Courses

Spring 2016

Undergraduate Seminar: Popular Visual Cultures of the Global South: Africa in India, India in Africa Course Number: HA 192M | CCN: 05105

Ivy Mills

We will explore horizontal affinities and antipathies in the Global South by tracking flows of visual culture between Africa and India. We will also consider possibilities opened up by a comparative approach that tests the transferability of analytics developed in...

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Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Representing Urban Modernity Course Number: R1B Section 8 | CCN: 04974

Sharone Tomer

One of the fundamental aspects of modernity is the persistent transformation of society and space – and that these changes are always experienced unevenly. Modernity’s history is of some people and spaces benefiting tremendously and others experiencing waves of marginalization and dislocations. This...

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Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Viewing the Pain of Others Course Number: R1B Section 7 | CCN: 04971

Vanessa Brutsche

This course will explore how images call upon us to engage with violence, with suffering bodies, or what Susan Sontag referred to as “the pain of others.” Examining visual media ranging from painting and sculpture to photography and cinema, we...

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Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Art and Space: Tian’anmen Square Since 1949 Course Number: R1B Section 6 | CCN: 04968

Rosaline Kyo

Since 1949, the area of Tian’anmen Gate and Square has gone through major spatial and architectural renovations. Along with these physical changes, the area has developed into a highly charged space for political theatre and protest. This class will consider artworks in various...

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Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: The Body in Avant-Garde Art, 1850-1940 Course Number: R1B Section 4 | CCN: 04962

Caty Telfair

The art world in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth was a tumult of controversy, debate, wild invention and stubborn reactionism that resulted in the radical transformation of centuries-long conventions of artistic...

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Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Reading the Crowd: Nineteenth Century Texts and Images Course Number: R1B Section 5 | CCN: 04965

Margot Szarke

Baudelaire famously remarked that only gifted artists can efficiently mingle with the crowd [“Il n’est pas donné à chacun de prendre un bain de multitude, jouir de la foule est un art…”]. Yet the inescapable, frenetic mob becomes a quintessential figure...

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Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Seeing the World: The art and science of landscape in early modern Europe Course Number: R1B Section 3 | CCN: 04959

Jason Rozumalski

 Are there boundaries between art and science? What is the difference between representation and abstraction? How does perception interact with reality? Can visualization be objective? In this course, we will address these questions (and others) by working to understand why and how people...

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Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: The Body in Avant-Garde Art, 1850-1940 Course Number: R1B Section 2 | CCN: 04956

Caty Telfair

The art world in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth was a tumult of controversy, debate, wild invention and stubborn reactionism that resulted in the radical transformation of centuries-long conventions of artistic...

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Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: The Body in Chinese Visual and Material Culture Course Number: R1B Section 1 | CCN: 04953

Patricia Yu

This course will examine changing conceptions of the body in Chinese visual and material culture. We will look at examples throughout China’s long history, from the First Emperor’s quest for immortality to contemporary artists’ use of their own bodies as a medium...

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Undergraduate Seminar: Museum Seminar: Research and Presentation of Works of Art Course Number: HA 192CU | CCN: 05088

Jacquelynn Baas

An exhibition of works of art from the collection of the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive opening July 14, 2016 in the museum’s new building, is the focus of a seminar on...

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Undergraduate Seminar: Hands on at the Hearst Course Number: HA 192B | CCN: 05088

Andrew Stewart

This is a hands-on seminar designed to introduce qualified students to the "nuts and bolts" of Greek and Roman art, in the form of intensive study of selected objects in the Phoebe...

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Undergraduate Seminar: Cultural Dynamics of Medieval and Early-Modern Manuscripts Course Number: HA 192D.1 | CCN: 05091

In this course we will study medieval and early-modern manuscripts as complex intersections of materiality, aesthetics, politics, and institutionality. In a first part, students will be introduced into the fundamentals of codicology, paleography, and manuscript illumination: a hands-on phase for...

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Transnational Avant-gardes Course Number: HA 190M | CCN: 05064

Anneka Lenssen

This course explores the dreams of newness that traversed modernity’s overlapping geopolitical spaces, 1900-1968, and gave rise to experimental artistic practices around the world. In particular, we focus on the formation and reformation of four paradigms of avant-garde efforts: Futurism...

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Visual Cultures of Africa Course Number: HA 27 | CCN: 04998

Ivy Mills

Primitive. Tribal. Traditional. Authentic. These are the lenses that have fixed African visual cultures in relation to the dominant aesthetic traditions of the West. These classifications are based on “an Africa of the mind”—an Africa imagined as untainted, unchanging and...

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Early Modern French Art and Visual Culture: Renaissance to French Revolution Course Number: HA 175 | CCN: 05055

Todd Olson

This course will examine French art and visual culture from the 16th century to the mid-18th century. Beginning with the architecture, processions, painting, prints and decorative arts of the School of Fontainebleau...

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Western Art from the Renaissance to the Present Course Number: HA 11 | CCN: 04977

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby

This course is an introduction to visual art in Europe and the USA since the 14th century with the main emphasis on painting and sculpture.  Rather than attempting to offer a sweeping...

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Undergraduate Seminar: Renaissance Walls & Wall Paintings Course Number: HA 192D.2 | CCN: 05094

Henrike C. Lange

The study of wall painting unites some of the most defining elements of Renaissance artistic practices: Questions of patronage, spirituality, materiality and illusionism, architecture, time, and narrative arise from the many options of decorating walls with frescoes. We will examine...

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Undergraduate Seminar: Reading Photographs of the American West, 1850-1920 Course Number: HA 192F.1 | CCN: 05097

Christine Hult-Lewis

This seminar will focus on three intertwined issues: photography in the American West, the ways in which these photographs were disseminated, and how these images defined and visualized the West for the...

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Methods and Theories of Art History Course Number: HA 100 | CCN: 05013

Lauren Kroiz

This course introduces theories and methods of art history that have played a major role in the formation of the discipline from the later eighteenth century to the present day. Readings include key texts by major art-writers, art theorists, and...

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Etruscan and Roman Painting Course Number: HA 145A | CCN: 05028

Christopher Hallett, Lisa Pieraccini (Classics)

The art of painting was highly valued in ancient Italy from the earliest times. Archaeological evidence demonstrates that the pre-Roman cultures of Italy—such as the Greeks, Leucanians, and Etruscans—all made extensive use...

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Undergraduate Seminar: Art and the Modern Interior Course Number: HA 192F.2 | CCN: 05100

Imogen Hart

The domestic interior was central to the development of modern western art. It was a favorite subject for painters, a space of artistic display for new middle-class patrons...

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Undergraduate Seminar: Art: Take it, Break it, and Fake it Course Number: HA 192T | CCN: 05105

Gregory Levine

This undergraduate seminar considers the visual arts in relation to behaviors that are generally deemed pernicious or at least provocative or sensational—art looting and theft, iconoclasm and vandalism, and forgery. Not, in other words, the sorts of behaviors one might...

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Art in Late Antiquity Course Number: HA 151 | CCN: 05037

Diliana Angelova

This class examines the complex artistic, religious, and cultural transformations that took place in the ancient Mediterranean world in the period from the emperor Constantine (306-337) to the rise of Islam in...

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Visual Activism Course Number: HA 190F | CCN: 05055

Julia Bryan-Wilson

How has visual culture played a contested role within the social movements of the last several decades? How, we might ask, is activism made visible; how does it erupt (or disappear) with collective fields of vision? Drawing upon South...

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Elizabethan Renaissance: Art, Culture, and Visuality Course Number: 169A | CCN: 05046

Elizabeth Honig

This course has two goals: to explore visual culture and the role of visuality in renaissance England, and to develop research skills. Elizabeth I’s long reign saw a remarkable flowering of the arts.  Her unique position as a female monarch surrounded...

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Graduate Seminar: Ethics of Abstraction Course Number: HA 290.1 | CCN: 05184

Anneka Lenssen, Julia Bryan-Wilson

The course will interrogate abstraction as a strategy in 20th and 21st century art around the globe, and its manifold implications for political projects of being, seeing, and knowing together. We will look at...

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Graduate/Undergraduate Seminar: Creole: French Portrayals of the Caribbean and Americas in the 18th and 19th centuries Course Number: HA 281 | CCN: 05178

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby

This seminar will grapple with the unique indeterminacy of the term “creole,” defined by one dictionary as: “ in the West Indies and parts of America- a. a native-born person of European, especially Spanish, ancestry; b. a native-born person of...

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Graduate Seminar: Cultural Transfer: Problems and Methods in the Study of Renaissance and Early Modern Visual Cultures (Colonial Latin America and the Trans-Atlantic World) Course Number: HA 270 | CCN: 05175

Todd Olson

This seminar will examine art historical theories and critical tools concerning the transmission, circulation and translation of images, artifacts, performances and visual technologies. The seminar’s readings and studies will focus on the...

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Graduate Seminar: City of Memory Course Number: HA 285 | CCN: 05181

Lauren Kroiz, Andrew Shanken

Our cities are layered with pasts. Street names celebrate lost leaders and buildings provide tangible links to history. Monuments memorialize traumas that are also written on to the bodies of urban inhabitants....

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Mellon Exhibition Graduate Seminar: Berkeley Collects! Course Number: HA 290.2 | CCN: 05187

Margaretta Lovell, Patricia Berger

This seminar continues the work of the fall 2015 Mellon Exhibition Graduate Seminar (HA 290.1) and is open (only) to the enrollees in that earlier class. Drawing on the University’s vast collections...

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