analyze the great historical columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius.Michael Koortbojian
ART 562Seminar in American ArtInspired by the centennial of the 1913 Armory Show, this seminar examines material from 1900-1945 categorized as "early American modernism." Yet it questions that designation in order to newly characterize a diverse array of artistic projects and conceptual/theoretical concerns. Topics will range from the so-called Stieglitz circle, the advent of abstraction, New York Dada, and transatlantic exchange to new definitions of portraiture, the scientific conditions of picture making, word-image relationships, and the cult of the machine. Includes visits to area museums, including the re-staging of the Armory Show at the NYHS.Rachael Z. DeLue
ART 568Insurgent Modernities: The Architecture of Western Colonialism in Asia (1800-1949)This seminar explores the architecture, urbanism, and restoration practices of European powers in Asia. Our goal is to understand the complex forms of cultural production that resulted from the unequal encounter with imperialism, the role played by architecture and the circulation of art objects in the Western construction of Asia, and conversely, the emerging cultures of resistance that were themselves highly diversified and transnational.Esther da Costa Meyer
ART 574Seminar in Japanese Art and Archaeology: Japanese Tea and the Visual ArtsThe seminar examines the diverse arts employed in pre-modern chanoyu, the Japanese secular ritual of tea, including ceramics, paintings, lacquer, calligraphy, and architecture. Special attention is given to period texts written about tea objects. Among the topics considered are the physical and conceptual adaptations of objects (both indigenous and non-Japanese) for the tea context, the aesthetic terms tea practitioners created for chanoyu objects, the practice of bestowing names on objects, and the ensemble use of objects of different mediums. Seminar members may also, if they wish, study objects outside Japanese tea as comparative examples.Andrew M. Watsky
ECS 455/ART 464/ARC 455Animation: Art, Architecture, History(LA)Seminar examines the origins of animation in art and architecture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The class will focus on issues of agency, affect, empathy, projection and other psychological reactions occasioned by inanimate objects as they are probed by major figures in art and architectural historiography, aesthetics, cultural anthropology, ethnography, sociology, psychoanalysis and film theory. Seminar will also analyze specific case studies from modernist avant-garde and architectural movements in Germany and France during the first half of the last century.Spyridon Papapetros
GER 517/MOD 517/ART 517Modernism and Modernity: Aesthetics of SurveillanceTaking up Orwell's master trope of distopic futurity, this seminar in comparative media aesthetics and theory explores the paranoid logic of surveillance in its literary, architectural, artistic and, above all, technological (photographic, cinematic, digital) manifestations in order to unpack a category that is at once a political tactic, a narrative strategy, a theory of the subject, an architectural model, a mode of spectatorship and, quite possibly, the paradigmatic epistemology of the cinematic medium.Thomas Y. Levin
HUM 581/GER 581/MOD 581/ART 593Benjamin's "Artwork Essay" or, Cultural History as the Rigorous Study of Art and MediaSeminar explores W. Benjamin's "Artwork Essay" as an experiment in and a critique of modernist cultural history. Through its exacerbation of the antinomies of analyzing cultural production in historical terms and its theorization of technological media in relation to the history of art, the artwork essay interrogates both the very possibility of writing cultural history and the conditions of its necessity as a form of knowledge. Seminar focuses on the artwork essay's refunctioning of sources in a wide variety of disciplines and discourses, as well as on a number of exemplary exercises in cultural history and media theory in its aftermath.Brigid DohertyMichael W. Jennings
VIS 392/ART 392Issues in Contemporary Art(LA)A required seminar for Art and Archaeology Program 2 majors and Program in Visual Arts certificate students emphasizing contemporary art practices and ideas. The course addresses current issues in painting, drawing, sculpture, film, video, photography, and performance installation. It includes a visiting artist lecture series, critiques of students' work, and excursions to galleries, museums and/or artists' studios.Martha Friedman
