HSAR 5500a, First-Year Colloquium  Nicola Suthor

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.
Th 1:30pm-3:25pm

HSAR 6553a, Embodied Artisanal Knowledge  Edward Cooke

The development and transmission of knowledge during the early modern European world has lately been a dynamic subject of scholarly inquiry. Much of this work has focused upon the work of royal academies’ explorations of natural philosophy and the mechanical arts. This seminar seeks to move beyond that narrow geographic focus and descriptive taxonomies to consider embodied artisanal knowledge throughout the world in the period from 1500 to 1800. As Tim Ingold reminds us, embodied knowledge is a skilled, socially generated practice distinct from the innate talents of mechanical execution. It is a cognitive skill that prizes resourcefulness; efficiency of effort; and informed, intensive use of tools. This tacit knowledge, the intellect of the hand, is experienced and felt rather than written about and illustrated. Making things depends upon constant attention to the transmission of ideas from brain to hand and from tool to material, with feedback channeled back through the tool to the body and mind of the maker. This seminar combines reading, object-driven inquiry, and hands-on exercises to explore the role of materials, techniques, and human agency in the making of objects. Students expand their own approaches to the study of artisans and objects from many periods and places.
W 9:25am-11:20am

HSAR 6557a / CLSS 7737a, Art and Text in Greek Antiquity  Milette Gaifman

One of the prominent traits of ancient Greek visual culture, starting from the rise of the Greek city-state (ca. 750 BCE), is the complex relationship between art and text witnessed in images related to mythological subjects, in written descriptions of works of art, and in combining inscribed texts with pictorial representations in various media and contexts. The seminar examines the relationship between word and image and between the visual and the literary in Greek antiquity. Taking Lessing’s Laokoon of 1776 as a point of departure, the seminar considers several related themes including the notion of pictorial narratives, the literary genre of ekphrasis, and the significance of inscriptions in Greek artistic representations.
M 4pm-5:55pm

HSAR 6564a / ANTH 5331a / CLSS 7000a / EALL 7730a / HIST 6000a / JDST 6553a / NELC 5330a / RLST 8030a, Archaia Seminar: Art, Architecture, and Climate Change in the Premodern World  Avary Taylor

This seminar explores artistic, architectural, and material responses to environmental transformations, such as floods, droughts, volcanic events, and periods of exceptional abundance, across the premodern world. Foregrounding the indivisibility of natural worlds and human creativity, we examine how ancient peoples conceived of, and responded to, the disruptions and affordances of their environment. Through a comparative framework that puts cultures across the ancient world into conversation—from Mesopotamia to Mesoamerica and beyond—we trace the entanglements of art, politics, and climate, asking: how, if at all, did environmental change materialize in the things people made? 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 9:25am-11:20am

HSAR 6565b, The Media of Architecture and the Architecture of Media  Craig Buckley

Architecture’s capacity to represent a world and to intervene in the world has historically depended on techniques of visualization. This seminar draws on a range of media theoretical approaches to examine the complex and historically layered repertoire of visual techniques within which architecture operates. We approach architecture not as an autonomous entity reproduced by media, but as a cultural practice advanced and debated through media and mediations of various kinds (visual, social, material, and financial). If questions of media have played a key role in architectural theory and history over the past three decades, recent scholarship in the field of media theory has insisted on the architectural, infrastructural, and environmental dimensions of media. The seminar is organized around nine operations whose technical and historical status will be examined through concrete examples. To do so, the seminar presents a range of differing approaches to media and reflects on their implications for architectural and spatial practices today. Key authors include Giuliana Bruno, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Beatriz Colomina, Robin Evans, Friedrich Kittler, Bruno Latour, Reinhold Martin, Shannon Mattern, Marshall McLuhan, Felicity Scott, and Bernhard Siegert, among others.
W 9:25am-11:20am

HSAR 6570b, Language and the Study of Indigenous Art  Allison Caplan

What role has language played in the creation of Indigenous art of the Americas, and how should language inform its art historical interpretation? The question of language’s role in art has a specific history and inflection in the study of the Indigenous Americas, which have often been described as a field without texts. Through a transhistorical series of case studies of the art of Mesoamerica, the Andes, and Native North America, we examine what fueled this vision of Indigenous art and how it intersects with colonialist and nationalist discourses, as well as counter-efforts for Indigenous storywork and language revitalization. By critically analyzing major works of scholarship from art history, anthropology, and Indigenous studies, we examine how different writers and thinkers approach and employ the relationship between verbal and material expression. Additionally, we apply language-based analysis as a method for the study of specific works of Indigenous art, while also thinking critically about this methodology’s particular resonances in light of regional histories of colonialism and nationalism.
Th 1:30pm-3:25pm

HSAR 6574b / ANTH 5332b / CLSS 7001b / EALL 7731b / HIST 6010b / JDST 6554b / NELC 5331b / RLST 8031b, Archaia Seminar: Literacy, Books, and the Materiality of Writing in the Premodern World  Victoria Almansa-Villatoro and Joe Glynias

What is literacy? What is reading? This course takes a longue durée approach to how premodern individuals produced and engaged with texts. From hieroglyphs to alphabets (and everything in between), this course considers ways of writing and the intersection between orality, aurality, and textuality in the premodern world, focusing on (but not limited to) the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. Due to its focus on the physical media of writing and the preservation and study of premodern writing materials by modern scholars, roughly half of the meetings of this course take place in Yale Collections. Topics covered by the course include pseudoscripts and pseudepigrapha, scribes and scholars, and the ideological and ritual uses of writing across premodern cultures. 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.
W 9:25am-11:20am

HSAR 6579a, Modernism and the Middle East  Kishwar Rizvi

This course studies the concepts that inform the making and reception of modern architecture in the Middle East. In the Islamic world, new fundamentalisms and shifting religious trends have created an environment in which each country must renegotiate its past and reconsider its collective future. Whether by suppressing their Islamic roots, as in the case of republican Turkey, or through reinventing them, as in the case of post-Revolution Iran, such countries must constantly transform their national image. It is through public works, such as architecture and planning, that they convey their political and religious ideology. This course examines the debates and theories of modern architectural production that have informed the discourse on Islamic architecture by situating cases of colonial and nationalist architecture in the context of their particular social and religious history.
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

HSAR 6580a / CPLT 5480a / GMAN 5480a, Art/Work: On Aesthetics and Labor  Kirk Wetters

Since the 1980s, so-called “postfordistic forms of labor” have increasingly replaced the production processes of industrial good manufacturing in modern information societies and service economies. These new forms of work bear a remarkable resemblance to the ways the artist and artistic processes have been understood in aesthetic discourses since the end of the eighteenth century. The course explores this relation between art and labor from two different angles. (1) It gives an historic overview over the development from ancient concepts of leisure and contemplation to a modern understanding of work as anthropologically crucial and the role art and aesthetic concepts did play in it. (2) It discusses contemporary literature and theories on “new capitalism”, forms of subjectification, and discourses of creativity with regard to their connection to aesthetics around 1800, while also addressing the question of how this development is currently being decisively changed once again by AI.
TTh 1:30pm-3:25pm

HSAR 6616a, Capital Building: Histories of Design and Accumulation  David Sadighian

How has design shaped the rise of global capitalism, c.1700 to present? Surveying a wide range of buildings, objects, infrastructures, and landscapes across the Atlantic World, our aim is to understand how the built environment evolved to guide practices of capital accumulation—from the plantations of the early modern Caribbean to the “supertalls” of Billionaires’ Row. Readings draw from a growing body of scholarly literature that approaches design as an agent of political economy as opposed to a reflection of pre-existing ideas and economic structures. The seminar’s case studies therefore emphasize the reciprocity between themes of architectural and capitalist modernity (e.g., Circulation, Development) as well as the spatial forms and extractive processes that accompany them. Coursework results in new critical perspectives for the historical study of present-day spatial inequality. Moreover, moving beyond familiar narratives and geographies of modernity, we consider design’s relation to not only the production of wealth but also counter-models of local autonomy, mutual aid, and redistribution.
Th 9:20am-11:15am

HSAR 6660b, 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-3:25pm

HSAR 6678b / ENGL 6775b, Portraiture and Character from Hogarth to Woolf  Ruth Yeazell

Case studies in the visual and verbal representation of persons in Anglo-American painting and fiction, with particular attention to novels that themselves include portraits or address relations between the two media. Novelists tentatively include Henry Fielding, Jane Austen, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf. Painters include William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Lawrence, James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, and Vanessa Bell. Selected readings in recent theories of fictional character and in the history and theory of portraiture. Whenever possible, we draw on paintings in Yale’s collections.
M 1:30pm-3:25pm

HSAR 6682a, Gesamtkunstwerk  Tim Barringer

This seminar explores the long history of the “total artwork,” or Gesamtkunstwerk. Brought to prominence by composer Richard Wagner in the middle of the nineteenth century, the term is widely associated with his signature form, the music drama, which he understood as a synthesis of music, poetry, and theater. But the roots of this concept lie decades earlier, in the aesthetic theory of the Romantic period; and its offshoots reach far beyond Wagner’s own day, into the choreographed interiors of the fin de siècle, and undergird pivotal twentieth-century attempts to unite art and life. Expanding on Wagner’s vision of the Gesamtkunstwerk as a musical and literary phenomenon, this seminar proposes it as central to the formation and theorization of modern art and design from the nineteenth century to today. This course explores the Gesamtkunstwerk in relation to histories of art and design. We examine the precursors of the Gesamtkunstwerk; its manifestations in Wagner’s operas and stagecraft; its influence on the aesthetic movement, art nouveau, twentieth-century European modernisms, and its relevance for art and design strategies of the present day. The seminar is taught collaboratively between Yale University and the Bard Graduate Center, where the instructor will be Professor Freyja Hartzell. It includes opportunities for students from both institutions to meet and exchange ideas. There are two field trips to New York City, funded by the History of Art Department.
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

HSAR 6689a, Utopias, Counter-Utopias, Heterotopias: An Architectural and Urban History  Craig Buckley

The seminar engages the recent return of utopian thinking at a time defined by multiple catastrophes—from climate change to housing shortage to rising authoritarianism. The seminar begins with an introduction to canonized utopian narratives, including Plato, More, and Bacon. Throughout the seminar we engage with key authors who have interpreted utopian traditions in architecture (including Marx, Balibar, Benhabib, Bloch, Foucault, Hayden, Jameson, Marin, and Vidler, among others). Particular emphasis is given to changes in the conception of utopia across time together with the shifting representational techniques through which utopia was envisioned. The readings are structured around a series of architectural projects for utopian cities or buildings that have emerged since the early nineteenth century. Topics may include Charles Fourier’s Phalansteries, the Shaker Village of Hancock, Robert Owen’s Plans for the town of New Harmony, late nineteenth century cooperative housing schemes, expressionist utopias of the early twentieth century; the Situationist New Babylon project, communes of the 1960s, Afro-futurism, and the counter-utopias of the Italian Radical movement, among others. Sessions utilizing material from Yale’s collections are emphasized to the greatest extent possible.
T 9:25am-11:20am

HSAR 6700a, Media Cultures of the Cold War  Pamela Lee

This course examines the intersection of politics, aesthetics, and new media technologies in the United States between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Topics include the aesthetics of “thinking the unthinkable” in the wake of the atom bomb; Abstract Expressionism and “modern man” discourse; game theory, cybernetics, operational research, and emergent art practices; the rise of television, intermedia, and the counterculture; and the continuing influence of the early cold war on contemporary media aesthetics. Readings are drawn from primary and secondary sources, and from the fields of art history, communication, and critical theory. Open to graduate students only, with priority given to History of Art students. Enrollment is by permission only; please contact the instructor for more information.
M 9:25am-11:20am

HSAR 6701b, Animals, Nonhuman and Otherwise  Pamela Lee

In “Why Look at Animals?” (1977), a canonical essay in the literature of animal studies, John Berger writes on the historic dynamic between humans and nonhuman animals as a question of seeing and being seen, subject and object, vision and power. Charting this relationship from the distant past to the industrial present, Berger focuses on the modern spectacle of nonhuman animals as an index of the progressive marginalization of animal life; the public zoo, for example, constitutes “the living monument of their own disappearance.” Visitors to the zoo, Berger notes “ . . . proceed from cage to cage, not unlike visitors in an art gallery who stop in front of one painting, and then move on to the next or the one after next.” In rendering the modern zoo continuous with the modern art gallery, Berger prompts us to consider the role of the animal in modern and contemporary art with respect to the priority accorded the human subject. This seminar attends to the wide-ranging interests of this dynamic within the history of art and visual culture, addressing, among other issues, the status of “Man” versus nonhuman animals and the hierarchies of personhood, race, class, gender, and power that underwrite their representation. We consider topics ranging from the relationship between the natural sciences and the visual arts; companion animals, domestication, and domesticity; animals, technology, and bio-media; animal rights and interspecies collaboration; race and colonialism; animals in times of war. In addition to literature from animal studies and the history of art, readings are drawn from philosophy, critical theory, Black studies, gender studies, and science and technology studies. In part following the model of a bestiary, the syllabus introduces many nonhuman animals as case studies: dogs, sharks, termites and ants, nonhuman primates, horses, birds, mollusks, tigers, elephants, etc. A transhistorical roster of artists includes Goya, John Singleton Copley, George Stubbs, Edwin Landseer, Samuel Daniell, Winslow Homer, Kerry James Marshall, Anicka Yi, Kara Walker, Sue Coe, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Tomás Saraceno, Mark Dion, Juliana Huxtable, Jeffrey Gibson, Sammy Baloji, Lin May huSaeed, Jes Fan, and Agnieszka Kurant. Campus visits to the Yale Center for British Art, the Peabody Museum and the Beinecke. Enrollment is restricted to graduate students in the History of Art and graduate students in the humanities (with permission of the instructor). No auditing.
M 1:30pm-3:25pm

HSAR 6716b / AMST 7716b / ANTH 7269b / ARCG 7269b, Landscapes of Meaning: Museums and Their Objects  Anne Underhill

This seminar explores how museums convey various meanings about ethnographic, art, and archaeological objects through the processes of collecting, preparing exhibitions, and conducting research. Participants also discuss broader theoretical and methodological issues such as the roles of museums in society, relationships with source communities, management of cultural heritage, and various specializations valuable for careers in art, natural history, anthropology, history, and other museums.
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

HSAR 6768a / CPLT 5970a / ENGL 6768a, The Birth of Aesthetics  Jonathan Kramnick

This is a course on the emergence of aesthetic theory in Enlightenment and Romantic era Europe. We'll examine how a new language of art and nature focused on the experience of the beholder and track evolving categories of the sublime, beautiful, and picturesque in key texts of philosophy and literature. We'll connect ideas of aesthetic judgment and autonomy to central institutions and ideologies of the modern era, including the public sphere, secularism, the private subject, racial capitalism, and the market. Readings begin with empirical philosophies of perception and early accounts of the aesthetic in Locke, Addison, Hutcheson, Pope, Hume, and Burke and continue through the watershed moment of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Kant, and Schiller. The seminar ends with a consideration of aesthetic theory in the long contemporary period of Adorno, Scarry, Rancière, and Ngai. Previously ENGL 768.
Th 1:30pm-3:25pm

HSAR 6770a / AMST 6663a / FILM 6070a, Video Art, Guerrilla Television, and Alternative Media  Tom Day

Video art has been an important aspect of contemporary art since the 1960s, born out of the increasing pull of mass media on society and alongside the political unrest of the times. A form of moving image unique to the later half of the twentieth century, video is the embodiment of the heterogeneity and repetition that characterize postmodernism, as noted by theorists like Rosalind Krauss and Fredric Jameson. This course places video art within wider cultural, theoretical, and political contexts. Over the course, we trace video and other moving image media as an alternative ecosystem of production, distribution, and exhibition, observing artists, collectives, and movements that have used the technology to communicate, comprehend, and critique the changing media and lived realties of the second half of the twentieth century. Emphasis is the connections between video and corporately controlled media as we examine artists who attempted to provide an alternative vision of mass media through subversive interventions and utopian alternative programming. We also analyze video’s changing place within recent exhibition practices with the increasing presence of documentary modes and works reacting to an increasingly networked and surveilled society since the 1980s.
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

HSAR 6791a, Unfinished Conversations: Black Contemporary Art  Nana Adusei-Poku

This seminar offers an introduction to the complexities, diversity, and specificity of contemporary African diasporic art. The course examines how artists across the African diaspora, specifically the UK, Germany, and France engage (and disengage) with history, identity, memory, migration, and cultural exchange through a wide range of artistic practices. We discuss the practices of a.o. Sonia Boyce, John Akomfrah, Isaac Julien, Ima Abasi-Okon, Rhea Dillon, Alberta Whittle, Liz Johnson Arthur, Julien Creuzet, Julia Phillips, Marc Brandenburg, James Atkins, and Philip Metz. Students consider how these practices intersect with key aesthetic, cultural, and theoretical developments within the Black diaspora. Through the close study of selected artists and artworks, the seminar explores the tensions, contradictions, and possibilities that contemporary artists are proposing, particularly around questions of race, grief, belonging, displacement, and representation. We discuss how artists negotiate inherited histories of colonialism, slavery, and migration while also imagining new cultural futures and forms of expression. The seminar analyzes works across multiple media, including painting, collage, installation, sculpture, video, and photography, paying attention to both formal strategies and conceptual frameworks. Readings draw from art history, Black studies, cultural studies, visual culture studies, and diaspora studies to provide critical tools for understanding how contemporary artists contribute to ongoing conversations about the Black global experience. By the end of the course, students have a foundational understanding of the major themes, debates, and artistic approaches shaping contemporary African diasporic art, while developing the skills to critically interpret artworks within broader social, historical, and theoretical contexts. Knowledge in the history of art and Black studies is highly requested.
M 1:30pm-3:25pm

HSAR 6833a / RUSS 7890a / SLAV 6240a, Paper Icons  Justin Willson

Print profoundly transformed how people thought about images and the nature of depicted subject matter. This seminar examines the impact of print through the prism of the early modern Balkans, Eastern Europe and Russia. Our focus is on the trajectory of looseleaf prints, though we attend to the relation of standalone compositions and book printing. We begin in the fifteenth century with the earliest Greek and Cyrillic prints and end in the late nineteenth century, exploring, along the way, the techniques of woodcut, engraving, monotype icon tracings, and lithography. Key themes are the epistemic challenges posed by an ephemeral medium, the archaeology of medieval iconography, economies of loss, pilgrimage cartography, Slavic poetics and the emblem, and the monastic pastoral. Primary sources in translation complement secondary readings, shedding light on key artistic actors. Extensive use is made of the Greek and Slavic collections at the Beinecke and Yale University Art Gallery. No previous coursework in art history is required.
Th 1:30pm-3:25pm

HSAR 6841a and HSAR 6842b / ANTH 8897a and ANTH 8898b / HIST 5804a and HIST 5805b / HSHM 7691a and HSHM 7692b, Topics in the Environmental Humanities  Paul Sabin

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
T 11:30am-1:20pm

HSAR 6845b, Adaptive Reuse in Karachi: History, Documentation, and Intervention  Kishwar Rizvi

This seminar considers the challenges of adaptive reuse in a global mega-city and explores and enact the potential of cultural preservation to resist mechanisms of erasure that stem from capital-driven development. Karachi is considered as an interdisciplinary case study and working site, bringing together graduate students from history of art, architecture, and related disciplines. This multidisciplinary collective of students and faculty with diverse backgrounds and skills in research, documentation, analysis, and design works as a team to both learn from, and contribute to, ongoing work that is being led by The Heritage Foundation of Pakistan (HFP). The HFP, established by Sohail and Yasmeen Lari in 1980, has been documenting the British Colonial era buildings of Karachi and Lahore for several years. At present, Yasmeen Lari has designed a pedestrian pathway through Kharadar, with the help of local shop-owners, on the principals of community engagement and participatory design. Countering urban decay and climate change, the aim of this seminar is to consider how future architects, urbanists and historians may approach the issues facing the region. From this vantage point, we consider the manners in which urban space is instrumentalized towards narratives of imperial and national identity; how gentrification and ex-urbanization effects historical city-centers; how revitalization projects must be understood ad critiqued; and what role collaborative and interdisciplinary study may play as a conduit and conveyer of positive solutions. Starting with a comparativist approach, the seminar digs deep into the histories and cultures of Sindh, Pakistan, foregrounding how culture is made manifest through buildings and cities. We then move to contemporary Karachi and how these histories confront the dynamics of a city of over twenty million inhabitants per the 2023 census. Finally, the group takes an in-depth look at Kharadar, its urban form and the forces that are shaping the context that HFP is working with and responding to. These three inputs inform a mid-semester report integrating text and drawings collectively compiled by the student group in preparation for on-site fieldwork in Karachi. In Karachi, we collaborate with the HFP, using the Kharadar pedestrian pathway project as both site and substrate to directly participate in an ongoing cultural preservation project. This fieldwork includes collection of contextual documentation (architectural, oral, and historical); engagement with community stakeholders, policymakers, and urban designers; and collaboration with the shop-owners, craftspeople, and designers creating the pathway. Finally, we work with HFP to outline envisioning a project that the students will undertake over the second half of the semester that contributes to the Kharadar pedestrian pathway, while also identifying strategies for its expansion in the old city. On return to New Haven, the student group synthesizes material from the fieldwork, articulates the scope of the project, and again works collectively to craft a design proposal, in text, drawings, and models, that is theoretically and materially responsive to the context of the old city and the contemporary forces that it is negotiating. The results are presented to a group of academics, architects, preservationists, and Mrs. Lari herself, whose travel to Yale is supported by the School of Architecture as part of a presentation and celebration of her career and work. Prerequisite: permission of instructors.
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

HSAR 9512a, Directed Research  Joanna Fiduccia

By arrangement with faculty.
HTBA

HSAR 9546a, Critical Readings in American Art  Jennifer Raab

Readings in American art in preparation for Ph.D. examinations. Discussions of texts, methods, and works of art. Prior permission of the instructor required.
T 1:30pm-3:25pm