Reading widely across art history and taking nothing for granted in terms of pre-existing assumptions, this seminar will ask: What is an object? What is a method? What is art? What is history? How have these categories been by turns upheld, policed, challenged, and dismantled? What might be at stake, politically, in studying art history today? Together we will explore different models of writing and theoretical commitments as students will be encouraged to answer these questions for themselves. The Proseminar is required of first-year PhD students in History of Art; it is open to first-year students in other programs by permission of the instructor.