| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ART HIS 40B | EUROPE:MEDIEVL &REN | MASSEY, L. | AH 40B (Western Art of the Middle Ages and Renaissance) focuses on the long period that extends from the end of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century through the sixteenth century. There are no prerequisites for the course and no expectations that students will necessarily have taken Art History 40A. Less a survey than a series of case studies, this course looks at colossal statues of emperors, miracle working icons, gem encrusted reliquaries, Gothic cathedrals, the eye-tricking illusions of Renaissance painters, the first nude statues in the West since antiquity, Michelangelo’s paintings in the Sistine Chapel, and Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. In looking at these things, we will trace the emergence of European visual culture, its dialogue with other cultures, the questioning of the nature and validity of representation within that culture — especially the representation of the human body — and the gradual eclipse of the sacred icon by the secular, modern work of art during the Renaissance. |
| ART HIS 42D | ARTS OF ISLAM | PATEL, A. | This course examines past and present Islamic art, spanning 1500 years and extending from the Americas through Indonesia. Themes include Islam as a globalizing force, the definition of “Islamic,” and the competing roles of religion and politics in making art. |
| ART HIS 114 | BYZANTINE ART | BETANCOURT, R. | Focusing on the central role of images in Byzantine culture, this course pays close attention to how these basic questions about images and their powers in the medieval world can inform the ways in which we think about images in the age of social media. Spanning the crucial years of the Byzantine Empire (roughly 330-1453 CE), this survey course looks at the art, architecture, and theories of visual culture in the medieval lands of the eastern Mediterranean, encompassing diverse places such as Sicily, Venice, North Africa, the Levant, the Balkans, and modern-day Turkey, Greece, Syria, and Russia. |
| ART HIS 145B | MODERN ARCHITECTURE | DIMENDBERG, E. | This course will introduce principal developments in architecture and urbanism since the end of the 1930s. It will focus upon the global diffusion of western modernism and its reception in other parts of the world, the development of the megalopolis, the emergence of postmodernist and critical regionalist traditions, digital design and fabrication technologies, the quest for sustainability, and the imbrication of the built environment in the political, social, and cultural changes accompanying the coldwar, the civil rights and anti-war movements, the counterculture, and decolonization. Assignment structure: Take-home midterm and final research paper. Instructor: Edward Dimendberg. |
| ART HIS 150 | EARLY MOD EMPIRES | PATEL, A. | The Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals and the Shaping of the Modern World: This course takes an in-depth and comparative look at the most powerful states of the emerging modern world: the Ottomans of Anatolia (1453-1923), the Safavids of Iran (1501-1736), and the Mughals of South Asia (c. 1525-1858). Between them, these states commanded western Asia and Asia Minor and were the principal counterparts to the nascent European colonial powers of Britain, France and Holland. During a time when all of these states were on an equal footing, there was an extensive flow of good and ideas between these world regions. We will explore how the interactions of the Islamic powers among themselves, as well as their dialogue with the European states, were both foundational to the shaping of the modern world as we know it. No prerequisite. |
| ART HIS 162C | CONTEMPORARY JAPAN | WINTHER TAMAKI, B. | Over the last half century Japanese art has developed in manifold directions intersecting and diverging from art elsewhere in the world. This course highlights Japanese avant-gardism, photography, ceramics, women artists, and painting. You will learn about Japanese artistic responses to World War II and other historical events, the reassessment of traditional arts, artists' groups, the critique of popular culture, and artistic statements about environmental disasters. No prerequisites. |
| ART HIS 164B | CONTEMP AFAM ART | COOKS, B. | This course is a study of art by African Americans with a particular focus on the politics of representation. Beginning chronologically with government sponsored artworks in the 1930s, students will discuss artworks created in a variety of forms including painting, sculpture, photography, installation, and new media. Museum visits are often incorporated. |
| ART HIS 165D | US ART & POLITICS | WHITING, C. | Artists witness the events of war as well as produce and mobilize patriotic support and resistance to conflicts as they unfold. Often they develop memorials and images that shape memories of wars long past. This class will focus on photographs, paintings, and public monuments from wars past and present, treating them as contested sites of public memory and national identity. |
| ART HIS 190W | ART HISTORY METHODS | WHITING, C. | This seminar offers an overview of major approaches and methodologies in the study of art history; it is also a writing-intensive course that seeks to improve students’ writing skills as they relate to thinking about, analyzing, and researching visual works of art. We will examine various approaches in art history; by discussing, reading, and writing about a selection of art historical essays, students will come to a fuller understanding of the tools used by art historians to investigate the art work. Students are expected to make use of these tools in their own writing, and through the process of writing, editing, and revising, reflect on their own approaches to the art work. This course is required for art history majors. |
| ART HIS 198 | LANDSEAENVIRONMENT | MASSEY, L. | With climate change and its effect on sea levels threatening coasts and island communities worldwide, this course focuses on historical engagement with and visual representation of seas and oceans in Early Modern cultures. The recent turn to “blue humanities,” a term coined by Steven Mentz, has energized scholarship on the physical and symbolic impact of oceans and seas in the history of pre- and early modern Europe. Oceans offered seemingly unlimited possibilities for acquisition and conquest, and in the sixteenth century, Europeans conducted a rapid, global, and unprecedented sea-bound expansion. The oceans provided means to create increasingly more complex networks of communication, military dominance, and wealth, resulting in colonial encounters with what became subjugated peoples, and exportation of enslaved human capital to exploit natural resources. Sea travel led to scientific discoveries, to experiments in navigation and cartography, and to management and collection of newly discovered resources. But Europeans also were required to navigate their relationship to the sea at home. While the effects of sea-level rise are integral to current day discussions of climate change, early modern Europeans, importantly, were engaged in multiple efforts to manage and contain the tenuous, relationship between land and sea, especially along the coasts. Venice’s constant negotiation of tides and rising currents, the dike system in the Netherlands, and the infill of the Fens in England are all instances in which early modern Europeans struggled to organize their relationship to a resource, the ocean, that was both crucial to life and environmentally capricious. Such issues are at the heart of what is called “New Thalassology” (from the Greek for seas, thalassos), a turn toward studying the complex interactions with and understanding of oceans and seas in the early modern period. Sea travel transformed both Europeans and the distant lands they encountered, and this is reflected in the emergence of robust interdisciplinary studies on the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. As John R. Gillis has pointed out, this historicization of the seas and oceans along with a turn toward ecocritical perspectives has been one of the most striking new areas of inquiry in early modern studies in the past two decades. In keeping with the "Sea" theme organized by the Humanities Center at UCI for 2020-21, this graduate seminar explores early modern visual and material forms and the insights they yield about maritime environments and their challenges. The emergence of seascapes and harbor scenes in genre painting, the large number of shells in European cabinets of curiosities and grottos, ichthyology and fossils, maps and itineraries, ships and modes of navigation, horizons and coastlines, are some examples of the archive. Through readings and student research, we will contrast human and more-than-human centered viewpoints, interrogate narratives of progress and science, and contend with changing historical notions of nature and power. |