Current Undergraduate Courses

• PROFESSOR: Brian Foss
• DESCRIPTION: This course is a selective survey of art of the last 700 years, studying how art has reflected political, religious and social concerns of the societies in which it was produced and consumed. This is done through the introduction and analysis of major ideas, artists and artworks. Although the main focus is on the art of West, attention is also paid to the complex relationships between the visual art of Western and non-Western cultures. Major ideas, artists, and artworks are introduced and analyzed. Course activities and assignments develop basic visual analysis skills that are essential in today’s image-saturated world.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
• READINGS: TBA

• PROFESSOR: Alessandra Mariani
• DESCRIPTION: This course is an introduction to the history of architecture from prehistory to the Renaissance. Major movements, themes and monuments of the Western world will be emphasized, while including some monuments of the non-Western tradition. Architectural works and the built environment will be presented from an historical perspective, but also from the political, social, spiritual, cultural climate that originally shaped them and gave them their meaning. Buildings will be examined in the context of the prevailing ideas characterizing the period during which they were built.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBD, but will include a midterm test, short writing assignments and a final exam
• READINGS: TBD

• PROFESSOR: Alessandra Mariani
• DESCRIPTION: This course features the development of the built environment from the Renaissance to the present. Primarily focused on culturally significant Western architecture, it includes some references to non-Western buildings. Buildings and key architectural projects will be considered in relation to their cultural, social, political, and economic contexts. They will be analyzed through the concepts that gave them their form, their materiality, and their function. Students will gain an understanding of the language of architecture and its evolution, through a diversity of programs and typologies, as well as the technology that made them possible. The course will explore the following themes: the architecture of faith and power, image and representation, the architecture of reason and autonomy, the role of architecture, the geometrization of space, mechanization and rationalism, resistance movements, form to function, globalization and formal experimentation, interdisciplinarity.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBD, but will include a midterm test, short writing assignments and a final exam
• READINGS: TBD

• PROFESSOR: Stacy Ernst
• DESCRIPTION: Art making in Canada is intertwined with its changing social and political realities. This course will emphasize the way artists have made and remade the space north of the 49th parallel from 1900 to the present. How have artists working in Canada used their art to address issues such as nationalism, sovereignty, colonization, decolonization, modernism, and postmodernism? At the end of the course, students will be familiar with a diverse breadth of art made in Canada, across a wide variety of media. They will be able to visually analyze and consider art works in their respective socio-political contexts using art historical language, terminology, and methodology.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBC but will likely include an in-class mid-term test, short writing assignments, and a final exam.
• READINGS: TBA

• PROFESSOR: Victoria Nolte
• DESCRIPTION: This course surveys roughly 5,000 years of artistic production, examining visual and material cultures and built environments within interconnected regional contexts in South and East Asia. Students will learn about artworks produced for a number of specific purposes, such as for religious rituals and ceremonies, for the imperial courts, global and domestic markets, the museum, and the state. Throughout the course we will discuss a wide variety of art practices, including bronzes, sculpture, ceramics, calligraphy, ink painting, miniature painting, garden design, and architecture. In the final weeks of the course we will examine cultural and socio-political transformations that have shaped global encounters with Asian art. The aim of the course is to familiarize students with histories of art and culture in Asia as well as to complicate conventional study of these histories. A key aspect of this course will be to examine art’s entanglements with religion and cultural belief systems, dynastic power, imperialism, identity, and modernity.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
• READINGS: TBA

• PROFESSOR: Stéphane Roy
• DESCRIPTION: This course focuses on the techniques, materials and institutions of art history through lectures and workshops on subjects ranging from art historical research and writing to the materials of art. Numerous activities (workshops, guest speakers, etc.) will provide students with a better sense of the professional skills required in the field of art history, giving them exposure to works of art and to the professionals of art in a variety of institutions. Ultimately, this course aims to provide a truly unique perspective on art history by: 1) introducing students to those who “make” art history: artists, curators, scholars and conservators; 2) exposing students to the materiality of art.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
• READINGS: TBA

• PROFESSOR: Anke Kausch
• DESCRIPTION: A survey of the visual arts of China from the Neolithic era to the present.
  Artworks in various media will be studied in their historical, cultural, religious and philosophical context: early tomb art, ceremonial objects in bronze and jade, Buddhist sculpture, classical architecture and gardens, ceramics, traditional ink painting and calligraphy, as well as modern and contemporary art. Students will have the opportunity to view selected works of Chinese art first hand at the National Gallery of Canada
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
• READINGS: TBA

• PROFESSOR: Shannon Perry
• DESCRIPTION: Tracing the invention(s) of photography, from the Daguerreotype to digital. The course focus is on the social, cultural and artistic and scientific impact of photography, primarily in France, England and the United States. In this introduction to the history of photography, historic and modern photographers such as Timothy O’Sullivan, Robert Capa, Weegee, Ansel Adams, Alfred Stieglitz and Cindy Sherman are discussed, in context of a broader history.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
• READINGS: Mary Warner Marien “Photography: A Cultural History”

• PROFESSOR: Ming Tiampo
• DESCRIPTION: This course considers Global Modernisms from the 19th century until 1989. The course focusses on intersections and parallels within Modernisms in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Taking Asia as a springboard for understanding modernity from a non-Western perspective, this class proposes an account of modernity and modernism that treats issues of colonialism, national culture, war, migration, and cultural transfer alongside discussions of industrialization, urbanization, progress, and aesthetic innovation typical of Euro-American treatments of modernism.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
• READINGS: Online Readings

• PROFESSOR: Marie Clausén
• DESCRIPTION: One of the most notable things about the European Middle Ages is its remarkable architectural legacy: its castles and cathedrals, its monasteries and parish churches. These structures were built by master builders of such remarkable talent and vision that they dominate the skylines and cityscapes to this very day.
  This course will offer a survey of all its many styles, including Early Christian, Byzantine, Ottonian, Carolingian, Anglo-Saxon, Romanesque, Anglo-Norman and Italo-Norman, as well as early, mature and late Gothic/Renaissance. The study of medieval art and architecture is not only the study of form, structure and style, but also provides an insight into medieval theology, liturgy, philosophy, law, and economic and social history.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA.
• READINGS: Marilyn Stokstad and Michael W. Cothren, Art History, Volume 1, 6th edition (2017)
  eText version: ISBN 9780134485256.

• PROFESSOR: Dijana O. Apostolski
• DESCRIPTION: The Italian Renaissance has been considered the pinnacle of the visual, plastic, and literary early modern arts and the watershed of the modern sciences. This course focuses on complicating and disrupting this ubiquitous interpretation. The course will acquaint students with the major subjects and artists as well as the historically marginalized topics, works, and voices. Students will also be familiarized with the variety of ways scholars have approached the Italian Renaissance and given the opportunity to experience, read, write, and question art and art history from their proper perspectives. Placed under scrutiny, Italian Renaissance art will allow students to think critically about the contemporary world as they learn about the past.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: Participation/ Discussion 10%; Group Project and Presentation 15%; 2 Three-Page Papers 20%; Final Essay 35%; No Midterm and Final Exam.
• READINGS: TBA

• PROFESSOR: Yelda Nasifoglu
• DESCRIPTION: This course is an examination of architecture from the late medieval period to the 18th century with a focus on the European and Islamic worlds and their cross-cultural interactions with the world. The early modern period, spanning roughly between 1400 and 1750, was a transformative era for the development of architecture in our contemporary sense. This was a time of increased exchanges between Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, with complex results that included colonialism and attempts at socio-cultural and religious conversion. It saw the development of the Renaissance and competing geographical interpretations of ancient cultures, the explosive influence of print culture, the Scientific Revolution, and the rise of epistolary dissemination of ideas. Architecture was both influenced by these developments and became a vehicle for their growth and dramatic expansion. Taking on an interdisciplinary approach, the course will explore the development of architectural ideas and practices across diverse cultural and geographical landscapes. It will draw on the literary, material, and visual cultures of the period, along with buildings and infrastructure, to offer a critical and cross-cultural learning experience to the students.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
• READINGS: TBA

• PROFESSOR: Alessandra Mariani
• DESCRIPTION: This course will explore the architectural origins of the modern world, from the structural and material innovations granted by the industrial revolution, following by the rise and spread of the Modern Movement in Europe and America, and concluding in the exploration of the diverse forms and attitudes of Postmodern architecture. It will feature architects who defined architectural modernism, the notions and concepts that gave way to its new materiality and typologies and the revisions and critique that furthered its development. Iconic projects will illustrate how technological development contributed to the emergence of new architectural languages and forms, and how these proliferated globally. Themes such as functionalism, international style, space-time, off-center composition, transparency, brutalism, and deconstruction will contribute to identify the specificity of the twentieth-century architecture.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: One reading summary, weekly short assignments, and a final exam.
• READINGS: TBD

• PROFESSOR: Gul Kale
• DESCRIPTION: What does architecture look like, sound like, smell like? How do we best communicate our experience of the designed environment? These are some of the questions this course explores through a series of site visits, class activities and multimedia projects.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: Students will be evaluated through participation in class and work on a wide variety of projects including descriptive and analytical writing, photography and podcasting.
• READINGS: Required texts will be posted through the library’s digital reserves service ARES.

• PROFESSOR: Alessandra Mariani
• DESCRIPTION: This course will define and explore the communication systems of architecture (drawings, models, writing, photography, film, exhibitions) through a historical survey of concomitant architectural theories, and technological developments. Representational practices will be examined along the agency and ideologies that they conveyed. A focus will be made on the way they transformed architectural knowledge and culture. The lectures will address the topics of harmony, proportions and distortions of the Renaissance, the impact of the linear perspective, the notion of Architecture parlante, the quest for utopias in the 20th century, the effect of photography and film on architecture, the role of academia, publications and ideology in the development of architectural representations (late 20th and 21st century), the prescriptive effect of exhibitions, and the trajectory and effects of computer-aided imagery production.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBD
• READINGS: TBD

• PROFESSOR: Mitchell Frank
• DESCRIPTION: Today a variety of research methods are available to art and architectural historians. In this course, we will examine a range of methods that art and architectural historians have used to understand and interpret visual and material culture. Through an exploration of some of the historical and theoretical foundations of art and architectural history, we will study the practices and problematics of a variety of methods and approaches.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA.
• READINGS: Online Readings

• PROFESSOR: Michael Windover
• DESCRIPTION: How is architectural history done? What methods are used and how has the methodology of architectural history changed over time? Through a combination of close, critical reading and class activities, this course trains students how to use some research methods and provides opportunities to put them into practice.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA, but will include written assignments, participatory activities, and the creation of an online, multimedia project
• READINGS: Required texts will be posted through the library’s digital reserves service ARES.

• PROFESSOR: Carmen Robertson
• DESCRIPTION: Visual Storytelling has deep roots in Indigenous cultures. Like oral stories, visual stories were shared through forms of intergenerational knowledge transmission. Complicated by colonialism, the ways visual stories are viewed and migrate has changed and been adapted. In this course we will discuss Indigenous visual stories of the past, present, and future that challenge linear timelines in a wide range of media within a Turtle Island/Canadian context. Taking advantage of Indigenous art exhibitions available and on display during the given semester, this course will explore story, storywork and storying in a variety of contexts and how it reflects the ways of knowing of Indigenous peoples in a range of territories.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
• READINGS: TBA

• PROFESSOR: Rosalie Smith McCrea
• DESCRIPTION: This course critically surveys Jamaican landscape representations from Columbus’s contact in 1494 up to the present.  It seeks to understand how through the decades of colonial, post-colonial and independent Jamaica was ‘landscape’ understood, recorded, printed, painted or photographed in aesthetic, strategic or commercial ways. The course broadens the definition of the word ‘landscape’ in that it considers recurring images, motifs and elements from the landscape as intentional on the part of the artist when transcribed to media such as Tortoiseshell in the 17th c or furniture design in the 19th c. As a Western Genre, ‘Landscape’ will encompass not only what the viewer observed in the present moment but also what was absent and recalled through memory for a different location. The course associates ‘landscape’ art after Jamaican independence with works of fantasy (secular or religious) when speaking of self-taught [Intuitive] artists and academically trained painters.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: 25% Mid-Term; 25% Oral Presentations: 50% Short Research Paper
• READINGS: A Reading List will be put on reserve in the Library

• PROFESSORS: Kathy Armstrong, Malini Guha, Gül Kale
• DESCRIPTION: This course takes a cross-disciplinary as well as intersectional approach to the topic of race and representation. Spanning a variety of artistic mediums including film, music, visual art and architecture, this course will explore the politics of representation, and the challenges as well as opportunities of producing works by artists, makers, and collectives from Black, Indigenous and racialized communities.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
• READINGS: TBA

• PROFESSOR: Paul Jasen
• DESCRIPTION: This course is designed for emerging arts (and design) professionals in any field. Our focus is on developing fundamental skills in digital media production that will be of use to students planning careers in the arts sector or related industries. Through lessons, case studies, workshopping and collaborative production sessions, students will gain experience in the following areas: website design and development, image editing, audio recording and podcasting, streaming video, designing for print, social media integration and writing for the web. Students will leave this course having developed a multi-faceted portfolio project related to their field, as well as confidence and demonstrated proficiency using current media production tools and platforms.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: In-class workshopping activities; small, skills-building assignments; production of a multi-part media project on a topic of personal interest.
• READINGS AND TECHNOLOGY: TBA

• PROFESSOR: Gul Kale
• DESCRIPTION: This course will focus on the link between architecture, art, science, and knowledge with a special emphasis on the Ottoman Empire and its interactions with the wider Islamic and the Mediterranean worlds from the late medieval period to the nineteenth century. The course will examine how diverse Islamic societies produced and reacted to artifacts that had a transforming effect on places and people. The literary, material, and visual cultures of the period will be examined to understand the built environment and material culture in practical, philosophical, religious, and political contexts. Some themes include: orientalist discourses on the arts of the Islamic world, the notion of globalisation in Islamic art and architectural history, architectural poems, sacred geography, sound and architecture, surveying and hydraulic works, the uses of practical geometry, material culture and society, and multisensory experiences. The course will develop the necessary historical perspective and critical understanding of the Islamic world and beyond for students. It aims at strengthening how students explore and analyze architecture and artwork in a cross-cultural context from an interdisciplinary perspective. The course comprises presentations, readings, and discussions of selected primary and secondary sources.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
• READINGS: TBA

• PROFESSOR: Randi Klebanoff
• DESCRIPTION: An exploration of ways in which artists from the 14th to the early 16th centuries used naturalistic depictions of the material world to convey the immaterial in Christian art. Readings in art history and theology will give us the tools to analyze artworks of revelatory inventiveness.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA. Components to include reading responses, discussion participation, presentation, and research paper. There will be no final exam.
• READINGS: Online Readings

• PROFESSOR: Carol Payne
• DESCRIPTION: This seminar will address the role that photography plays in conceptualizations of memory. We will draw on the rich body of literature on photography and memory as well as theory drawn from Memory Studies and Photo Studies.  Along the way we will explore work by specific artists, historians, and theoreticians as case studies. These may include Ariella Azoulay, Roland Barthes, Tina Campt, Marianne Hirsch, Annette Kuhn, Martha Langford, Pierre Nora, and Barbie Zelizer. As a practical component of the course and part of our exploration of photography and memory, we will also engage with photo-based oral history. This will include discussions of literature on the intersections of oral history and photo studies. But it will also include a hands-on project by members of the class, conducting their own photo-based oral history.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: 50% Research Project; 20% Reader Responses; 15% Photo-based oral history assignment; 15% participation
• READINGS: Assigned reading will be mainly available through BrightSpace and will not require purchase.  (If I decide to order one or two books, I will let you know in advance.)

• PROFESSOR: Valentina Davila
• DESCRIPTION: Through its built environment, this seminar will explore the diverse, stimulating, and multifaceted Latin American subcontinent. It will focus on the last century (1920-2020), the region’s most dynamic and exciting period from modernity to contemporary times. This overview will favour a cultural landscape methodology to identify how wealth and dispossession, power and oppression, and beauty and violence are intertwined and reflected in these diverse yet unified geographies. La Torre de David, also known as the world’s tallest favela, the unfinished Cuban Art Schools, and a group of tiny plastic homes known as petrocasas are some of the buildings included in this course. The design and construction of these buildings reflect the polarized Latin American discussions about the meaning of identity, colonialism, nationalism, and international interventions. Their form, scale, and materiality echo the tensions in the widespread dilemma between remaining faithful to their roots and traditions while adhering to cosmopolitan ideas of progress and globalization. The structures will always be studied in a broad cultural, political, and historical context to understand better the people, ideas, and events that collectively shaped the continent. Lectures will be delivered in person and will support student-led discussions
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
• READINGS: TBA

• PROFESSOR: Sarah Gelbard
• DESCRIPTION: One of the most notable things about the European Middle Ages is its remarkable architectural legacy: its castles and cathedrals, its monasteries and parish churches. These structures were built by master builders of such remarkable talent and vision that they dominate the skylines and cityscapes to this very day.
  This course will offer a survey of all its many styles, including Early Christian, Byzantine, Ottonian, Carolingian, Anglo-Saxon, Romanesque, Anglo-Norman and Italo-Norman, as well as early, mature and late Gothic/Renaissance. The study of medieval art and architecture is not only the study of form, structure and style, but also provides an insight into medieval theology, liturgy, philosophy, law, and economic and social history.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA.
• READINGS: TBA

• PROFESSOR: Amy Bruce
• DESCRIPTION: Contemporary art is a way of engaging with the world. It helps us to make sense of the world, to ask new questions and to open up new worlds. In this course we will encounter a variety of artworks, artists and art institutions of contemporary art. We will explore how they articulate and mediate world and learn to understand and connect with them. We will immerse ourselves in collaborative close-looking sessions, study and adopt different models of understanding and interpreting contemporary art, learn about central topics in the art of the present, and become aware of the multiple and entangled histories that shape contemporary art in the global framework.Throughout the semester, we will welcome guest speakers and often leave the classroom to directly engage with contemporary art in Ottawa and Gatineau. Among others we will visit the Carleton Art Gallery (CUAG), the National Gallery of Canada (NGC), the Ottawa Art Gallery (OAG), SAW Gallery, City Hall Gallery, Art Garage, Galerie UQO, and meet actors of contemporary art in our region.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: 25% active participation; 50%  in-class writing assignments and short final paper; 25% oral presentation)
• READINGS: All readings will be made available on Brightspace.

• PROFESSOR: Alessandra Mariani
• DESCRIPTION: This course features the development of the built environment from the Renaissance to the present. Primarily focused on culturally significant Western architecture, it includes some references to Nonwestern buildings. Buildings and key architectural projects will be considered in relation to their cultural, social, political, and economic contexts. They will be analyzed through the concepts that gave them their form, their materiality, and their function. Students will gain an understanding of the language of architecture and its evolution, through a diversity of programs and typologies, as well as the technology that made them possible. The course will explore the following themes: the architecture of faith and power, image and representation, the architecture of reason and autonomy, the role of architecture, the geometrization of space, mechanization and rationalism, resistance movements, form to function, globalization and formal experimentation, interdisciplinarity and critical spatial practice.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
• READINGS: TBA

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• PROFESSOR: Morgan Currie
• DESCRIPTION: This course is a broad historical survey of different artistic traditions from prehistory to the Renaissance that explores how works of art were produced, and the roles that they played in their societies. Principle theories of art from the ancient and medieval worlds will also be introduced. Students will gain the ability to recognize images from a wide range of times and places, and their relationships with the societies and cultures where they originated. Course activities develop basic formal and contextual analysis skills that are valuable in today’s image-saturated world.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: Three-part analysis and virtual exhibit assignment 45%; Midterm test 15%; Final Exam 25%; Tutorial 15%
• READINGS: Marilyn Stokstad & Michael W. Cothren, Revel Art History, 6e

• PROFESSOR: Brian Foss
• DESCRIPTION: This course is a selective survey of art of the last 700 years, studying how art has reflected political, religious and social concerns of the societies in which it was produced and consumed. This is done through the introduction and analysis of major ideas, artists and artworks. Although the main focus is on the art of West, regular attention is also paid to the complex relationships between the visual art of Western and non-Western cultures. Major ideas, artists, and artworks are introduced and analyzed. Course activities and assignments develop basic visual analysis skills that are essential in today’s image-saturated world.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
• READINGS: TBA

• PROFESSOR: Amy Bruce
• DESCRIPTION: This course examines the ways in which art is considered a form of visual communication. By approaching art as a distinct category of visual production, this course moves from discussions on the basic elements of art (eg. line, shape, colour, form) to different interpretative frameworks that have been applied to art in order to understand how art makes meaning. This course is not a conventional art historical survey, but rather an introduction to art as a cultural concept. A wide range of artworks from various periods and historical contexts will be examined in order to illuminate rich and diverse topics such as aesthetics, feminism, and global art.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION:
  Formal analysis assignment: 25%
  Mini research assignment: 25%
  Final assignment: 35%
  Weekly activities (10 total): 15%
• READINGS: The course does not have a textbook or course pack. Readings will be provided in an online collection through the library, free of charge.

• PROFESSOR: Peter Coffman
• DESCRIPTION: This survey of Western architecture to approximately 1500 is a wide-ranging exploration of how architecture has served human needs. It lays a foundation for subsequent courses in architecture and architectural history, and can also be a stand-alone exploration of history viewed through the lens of the built environment. It roams from Neolithic tombs to Greek and Roman temples to medieval castles to Islamic palaces to Renaissance churches and palazzi – with a great deal in between. In all cases, the buildings will be analyzed on a broad cultural and historical landscape, connecting them to the ideas, events and circumstances that originally gave them meaning. Lectures will be delivered asynchronously online, complemented by regular in-person meetings.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: Assignments will include short weekly online exercises, class participation, quizzes, and a short essay. Full details TBA.
• READINGS: TBA
  

• PROFESSOR: Gul Kale
• DESCRIPTION: This course will examine global architectural history and theory from 1500 to the present. It explores the architectural and urban history of diverse regions such as Europe, India, Africa, the Americas, the Middle East, China, and Japan through key buildings and infrastructure. The course will lay the framework for understanding the fabrication, perception, and experience of the built environment and artifacts by different communities. It will simultaneously look at the ways in which ideas, people, and goods circulated between cities. Some of the themes include: architecture and ritualistic space; the public role of the architect; imperial cities and buildings; public festivals in urban squares; decision-making for urban projects; architecture and politics; architectural design; sacred space; visual experience and urban landscape; gardens and theatrical space; architecture and world fairs; city and cinematic space; urban views and photography; and architecture and urban modernization. Shared architectural ideas that shaped the built environment, as well as were shaped by specific cultural, social, political, and scientific contexts will be discussed through examining selected architectural concepts and works. The course will integrate various modes of interdisciplinary knowledge from the arts, humanities, sciences, and technology and disseminate them as the means of historical inquiry and critical and creative thinking on global architectural history and theory.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
• READINGS: TBA

• PROFESSOR: Stacy Ernst
• DESCRIPTION: This course will survey the visual arts in what would become Canada from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. We will look at creative output made by Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists, amateur and professional makers, artists who were here for a short time and artists who lived here. We will address a wide variety media including painting, sculpture, printing, textiles, and photography. Throughout the term we will consider how colonialism and emerging settler colonial nationalism shaped the visual arts of this emerging nation.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: Course evaluation is TBC but will most likely include attendance, an essay assignment based on a work from the National Gallery of Canada, midterm test, and final exam
• READINGS: Readings will be made available through Brightspace and Ares

• PROFESSOR: Jasmine Inglis

• PROFESSOR: Victoria Nolte
• DESCRIPTION: This course surveys roughly 5,000 years of artistic production, examining visual and material cultures and built environments within interconnected regional contexts in South and East Asia. We will discuss a wide variety of art practices, including bronzes, sculpture, ceramics, calligraphy, ink painting, miniature painting, garden design, and architecture. The aim of the course is to both familiarize students with histories of art and culture in Asia as well as to complicate conventional study of these histories. A key aspect of this course will be to examine art’s critical entanglements with religion and cultural belief systems, dynastic power, imperialism, identity, and modernity.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: Class discussion, midterm assignment, visual analysis paper, and final exam.
• READINGS: TBA

• PROFESSOR: Sheena Ellison
• DESCRIPTION: TBA
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
• READINGS: TBA

• PROFESSOR: Stephane Roy
• DESCRIPTION: A core course that focuses on the techniques, materials and institutions of art history through lectures and (virtual) workshops on subjects such as art historical research and writing, the materials of art, professional skills and discussions with professionals.   Restricted to Honours Art History Majors.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: Three reaction papers (3 x 20%); Assignment (25%); Participation (15%)
• READINGS: TBA

• PROFESSOR: Susan Downie
• DESCRIPTION: The course covers the art, architecture, and archaeology of ancient Greece from the Bronze Age to the death of Alexander the Great (roughly 1000 years).  Various kinds of physical remains are discussed with most attention on pottery / vase painting, sculpture and public architecture.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: 2 tests (midterm and scheduled final exam), research project in 3 parts
• READINGS: J.G. Pedley, Greek Art and Archaeology, 5th ed. (Prentice-Hall, 2012).

• PROFESSOR: Gul Kale
• DESCRIPTION: This course is an examination of Islamic architecture and art from the medieval period to the 18th century. The exploration of theoretical ideas, art and architectural practices, socio-cultural foundations of arts will open the ground to understand architectural making and thinking in historical contexts. Architecture’s role in culture, religion, politics, and urban transformations in cities such as Istanbul and Isfahan will be explored. The course will draw on the literary, material, and visual cultures of the period along with buildings and infrastructure. A focus on the notion of architecture as a socio-cultural phenomenon that was constantly in contact with diverse cultures, other forms of knowledge, and lived experiences will offer an interdisciplinary, critical, and cross-cultural learning experience that evaluates the history and theory of architecture in a global context.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
• READINGS: TBA

• PROFESSOR: Amy Bruce
• DESCRIPTION:What is an art biennial? Have biennials changed the way contemporary art is being made? How do global art worlds intersect with local artistic production? What is the work of the curator, artist, and art historian when producing, participating, and understanding the art biennial and the issues that they generate? This course, as a critical survey of the art biennial, will address these questions by examining past global biennial editions in conjunction with biennial art historical scholarship and the predominant framings of biennial history.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
• READINGS: TBA

• PROFESSOR: Morgan Currie
• DESCRIPTION: The Italian Renaissance is a period of dramatic change in art and society. Renewed emphases on human accomplishment and ancient culture laid the foundation for the emergence of the modern world. The visual arts grew in prestige, as creators such as Brunelleschi, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Titian transformed the notion of the artist from a skilled craftsman to a revered genius. This course examines the art and architecture of Renaissance Italy on formal, technical, and theoretical grounds, and in relation to the social, religious and cultural context.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: Midterm test 25%; Research Essay 30%; Final Exam 35%; Participation/Response 10%
• READINGS: TBA

• PROFESSOR: Peter Coffman
• DESCRIPTION: The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were a time of enormous intellectual and creative activity, social upheaval, and technological innovation. This course will explore the styles, building types, key monuments and intellectual frameworks of architecture of the 18th and 19th centuries. These will range from the strictest Neo-Classicism through revived medievalism and the restless experimentation with new forms, materials, and building types that characterized this era. Asynchronous online lectures will be combined with weekly in-person meetings.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: Details TBA; will include weekly activities, occasional quizzes, and a final assignment with a choice between an essay or design assignment.
• READINGS: TBA
  

• PROFESSOR: Jill Carrick
• DESCRIPTION: This course explores the great visual breakthroughs of early 20th century European modern art. Through focus on movements such as Cubism, Futurism, Russian Constructivism, Dada, and Surrealism, the class investigates what one historian perceptively described as the “demolition of the received visual order”. How did modern art re-imagine the world? What is modernism and the avant-garde? How did artists picture desire and sexuality, political change and social contestation, and the dramatic technological transformations of their century?
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: The class is based on illustrated lectures, readings, and class discussion. Assessment details to be announced at beginning of semester.
• READINGS: Textbook: Arnason, H. H. and Elizabeth C. Mansfield. History of Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Photography. 7th edition. By Prentice Hall, 2012.

• PROFESSOR: Shannon Perry
• DESCRIPTION: History & Theory of Photography broadly examines the histories of photography from its beginnings in the early 19th century to today, from Daguerreotypes to digital. The processes and products of photography’s major (and minor) developments are considered and understood within a wider social, scientific and art historical context.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
• READINGS: Mary Warner Marien, “Photography: A Cultural History, 5th edition, (Laurence King Publishing), 2021.

• PROFESSOR: Dustin Valen
• DESCRIPTION: This course surveys global urban and architectural culture from the late nineteenth century to the present. Students will gain a broad-based understanding of urban and architectural modernity through an introduction to the work of a select number of architects, planners, and activists. Lectures highlight how the transnational flow of ideas, people, and capital has changed the global built environment throughout the western and non-western world.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
• READINGS: TBA

• PROFESSOR: Peter Coffman & Michael Windover
• DESCRIPTION: What does architecture look like, sound like, smell like? How do we best communicate our experience of the designed environment? These are some of the questions this course explores through a series of site visits, class activities and multimedia projects.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: Students will be evaluated through participation in class and work on a wide variety of projects including descriptive and analytical writing, photography and podcasting.
• READINGS: Required texts will be posted through the library’s digital reserves service ARES.

• PROFESSOR: TBA
• DESCRIPTION: TBA
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
• READINGS: TBA

• PROFESSOR: Gul Kale
• DESCRIPTION: This course will examine the history of architectural representation from the late medieval period up to the 19th century with a focus on the Mediterranean world. It will center on representational practices in architecture and culture that became vehicles for the circulation and transformation of ideas, cultures, peoples, and artifacts beyond borders and at contact zones. Some of the themes include: architecture and drawing, the uses of models, pattern making in arts, architectural books, travel accounts, city views, mapping the world, and orientalist images. The historical techniques of representation used in artistic making and thinking will be explored along with their agency in the production of discourses on cultures and the notion of globalization. The course will introduce students to critically examine and understand the representation, dissemination, and distortion of architectural cultures and knowledge through books, drawings, images, and objects.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
• READINGS: TBA

• PROFESSOR: Randi Klebanoff
• DESCRIPTION: A course of critical readings on methods and approaches of architectural and art history. Through seminar type discussions, lectures, individual and group work, workshops, assignments, and analytic writing, students will build academic skills and outlooks on foundational approaches to the study of art and architecture.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA. No final exam.
• READINGS: Readings will be available online.

• PROFESSOR: Michael Windover
• DESCRIPTION: How is architectural history done? What methods are used and how has the methodology of architectural history changed over time? Through a combination of close, critical reading and class activities, this course trains students how to use some research methods and provides opportunities to put them into practice.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA, but will include written assignments, participatory activities, and the creation of an online, multimedia project.
• READINGS:

• PROFESSOR: Mitchell Frank
• DESCRIPTION: In this seminar we will engage with a number of theories and methodologies that have shaped directions in art history from the 20th century until today. Centred around thoughtful analysis and discussion of shared readings, emphasis will also be given to the active cultivation of skills of research, writing and presentation of art historical work.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
• READINGS: TBA

• PROFESSOR: Tristian Marsman
• DESCRIPTION: In what ways did Western art change in the wake of the Second World War? How did artists respond to the new sociopolitical conditions in the post-war era? What changed when the centre of the Western art world shifted from Paris to New York? To answer these questions, this course surveys art from 1945 through to the present day, exploring such artistic movements as Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Conceptual Art. The course readings will help illuminate such urgent issues as anti-war politics, race, class, gender, and the environment to help us better understand the works of art we discuss.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA, but will include both written work and in-class presentations.
• READINGS: TBA

• PROFESSOR: Morgan Currie
• DESCRIPTION: Seventeenth-century Rome was home to a remarkable burst of architectural creativity that introduced movement, emotionalism, and sense of wonder to the classical legacy of the Italian Renaissance. Innovators like Francesco Borromini, Pietro da Cortona, and Gianlorenzo Bernini unleashed complex geometries, dynamic fluid spaces, and interactive experiences that despite their originality were united by a shared emphasis on emotional appeal. This class will look closely at the, historical development, major landmarks and theoretical foundations of this rhetorical architecture, with specific attention to the role of the built environment in expressing and shaping social and religious ideals.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: Analysis paper 35%; Midterm 25%; Final Exam 35%; Attendance 5%
• READINGS: Weekly selected readings are provided

• PROFESSOR: Paul Jasen
• DESCRIPTION: This course teaches fundamental skills of digital media production with a focus on applications in arts-related fields. Through lessons, workshopping and collaborative production sessions students will gain experience in the following areas: website design and development, image editing, audio recording and podcasting, streaming video, social media integration and writing for the web. Students will leave this course having developed a multi-faceted portfolio project related to their field, as well as confidence and demonstrated proficiency using current media production tools and platforms.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: In-class workshopping activities and production of a multi-part media portfolio.
• READINGS AND TECHNOLOGY: TBA

• PROFESSOR: Morgan Currie
• DESCRIPTION: The seventeenth century in Rome was a period of social and religious turmoil and tremendous artistic creativity. Artists explored the power of visual rhetoric to overwhelm viewers in the service of a self-absorbed aristocracy and a Church defined paradoxically by worldly corruption and intense mystical faith. No figure epitomized this landscape like Gianlorenzo Bernini, a sculptor, architect, playwright, theatre designer, and occasional painter who dominated the Roman art world for nearly seven decades. This course will use Bernini’s life and work as a lens to explore the relationships between artistic theory and practice, society, and authority in this turbulent time, with special emphasis on his radical rethinking of sculpture as an instrument of interactive rhetorical communication.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: Analysis paper 35%; Midterm 25%; Final Exam 35%; Attendance 5%
• READINGS: Selected weekly readings are provided

• PROFESSOR: Stephen Inglis
• DESCRIPTION: An introduction to the architecture and design of India with reference to Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka and the international influences of ideas, materials and techniques over time. A survey of major monuments and sites of different regions, periods and styles from cave dwellings to current buildings, with an emphasis on the religious, social and historical contexts of production.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: Participation: 10%, short assignments: 20%, class presentation: 20%, final paper: 40%.
• READINGS: No textbook, online readings and a few library readings.

[slideme title="ARTH 4000B Topics in Canadian Art: Decolonial Aesthetics in Canada - Winter"]

• PROFESSOR: Stacy Ernst
• DESCRIPTION: In Canada, the visual arts have been used as a means of colonization and nation building from the earliest moments of colonial activity to the present. However, in the 1970s, Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists began to make artworks that actively questioned the settler colonial nation. Their works bring into focus what can be identified as a decolonial aesthetic.Focusing on various “sites” including methodologies, exhibitions and galleries, the land, and archives, this seminar will consider the possibilities of decolonial aesthetics in the Canadian context and the broader implications of such an aesthetic on these sites. Some questions we will consider include what constitutes decolonial aesthetic? What are the limits of a decolonial aesthetic? And finally, as Métis scholar David Garneau argues, can decolonial aesthetics be a way of enacting activism?
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: Evaluation is TBC but will most likely include attendance/participation, a discussant assignment, reading response, essay proposal, and final essay
• READINGS: Readings will be made available via Brightspace and Ares

• PROFESSOR: Birgit Hopfener
• DESCRIPTION: This reading intensive course will provide a critical introduction to discourses, historiographies, socio-political contexts, scholars, institutions, concepts, and methodological approaches of art history in a global framework. We will study and compare the beginnings of “Weltkunstgeschichte” (world art history) discourses in 20th century German speaking art history and recent discourses such as World Art Studies, Post-colonial Art History, Global Art History, Transcultural Art History, Transnational and Decolonial Art History, Migration and art history and planetary approaches to contemporary art.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
• READINGS: All readings will be available on Brightspace

• PROFESSOR: Gul Kale
• DESCRIPTION: This course will focus on the link between architecture, art, science, and knowledge with a special emphasis on the Ottoman Empire and its interactions with the wider Islamic and the Mediterranean worlds from the late medieval period to the late eighteenth century. The course will examine how diverse Islamic societies produced and reacted to artifacts that had a transforming effect on places and people. The literary, material, and visual cultures of the period will be examined to understand the built environment and material culture in practical, philosophical, religious, and political contexts. Some themes include: orientalist discourses on the arts of the Islamic world, the notion of globalisation in Islamic art and architectural history, architectural poems, sacred geography, sound and architecture, surveying and hydraulic works, the uses of practical geometry, material culture and society, and multisensory experiences. The course will develop the necessary historical perspective and critical understanding of the Islamic world for students. It aims at strengthening how students explore and analyze architecture and artwork in a cross-cultural context from an interdisciplinary perspective. The course comprises presentations, readings, and discussions of selected primary and secondary sources.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
• READINGS: TBA

• PROFESSOR: Carol Payne
• DESCRIPTION: This seminar will draw on the rich body of literature on photography and memory as well as theory drawn from Memory Studies and Photo Studies. As part of the course class members will also conduct their own photo-based oral history interview.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: (Note: this is a tentative breakdown of evaluation) 50% research project; 15% short photo-based oral history assignment; 20% reader response papers; 15% participation
• READINGS: Assigned reading will be available through Bright Space. These may include Ariella Azoulay, Roland Barthes, Christian Boltanski, Tina Campt, Marianne Hirsch, Annette Kuhn, Martha Langford, Pierre Nora, W.G. Sebald, and Barbie Zelizer.

• PROFESSOR: Hilary Grant
• DESCRIPTION: What do we mean when we use the word modern? When was the modern, how do we experience the modern, and how does the modern manifest architecturally? This reading-intensive seminar will address these questions, challenging how architectural history has traditionally framed modernism and its attendant historiographic assumptions of innovation and progress. It will explore twentieth- and twenty-first century building trends on the margins of architectural history–European neo-vernacularism, American novelty architecture, rural folk architectures, Indigenous building practices, and the rise of the heritage conservation movement, among others–and their relationship to avant-garde European modernism.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
• READINGS: All readings will be available on Brightspace.

• PROFESSOR: Michael Windover & Peter Coffman
• DESCRIPTION: Sound is essential to the experience of place and space. We tend to privilege the sense of sight when studying architecture, but our ears are equally important in developing our relationship with space. How does listening carefully to the designed environment affect our understanding of place? How can we study the spatial experience of sounds from the past?This course will consider the relationship of sound and space through history. We will take a critical look at the role of sound in architecture and in the discipline of architectural history. Students will have opportunities to work with audio recording and production in their coursework.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
• READINGS: Required texts will be posted through the library’s digital reserves service ARES. Any additional texts, links, or audio files will be posted to the course’s Brightspace page.

• PROFESSOR: Morgan Currie
• DESCRIPTION: Seventeenth-century Rome was home to a remarkable burst of architectural creativity that introduced movement, emotionalism, and sense of wonder to the classical legacy of the Italian Renaissance. Innovators like Francesco Borromini, Pietro da Cortona, and Gianlorenzo Bernini unleashed complex geometries, dynamic fluid spaces, and interactive experiences that despite their originality were united by a shared emphasis on emotional appeal. This class will look closely at the, historical development, major landmarks and theoretical foundations of this rhetorical architecture, with specific attention to the role of the built environment in expressing and shaping social and religious ideals.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: Seminar Paper 60%; Annotated Bibliography 10%; Reading Response 15%; Attendance and Participation 15%
• READINGS: Selected weekly readings are provided

• PROFESSOR: Emily Putnam
• DESCRIPTION: What is public art? How does art contribute to, inform, and/or shape our understanding of the public? Through seminar-style discussion, readings, guest talks, interactive and experiential learning, this course seeks to answer these questions. If you are interested in learning about contemporary art, and the intersections between the arts and the public, this course is for you.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
• READINGS: TBA

• PROFESSOR: Morgan Currie
• DESCRIPTION: The seventeenth century in Rome was a period of social and religious turmoil and tremendous artistic creativity. Artists explored the power of visual rhetoric to overwhelm viewers in the service of a self-absorbed aristocracy and a Church defined paradoxically by worldly corruption and intense mystical faith. No figure epitomized this landscape like Gianlorenzo Bernini, a sculptor, architect, playwright, theatre designer, and occasional painter who dominated the Roman art world for nearly seven decades. This course will use Bernini’s life and work as a lens to explore the relationships between artistic theory and practice, society, and authority in this turbulent time, with special emphasis on his radical rethinking of sculpture as an instrument of interactive rhetorical communication.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: Seminar Paper 60%; Annotated Bibliography 10%; Reading Response 15%; Attendance and Participation 15%
• READINGS: Selected weekly readings are provided

• PROFESSOR: Maxime Valsamas
• DESCRIPTION: This course is a broad survey of architecture, metalwork, painting, printmaking, sculpture, and other art forms from prehistory to the Renaissance. We will pay particular attention to the cultural, religious, and political contexts for art’s production, the role of the artist, and the ever- changing relationship of art to society. Important consideration will also be given to the techniques and styles used in different cultural periods and how meaning is created in diverse modes of visual expression. This course will place emphasis on the visual analysis of works of art, enabling students to develop the foundational skills to undertake further studies in art history and to navigate today’s increasingly image-saturated world.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: Attendance and participation in weekly discussions 15%, Midterm exam 25%, Visual analysis paper 25%, Final exam 35%
• READINGS: TBA

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• PROFESSOR: Alessandra Mariani
• DESCRIPTION: This course features the development of the built environment from the Renaissance to the present. Primarily focused on culturally significant Western architecture, it includes some references to Nonwestern buildings. Buildings and key architectural projects will be considered in relation to their cultural, social, political, and economic contexts. They will be analyzed through the concepts that gave them their form, their materiality, and their function. Students will gain an understanding of the language of architecture and its evolution, through a diversity of programs and typologies, as well as the technology that made them possible. The course will explore the following themes: the architecture of faith and power, image and representation, the architecture of reason and autonomy, the role of architecture, the geometrization of space, mechanization and rationalism, resistance movements, form to function, globalization and formal experimentation, interdisciplinarity and critical spatial practice.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: Biweekly short exercises, discussion forum participation, a short essay, a final assignment. Full details TBA
• READINGS: TBA

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• PROFESSOR: Morgan Currie
• DESCRIPTION: Raphael Sanzio is one of the best-known names associated with the art of the Italian Renaissance, and as much as any one individual, established the foundations for Western classicism over the following centuries. However, even this profound influence sells short the singular combination of continual innovation and technical acumen that defined his regrettably short career. This course will examine the work of Raphael within its social, historical, and ideological contexts, with a particular focus on its place in the development of a theoretical notion of artistic ideality at the time and subsequently. Attention will also be paid to the historiography of the Renaissance period; how changing assumptions shaped the critical understanding of art, and the role of Raphael within that process. These themes will be presented in the context of an in-depth examination of Raphael’s painting and architecture, and selected works by his key influences and contemporaries.
• METHOD OF EVALUATION: This is a split-level course meaning students can enroll at either the 3000 or 4000 level. Only one enrolment is possible. Students at the 3000 level will be evaluated on the basis of a midterm and final exam as well as a term paper of approximately eight pages. 4000 level students will not sit the tests but will write a seminar-type paper of approximately sixteen pages for the research experience and two short response pieces during the term.
• READINGS: There is no assigned textbook for the course. Weekly readings will be posted on the class Brightspace page.

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PROFESSOR: Morgan Currie
DESCRIPTION: Raphael Sanzio is one of the best-known names associated with the art of the Italian Renaissance, and as much as any one individual, established the foundations for Western classicism over the following centuries. However, even this profound influence sells short the singular combination of continual innovation and technical acumen that defined his regrettably short career. This course will examine the work of Raphael within its social, historical, and ideological contexts, with a particular focus on its place in the development of a theoretical notion of artistic ideality at the time and subsequently. Attention will also be paid to the historiography of the Renaissance period; how changing assumptions shaped the critical understanding of art, and the role of Raphael within that process. These themes will be presented in the context of an in-depth examination of Raphael’s painting and architecture, and selected works by his key influences and contemporaries.
METHOD OF EVALUATION: This is a split-level course meaning students can enroll at either the 3000 or 4000 level. Only one enrolment is possible. Students at the 3000 level will be evaluated on the basis of a midterm and final exam as well as a term paper of approximately eight pages. 4000 level students will not sit the tests but will write a seminar-type paper of approximately sixteen pages for the research experience and two short response pieces during the term.
READINGS: There is no assigned textbook for the course. Weekly readings will be posted on the class Brightspace page.
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