Teaching
UNDERGRADUATE COURSES
Taught at the University of Southern California
Spring 2008: Arts of Latin America, Colonial to Contemporary (AHIS 128g)
A survey of the art, architecture, and visual culture of Latin America from the colonial to the contemporary period. The course will begin by examining the introduction and adaptation of European artistic models into the Americas as well as the transformation of American art as a result of the conquest, analyzing a variety of materials and media including urban planning, religious and secular architecture, paintings, sculpture, manuscript drawings, and prints from the colonial period (1492 – circa 1820). We will then study materials from the nineteenth century, examining the role of the arts in building independent nations, and from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, focusing on modern and contemporary art.
Syllabus
Fall 2007:
Arts of Colonial Latin America (Span 495)
This seminar focuses on two themes. First, it will study the history of colonial Latin America art, broadly construed. We will survey a wide range of materials produced in the Spanish Americas during the colonial period (1492-1802s), including paintings, drawings, sculpture, furniture, textiles, silver, texts from the periods, etc. Our overall goals will be to approach both images and objects historically, that is, to examine them in the specific cultural and social context in which they existed; and also to consider them as historical sources, investigating what they can tell us about the people who produced and consumed them. Second, the seminar will address the way in which exhibitions (especially in the U.S.) have displayed and depicted colonial Latin American art, examining the idea that an exhibition has a narrative and an argument. This year only, the course will be able to draw on the unique opportunity presented by the concurrent exhibition, The Arts in Latin America, 1492-1820, on show at LACMA from 08/05 till 10/28. Most of our seminar meetings during September and October will take place directly at LACMA, where we will have a chance to examine art objects from colonial Latin America first-hand and to meet with the show’s curators, designer, education content specialist, and international experts from the U.S., Spain, and Latin America.
Syllabus
Fall 2007:
Cultural Encounters in the Age of Exploration (ARLT 100g)
This course will examine selected episodes in the history of cultural encounters in the Americas, focusing on the first long century of contact between Europeans and Americans. In this first age of truly global interactions, peoples and cultures encountered one another in multiple contexts: exploration, trade, war, colonial occupation, religion. The images and texts produced during the period recorded not only the events but also how people perceived them at the time. These encounters forced those who participated in them to examine some of their most basic ideas and beliefs: what a human being is, how a culture functions, what is acceptableand unacceptable in a society, and—perhaps most important—how to respond to similarity and difference, notions of self and otherness. We will examine the ways in which a wide range of texts, images, and objects produced during the period participated in and reflected upon experiences of encounter, exchange, interpretation, and representation among different and often distant cultures. We will also examine the ways in which a selection of contemporary films has represented early modern encounters.
Syllabus
Spring 2007:
Visual and Material Culture in Colonial Latin America (Span 499)
This seminar will focus on the visual and material culture of Colonial Latin America. We will examine the role of images and objects in everyday life through the study of a wide range of materials, including paintings, drawings, furniture, textiles, maps, architecture, urban planning, and texts from the period. Throughout the course, we will investigate the connections between visual culture, material culture, and empire. Our overall goals will be: (1) to approach both images and objects historically, that is, to examine them in the specific cultural and social context in which they existed; and (2) to consider them as historical sources, investigating what they can tell us about the people who produced and consumed them.
Syllabus
Fall 2006:
Studies in Visual and Material Culture (AHIS 477)
This semester, the topic of the seminar will be: Visual and Material Culture in Early Modern Europe. We will investigate the role of images and objects in Europe between 1500 and 1800, both in art and in everyday life. We will examine materials that are usually studied in art history courses, such as paintings; materials that have received less attention in the traditional curriculum, such as tapestries, furniture, home architecture, and clothing; and materials that are only rarely considered, such as food, ideas about the body, and the importance of hair (or lack of!). Overall, the goal will be two-fold: first, to approach both images and objects historically, that is, to examine them in the context in which they existed; second, to consider them as historical sources, investigating what they can tell us about the cultural, social, and intellectual life of the people who produced and consumed them.
Syllabus
Fall 2005: Encounters and transformations: art across cultures in the early modern world (AHIS 499)
This seminar will examine the cultural and artistic exchange between Europe, Asia, and the Americas in the early modern period (1450-1800). We will examine the ways in which a wide range of visual materials and artifacts—including paintings, drawings, prints, books, written accounts, decorative objects, furniture, textiles, etc.—participated in the experience of encounter, exchange, interpretation, and representation among different and often distant cultures. Some of the contexts we will discuss include exploration and travel, trade, exoticism, religious encounters, and colonialism. Our approach will combine art history, cultural history, and anthropology in order to examine images and artifacts not as isolated aesthetic statements but as historical sources, investigating what they can tell us about the cultural, social, and intellectual life of the people who produced and consumed them.
Syllabus
GRADUATE COURSES
Taught at the University of Southern California
Spring 2008:
Image / Word / Object: Rethinking the History of Books and Reading (MDA 599; co-taught with Deborah Harkness, USC History Department)
This graduate seminar seeks to rethink the history of the book and reading in the West from the Renaissance to the present by focusing on the visual and material aspects of books and book culture, in addition to the textual ones that have traditionally dominated the field. Our goal is to take a fresh approach to a field that is currently dominated by two questions: How fixed is print culture? How revolutionary was the print revolution? We propose in this course to move the study of the book in a new direction by approaching books as objects that contain both words and images. It is our contention that the history of the book should include a careful exploration of the material object of the book (delving into matters of design, manufacturing, codicology, and typography), as well as the complicated relationship between images and texts. Similarly, the history of reading can be fruitfully reconsidered by approaching it in terms of the history of seeing (albeit a specialized kind of seeing). In this way, we seek to rethink the history of the book from the vantage points of visual and material culture.
Syllabus
Spring 2007:
Problems in the History of Collecting and Display (AHIS 501)
This seminar provides an overview of central theoretical, methodological, and empirical topics in the history of collecting and display. In the Spring 2007 semester, the seminar will adress collecting as a global and transcultural phenomenon from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries (focusing on the early modern period). We will begin with a general introduction to the history of collecting and display, and then concentrate on the movement and interpretation of objects across cultures, whether it be European collections of New World objects in the early modern period, exchanges with Asia, etc. (Participating students’ areas of interest and expertise will help us determine our exact case studies.) An interdisciplinary approach drawing from art history, history, literature, anthropology, and sociology will allow us to examine specific cross-cultural and cross-regional transactions, and to use them to investigate important questions in the history of collecting.
Topics examined may include:
- The formation and organization of collections: trajectories, networks, circulation, exchange
- The motivations and uses of collections: science, art, religion, curiosity, commerce, empire
- The interpretation, contextualization, and reinvention of collections
- The transference of techniques, artistic styles, ideas, and beliefs through the circulation of objects
- The role of geography in the production, circulation, and interpretation of collections
- The role of theories of center and periphery, diffusionism, transculturation, metissage, etc. in the understanding of collections
- Relationships between objects, texts, and images
Syllabus
Spring 2006: Categories and Collections -- PRINT (AHIS 503)
The seminar will consider how print functions as a category of collecting, focusing on the early modern period, 1450-1800. Over the last thirty or so years, cultural and social historians have emphasized the enormous importance of print in the early modern world, proposing the much debated notion of a “print revolution” of equal or greater importance to political, religious, and scientific revolutions. The study of print has shed new light on old topics, such as the production and circulation of ideas, and sparked active lines of research, most notably on the history of the book and reading. However, the history of print has concentrated almost exclusively on the history of the printed word and tended to ignore the printed image (even if there were many more viewers than readers in the early modern period). Similarly, while the history of collecting has gained new momentum over the last few decades, very little attention has been paid to the history of collecting prints when compared to the history of collecting other media. The course will focus on the intersection of these two historiographical lacunae.
The course is divided into three parts. The first part will introduce students to print as medium, discussing on the production of woodcuts, engravings, and etchings; the idea of print as a reproductive medium and issues of originality, authenticity, and copy both in the early modern period and in twentieth-century historiography; and the current state of scholarship on the history of collecting, the history of prints, and the history of the book. The second part will consider the process of collecting prints, principally in the early modern period and to a lesser degree in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by examining the print market, guidelines for collectors, and individual collections as case studies. The third part will further explore connections between the history of print collections and the history of the book by considering the illustrated book as a print collection in itself, focusing on the encyclopedia (a single book as a collection of all knowledge); the library (as collection of books); the connections between text, image, and epistemology; and the body in print.
Syllabus
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