Graduate Course Schedules

ARTHIST 590R: Seminar in Methods of Art Historical Research

Todd Cronan     W 5:15pm-8:00pm    Carlos Hall Conf Rm    Class #3440

This class is designed as an orientation to the historiography, methods and profession of Art History. We will address primary texts, sample the approaches and contributions of various art historians to the field including an effort to understand the most current problems confronting the field.

ARTHIST 592G/387: Issues in Conservation

Renée Stein     Th 1:00pm-3:45pm    Carlos Museum – Tate Room    Class #3436

This course will provide an introduction to the field of Art Conservation as well as an overview of the principal issues surrounding the care and preservation of cultural properties. Presentations and discussions will address historic materials and technologies, as well as aging properties, deterioration, and conservation treatment. Discussions will consider issues of aesthetics, ethics, artist's intent, change over time, and compensation for damage. We will also examine the use of science, review seminal debates in the recent history of conservation, and consider the role of conservation within collecting institutions and beyond. Examples will be drawn from a wide variety of cultures and will represent diverse media, including paper, paintings, stone, metals, ceramics, archaeological remains, and modern synthetic materials.

ARTHIST 592H/210: Architectural Visualization and Modeling Lab

Ermal Shpuza     T 6:00pm-9:00pm    M&S E301A    Class #3420

This class serves as an introduction of software mediums that will provide the user with skills in 2-D, 3-D, and motion. The student will use a hands-on approach via the digital world to explore and showcase their ideas in new and unimaginable ways. 

ARTHIST 596R: Internship in Art History 

Coordinator: Andrew Ward

May be repeated with permission from the director of internships. Interns must be nominated by the department for internships at the Michael C. Carlos Museum, the High Museum of Art, and elsewhere. Variable credit.

ARTHIST 597R: Directed Study 

Variable credit.

ARTHIST 599R: Thesis Research

ARTHIST 719R/470W-1: The Discovery of the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife

Rune Nyord     M 2:30pm-5:15pm    Carlos Hall Conf Rm    Class #3437

It is a well-established idea that the ancient Egyptians went to great lengths to achieve eternal life, including such practices as mummification and the construction of often huge and lavishly equipped tombs. However, on closer scrutiny, the Egyptian sources are much less occupied with ideas like eternal life and preservation of the body than this framework would lead us to believe, raising the question of how the modern understanding of ancient Egyptian mortuary religion came about. Through close examination of both primary and secondary sources, this seminar explores the development of the modern concept of the ancient Egyptian afterlife in Western history. In the formative period of the long 19th century in particular, interpretations of the Egyptian afterlife were heavily tinged by broader contemporary ideas in such areas as biblical and Classical scholarship, theology, and ethnography, while also being inextricably bound up with colonial concerns, and the seminar examines these various backdrops and influences to understand how they have helped shape interpretations of the ancient Egyptian sources.

ARTHIST 729: Reconstructing Ancient Rome in the Renaissance: Pirro Ligorio's Anteiquae Vrbis Imago of 1561

Eric Varner     T 1:00pm-3:45pm     MCCM Tate Room    Class #3441

In 1561, the Renaissance artist, antiquarian and archaeologist, Pirro Ligorio, published his reconstruction of ancient Rome, the Anteiquae Urbis Imago. Ligorio, one of the leading figures in 16^th century Roman humanism, based his reconstruction on a close scrutiny of surviving monuments, like the Colosseum or the Pantheon, but also on evidence from ancient coins, texts and inscriptions. In addition, Ligorio had access to much archaeological material that is now lost. Emory owns a very rare edition of Ligorio's map, now house in the Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Books Library. This course will consider the history and topography of the ancient city and investigate individual monuments featured on the map and compare Ligorio's reconstructions and the evidence he was using with current scholarly assessments. We will also be exploring related materials in the rare book library, including Giovanni Battista Piranesi's Le Antichità Romane. We will also be working closely with ECDS on our digital platform "Views of Rome," and students will be developing new entries for the digitized map. 

ARTHIST 739R: Medieval Manuscripts

Elizabeth Pastan     Th 10:00am-12:45pm     Carlos Hall Conf Rm    Class #3439

The book as we know it was one of the most original creations of the Middle Ages, and represented a technological advance over carved stones, papyri, and scrolls that had served as writing surfaces in the ancient world. This course turns to the evidence of medieval manuscripts to understand how the book was created in the first place, how it was produced, how the text and imagery interact, and how scholars now conceive of this rich body of material. We'll begin with Kurt Weitzmann's landmark study Illustrations in Roll and Codex (1947) that argues for the creation of the book or codex by the 2^nd century CE using the evidence of illustrations of Homer, and delve into scholarship by Michael Camille and others about how the imagery of manuscripts extends and editorializes on the text. Case studies include Irish illuminated manuscripts like the Book of Kells, intensely illustrated medieval Psalters that Christianize this chapter in the Hebrew Bible, medieval Bestiaries and other specialized texts, and private devotional works like the Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux. The course will draw upon medieval manuscript facsimiles in the Rose Library, as well as the Candler Bible, an original, thirteenth-century preacher's bible from Paris.

ARTHIST 775R-2: Letters and Late Modernism

Becky Bivens     T 10:00am-12:45pm     Carlos Hall Conf Room     Class #6611

This research seminar examines letters as a form of understanding late modernism, especially mid-twentieth century American abstract art. We will think about letters as forms of genre literature and consider their particular freedoms and limitations--among them a one-to-one mode of address and (often) an off-the-cuff, free-wheeling style. Beyond style, we will also consider content, asking how letters help us understand the special concerns of late modern abstract art, especially the relevance--if any--of the interior self and psychological experience to historicizing, interpreting, and evaluating works of art. Readings are drawn from primary materials and include love letters, letters to the editor, correspondence, and postcards. Authors include Clement Greenberg, John Berger, Lucy Lippard, and Chris Kraus, among others. Students will write term papers that draw on letters as resources.