Graduate Course Schedules

ARTHIST 592G/387: Issues in Conservation

Renée Stein     Th 1:00pm-3:45pm    Tate Room - Carlos Museum    Class #3674

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 596R: Internship in Art History

Coordinator: Giovanni Lovisetto

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.

ARHIST 597R: Directed Study

Variable credit.

ARTHIST 599R: Thesis Research

ARTHIST 729/475RW: Rome on Paper

Eric Varner/Sarah McPhee    T 1:00pm-3:45pm    Rose Library TBA    Class #2235

The image of the Eternal City, like no other, is indelibly fixed on paper, through printed views, maps, and illustrated books produced largely in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.  This course explores the vibrant print culture of early modern Rome and the artists, architects, antiquarians and publishers who shaped evolving visions of the city.  Paper proved to be an ideal medium for reconstructing ancient buildings, recording historic ruins and documenting the magnificence of the papal city in portable formats that appealed to multiple audiences. The course will be taught in the Rose Manuscript, Archive and Rare Book library and students will embark on in-depth, firsthand examinations of the rare printed materials that comprise the Library’s extensive “Views of Rome” collection.  The course will also feature two hands on workshops on paper and print making.  Students will also be able to attend talks by visiting scholars at the 2025 Lovis Corinth Colloquium which is focused on Renaissance paper and prints.

ARTHIST 739R: The Luminous Image: Investigating Medieval Stained Glass

Elizabeth Pastan    M 1:00pm-3:45pm    Carlos Hall Conf Rm    Class #2237

Restorations taking place in the stained-glass windows of medieval buildings such as Chartres Cathedral and Notre-Dame of Paris are revealing the art of glass painting in new and unexpected ways. This course is dedicated to exploring the inherent appeal of this medium, sometimes characterized as “painting on light,” “luminous imagery,” or, as one scholar taking note of the fragility of glass recently stated, “the certainty that, at any moment, a glass object can undergo sudden, unexpected, and catastrophic failure.” Beginning with the origins of glass in antiquity, we will follow its adaptation from a jewelry art to a monumental medium peculiarly suited to the windows of tall Gothic buildings. Then, like the many colored panes of glass that are leaded together to make up a window, this course will examine multiple facets of the medium, including its materials, production, and artistic expression. We will also investigate the rise of new donors and sources of revenue necessary to fund the glazing that often cost as much as the building that contained it. A key question concerns whether stained-glass windows actually served as visual “bibles for the poor,” as is often stated. Finally, the performative role of this kinetic medium, revealed by light over the course of the day, with translucent and evanescent imagery that might serve a variety of devotional ends, will be explored.

ARTHIST 775R: Still, Landscape, Portrait: The Viability of Genre

Lisa Lee    T 9:00am-11:45pm    Carlos Hall Conf Rm    Class #2234

Is the notion of genre a mere vestige of academic values, useful to us only as taxonomic convenience? This course attempts to put forth the viability of genre, even as it questions the stability of the categories it puts forth. (As such, it takes seriously Jacques Derrida’s provocation, “What if there were, lodged within the heart of the law [of genre] itself, a law of impurity or a principle of contamination”?) We will set aside the privileged “genre historique” in favor of those previously deemed lesser: still life, landscape, and portrait. Together, we will study how artists have worked in relation to, and against, the history and definition of these genres. We will ponder how still life, landscape, and portrait lend themselves to considerations of subject and object relations, nature and culture, self and other. At the same time, we will explore these genres as the means by which artists took up ever pressing question about pictorial space and the nature of representation.

ARTHIST 789R-1: Art / Data / Restitution

Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi    Th 10:00am-12:45pm    Carlos Hall Conf Rm    #2236

What is African art, and how does study of African art, or arts, help us think about the study of past and present arts from other parts of the world? Where, why, and how might we encounter data about art, and how should we attend to data about art with care? And how do data about art contribute to and shape restitution debates? Participants in this seminar will engage with these questions through a variety of readings and other assignments. While arts linked to the African continent at different moments in time as well as methods for studying and presenting African arts will serve as starting points for informed discussion, an important goal of the seminar is to prompt probing and informed analysis of matters that pertain to arts from any time and place. No prior knowledge of the African continent or African arts is necessary.

The seminar features creative assignment and analytical writing designed for the emerging professional. It requires deep reading, attentive listening, thoughtful discussion, and mutual respect; it is not a lecture course. Another aspect of the seminar includes sustained attention to the well-being and full humanity of each and every participant.