Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: The Art of Death: Precolumbian Representations of Death and the Afterlife Course Number: R1B Section 1 | CCN: 19908
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...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: The Nature of Monsters Course Number: R1B Section 2 | CCN: 19909
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...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Medicine, Museums, and the Art of Observation Course Number: R1B Section 3 | CCN: 19910
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...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Esoterica Course Number: R1B Section 4 | CCN: 19911
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...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Contemporary Art and Controversy Course Number: R1B Section 5 | CCN: 19912
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...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Work and the Idioms of Body, Instrument, and Scene Course Number: R1B Section 6 | CCN: 19913
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...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Movement in Modernist Art: A Global Perspective Course Number: R1B Section 7 | CCN: 19914
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...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Cultural Heritage: Theory, Practice, and Politics Course Number: R1B Section 8 | CCN: 24461
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...
Freshman Seminar: Thinking about the strangeness of photography Course Number: HA 24 | CCN: 32785
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...
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...
Visual Cultures of Africa Course Number: HA 27 | CCN: 30611
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...
Art, Ecology, and Asia: Ecohumanities and, or Against, the Climate Crisis Course Number: HA 38 | CCN: 32573
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...
Projecting Ancient Rome Course Number: HA 108 | CCN: 30612
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...
Sacred Arts in China Course Number: HA 131A | CCN: 30614
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...
The Spectacle of Modernity: Art and Technologies in late 19th-Century Paris Course Number: HA 180C | CCN: 30617
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...
The Shock of the Modern: European Art, 1900-1940 Course Number: HA 186A | CCN: 30918
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...
Anti-Colonial Avant-gardes Course Number: HA 190M | CCN: 30621
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....
Theory of the Copy Course Number: HA 190T/Rhetoric 136 | CCN: 32760
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...
Undergraduate Seminar: Space, Time, and Chinese Architecture Course Number: HA 192A | CCN: 31183
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...
Undergraduate Seminar: American Folk Art Course Number: HA 192AC | CCN: 30622
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...
Undergraduate Seminar: The Art and Monuments of Augustan Rome Course Number: HA 192B.2 | CCN: 24756
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...
Undergraduate Seminar: Tomb Biographies & Rituals from Ancient Italy: Exploring the Etruscans at the Hearst Museum Course Number: HA 192B.3 | CCN: 31190
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...
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...
Undergraduate Seminar: Contemporary Art In/Against Global Crisis: Cairo Course Number: HA 192H | CCN: 30624
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...
Undergraduate Seminar: Popular Visual Cultures of the Global South: Africa in India, India in Africa Course Number: HA 192M | CCN: 23518
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...
Undergraduate Seminar: Art History and Philosophy Course Number: HA 192T.1 | CCN: 31191
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...
Undergraduate Seminar: Psychologies of Art: Medieval & Early Modern Europe Course Number: HA 192T.2 | CCN: 31192
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...
Undergraduate Seminar: Breaking Images: Iconoclasms, Past and Present Course Number: HA 192T.3 | CCN: 32558
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...
Graduate Seminar: The Arts of Migration/ The Arts of the Folk Course Number: HA 289 | CCN: 30627
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...
Graduate Seminar: Berlin: The Guilt Environment (Global Urban Humanities Graduate Interdisciplinary Research Studio Spring 2020) Course Number: HA 290.1/ Architecture 209 | CCN: 18605
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...
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...
Graduate Seminar: From Democracy to Decolonization: The History and Futures of Museums Course Number: HUM 295 | CCN: 32451
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...
