Courses

Spring 2020

Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: The Art of Death: Precolumbian Representations of Death and the Afterlife Course Number: R1B Section 1 | CCN: 19908

Molly Fierer-Donaldson

Monday, Wednesday: 8:00-9:30am

This course will focus on how the Precolumbian people of Mesoamerica, especially the Maya and Nahua (Aztec), conceptualized, enacted, and visually represented their ideas of death and the afterlife. We will explore these societies’ responses to death — and their visions...

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Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: The Nature of Monsters Course Number: R1B Section 2 | CCN: 19909

Caty Telfair

Monday, Wednesday: 9:30-11:00am

Modern culture is bristling with monsters: vampires, werewolves, sphinxes and Frankensteins  galore have taken over our big and small screens, haunt our bookshelves, and stalk the halls of our museums and galleries. Even as a literal belief in monsters and the...

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Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Medicine, Museums, and the Art of Observation Course Number: R1B Section 3 | CCN: 19910

Eva Allan

Monday, Wednesday: 11:00-12:30pm

Increasingly over the past 20 years, medical schools have started to partner with local museums in order to integrate art observation courses into their curricula. The visual tools of art history—observation and questioning; careful, critical looking; and noticing details in relation to the whole—have been shown to...

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Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Esoterica Course Number: R1B Section 4 | CCN: 19911

Jon Soriano

Monday, Wednesday: 12:30-2:00pm

Esoteric art is obscure and intentionally so. Unintelligible to the uninitiated, esoterica is shaped by systems of thought and practice at odds with institutional or normative modes of vision, especially those commonly classified as scientific and modern. This class examines how contemporary scholars...

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Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Contemporary Art and Controversy Course Number: R1B Section 5 | CCN: 19912

Jez Flores

Monday, Wednesday: 2:00-3:30pm

This course examines art at the center of public controversy in the United States since the 1970s. We will be exploring art in a range of media including painting, sculpture, photography, prints, and video. The content of this course is...

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Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Work and the Idioms of Body, Instrument, and Scene Course Number: R1B Section 6 | CCN: 19913

William Stafford

Monday, Wednesday: 3:30-5:00pm

In this course, we will explore engagements with ‘work’ and ‘worksites’ through visual means and media. We will aim to navigate the stakes, ethics, and affects expressed in and through work as a mode of knowing, making, and performance. We...

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Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Movement in Modernist Art: A Global Perspective Course Number: R1B Section 7 | CCN: 19914

Megan Alvarado Saggese

Monday, Wednesday: 5:00-6:30pm

This course aims to develop students’ critical thinking, looking, reading, writing, and research skills through close analysis of visual art, with a particular emphasis on twentieth-century kinetic art. Using Frank Popper’s Origins and Development of Kinetic Art to guide the course, we will reflect on how a concern with motion in earlier art movements...

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Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Cultural Heritage: Theory, Practice, and Politics Course Number: R1B Section 8 | CCN: 24461

Patricia Yu

Tuesday, Thursday: 8:00-9:00am

This is the second course in the Reading and Composition series. We will focus on how to read critically, compose arguments, conduct research, and write a 10-12 page research paper using visual evidence and citing appropriate sources. In addition to reading texts...

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Freshman Seminar: Thinking about the strangeness of photography Course Number: HA 24 | CCN: 32785

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby

Tuesday, 1:00-3:00pm

Class will meet on Tuesdays from January 21 to March 3, 2020. This seminar will introduce students to the complexity of photography as a medium and its history. We will read some of the classic texts on photography from the 19th...

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Thinking Through Art and Design @Berkeley: Public Art and Belonging Course Number: L&S 25 | CCN: 20128

Lauren Kroiz, Leigh Raiford

Tuesday, Thursday: 12:00-2:00pm

This course introduces students to key vocabularies, forms, and histories from the many arts and design disciplines represented at UC Berkeley. It is conceived each year around a central theme that responds to significant works and events on the campus...

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Visual Cultures of Africa Course Number: HA 27 | CCN: 30611

Ivy Mills

Tuesday, Thursday: 12:30-2:00pm

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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Art, Ecology, and Asia: Ecohumanities and, or Against, the Climate Crisis Course Number: HA 38 | CCN: 32573

Gregory Levine

Tuesday, Thursday: 9:30-11:00am

Are we approaching the “end of the world” and the extinction of our species, indeed most species in the web of life? What can—and should—we do about it?  How might we bring together the study of art/architecture, ecology, and history in...

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Projecting Ancient Rome Course Number: HA 108 | CCN: 30612

Lisa Pieraccini

Mon, Wed, Fri: 1:00-2:00pm

Projection consists of presenting an image on a surface (such as a movie screen). It can also refer to distancing (we are not the Romans) or relating to or identifying with (we are the Romans) or sometimes a blend of...

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Sacred Arts in China Course Number: HA 131A | CCN: 30614

Jun Hu

Mon, Wed, Fri: 3:00-4:00pm

Why did a ruler of a small state take a lavish set of bronze bells instead of weapons with him to the netherworld in a time of war? Why, over a millennium, did artists continue to excavate and furnish grottoes...

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The Spectacle of Modernity: Art and Technologies in late 19th-Century Paris Course Number: HA 180C | CCN: 30617

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby

Tuesday, Thursday: 11:00-12:30pm

What form can be given to modernity?  What were politics of modern self-fashioning and visual culture in Paris, the city Walter Benjamin famously called “the Capital of the Nineteenth Century”? This class will focus on the period from the 1860s...

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The Shock of the Modern: European Art, 1900-1940 Course Number: HA 186A | CCN: 30918

Aglaya Glebova

Tuesday, Thursday: 2:00-3:30pm

In this course, we will look at the major developments, movements, and paradigms of European modernism from the turn of the century to the beginning of World War II. Topics covered include abstraction, the avant-garde’s use of mass media (from...

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Anti-Colonial Avant-gardes Course Number: HA 190M | CCN: 30621

Anneka Lenssen

Tuesday, Thursday: 3:30pm-5:00pm

This lecture course explores the transnational history of artistic efforts at radical representation and reconstruction following the Second World War, a period of sweeping independence and liberation movements in formerly colonized territories as well as new definitions of human rights....

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Theory of the Copy Course Number: HA 190T/Rhetoric 136 | CCN: 32760

Winnie Wong

Mon, Wed, Fri: 9:00-10:00am

The course surveys critical controversies surrounding fakes, forgeries, multiples, counterfeits, imitations, and appropriations from the Late Renaissance to the present day, in European, American, Australian and Chinese art. Each of the images and objects we will examine sparked extensive debate...

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Undergraduate Seminar: Space, Time, and Chinese Architecture Course Number: HA 192A | CCN: 31183

Jun Hu

Mon. 9:00-12:00pm

This seminar offers a set of introductions to basic aspects and elements of built environments in China. It is not a chronological survey. Each of the thematic sections incorporates a variety of perspectives, theoretical and technical, aesthetic and historical. Our...

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Undergraduate Seminar: American Folk Art Course Number: HA 192AC | CCN: 30622

Margaretta Lovell

Friday, 9:00-12:00pm

This seminar will look at specific case studies of the production and use of architecture, paintings, and needlework within specific communities in what is now the United States.  We will look, for instance, at Shaker watercolors and design; Puritan painting...

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Undergraduate Seminar: The Art and Monuments of Augustan Rome Course Number: HA 192B.2 | CCN: 24756

Christopher Hallett

Monday, 2:00-5:00pm

Augustus Caesar, the first emperor of Rome, inaugurated an enormous building program during his long reign that completely transformed the empire’s capital city.  In this seminar we will consider some of the most famous of his constructions—his Mausoleum (the tumulus...

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Undergraduate Seminar: Tomb Biographies & Rituals from Ancient Italy: Exploring the Etruscans at the Hearst Museum Course Number: HA 192B.3 | CCN: 31190

Lisa Pieraccini

Monday, 9:00-12:00pm

At the turn of the 20th century Phoebe A. Hearst set out to bring Etruscan antiquities to UC Berkeley for the educational benefit of students, faculty, and the public at large. Several thousand artifacts from Tuscany (from funerary and religious...

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Undergraduate Seminar: Victorian Orientalisms Course Number: HA 192F | CCN: 30623

Tuesday, 9:00-12:00pm

This undergraduate seminar explores the art of the Victorian period (1837–1901) with a focus on orientalisms. We will look at diverse case studies in a range of media including Pre-Raphaelite paintings by William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward...

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Undergraduate Seminar: Contemporary Art In/Against Global Crisis: Cairo Course Number: HA 192H | CCN: 30624

Anneka Lenssen

Thursday, 9:00-12:00pm

This seminar takes the city of Cairo, the massive Egyptian capital of some 20 million residents, as a locus for exploring a range of critical artistic practices from the 1970s until the present day, and how these visual experiments shaped...

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Undergraduate Seminar: Popular Visual Cultures of the Global South: Africa in India, India in Africa Course Number: HA 192M | CCN: 23518

Ivy Mills

Wednesday, 9:00-12:00pm

In this undergraduate seminar, we will explore horizontal affinities and antipathies in the Global South by tracking flows of visual culture between Africa and India. We will also experiment with a comparative approach that tests analytics developed to understand contemporary...

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Undergraduate Seminar: Art History and Philosophy Course Number: HA 192T.1 | CCN: 31191

Whitney Davis

Tuesday, 2:00-5:00pm

This seminar explores how different philosophical frameworks enable (or in some cases disable) certain kinds of art historical inquiries. We might look at various kinds of philosophical systems which have been taken up by art historians or have obvious relevance...

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Undergraduate Seminar: Psychologies of Art: Medieval & Early Modern Europe Course Number: HA 192T.2 | CCN: 31192

Henrike C. Lange

Thursday, 2:00-5:00pm

“Psychologies of Art: Medieval & Early Modern Europe” maps psychological, emotive, and pathological patterns in art, in the history of art, and in art theory from the late Middle Ages to the present day. In this new version of the...

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Undergraduate Seminar: Breaking Images: Iconoclasms, Past and Present Course Number: HA 192T.3 | CCN: 32558

Diliana Angelova

Wednesday, 2:00-5:00pm

Purposeful image-destruction, or iconoclasm, has occurred many times in the history of art. This undergraduate seminar examines the causes and the theorization of such iconoclasms through a number of case studies, starting with Mesopotamian assault and abduction of statues, and...

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Graduate Seminar: The Arts of Migration/ The Arts of the Folk Course Number: HA 289 | CCN: 30627

Margaretta Lovell

Wednesday, 2:00-5:00pm

This seminar takes as its subject two kinds of artworks—first, those made by migrating peoples chronicling their journeys or commenting on the facts of their migration (such as Hmong storycloths and the Aztec codices), and in some cases, artworks made...

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Graduate Seminar: Berlin: The Guilt Environment (Global Urban Humanities Graduate Interdisciplinary Research Studio Spring 2020) Course Number: HA 290.1/ Architecture 209 | CCN: 18605

Lauren Kroiz, Andrew Shanken

Thursday, 9:00-12:00pm

Since the city’s reunification in 1989, Berlin has intertwined its urban renewal with landscapes of reconciliation and commemoration. The “New Berlin” that politicians and city authorities imagined in the 1990s, after the Wende (or Fall of the Berlin Wall), was...

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Graduate Seminar: SCULPTURE! Course Number: HA 290.2 | CCN: 32870

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Todd Olson

Monday, 2:00-5:00pm

“Why sculpture is boring” wrote Charles Baudelaire in his Salon of 1846.  The phrase has lived on partly because many concur. After all, much sculpture appears so formulaic that we hardly see it at all. Yet sculpture as painting’s other...

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Graduate Seminar: From Democracy to Decolonization: The History and Futures of Museums Course Number: HUM 295 | CCN: 32451

Lauren Kroiz

Thursday, 3:00-5:00pm

Collaborative Research Seminars, 2 credit Graduate Seminar   Instructors Lauren Kroiz, Associate Professor, History of Art Beth Piatote, Associate Professor, Ethnic Studies Leigh Raiford, Associate Professor, African American and African Diaspora Studies   HUM 295 Collaborative Research Seminars are a suite of 2-unit graduate seminars, ranging across...

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