Recent Courses

Art 201 | Introduction to Art History
Theories of visuality are central to debates in the humanities. Interdisciplinary approaches to art have prompted reconsiderations of representation and reality, changing the parameters of our objects of study. This has resulted in new relationships of words to images and objects, as well as innovative conceptual tools available to interpret all three. In this course we will examine the phenomena of cultural production and consumption of a range of media, asking how images and objects function, and how they mediate what we see and experience. Through shared readings, student presentations, and written projects, we will consider issues of form, representation, and knowledge, and the politics of ascribing meaning and value.

Art 301 | Art History Beyond the Visual
Art history is a discipline, institutionalized in the nineteenth century, that mobilized vision as a tool of western imperialism. In this course, we seek to decenter the visual by problematizing our definition of visuality and by examining aspects of works of art that have gone unseen. For example, we will explore the ways in which works of art acted on the body and the sensorium; the significance of materials whose identities were not visible; the purposes for which art was never meant to be seen; and the artistic practices that provoked non-physical ways of seeing. While studying how works of art have interacted in non-visual ways with their human interlocutors across a wide range of times and places, we will also consider how art historians can integrate new methodologies that go beyond traditional ocularcentric approaches. This course is a team-taught collaboration with Jenny Sakai.

Art 301 | Ecocritical Art Histories
What perspectives and methodologies can art history contribute to ongoing debates and research on climate change, ecological crises, and the Anthropocene in the humanities and natural sciences? This course will introduce students to innovative examples of recent art historical scholarship that postulate ecologically conscious approaches to the study of visual and material cultures. As a discipline, Art History takes objects produced by humans as its loci of analysis. By engaging with new theoretical frameworks such as postcolonial ecocriticism, new materialism, posthumanism, and critical animal studies, we will confront established art historical paradigms that have privileged the human as the primary agent of history. Rather than focusing on specific geographical places or temporal periods, we will explore the interrelation of human cultural production and ecological systems through different thematic points of inquiry, ranging from water, air, and fire to animals and eco-activism. In doing so, we aim to challenge the binaries between human and non-human to advance non-hierarchical approaches to the study of art. This course is a team-taught collaboration with Shivani Sud.

Art 313 | Art and Life in Renaissance Florence
Giorgio Vasari describes in Lives of the Artists how “the arts were born anew” in Renaissance Florence.  The city’s streets and piazzas, palaces and churches, paintings and sculptures give visual form to the cultural and social changes that impacted Florentine life. This course, in its study of artists such as Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Cellini, concentrates on the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as a period of innovation, both in terms of artistic theory and practice. Through an examination of Florence’s public and private spaces, we will consider how visual and material culture served as markers of civic identity and social distinction.

Art 322 | Early Modern Things
Things expose relations in and between societies that inform the past. As Arjun Appadurai argues, “even though from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodological point of view it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context.” In this course, we will mobilize early modern things to explore what inanimate objects reveal about the animate world. We will study the social significance and cultural value of such things to look at and beyond their materiality. In particular, we will examine objects such as clothing from England, earthenware from the Italian peninsula, featherwork from the New World, and carpets from the Ottoman Empire to rethink how such things construct biography, impact memory, produce ambiguity, and dictate taste.

Art 328 | Nonextant Art and the Early Modern World
What do we learn from objects, images, texts, and performances that no longer exist? How do we write histories of things that have been violently destroyed, involuntarily lost, or deliberately left to decay over time? What is the role of the conservator in recreating lost works of art? What do nonextant things tell us about trauma and collective memory? In this course, we study works that can no longer be experienced firsthand to explore how nonextant art informs our understanding of the past. This course is a team-taught collaboration between the art departments at Reed College and Lewis & Clark College. 

Art 408 | Renaissance Space
"Whoever holds the piazza is master of the city," writes the Florentine chronicler Giovanni Cavalcanti. The master of the city was no neutered subject. Cavalcanti's remarks demonstrate how urban geographies were in fact gendered in the early modern period. Whereas men occupied the piazza and its public architecture, women were ensconced within the folds of the private interior. This course will explore the representations of space in visual and textual culture as they relate to issues of gender. In particular, we will examine how the spatial relations of the Renaissance city articulate the power and social controls delineating the contours of community. Included in our discussion will be the art of Botticelli and Titian; the architecture of prostitutes, patricians, and monastics; and contemporary treatises by Alberti and Filarete.

Hum 211 | The Birth of the Modern
Beginning with the cultural and intellectual entanglements of the Christian and Islamic worlds in the Middle Ages, this course examines how Europeans’ understanding and experience of the world they inhabited were transformed between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. Through readings of authors such as Ibn Tufayl, Averroës, Dante, Machiavelli, Diaz, Luther, Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, and Montaigne, we will explore how the momentous social, cultural, political, religious, philosophical, literary, and artistic developments of this period—encounters with non-Christians in the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds, the emergence of new genres in the literary and visual arts, and the social and religious upheaval of the Protestant Reformation—provoked a period of crisis and creativity that transformed the complex legacies of the ancient world. In particular, we will study how the reconfigured understandings of humanity’s relationship to nature, society, and the divine challenged assumptions about political, intellectual, religious, and gendered authority.

Hum 212 |  The Birth of the Modern
In the wake of the political, religious, and cultural upheavals in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europeans pursued new forms of knowledge, literary and artistic expression, social and religious life, and domestic and political authority. In doing so, however, they also provoked new questions about the individual’s relationship to God, nature, family, and polity. By examining the writings of authors and artists such as Shakespeare, Teresa of Avila, Cervantes, Artemisia Gentileschi, Galileo, Descartes, Molière, Hobbes, and Milton, this course will examine topics such as the Counter-Reformation, the development of philosophical skepticism, the so-called Scientific Revolution, Mediterranean encounters with the Ottoman Empire, and the ongoing tension between absolute monarchy and constitutional government.