Courses

HART B103 Survey of Western Architecture

Not offered 2024-25

The major traditions in Western architecture are illustrated through detailed analysis of selected examples from classical antiquity to the present. The evolution of architectural design and building technology, and the larger intellectual, aesthetic, and social context in which this evolution occurred, are considered. This course was formerly numbered HART B253; students who previously completed HART B253 may not repeat this course.

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

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HART B110 Introduction to Medieval Art and Architecture

Fall 2024

This course takes a broad geographic and chronological scope, allowing for full exposure to the rich variety of objects and monuments that fall under the rubric of "medieval" art and architecture. We focus on the Latin and Byzantine Christian traditions, but also consider works of art and architecture from the Islamic and Jewish spheres. Topics to be discussed include: the role of religion in artistic development and expression; secular traditions of medieval art and culture; facture and materiality in the art of the middle ages; the use of objects and monuments to convey political power and social prestige; gender dynamics in medieval visual culture; and the contribution of medieval art and architecture to later artistic traditions. This course was formerly numbered HART B212; students who previously completed HART B212 may not repeat this course.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

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HART B120 History of Chinese Art

Spring 2025

This course is a survey of the arts of China from Neolithic to the contemporary period, focusing on bronze vessels of the Shang and Zhou dynasties, the Chinese appropriation of Buddhist art, and the evolution of landscape and figure painting traditions.This course was formerly numbered HART B274; students who previously completed HART B274 may not repeat this course.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward Museum Studies

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HART B130 Renaissance Art

Fall 2024

A survey of painting in Florence and Rome in the 15th and 16th centuries (Giotto, Masaccio, Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael), with particular attention to contemporary intellectual, social, and religious developments. This course was formerly numbered HART B230; students who previously completed HART B230 may not repeat this course.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

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HART B140 The Global Baroque

Not offered 2024-25

Global Baroque examines the Baroque style both within and beyond Europe, moving from Italy, France, Spain and Flanders to seventeenth-century India, Iran, Japan and China, the New World, the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Kongo. We will study the role of Baroque art in early modern politics, religious missions and global trade; the emergence of princely collections of wonders and cartography; the flourishing of new and wondrous art materials; and the changing role of the artist and artisan in this period. We will consider the Baroque as an invitation for emotional engagement, as a style of power that was complicit in the violence of European colonialism, and as a tool of cultural reclamation used by artists across the world. As a class, we will work to construct an art history of The Global Baroque that also attends to the complex specificities of time and place. This course was formerly numbered HART B240; students who previously completed HART B240 may not repeat this course.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

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HART B150 Nineteenth-Century Art

Fall 2024

This course takes a transnational approach to the history of art from the Age of Revolution (beginning in the late-eighteenth century) through the industrial globalization of the late-nineteenth century. Lectures, readings and class discussions will engage key artistic and historical developments that shaped art and culture during this period. This course was formerly numbered HART B233; students who previously completed HART B233 may not repeat this course.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

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HART B151 Modern Art

Not offered 2024-25

This course traces the history of modernism from ca. 1890 to ca. 1945. Lectures, readings, and class discussions will engage key artistic and historical developments that shaped art and culture during the modern period. This course was formerly numbered HART B260; students who previously completed HART B260 may not repeat this course.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

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HART B160 The Global Present

Not offered 2024-25

This course navigates the global geography of art, from 1989 to the present. This course was formerly numbered HART B266; students who previously completed HART B266 may not repeat this course.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

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HART B161 Survey of Contemporary Art & Theory

Spring 2025

This class focuses on European and American art and theory from approximately 1960 to the present. We examine key aesthetic developments including Pop Art, Minimalism, institutional critique, performance, installation, and video. This course was formerly numbered HART B272; students who previously completed HART B272 may not repeat this course

Critical Interpretation (CI)

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HART B170 History of Narrative Cinema, 1945 to the present

Not offered 2024-25

This course surveys the history of narrative film from 1945 to the present. We will analyze a chronological series of styles and national cinemas, including Classical Hollywood, Italian Neorealism, the French New Wave, and other post-war movements and genres. Viewings of canonical films will be supplemented by more recent examples of global cinema. While historical in approach, this course emphasizes the theory and criticism of the sound film, and we will consider various methodological approaches to the aesthetic, socio-political, and psychological dimensions of cinema. Readings will provide historical context, and will introduce students to key concepts in film studies such as realism, formalism, spectatorship, the auteur theory, and genre studies. Fulfills the history requirement or the introductory course requirement for the Film Studies minor. This course was formerly numbered HART B299; students who previously completed HART B299 may not repeat this course.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward Film Studies

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HART B201 Critical Approaches to Visual Representation: Medieval/Modern

Section 001 (Fall 2023): Byzantine Icons, Then and Now
Section 001 (Fall 2024): Byzantine Icons, Then and Now

Fall 2024

This is a topics course. Course content varies. This course is writing intensive. This course examines intersections between the medieval and modern worlds through art and architecture. Students study medieval works of art and/or architecture as well as their afterlives in the modern era, as realized through revivals of style and form, museum exhibition excavation, alteration and adaptation for reuse, etc. There are no prerequisites for this course. Enrollment preference given to majors and minors in History of Art.

Current topic description: This course examines the devotional painting tradition of Byzantium (fourth to fifteenth centuries) and explores its impact on subsequent traditions of early modern, modern, and contemporary art. Students consider icons from the perspectives of iconography, style, function, and materiality. Focus then shifts to how Byzantine painting inspired subsequent artists, including Henri Matisse, Andy Warhol, and Mark Rothko, who reworked and updated the conceptual frameworks informing the medieval icon tradition.

Writing Intensive

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward Museum Studies

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HART B205 Critical Approaches to Visual Representation: Art, Death, and the Afterlife

Fall 2024

This course is writing intensive. This course aims to explore how art was used as a symbolic form to overcome death and to assure immortality in a variety of archaeological, philosophical, religious, sociopolitical, and historical contexts. Prerequisite: one course in History of Art at the 100-level or permission of the instructor. Enrollment preference given to majors and minors in History of Art. This course was formerly numbered HART B112; students who previously completed HART B112 may not repeat this course.

Writing Intensive

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

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HART B210 Critical Approaches to Visual Representation: The Classical Tradition

Not offered 2024-25

This course is writing intensive. An investigation of the historical and philosophical ideas of the classical, with particular attention to the Italian Renaissance and the continuance of its formulations throughout the Westernized world. This course was formerly numbered HART B104; students who previously completed HART B104 may not repeat this course. Prerequisite: one course in History of Art at the 100-level or permission of the instructor. Enrollment preference given to majors and minors in History of Art.

Writing Intensive

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

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HART B215 Critical Approaches to Visual Representation: Topics in South Asian Art

Not offered 2024-25

This course is writing intensive. This course examines the representations of gods, plants, humans and animals in the Hindu, Buddhist, Jain and Islamic artistic traditions of India. It traces both the development of naturalistic representations, as well as departures and embellishments on naturalism in the painting, sculpture, architecture, metalwork and textiles of South Asia. The course will consider the spiritual, social, political and aesthetic motivations that led artists to choose naturalistic or supernatural forms of representation.This course was formerly numbered HART B102; students who previously completed HART B102 may not repeat this course. Prerequisite: one course in History of Art at the 100-level or permission of the instructor. Enrollment preference given to majors and minors in History of Art.

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HART B220 Critical Approaches to Visual Representation: Landscapes, Art, & Racial Ecologies

Spring 2025

This course is writing intensive. This course uses art, visual, and material culture to trace the plantation's centrality to colonial and post-colonial environments in the Atlantic World from the eighteenth century to the present, as a site of environmental destruction as well as parallel ecologies engendered by African-descended peoples' aesthetic and botanical contestation. Objects to be considered include landscape painting, plantation cartography, scientific imagery, environmental art, and ecologically motivated science fiction. This course was formerly numbered HART B111; students who previously completed HART B111 may not repeat this course. Prerequisite: one course in History of Art at the 100-level or permission of the instructor. Enrollment preference given to majors and minors in History of Art.

Writing Intensive

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

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HART B235 Critical Approaches to Visual Representation: Identification in the Cinema

Spring 2025

This course is writing intensive. An introduction to the analysis of film and other lensed, time-based media through particular attention to the role of the spectator. Why do moving images compel our fascination? How exactly do spectators relate to the people, objects, and places that appear on the screen? Wherein lies the power of images to move, attract, repel, persuade, or transform their viewers? Students will be introduced to film theory through the rich and complex topic of identification. We will explore how points of view are framed by the camera in still photography, film, television, video games, and other media. Prerequisite: one course in History of Art at the 100-level or permission of the instructor. Enrollment preference given to majors and minors in History of Art and Film Studies. Fulfills Film Studies Introductory or Theory course requirement. This course was formerly numbered HART B110; students who previously completed HART B110 may not repeat this course.

Writing Intensive

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward Film Studies

Counts Toward Visual Studies

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HART B268 Telling Bryn Mawr Histories: Topics, Sources, and Methods

Not offered 2024-25

This course introduces students to archival and object-based research methods, using the College's built environment and curatorial and archival collections as our laboratory. Students will explore buildings, documents, objects, and themes in relation to the history of Bryn Mawr College. Students will frame an original group research project to which each student will contribute an individual component. Prerequisite: An interest in exploring and reinterpreting the institutional and architectural history of Bryn Mawr College and a willingness to work collaboratively on a shared project.

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HART B275 Museum Studies: History, Theory, Practice

Fall 2024

Using the museums of Philadelphia as field sites, this course provides an introduction to the theoretical and practical aspects of museum studies and the important synergies between theory and practice. Students will learn: the history of museums as institutions of recreation, education and leisure; how the museum itself became a symbol of power, prestige and sometimes alienation; debates around the ethics and politics of collecting objects of art, culture and nature; and the qualities that make an exhibition effective (or not). By visiting exhibitions and meeting with a range of museum professionals in art, anthropology and science museums, this course offers a critical perspective on the inner workings of the museum as well as insights into the "new museology." Not open to first-year students. Enrollment preference given to minors in Museum Studies. This course was formerly numbered HART B281; students who previously completed HART B281 may not repeat this course.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward Museum Studies

Counts Toward Visual Studies

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HART B276 Topics in Museum Studies

Not offered 2024-25

This is a topics course. Course content varies. This course was formerly numbered HART B248.

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HART B310 Topics in Medieval Art

Section 001 (Fall 2023): Art and Medieval Jewish Communities
Section 001 (Spring 2024): Africa & Byzantium

Not offered 2024-25

This is a topics course. Course content varies. Prerequisite: one course in History of Art at the 100- or 200-level or permission of the instructor. Enrollment preference given to majors and minors in History of Art.

Course does not meet an Approach

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HART B320 Topics in Chinese Art

Section 001 (Fall 2024): Critical Probs: Ritual Bronze
Section 001 (Spring 2025): Chinese Calligraphy

Fall 2024, Spring 2025

This is a topics course. Course content varies. Prerequisite: one course in History of Art at the 100- or 200-level or permission of the instructor. Enrollment preference given to majors and minors in History of Art.

Current topic description: Bronze was a highly prized material in early China from the 2nd millennium BCE to the 2nd century CE. It was used to create a variety of ritual objects, often adorned with intricate decorations and inscriptions. Modern archaeology has uncovered a vast array of bronze artifacts, raising questions about how the Chinese conceptualized, categorized, and utilized them. This course delves into the material, technical, ornamental, and social aspects of bronze works to explore their significance in early Chinese culture.

Current topic description: This seminar delves into the theoretical and historiographic foundations of traditional Chinese calligraphy, an area that has received relatively little attention in modern scholarship. Despite its pivotal role in Chinese art, calligraphy's lack of a direct Western counterpart has led to its comparative neglect. By examining traditional Chinese calligraphy practices, the course aims to reassess its unique essence, exploring key aspects such as ontology, embodiment, technique, agency, ethics, politics, and religion.

Course does not meet an Approach

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HART B330 Topics in Renaissance and Baroque Art

Section 001 (Fall 2023): Palladio and neo-Palladianism
Section 001 (Spring 2024): The Fresco

Not offered 2024-25

This is a topics course. Course content varies. This course was formerly numbered HART B323.

Course does not meet an Approach

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HART B340 Topics in Material Culture

Section 001 (Spring 2024): Manuscripts
Section 001 (Fall 2024): Ornament
Section 001 (Spring 2025): Textile Dyes

Fall 2024, Spring 2025

This is a topics course. Course content varies. This course was formerly numbered HART B345.

Current topic description: This undergraduate seminar examines histories and theories of ornament from a wide range of disciplinary, temporal, and geographic perspectives. The course will engage with intermedial, and intercultural transfers of ornament, while also interrogating the idea of ornament as a universal language, and will seek to locate ornament in its material, geographic, and historical contexts. As a class, we will also explore the hands-on processes of pattern-making and ornamentation through fieldtrips, workshops and visits to Bryn Mawr Special Collections.

Current topic description: This course investigates the artistic and ecological histories of textile dyes focusing in particular on the nineteenth-century transition away from plant, animal, and mineral dyes to synthetic dyes. The course will include hands-on dyeing activities and fieldtrips to meet with contemporary practitioners.

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward Museum Studies

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HART B346 The History of London Since the Eighteenth Century

Spring 2025

Selected topics of social, literary, and architectural concern in the history of London, emphasizing London since the 18th century. This course was formerly numbered HART B355; students who previously completed HART B355 may not repeat this course. Prerequisite: one course in History of Art at the 100- or 200-level or permission of the instructor. Enrollment preference given to majors and minors in History of Art.

Course does not meet an Approach

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HART B350 Topics in Modern Art

Section 001 (Fall 2023): Flexner Seminar - Trauma's Traces
Section 001 (Fall 2024): Postwar Painting

Fall 2024

This is a topics course. Course content varies. Prerequisite: one course in History of Art at the 100- or 200-level or permission of the instructor. Enrollment preference given to majors and minors in History of Art.

Current topic description: In the immediate aftermath of World War II, New York became a new epicenter of cultural practice. This seminar will immerse students in the work of artists and critics who together created the monumental canvases that came to define postwar painting.

Course does not meet an Approach

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HART B365 Exhibiting Africa: Art, Artifact and New Articulations

Not offered 2024-25

At the turn of the 20th century, the Victorian natural history museum played an important role in constructing and disseminating images of Africa to the Western public. The history of museum representations of Africa and Africans reveals that exhibitions-both museum exhibitions and "living" World's Fair exhibitions- has long been deeply embedded in politics, including the persistent "othering" of African people as savages or primitives. While paying attention to stereotypical exhibition tropes about Africa, we will also consider how art museums are creating new constructions of Africa and how contemporary curators and conceptual artists are creating complex, challenging new ways of understanding African identities.This course was formerly numbered HART B279; students who previously completed HART B279 may not repeat this course.

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HART B370 Topics in History & Theory of Photography

Not offered 2024-25

This is a topics course. Course content varies. Prerequisite: one course in History of Art at the 100- or 200-level or permission of the instructor. Enrollment preference given to majors and minors in History of Art. This course was formerly numbered HART B308.

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HART B375 Topics in Contemporary Art

Section 001 (Fall 2024): Latin American Conceptualisms

Fall 2024

This is a topics course. Course content varies. Prerequisite: one course in History of Art at the 100- or 200-level or permission of the instructor. Enrollment preference given to majors and minors in History of Art. This course was formerly numbered HART B380.

Current topic description: This seminar explores a variety of Latin American artistic approaches to conceptual practice in the 1960s and 1970s.

Course does not meet an Approach

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HART B376 Topics in Interpretation and Theory

Section 001 (Fall 2023): 20th C. Theories of Signs and Images
Section 001 (Spring 2025): Affect, Art, & Psychoanalysis

Spring 2025

This is a topics course. Course content varies. Prerequisite: one course in History of Art at the 100- or 200-level or permission of the instructor. Enrollment preference given to majors and minors in History of Art.

Current topic description: This seminar interrogates the 'Affective Turn' in the humanities that emerged in the past two decades and places this 'new' approach within a longer lineage of psychoanalysis and its centrality to certain strains of art historical research. Particular attention will be paid to the role of psychoanalysis and affect in feminist, queer, and Black studies approaches.

Course does not meet an Approach

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HART B380 Topics in Film Studies

Section 001 (Spring 2025): Digital Media Art

Spring 2025

This is a topics course. Course content varies. Prerequisite: one course in History of Art at the 100- or 200-level or permission of the instructor. Enrollment preference given to majors and minors in History of Art and Film Studies. This course was formerly numbered HART B334.

Current topic description: D. N. Rodowick has argued that the digital arts "are the most radical instance yet of an old Cartesian dream: the best representations are the most immaterial ones because they seem to free the mind from the body and the world of substance." In this seminar, we will explore digital images in relation to cinema, photography, and other media. We will examine the fate of materiality, the body, and duration in 21st c. media, and consider whether or not the digital marks a significant break from the analog. Texts by Lev Manovich, Gilles Deleuze, Hito Steyerl, and others; works by Walid Raad, Nonny de la Peña, Jacolby Satterwhite, and others. Prerequisite: at least one prior 100- or 200-level course in the History of Art or equivalent. Cross-listed with Film Studies and English for major/minor credit.

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward Film Studies

Counts Toward Visual Studies

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HART B398 Senior Conference I

This course is open only to History of Art senior majors; permission of the instructors is required for registration. A critical review of the discipline of art history in preparation for the senior thesis. Capstone in the major; culminates in the senior thesis proposal.

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HART B399 Senior Conference II

This course is open only to History of Art senior majors; permission of the instructors is required for registration. A seminar for the discussion of senior thesis research and such theoretical and historical concerns as may be appropriate. Interim oral reports. Capstone in the major; culminates in the senior thesis.

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HART B403 Supervised Work

Advanced students may do independent research under the supervision of a faculty member whose special competence coincides with the area of the proposed research. Consent of the supervising faculty member and of the major adviser is required.

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HART B420 Museum Studies Fieldwork

This course provides students a forum in which to ground, frame and discuss their hands-on work in museums, galleries, archives or collections. Whether students have arranged an internship at a local institution or want to pursue one in the Bryn Mawr College Collections, this course will provide a framework for these endeavors, coupling praxis with theory supported by readings from the discipline of Museum Studies. The course will culminate in a final presentation, an opportunity to reflect critically on the internship experience. Prior to taking the course, students will develop a Praxis Learning Plan through the Career and Civic Engagement office. All students will share a set syllabus, common learning objectives and readings, but will also be able to tailor those objectives to the specific museum setting or Special Collections project in which they are involved.

Counts Toward Museum Studies

Counts Toward Praxis Program

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HART B425 Praxis III

Students may register for this course with approval of a faculty supervisor in conjunction with internship projects in the college's collections and other art institutions in the region.

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HART B610 Topics in Medieval Art

Section 001 (Spring 2024): Africa & Byzantium

Not offered 2024-25

This is a topics course. Course content varies. Open to graduate students, AB/MA candidates, or by permission of the instructor.

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HART B620 Topics in Chinese Art

Section 001 (Spring 2025): Rethinking Chinese Caligraphy

Fall 2024, Spring 2025

This is a topics course. Course content varies. Open to graduate students, AB/MA candidates, or by permission of the instructor. This course was formerly numbered HART B639.

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HART B630 Topics in Renaissance Art

Section 001 (Fall 2023): Palladio and Neo-Palladianism

Not offered 2024-25

This is a topics course. Course content varies. Open to graduate students, AB/MA candidates, or by permission of the instructor.

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HART B633 Problems in Representation

Not offered 2024-25

This seminar examines, as philosophy and history, the idea of realism, as seen in the visual arts since the Renaissance and beyond to the 19th and 20th centuries.Open to graduate students, AB/MA candidates, or by permission of the instructor. This course was formerly numbered HART B645, students who previously completed HART B645 may not repeat this course.

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HART B640 Topics in Material Culture

Section 001 (Fall 2024): Ornament

Fall 2024

This is a topics course. Course content varies. Open to graduate students, AB/MA candidates, or by permission of the instructor. This course was formerly numbered HART B646.

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HART B641 Topics in Baroque Art

Not offered 2024-25

This is a topics course. Course content varies. Open to graduate students, AB/MA candidates, or by permission of the instructor. This course was formerly numbered HART B640.

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HART B646 The History of London Since the Eighteenth Century

Not offered 2024-25

Selected topics of social, literary, and architectural concern in the history of London, emphasizing London since the 18th century. Open to graduate students, AB/MA candidates, or by permission of the instructor.

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HART B650 Topics in Modern Art

Section 001 (Fall 2023): Flexner Seminar - Trauma's Traces
Section 001 (Fall 2024): Reconceiving Abstraction

Fall 2024

This is a topics course. Course content varies. Open to graduate students, AB/MA candidates, or by permission of the instructor.

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HART B676 Topics: Interpretation and Theory

Section 001 (Fall 2023): 20th C. Theories of Signs and Images
Section 001 (Spring 2025): Affect, Art, & Psychoanalysis

Spring 2025

This is a topics course. Course content varies. This course was formerly numbered HART B651. Open to graduate students, AB/MA candidates, or by permission of the instructor.

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HART B680 Topics in Film Studies

Section 001 (Spring 2025): Digital Media Art

Spring 2025

This is a topics course. Course content varies. This course was formerly numbered HART B661. Open to graduate students, AB/MA candidates, or by permission of the instructor.

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HART B699 Advanced Research Methods

Spring 2025

This is a workshop designed to support graduate students in the History of Art in independent research and writing projects at any stage, including MA theses, preliminary exams, researching and writing a dissertation prospectus, or writing drafts of dissertation chapters. May be taken more than once for credit; mandatory for graduate students beyond coursework stage except by permission of primary advisor.

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HART B701 Supervised Work

Fall 2024, Spring 2025

Supervised Work

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AFST B202 Black Queer Diaspora

Fall 2024

This interdisciplinary course explores over two decades of work produced by and about Black Queer Diasporic communities throughout the circum-Atlantic world. While providing an introduction to various artists and intellectuals of the Black Queer Diaspora, this course examines the viability of Black Queer Diaspora world-making praxis as a form of theorizing. We will interrogate the transnational and transcultural mobility of specific Black Queer Diasporic forms of peacemaking, erotic knowledge productions, as well as the concept of "aesthetics" more broadly. Our aim is to use the prism of Blackness/Queerness/Diaspora to highlight the dynamic relationship between Black Diaspora Studies and Queer Studies. By the end of this course students will have a strong understanding of how systems of power work to restrict the freedoms of Black Queer and Trans communities, and how Black LGBTQ people have lived, organized, and created in spite of and in response to these oppressions. This interdisciplinary undergraduate upper-level course will utilize academic texts accompanied by poetry, fiction, film, television, and visual art to understand Black Queer and Trans subjectivities.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward Africana Studies

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ANTH B356 The Politics of Public Art

Not offered 2024-25

In this class we will explore the politics of public art. While we will look at the political messaging of public art, we will also seek to understand how public art, through its integration into a social geography, has a political impact beyond its meaning. We will see how art claims public space and structures social action, how art shapes social groups, and how art channels economic flows or government power. By tracing the ways that art is situated in public space, we will examine how art enters into urban contest and global inequality. Class activity will include exploration of public art and students will be introduced to key concepts of urban spatial analysis to help interrogate this art. One 200-level course in Social Sciences, Humanities, or Arts fields, or permission of the instructor

Course does not meet an Approach

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ARCH B102 Introduction to Classical Archaeology

Spring 2025

A historical survey of the archaeology and art of Greece, Etruria, and Rome.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward Museum Studies

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ARCH B204 Animals in the Ancient Greek World

Not offered 2024-25

This course focuses on perceptions of animals in ancient Greece from the Geometric to the Classical periods. It examines representations of animals in painting, sculpture, and the minor arts, the treatment of animals as attested in the archaeological record, and how these types of evidence relate to the featuring of animals in contemporary poetry, tragedy, comedy, and medical and philosophical writings. By analyzing this rich body of evidence, the course develops a context in which participants gain insight into the ways ancient Greeks perceived, represented, and treated animals. Juxtaposing the importance of animals in modern society, as attested, for example, by their roles as pets, agents of healing, diplomatic gifts, and even as subjects of specialized studies such as animal law and animal geographies, the course also serves to expand awareness of attitudes towards animals in our own society as well as that of ancient Greece.

Writing Attentive

Critical Interpretation (CI)

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ARCH B229 Visual Culture of the Ancient Near East

Not offered 2024-25

This course examines the visual culture of the Ancient Near East based on an extensive body of architectural, sculptural, and pictorial evidence dating from prehistoric times through the fifth century BCE. We will explore how a variety of surviving art, artifacts, sculpture, monuments, and architecture deriving from geographically distinct areas of the ancient Near East, such as Mesopotamia, the Eastern Mediterranean, Anatolia, and Iran, may have been viewed and experienced in their historical contexts, including the contribution of ancient materials and technologies of production in shaping this viewing and experience. By focusing on selected examples of diverse evidence, we will also consider how past and current scholarly methods and approaches, many of them art-historical, archaeological, and architectural in aim, have affected the understanding and interpretation of this evidence. In doing so, we will pay special attention to critical terms such as aesthetics, style, narrative, representation, and agency.

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ARCH B240 Archaeology and History of Ancient Mesopotamia

Spring 2025

A survey of the material culture of ancient Mesopotamia, modern Iraq, from the earliest phases of state formation (circa 3500 B.C.E.) through the Achaemenid Persian occupation of the Near East (circa 331 B.C.E.). Emphasis will be on art, artifacts, monuments, religion, kingship, and the cuneiform tradition. The survival of the cultural legacy of Mesopotamia into later ancient and Islamic traditions will also be addressed.

Writing Attentive

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

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ARCH B252 Pompeii

Spring 2025

Introduces students to a nearly intact archaeological site whose destruction by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 C.E. was recorded by contemporaries. The discovery of Pompeii in the mid-1700s had an enormous impact on 18th- and 19th-century views of the Roman past as well as styles and preferences of the modern era. Informs students in classical antiquity, urban life, city structure, residential architecture, home decoration and furnishing, wall painting, minor arts and craft and mercantile activities within a Roman city.

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward Museum Studies

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ARCH B254 Cleopatra

Not offered 2024-25

This course examines the life and rule of Cleopatra VII, the last queen of Ptolemaic Egypt, and the reception of her legacy in the Early Roman Empire and the western world from the Renaissance to modern times. The first part of the course explores extant literary evidence regarding the upbringing, education, and rule of Cleopatra within the contexts of Egyptian and Ptolemaic cultures, her relationships with Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, her conflict with Octavian, and her death by suicide in 30 BCE. The second part examines constructions of Cleopatra in Roman literature, her iconography in surviving art, and her contributions to and influence on both Ptolemaic and Roman art. A detailed account is also provided of the afterlife of Cleopatra in the literature, visual arts, scholarship, and film of both Europe and the United States, extending from the papal courts of Renaissance Italy and Shakespearean drama, to Thomas Jefferson's art collection at Monticello and Joseph Mankiewicz's 1963 epic film, Cleopatra.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward Gender Sexuality Studies

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ARCH B301 Greek Vase-Painting

Not offered 2024-25

This course is an introduction to the world of painted pottery of the Greek world, from the 10th to the 4th centuries B.C.E. We will interpret these images from an art-historical and socio-economic viewpoint. We will also explore how these images relate to other forms of representation. Prerequisite: one course in classical archaeology or permission of instructor.

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ARCH B501 Greek Vase Painting

Not offered 2024-25

This course is an introduction to the world of painted pottery of the Greek world, from the 10th to the 4th centuries B.C.E. We will interpret these images from an art-historical and socio-economic viewpoint. We will also explore how these images relate to other forms of representation. Prerequisite: one course in classical archaeology or permission of instructor.

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CHEM B208 Topics in Art Analysis

Not offered 2024-25

This is a topics course and topics will vary. All courses will cover a variety of methods of analysis of works of art centered around a specific theme. Using both completed case studies and their own analysis of objects in the Bryn Mawr College collection, students will investigate a number of instrumental methods of obtaining both quantitative and qualitative information about the manufacture, use and history of the objects. This course counts towards the major in History of Art.

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CITY B190 The Form of the City: Urban Form from Antiquity to the Present

Spring 2025

This course studies the city as a three-dimensional artifact. A variety of factors, geography, economic and population structure, politics, planning, and aesthetics are considered as determinants of urban form.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

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CITY B253 Before Modernism: Architecture and Urbanism of the 18th and 19th Centuries

Spring 2025

The course frames the topic of architecture before the impact of 20th century Modernism, with a special focus on the two prior centuries - especially the 19th - in ways that treat them on their own terms rather than as precursors of more modern technologies and forms of expression. The course will integrate urbanistic and vernacular perspectives alongside more familiar landmark exemplars. Key goals and components of the course will include attaining a facility within pertinent bibliographical and digital landscapes, formal analysis and research skills exercised in writing projects, class field-trips, and a nuanced mastery of the narratives embodied in the architecture of these centuries.

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

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CITY B254 History of Modern Architecture

Fall 2024

A survey of the development of modern architecture since the 18th century.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

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CITY B306 Advanced Fieldwork Techniques: Places in Time

Spring 2025

A hands-on workshop for research into the histories of places, intended to bring students into contact with some of the raw materials of architectural and urban history. A focus will be placed on historical images and texts, and on creating engaging informational experiences that are transparent to their evidentiary basis.

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CITY B377 Topics in Modern Architecture

Section 001 (Fall 2024): Multiplicity & Singularity in later 19th C. Archit

Fall 2024

This is a topics course on modern architecture. Topics vary.

Current topic description: This will be a closely focused seminar, temporally and geographically, that centers on three common, moderate-scale architectural venues, urban houses, suburban houses, and urban places of business -- places that were pervasive and numerically dominant elements of the American built landscape as it was transformed between the 1870s and the 1890s.

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ENGL B205 Introduction to Film

Not offered 2024-25

This course is intended to provide students with the tools of critical film analysis. Through readings of images and sounds, sections of films and entire narratives, students will cultivate the habits of critical viewing and establish a foundation for focused work in film studies. The course introduces formal and technical units of cinematic meaning and categories of genre and history that add up to the experiences and meanings we call cinema. Although much of the course material will focus on the Hollywood style of film, examples will be drawn from the history of cinema. Attendance at weekly screenings is mandatory.

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ENGL B336 Topics in Film

Not offered 2024-25

This is a topics course and description varies according to the topic.

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FREN B213 Theory in Practice:Critical Discourses in the Humanities

Fall 2024

By bringing together the study of major theoretical currents of the 20th century and the practice of analyzing literary works in the light of theory, this course aims at providing students with skills to use literary theory in their own scholarship. The selection of theoretical readings reflects the history of theory (psychoanalysis, structuralism, narratology), as well as the currents most relevant to the contemporary academic field: Post-structuralism, Post-colonialism, Gender Studies, and Ecocriticism. They are paired with a diverse range of short stories (Poe, Kafka, Camus, Borges, Calvino, Morrison, Djebar, Ngozi Adichie) that we discuss along with our study of theoretical texts. The class will be conducted in English with an additional hour in French for students wishing to take it for French credit.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

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GERM B223 Topics in German Cultural Studies

Section 001 (Fall 2024): Gender and Artificial Life

Fall 2024

This is a topics course. Course content varies. Taught in English.

Current topic description: Gender and Artificial Life: Monsters, Machines, Lovers and Others: Beginning with Pygmalion's animated sculpture, the creation of artificial life from dead matter stages a gendered dynamic between the creator and creation--a dynamic that was renegotiated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and continues to be revisited today. Whereas Cartesian thought celebrates the perfectibility of automata and anthropomorphic machines, Romantic stories featuring animated dolls of women and Doppelgängers reveal a deep skepticism toward artificial life, bound to key aesthetic and philosophical questions that intersect with conceptions of the feminine at the time. Early film at the turn of the century both deploy and upend these characterizations, uncovering an aesthetic anxiety in the face of technological innovations and the quickly evolving life in the Metropolis--depicting Others along racialized and gendered lines. In the present day, recent blockbusters such as the Barbie movie feature created life and simulacra and extend these questions beyond those of mere human autonomy to the very nature of visuality and representation. This course will feature works by Ovid, ETA Hoffmann, Edgar Allen Poe, Sigmund Freud, Eichendorff, Goethe, the Grimms, as well as expressionist and recent films.

Writing Attentive

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward Gender Sexuality Studies

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GSEM B608 Material Geologies

Spring 2025

This course mobilizes a humanistically informed approach to the study of geological materials, with a focus on late antique and medieval understandings of stones, minerals, metals, and land formation(s). Readings will encompass current perspectives on the diverse epistemologies of geology in the pre-modern world, from the magical and medicinal properties of gems, to the relation of stone and earth to concepts of empire, to mythologies of landscape and geomorphology. Students will explore primary textual sources such as ancient and medieval magical treatises, travel literature, and lapidaries, including works by Pliny the Elder, Procopius, Paul the Silentiary, and Michael Psellos. The course will also foreground visual and material culture, introducing students to both conventional and innovative methodologies and theoretical frameworks for exploring human understandings of the natural world from an interdisciplinary perspective. Students will work with Bryn Mawr's outstanding collection of geological samples and will learn fundamentals of mineral identification and crystallography. Final projects are expected to build from students' primary research interests and disciplinary investments. Course enrollment is limited to graduate students in the departments of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology; Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies; and History of Art.

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GSEM B619 Death and Beyond

Not offered 2024-25

The question of what happens after the moment of death has always fascinated humanity - at one moment there is a living person, the next only a corpse; where did the person go? Every culture struggles with these questions of death and afterlife - what does it mean to die and what happens after death? This seminar will examine a variety of types of evidence - archaeological, poetic, and philosophical - to uncover ideas of death and afterlife in some of the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean world, with particular attention to the similarities and differences between ideas of death and beyond in the cultures of Greece, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. Van Gennep's model of death as a rite de passage provides the basic structure for the class, which is divided into three sections, each concerned with one section of the transition: Dying - leaving the world of the living; Liminality - the transition between the worlds; and Afterlife - existence after death. This anthropological model allows us to analyze the different discourses about death and afterlife.

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GSEM B624 Greek Tragedy in Performance

Not offered 2024-25

In this seminar we will approach Greek dramatic texts from two angles: theoretically and experientially. On the one hand, we will be reading (in English translation) the tragedies of the three great playwrights of Classical Athens-Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides-while examining their treatment of myth, systems of metaphor and imagery, and the role of the chorus, as well as the relevance of Greek tragedy for subsequent centuries down to the present day. Special attention will be given to such themes as fate and predestination; relation between mortals and immortals; disability; euthanasia; slavery; and the impact of war on women and children. On the other, concurrent with our textual analysis, we will be reading Constantin Stanislavski, Michael Chekhov and other modern theater theorists. We will be applying these acting techniques to the texts in practice (i.e., performing them in class!) as we ask the question, What can be gained from stepping inside the plays and trying them on? No prior acting experience is necessary: just a curiosity about bringing ancient texts to life through the medium of one's body!

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GSEM B652 Interdepartmental Seminar: History and Memory

Not offered 2024-25

The seminar will begin by establishing the categories of history and memory, as they have been constituted across the humanistic disciplines, defining and refining the epistemological and ontological distinctions between the two. Readings will be drawn first from the writings of Nietzsche and Freud and then move to the work of Barthes, Caruth, Connerton, Foucault, Guha, Gundaker, La Capra, Margolit, Nora, Sebald, Todorov, and Yerushalmi. Once a grounding context is established, the second half of the seminar will be organized around a set of categories, ranging from the material to the theoretical, through which we will continue our explorations in history and memory, among them, the following: trauma, witness, archive, document, evidence, monument, memorial, relic, trace. It is here that we would each draw specifically on our own disciplinary formations and call upon students to do the same. The seminar would, of course, be open to all students in the graduate group.

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ITAL B213 Theory in Practice: Critical Discourses in the Humanities

Not offered 2024-25

What is a postcolonial subject, a queer gaze, a feminist manifesto? And how can we use (as readers of texts, art, and films) contemporary studies on animals and cyborgs, object oriented ontology, zombies, storyworlds, neuroaesthetics? In this course we will read some pivotal theoretical texts from different fields, with a focus on race&ethnicity and gender&sexuality. Each theory will be paired with a masterpiece from Italian culture (from Renaissance treatises and paintings to stories written under fascism and postwar movies). We will discuss how to apply theory to the practice of interpretation and of academic writing, and how theoretical ideas shaped what we are reading. Class conducted in English, with an additional hour in Italian for students seeking Italian credit.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Counts Toward Africana Studies

Counts Toward Gender Sexuality Studies

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ITAL B218 Early-Modern Intersections: A New Italian Renaissance

Fall 2024

The period or movement commonly referred to as the Renaissance remains one of the great iconic moments of global history: a time of remarkable innovation within artistic and intellectual culture, and a period still widely regarded as the crucible of modernity. Although lacking a political unity and being constantly colonized by European Empires, Italy was the original heartland of the Renaissance, and home to some of its most powerful and enduring figures, such as Leonardo and Michelangelo in art, Petrarch and Ariosto in literature, Machiavelli in political thought. This course provides an overview of Italian culture from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century by adopting a cross-cultural, intersectional, and inter-disciplinary approach. The course places otherness at the center of the picture rather than at its margins, with the main aim to look at pivotal events and phenomena (the rise of Humanism, courtly culture, the canonization of the language), not only from the point of view of its protagonists but also through the eyes of its non-male, non-white, non-Christian, and non-heterosexual witnesses. The course ultimately challenges traditional accounts of the Italian Renaissance by crossing also disciplinary boundaries, since it examines not only literary, artistic, and intellectual history, but also material culture, cartography, science, technology, and history of food and fashion. All readings and class discussion will be in English. Students seeking Italian credits will complete their assignments in the target language.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward Africana Studies

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ITAL B221 What is Aesthetics? Theories on Art, Imagination, and Poetry

Fall 2024

This course investigates how global thinkers, poets, and artists reflected in their works on the roles and powers of art, poetry, and human creativity. The course approaches this theme through a cross-cultural and trans-historical approach, which encompasses the Italian Humanism, which argued for the first time for the importance of aesthetic knowledge, as well as the Age of Enlightenment, which founded 'aesthetics' as a specific scientific discipline. Readings from these writers will show how artistic products, human imagination, and poetry are not just light-hearted activities but powerful cognitive tools which can reveal aspects of human history. If the human being is deemed to be a combination of reason and feeling - soul and body - art and poetry, which border both the rational and irrational realms, appear the most appropriate scientific tool to reveal the human essence and its destiny. The discussion will focus on pivotal global writers and philosophers such as Giambattista Vico and Giacomo Leopardi, who pioneered aesthetic, historical, literary, and anthropological ideas which are still crucial in the current theoretical debate on arts and poetry. All readings and class discussion will be in English. Students will have an additional hour of class for Italian credit.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

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ITAL B326 Love, Magic, and Medicine: Poetical-Philosophical Bonds

Spring 2025

The course investigates how the concepts of love, magic, and medicine emerged and developed throughout early modernity and beyond. In exploring the fields of Philosophy, Medicine, and Magic, global thinkers, poets, and artists drew not only from classical sources, but were also deeply influenced by a wide range of models, such as fictional ancient sources, Islamic philosophy, and the Jewish Kabbalah. In this interesting syncretism, love was considered as an inspiration experienced by the entire universe, and magical practice was understood as a philosophy in action, which had the power to establish a bond of a loving nature between the different realms of reality. Magicians were therefore conceived as wise philosophers capable of joining this network of correspondences and controlling them (art)ificially. As a result, the figures of poets and artists interestingly merged into those of magicians of physicians, and poetry was conceived both as a magic able to arouse mental images stronger than real visions, and as a medicine able to exert a mental and physiological agency on the body. The course will approach these themes through a multi-disciplinary and trans-historical approach, which will include in the discussion a wide variety of figures, such as global early modern and modern philosophers, physicians, poets, artists, and composers.All readings and class discussion will be in English. Students will have an additional hour of class for Italian credit.

Course does not meet an Approach

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MEST B210 The Art and Architecture of Islamic Spirituality

Not offered 2024-25

This course examines how Muslim societies across time and space have used art and architecture in different ways to express and understand inner dimensions of spirituality and mysticism. Topics to be studied include: the calligraphical remnants of the early Islamic period; inscriptions found on buildings and gravestones; the majestic architecture of mosques, shrines, seminaries, and Sufi lodges; the brilliant arts of the book; the commemorative iconography and passion plays of Ashura devotion; the souvenir culture of modern shrine visitation; and the modern art of twenty-first century Sufism. Readings include works from history, religious studies, anthropology, sociology, and the history of art and architecture.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward Visual Studies

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