Graduate Seminars Fall 2009
 AHIS 500: Methods and Theory of Art History
Karen Lang
Monday 9:00 - 11:50 AM
VKC 379
This seminar will introduce graduate students in Art History to one of most fundamental concerns of their chosen discipline: how ideology shapes the way we read, write, discuss and ultimately understand histories of art. While self-reflexivity and methodological engagement are widely encouraged today, the intersections of ideologies and the histories of artists, objects, audiences and consumers are anything but inventions of the postmodern age. This course will give students the opportunity to critically examine the ideological frameworks and assumptions that underpin academic histories of art from their inception in the sixteenth-century to the present. Through close readings both of foundational texts and influential applications of these fundamental concepts we will engage with a wide range of the viewpoints, concepts and constructs that inform how we do our jobs as historians of visual culture.
AHIS 501: Problems in the History and Theory of Collecting Display
Katja Zelljadt
Friday 2:00 - 4:50 pm
VKC 379
This seminar provides an overview of theoretical, methodological, and empirical topics in the history of collecting from the 15th to the 20th centuries, with particular emphasis on the modern period. An interdisciplinary approach drawing on art history, history, literature, anthropology, and economics will allow us to examine networks of cross-cultural exchange, the motivations and uses of collections, systems of classification, and the politics of collecting. The seminar will be held at the Getty Research Institute, using rare materials from its Special Collections, as well as auction catalogues, dealer records and provenance databases as jumping-off points for individual student investigations.
AHIS 509: Seminar in Arts of the Ancient Americas
Prajna Desai
Thursday 2:00 – 4:50 PM
VKC 379
This course considers the graphic arts of the ancient Maya [AD 200-800]. Organised thematically, it examines the formal and historical intersection of drawing and painting with writing and plastic space in Maya cultural practice. Propelled by key theoretical concerns, the course is designed to explore how the graphic arts mediated the world as materially expressive formal structures that exerted a rationalizing influence on cultural expression and complicated the relationship between image and text. Along with its culture-specific address we will also study the theoretical relevance of Maya brushwork in the wider realm of representation.
AHIS 518: Seminar in Chinese Art
Sonya Lee
Monday 2:00 – 4:50 PM
VKC 379
This seminar provides an overview of theoretical, methodological, and empirical topics in the history of collecting from the 15th to the 20th centuries, with particular emphasis on the modern period. An interdisciplinary approach drawing on art history, history, literature, anthropology, and economics will allow us to examine networks of cross-cultural exchange, the motivations and uses of collections, systems of classification, and the politics of collecting. The seminar will be held at the Getty Research Institute, using rare materials from its Special Collections, as well as auction catalogues, dealer records and provenance databases as jumping-off points for individual student investigations.
AHIS 520: Seminar in Modern Art: Piet Mondrian
Nancy Troy
Tuesday 2:00 – 4:50 PM
VKC 379
In additional to exploring how Piet Mondrian has been situated in the context of the early 20th Century De Stijl movement, this seminar will study how knowledge and attitudes about the artist and his work have been shaped since his death in 1944 by a multitude of factors, including scholarship, museum exhibitions, the art market and popular culture.
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