The aim of this course is two-fold: First, to develop an understanding of the extraordinary variety of ways meaning is produced in visual culture; secondly, to enable students to analyze and describe the social, political and cultural effects of these meanings. By studying examples drawn from contemporary art, film, television, digital culture, and advertising we will learn techniques of analysis developed in response to specific media and also how to cross-pollinate techniques of analysis in order to gain greater understanding of the complexity of our visual world. Grades are based on response papers, class attendance and participation, and a midterm and a final paper. Occasional film screenings will be scheduled as necessary in the course of the semester.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 504

This course introduces students to the theory and practice of media studies. We will look at a range of both media and historical tendencies related to the media, including manuscript culture, print, and the rise of the newspaper, novel, and modern nation-state; photography, film, television and their respective differences as visual mediums; important shifts in attitudes towards painting; the place of sound in the media of modernity; and the computerization of culture brought about by the computer, social networks, video games, and cell phones. In looking at these, we will consider both the approaches that key scholars in the field of media studies use, and the concepts that are central to the field itself (media/medium; medium-specificity; remediation; the culture industry; reification and utopia; cultural politics). By the end of the class, students will have developed a toolkit for understanding, analyzing, and even using the media that shape their lives in late modernity.

BUILDING: GAVET | ROOM: 202

This course introduces students to art made from the late 19th century to the present. We examine the various movements in their historical contexts, from Impressionism and post-Impressionism through Cubism, Abstraction Expressionism, Pop and Minimalism, as well as contemporary developments like installation and performance art. We consider how issues of gender, technological developments, and wars and social movements have affected art. The course is taught through a combination of lecture and discussion, and we will be constantly looking at images to understand how ideas, social change, and history are refracted in works of modern art.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 502

In the late 1960s the notion of site specificity emerged in art, posing a challenge to the ‘pure’ and ‘objective’ exhibition space of the museum, as well as the perceived limits of the artwork. Art moved out of the museum and into the world, embracing immateriality, duration, and—above all—the question of location. But this is not the only instance where the physical and conceptual space of the artwork has influenced the way we understand art. In this course we will consider the historical, cultural, discursive, institutional, and physical frameworks that allow us to draw meaning from art, juxtaposing modern and contemporary examples with classical, Renaissance, and other pre-modern traditions. In short we will explore the connection between art’s physical and conceptual frameworks, navigating the changeable worlds that exist within and beyond the frame.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 205

This discussion-based course interrogates the construction and evolution of Japan’s cultural traditions and idioms from ancient times to the eve of modernity. Drawing from oral records and mythology, literary and historical texts, and performing and visual arts, among other mediums, this course asks students to understand and appreciate the dynamic contexts of Japanese “tradition.” At the same time, contemporary evocations of the past, as represented through manga and film, will help us understand the processes through which traditions are (re)invented and (re)made. This course is therefore invested in both the historical legacy of traditional Japan and the ways in which tradition itself remains central to contemporary evocations Japanese culture. No prior knowledge of Japan is required or expected.

BUILDING: LCHAS | ROOM: 182

The history of Russian art and architecture from the Christianization of Russia through the twentieth century. Students learn how to read icons, discern the major features of Russian churches, and follow the development of Russian painting from the age of realism to modern times. In English.

BUILDING: DOUG | ROOM: 403

This course examines the physical remains of ancient Greek civilization, with an emphasis on architecture, sculpture, painting, and other visual arts, in order to understand Greek culture and society.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 501

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The course will examine the nature and culture of the African Diaspora as found on the African continent, Europe, the Americas and elsewhere. Among key issues on which the course will focus are variability, continuity and change in the cultures of different groups of Diasporan Africans, and relationships that are found between major environmental challenges as well as historical events such as the Islamic Jihads, Trans-Saharan Trade, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, colonialism, and Plantation Slavery in West Africa and the relocation and redistribution of African populations in Africa. A critical component of this class examines the historical, ethnographic, and archaeological research done in Africa, Europe, and the Americas to inform the student about theories and interpretations concerning the African Diaspora.

BUILDING: LCHAS | ROOM: 143

The principal objective of the course is to undertake a reevaluation of the received ideas associated with the art of the eighteenth century. Sometimes characterized as an age of frivolity (the Rococo), of a return to the antique (Neo-Classicism), of European expansionism (Chinoiserie), no one term or artistic style adequately conveys the complexity of the competing cultural formations that made up the eighteenth century. In place of these outmoded oppositions, we will consider themes such as the pictorial sublime, the Picturesque; the hierarchy of the genres, the Grand Tour; the role of science in art; art and industry; urbanization; travel and exploration; political revolution; the taste for the antique and the keynote influence of the intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 502

Ethnoarchaeology is the ethnographic study of peoples for archaeological reasons, usually through the study of the material remains of a society. Ethnoarchaeology aids archaeologists in reconstructing ancient lifeways by studying the material and non-material traditions of modern societies. This course will examine ethnoarchaeological work in Africa that is sensitive to the daily realities of peoples’ lives while it simultaneously builds the types of knowledge necessary for ethnoarchaeology to meet its important cognitive role within archaeological research. Examples will be drawn from research with potters and consumers, iron smelters, pastoralists, artists, and ethno-pharmacologists in West Africa, Southern Africa, and Eastern Africa. The course will guide the student to understand what ethnoarchaeology is, and to acquire skills, which would enable her or him to practice it. Lectures will be combined with class discussions of specific case studies.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 524

This course is a collaborative project realized by Alessandra Baroni and Donatella Stocchi-Perucchio. Its objective is threefold. The first is to introduce students to the history of Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque art in the geographical, historical, artistic, and anthropological context provided by the Tuscan territory and, for the sake of comparison, by other major centers of Italian art like Rome and Venice. The second objective is to teach students how to analyze a work of art and recognize iconographic tradition, meaning behind symbols, style, materiality, and multiple functions. The city of Arezzo, with its wealth of exemplary and acclaimed artistic masterpieces and landmarks is an ideal laboratory in which the above goals can be met by focusing on specific objects in their original locations and still performing their original function. The third objective is to show how in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, art, literature, and spirituality intersect and interact with one another.

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Studies the history of “aesthetic” thought—namely the philosophical reflection on the concepts of beauty, taste, and sublimity, on our affective response to art and nature, and on the role of art and the artist in society—from Plato to the present, with particular emphasis on how it relates to questions of epistemology, anthropology, ethics, ontology, and politics. Readings from Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, Dubos, Burke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Nietzsche, Lyotard, Derrida, Rancière. Conducted in English.

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This course will review the prehistory of ancient societies in the Andes, which will begin from the peopling of the continent to the conquest of the Inca Empire by the Spanish. Students will become familiar with Andean chronologies as well as the prehispanic cultures of Chinchorro, Caral, Chavin, Pukara, Paracas, Moche, Nasca, Wari, Tiwanaku, Chimú, and the Inca, among others. Special attention will be paid to how these societies adapted to the diverse ecology of the Andes. Topics include the history of Peruvian archaeology; plant and animal domestication; the development of social complexity, the emergence of religion; prehispanic art and symbolism; ancient technology, economies and trade; and urbanism. The course includes material from archaeological investigations and interpretations as well as ethnohistoric and ethnographic sources.

BUILDING: LATT | ROOM: 210

This course explores the rise and social influence of fixed images in Spain and Spanish America, from the Daguerreotype (1839) to modern digital media. It addresses topics such as the professionalization of photography, the rise and popularity of portrait studios, the collection of albums, the circulation of portable cartes de visite, official state photographs, documentary evidence and the creativity of Photo Shop, and the iconization of images across cultural borders. Photographs, both fictions of photography and documents on the art of the photograph, the role of women photographers, and the incorporation of photography in film are examined. Course taught in English but written work may be done in Spanish for SP credit.

BUILDING: LCHAS | ROOM: 143

PREREQUISITES: SP 200 (if taking for SP credit)

Focuses on what the critic Andreas Huyssen calls the perceived "Great Divide" between highbrow and lowbrow forms of culture. Explores the emergence of these divisions and interrogates if and how they have blurred in the recent past.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 502

This course covers key themes in the history of photography in the 20th & 21st century, when the medium achieved an unforeseen ubiquity. Photography’s attraction as an object of study is that there remains no aspect of modern life – from birth to death, from sex to war, from atoms to planets, from commerce to art – that is not touched by it in one way or another. Photography is a class of images and practices that thoroughly infiltrates and mediates the world around us. This ubiquity poses a unique problem for art history: how do we develop a method of analysis for something so functionally diverse? How can we differentiate the photograph as an object, a representation subject to manipulation, as well as what it represents with such exacting fidelity? We will address such questions by studying photography's history in relation to various social, cultural, and technological conditions from the advent of Modernism to the global spread of the camera phone.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 502

The Art New York Field Studio course will utilize the resources of New York City as a starting point for creative production. The course will be conducted primarily online, with face-to-face meetings with the professor spread throughout the semester. Projects will take students outside into the city to make art with a rotating variety of media, including photography, video, sound, and installation, with an emphasis on collaboration.

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As an integral part of the internship program, all students participating in ANY will meet weekly with the program's resident director. The class will visit museums, art galleries, film & media screenings, & learn from these visits through readings, papers, presentations & discussions. The colloquium will also serve to provide an intellectual framework for understanding the operations of the NY art world & to allow students to discuss with one another their experiences at the various institutions where they intern. Each student will be expected to make a presentation about their internship to the ANY group. There will be an entrepreneurial component which will introduce the students to a wide variety of entrepreneurial activity & innovative practices within arts and culture. Through guest speakers, seminars & field trips the students will learn how entrepreneurial endeavors develop. By the end of the semester, the students will create their own proposal for an entrepreneurial project.

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PREREQUISITES: Permission of instructor required.

What is the value of the everyday in modern and contemporary culture? And how does photography permit greater, more immediate access to ordinary life? This seminar will explore these two related questions starting with the underlying assumption that the modern experience is unthinkable without the proliferation of photographic technologies. Studio portraits, identification cards, family snapshots, newspaper photos, posters, and viral images all represent as well as constitute the ins-and-outs of daily life in ways conscious and unconscious, thoughtful and entirely indiscriminate.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 524

This course explores the contributions of black feminists to literary studies and visual and cultural studies. Beginning with Ida B. Wells, and then moving ahead to the foundational anthologies of the 1980s and continuing to the contemporary moment, we will cover a wide range of critical thinkers, including bell hooks, Hortense Spillers, Toni Morrison, Michele Wallace, and Valerie Smith. Some background in literary or visual studies is really essential.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 504

This course will examine the aesthetics of several key typologies of human infrastructure in modern times. Most works of civil engineering and other built manifestations of human organization are typically thought of in the contexts of utility, efficiency and functionality and not as veritable objects of beauty born of design philosophy. This broad overview, everything from sidewalks to transport networks, demonstrates that infrastructure has, counter to common believe, very often been at the forefront of aesthetic thought and has played a formative role in rendering human innovation and ingenuity in visual and physical terms. This seminar is organized typologically and will comprise the reading of one recent scholarly book per week from a broad range of disciplines including the history of architecture, the history of science, history, science and technology studies and the history of art. The course material will be augmented by three field trips to important sites in the Rochester area.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 524

Independent study under faculty guidance of a limited field of art history or individual study on a single topic at an advanced level under the guidance of a member of the art history faculty.

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Independent study under faculty guidance of a limited field of art history or individual study on a single topic at an advanced level under the guidance of a member of the art history faculty.

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Each student will intern in an institution arranged or approved by the Art and Art History faculty. The purpose of this internship is to give students an insiders' view of the workings of the art world. Students will be expected to document their internship experiences as a means of evaluation at the end of the semester. This program is limited to second, third, fourth and fifth year undergraduate students interested in learning about all aspects of contemporary art, about how art gets made, how it reaches its public, and the processes of its interpretation. Internships will consist of 20 hours per week, for which students will receive eight credits. Permission of instructor required.

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See "Requirements for Honors in Art History."

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Internships in London and the United States.

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