Courses
The Language of Landscape
At mid-nineteenth century in the United States, large-scale landscape paintings were enormously popular; tens of thousands of people paid to see the exhibitions of single canvases, bringing opera glasses to view the pictures closely. A few decades later, critics dismissed these canvases, often with a sense of embarrassment. Taking such works as our objects of study, this course broadly considers the relationship between landscape, art, ideology, and perception. Readings range from Kant, Burke, and Ruskin to Thoreau and Emerson to Humboldt and Darwin; critical texts include W.J.T. Mitchell, Denis Cosgrove, Joseph Koerner, Rachael DeLue, and Bryan Wolf.
The Material Culture of Australia and New Zealand
This seminar focuses upon the craftsmen and their products in the Antipodes from the late eighteenth century to the present. Looking closely at materials, techniques, forms, and decoration and paying attention to the training of craftsmen and the function and circulation of their work, the course probes the full complexity of textiles, metalwork, ceramics, and woodworking in regard to issues of colonialism, hybridity, and control of work. Attention is devoted to indigenous work as well as that of immigrants from the United Kingdom, Germany, China, and America.
The Replicated Image
The course works mainly with primary materials at the Yale Art Gallery and elsewhere. The main object of study is the image printed with ink on paper: the woodcut, engraving, and etching, independent sheets as well as illustrated books, in Europe from 1400 to 1600. But these technologies are placed in the wider historical context of the mechanical replication of texts and images, by both analogue and digital means, involving movable type, bronze casting, stamping and molding of coins and medals, terracotta sculpture, tapestry, and serial production of paintings. The seminar addresses the impact of the replication technologies on histories of art and culture.
The Teaching of the History of Art
By arrangement with faculty. History of Art graduate students only.
Victorian Narratives
Treating works in a variety of media—engraving and poetry as well as fiction and painting—this course examines how Victorian texts, visual and verbal, represent actions that exist in both space and time. The major literary works to be studied are Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53) and Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872–73), along with poetry by Tennyson and Browning; and the chief artists include Millais, Holman Hunt, Brown, and Frith.
Violence, Race, and Modernity
The course engages the art and material culture of transatlantic slavery, slave societies, Emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and contemporary times in the United States and the Caribbean through the indices of violence, trauma, and memory. It posits that violence (cultural, epistemic, ideological, systemic, physical, etc.) is a fundamental part of modernity within the African diaspora, but has thus far been under-examined within art history and visual culture.
The Senior Essay
Preparation of a research paper about thirty pages long under the direction of a qualified instructor. The essay is written in either the fall or the spring term of the senior year, though preferably in the fall term. Students write on subjects of their own choice. During the term before the essay is written, students plan the project in consultation with a qualified instructor or with the director of undergraduate studies. No student is permitted to enroll in HSAR 499 without submitting a project statement, with the formal title of the essay and a brief description of the subject to be treated. The statement must be signed by the student’s adviser and presented to the director of undergraduate studies before the student’s schedule can be approved.
The student must submit a suitable project outline and bibliography to the adviser and the director of undergraduate studies early in the term. The outline should indicate the focus and scope of the essay topic, as well as the proposed research methodology; the bibliography should be annotated. Students must also complete a library research colloquium for the senior essay. For essays submitted in the fall term, the deadline for the outline is September 16; for those in the spring term, January 20. Senior essays written in the fall term are due on December 2; those in the spring term on April 23. Two copies must be submitted to the director of undergraduate studies. Failure to comply with any deadline will be penalized by a lower final grade. No late essay will be considered for a prize in the department.
Permission may be given to write a two-term essay after consultation with an adviser and the director of undergraduate studies. Only those who have begun to do advanced work in a given area and whose project is considered to be of exceptional promise are eligible. The requirements for the one-term senior essay apply to the two-term essay, except that the essay should be from fifty to sixty pages in length.
Preparation of a research paper about thirty pages long under the direction of a qualified instructor. The essay is written in either the fall or the spring term of the senior year, though preferably in the fall term. Students write on subjects of their own choice. During the term before the essay is written, students plan the project in consultation with a qualified instructor or with the director of undergraduate studies. No student is permitted to enroll in HSAR 499a or b without submitting a project statement, with the formal title of the essay and a brief description of the subject to be treated. The statement must be signed by the student’s adviser and presented to the director of undergraduate studies before the student’s schedule can be approved. See the YCPS for deadlines and procedures.
Permission may be given to write a two-term essay after consultation with an adviser and the director of undergraduate studies. Only those who have begun to do advanced work in a given area and whose project is considered to be of exceptional promise are eligible. The requirements for the one-term senior essay apply to the two-term essay, except that the essay should be from fifty to sixty pages in length.
The Technical Examination of Art
Introduction to methods used in the technical examination of works of art, including critical assessment of the information such methods provide. What technical examination can reveal about the materials and techniques used in a particular work’s creation and about its subsequent history.
The Worlds of Homer
Interdisciplinary study of the artistic, literary, and cultural worlds of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, beginning in the Bronze Age of the Trojan War heroes and ending with the Homeric legacy in Western civilization. Topics include Homeric myth and reality, new archaeological evidence, the emergence of Greek art and thought, and Mediterranean and Near Eastern interconnections.