Reading & Writing about the Visual Experience: Aesthetics of Black Liberation Advocacy Course Number: HA R1B Section 1 | CCN: 22328
Gabriel Regalado
Monday, Wednesday: 8:00-9:30am
This course will explore the history of aesthetic and performance repertoires of Black radical protest movements in the U.S. with particular focus on the era of Black Lives Matter activism. We will survey the rhetoric and iconography of Black radical...
Reading & Writing about the Visual Experience: The Golden Age of Dead Media: Nostalgia in Modern Chinese Visual Culture Course Number: R1B Section 2 | CCN: 22329
Monday, Wednesday: 9:30-11:00am
Contemporary media culture has been described as “retromania,” “the aesthetics of obsolescence,” and “the golden age of dead media.” Our quotidian experiences with popular culture and new media, it seems, are haunted with memories of old, dead media. Contemporary China too is...
Reading & Writing about Visual Experience: Language Arts Course Number: R1B Section 3 | CCN: 22330
Tiffany Taylor
Monday, Wednesday: 11:00am-12:30pm
This course primarily focuses on the analysis of conceptual art. Through the juxtaposition of text and image in art, we will explore and challenge our assumptions and theories about language and art. Each week, we will focus on one or...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Radical Feminist Art in Times of Dictatorship Course Number: R1B Section 4 | CCN: 22331
Monday, Wednesday: 12:30-2:00pm
Under the violence of dictatorial regimes, social repression, and foreign intervention, artists across Latin America and the Caribbean have historically turned to art as a tool of demonstration and resistance. Looking closely at the political and social climate of the...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Depicting Food and Drink in Mediterranean Antiquity Course Number: R1B Section 5 | CCN: 22332
Jennifer Black
Monday, Wednesday: 2:00-3:30pm
Illustrations of food — sumptuous, simple, half-consumed, or yet to be hunted — have been central to human art for at least forty thousand years. The centrality of food and drink to cultural identity and survival has lent it this...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Decolonizing Vision: Representing Latin Americanness in Modern and Contemporary Art Course Number: R1B Section 6 | CCN: 22333
Monday, Wednesday: 3:30-5:00pm
This course aims to develop students’ critical thinking, looking, reading, and writing skills through close analysis of visual art and aesthetic theory, with a particular emphasis on twentieth and twenty-first century art in Latin America. We will read works of...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Food Writing Art Historically Course Number: R1B Section 7 | CCN: 22334
Monday, Wednesday: 5:00-6:30pm
Can food be art historical? Does being perishable, consumable, and all too familiar mean something is outside the canonical domains of art? Certainly, some forms of food can be identified with very specific people, places, and historical moments. Might the...
Reading and Writing about Visual Experience: Shadow Art History: Specters, Trauma, and Hauntings of the Unseen Course Number: R1B Section 8 | CCN: 25981
Tuesday, Thursday: 8:00-9:30am
Art history, as an academic discipline, is founded on a belief in close looking. Indeed, there is much to be learned about history and about the world from carefully analyzing visual and material culture. But there is also much to...
Western Art from the Renaissance to the Present Course Number: HA C11 | CCN: 30804
Tuesday, Thursday: 12:30-2:00pm
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 synthetic narrative of the development of art during...
ASIA MODERN: Art + Architecture, 1800-present Course Number: HA 36 | CCN: 30805
Tuesday, Thursday: 2:00-3:30pm
This course is intended as an introduction to the art and architecture of modern South, Southeast, and East Asia. Asia, of course, is as vast as it is diverse. Keeping this in mind, this course will not attempt an encyclopedic...
Eco Art: Art, Architecture, and the Natural Environment Course Number: HA 105 | CCN: 30806
Tuesday, Thursday: 11:00-12:30pm
Nuclear disasters. Global pandemics. The mass extinction of animal and plant species. The environmental crises that the planet faces today has fundamentally transformed the way we perceive human interaction with the natural environment. What can art, architecture, sustainable design, urban...
The Classical Painting Tradition in China Course Number: HA 131B | CCN: 30807
Tuesday, Thursday: 11:00-12:30pm
In 1651 a Mr. Wu in southern China made the dying wish that a mid-14th century landscape painting be tossed into a fire, hoping to take it with him to the netherworld. Unfortunately for him—but fortunately for us—when the painting...
Art and Society in Late Antiquity Course Number: HA 151 | CCN: 30808
Tuesday, Thursday: 3:30-5:00pm
This class has several objectives. The primary one is to teach you about the complex artistic, religious, and cultural transformations that took place in the ancient Mediterranean world in the period between Constantine’s reign (306-337) and the death of the...
Southern Baroque Course Number: HA 170 | CCN: 30811
Tuesday, Thursday: 9:30-11:00am
“Baroque” is an all-encompassing term that has been used to describe an amazing number of seventeenth-century artists and architects: Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi, Bernini, Ribera Rubens, Poussin, and Velázquez to name a few. Rather than trying to convince you that they...
The Shock of the Modern: European Art, 1900-1940 Course Number: HA 186A | CCN: 32783
Tuesday, Thursday: 2:00-3:30pm
In this course, for which no prior art history experience is required, 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—as well as...
Buddhist Visual Culture Course Number: HA 190A | CCN: 30818
Kwi Jeong Lee
Mon, Wed, Fri: 3:00-4:00pm
This course provides an introduction to the visual culture of Buddhism, covering the time period from its nascence up to the present in light of its regional forms and variations. While the course follows the chronological order loosely, it is...
Decolonizing Ancient Mediterranean Art Course Number: HA 190B | CCN: 33393
Mon, Wed, Fri: 2:00-3:00pm
This class examines new and innovative ways of “seeing”, discussing, analyzing and critically thinking about ancient Mediterranean material culture. There is a real urgency and agency in stripping away old models for understanding the past – this class embarks on...
Homoeroticism and the Visual Arts 1750 – 1920 Course Number: HA 190F.2 | CCN: 32559
Tuesday, Thursday: 12:30-2:00pm
This course deals with same-same attractions and the visual arts (concentrating on painting, sculpture, and photography), from the mid-eighteenth century to the end of the First World War, looking at individual artists, particular art movements (ranging from neoclassicism through academic...
African Aesthetics Course Number: HA 190M | CCN: 26247
Mon, Wed, Fri: 1:00-2:00pm
How should we approach the grotesque, the exaggerated, the imperfect, the improvisational, the unfinished, and the obscured in African art? Should we read “ugliness” as a sign of the “bad” – either as an intentional signaling of moral deviance, or...
Theory of the Copy Course Number: HA 190T / Rhet 136 | CCN: 32570
Mon, Wed, Fri: 11:00-12:00pm
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.1 | CCN: 30812
Tuesday: 2:00-5:00pm
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: Questions Concerning Global Modernism Course Number: HA 192A.2 | CCN: 30813
Wednesday: 2:00-5:00pm
The idea of “global modernism” has now gained significant currency within the academy. But what exactly does this term connote? When appended to “modernism” does the term “global” merely serve as a moniker for what was formerly described as the...
Undergraduate Seminar: Revisiting “Reception” of the Ancient World Course Number: HA 192B | CCN: 30815
Monday: 9:00-12:00pm
This seminar will explore ancient Greek and Roman monuments and artworks and their resurgence in Neo-Classical art in Europe and the Americas. It will often juxtapose ‘old world’ and ‘new world’ art and architecture in an attempt to address issues...
Undergraduate Seminar: Social Justice and Museum Studies Course Number: HA 192CU | CCN: 32617
Thursday: 9:00-12:00pm
How can museums become sites for social justice work? In 1793, the National Assembly in France opened the Louvre as an art museum, articulating a Western connection between museums and the spaces of democracy that continues to the present. Some...
Undergraduate Seminar: On Unicorns, Lions, Dragons, and Rabbits: Noah’s Ark from the Medieval Bestiarium to the Baroque Menagerie Course Number: HA 192D | CCN: 30816
Thursday: 2:00-5:00pm
In this seminar, we will consider how our local Berkeley mountain lions, canyon deer, and gophers relate to Dante and Giotto, and what our hummingbirds have to do with the global Baroque age. We will consider a history of animals...
Undergraduate Seminar: Jusepe de Ribera (1591-1652) and the Global Hispanic World Course Number: HA 192E | CCN: 30817
Thursday: 2:00-5:00pm
The Spanish born artist, who was active in Rome and Naples during the first half of the seventeenth-century, has left a series of works that are remarkable for their repetitiveness. Thumbnail photos of his oil paintings in catalogue raisonées betray...
Undergraduate Seminar: Art and the Modern Interior Course Number: HA 192F | CCN: 26249
Friday: 10:00-1:00pm
2020 has cast a spotlight on the domestic interior. As we regularly Zoom into one another’s homes, the boundary between public and private space seems more fragile than ever. New relationships between art and domesticity have developed as the pandemic...
Undergraduate Seminar: Lagos: Picturing the African Megacity Course Number: HA 192M | CCN: 25455
Wednesday: 9:00-12:00pm
Lagos is a city of constant flux, centuries-old cosmopolitanism, endless excitement, boundless potential, unchecked expansion, and 24/7 hustle. For the many millions who call the city home, Lagos life is also defined by daily frustrations, broken dreams, stalled traffic, power outages...
Undergraduate Seminar: Evolution, Aesthetics, and Art History Course Number: HA 192T | CCN: 19575
Tuesday: 9:00-12:00pm
We will look at a body of recent writing in which evolutionary theory intersects with aesthetics and art history, such as Prum’s theory of the evolution of beauty, Rutherford’s study of aesthetic fitness, Davies’s research on the role of art in the evolution...
Graduate Seminar: Art, Ecology, and other Earthly Matters Course Number: HUM 295 | CCN: 30327
Sugata Ray, Asma Kazmi (Art Practice), Sharad Chari (Geography)
Monday: 3:00-5:00pm
Course Catalog Description
These graduate seminars, ranging across disciplines, bring collaborative approaches and team-teaching to graduate studies in the humanities. Teams include two faculty members from the Division of Arts & Humanities and one faculty member from an outside discipline. Seminars...
Graduate Seminar: Crisis and Figuration: Art and the Politics of the Body Course Number: HA 285 | CCN: 30819
Wednesday: 2:00-5:00pm
This seminar investigates the issue of figuration in modern art, in particular through interwar European art (1918-1940) and the so-called “return to order”—although we will also consider the questions of figuration, representation, and embodiment in an expanded chronological and geographical...
Graduate Seminar: Buddhism, Race, Class, and Gender Course Number: HA 290 | CCN: 31025
Gregory Levine, Mark Blum (Buddhist Studies)
Tuesday: 2:00-5:00pm
This exploratory graduate seminar, co-taught by Mark Blum (East Asian Languages and Cultures/Buddhist Studies) and Greg Levine (History of Art), focuses on the study of race, class, and gender within the Buddhist tradition, its doctrinal, ritual, and institutional histories as...
