Archived: 2024-2025 Graduate Course Listings
Fall 2024/Winter 2025
-
- PROFESSOR: Michael Windover and Ming Tiampo
- DESCRIPTION: ARTH 5010 is a full-year course for incoming MA students in Art & Architectural History. The course combines critical theory with practical skills, both aimed to provide students with a solid foundation for graduate study in the field.
- METHOD OF EVALUATION: Over the course of the year, students will read widely in current Art & Architectural historiography and participate in class activities; produce a research paper drawing on theory; encounter and utilize key research resources and tools; produce targeted writing for a general audience based on primary and secondary research; write a detailed research proposal; and learn to write and present an academic conference paper.
- READINGS: TBA (course readings will be made available through the Library Reserves system, ARES)
-
- PROFESSOR: Michael Windover
- DESCRIPTION: Artefacts provide evidence for design historians and can be used to help narrate histories. They can prompt us to think about design, use, manufacture, consumption, the various spaces they have inhabited over their lives, and the way they communicate. This seminar will consider how artefacts (or design objects) can contribute to histories of design in Canada. We will work directly with the “xDX collection,” a group of artefacts once held by the Design Exchange (DX), an institution dedicated to promoting design in Canada but which ceased museum operations in 2019. What stories can these objects tell us? Students will have opportunities to carry out hands-on, object-oriented research, visit archives, and engage with professionals in the field.
- METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA (Students may produce exhibits and/or annotated 3-D images of objects, in addition to more traditional academic work)
- READINGS: TBA – Readings will be posted on ARES or made available on the course Brightspace page
-
- PROFESSOR: Ming Tiampo and Wayne Modest
- DESCRIPTION: This course takes Barbadian writer George Lamming’s Sovereignty of the Imagination (2004) as a starting point for imagining more just and equitable worlds through making that would challenge hegemonic conceptions of Being worlded from the European Enlightenment (Wynter). It considers how new vocabularies of freedom, of the freedom to be, have been produced through acts of refusal and resistance, by artists and other makers from the multiple geographies of the global majority. We are interested in practices such as beadwork, inkpainting, calligraphy, pottery, textiles, protest, music and dance that propose new imaginations of what is possible by making and remaking the modern world through objects, artworks and discourses in the context of various degrees of unfreedom. It is through these condensations of cultural feelings or art practices that new sensibilities emerge, which articulate modes of fashioning possible possibles (Escobar), for being otherwise in structures of impossibility. Reimagining modernities other than those which centre progress and a liberal world order, Sovereignties explores the possibilities and limitations of projects that articulate new and wayward worlds (Hartman). The course is being taught in collaboration with Wayne Modest, Director of Content, Wereldmuseum, and Professor, Vrije University Amsterdam. It is part of a larger project, which includes exhibitions, seminars, performances, reasonings, and publications.
- METHOD OF EVALUATION: The course will follow a traditional graduate seminar format, and include methods of evaluation such as a presentation, short assignments, and a term paper
- READINGS: Online readings
- Cross-listed with: CLMD 6102
-
- PROFESSOR: Birgit Hopfener
- DESCRIPTION: Contemporary art history and theory despite the “global turn” continue to be dominantly rooted in the universalized, self-referential Euro-American modern-postmodern genealogy, the related temporalities, and aesthetic and critical discourses. Mainstream discourse of contemporary art in the global context, predominantly derived from Euro-American scholarship, has been largely unconcerned with rethinking Euro-American conceptual frameworks. It has been centred around defining and critiquing “global contemporary art” as an universal effect of neo-liberal economic globalisation, as phenomenon constituted in and through global circulation, agents and institutions, without attending to contemporary art’s cultural, historical, epistemological and aesthetic heterogeneity and transcultural entanglements. In recent years, a growing number of globally active contemporary artists have been mobilizing cultural concepts – such as concepts of historical thinking, relational and socially engaged art, ecological art, collage, intermediality etc. – that were articulated outside of Euro-America and are conventionally not considered in mainstream discourses of contemporary art. For example, artworks and exhibitions by Raqs Media Collective, Ruangrupa, Sahej Rahal, Qiu Zhijie or Zheng Bo explore non-Western concepts and are invitations to examine how meaning and operating mechanisms of concepts change through interactions with other traveling (Western) concepts and contexts.Distinct from artistic projects that construct binary differences between the West and the non-West, or focus on Western critique, these artistic projects instead articulate themselves on a multi-sited and connected conceptual basis. It is in this regard that they provide the grounds for a critical global art history whose research agenda is on redressing the ignorance for the entangled multiplicity of art, by shifting its methodological focus on interrogating the multivalent transcultural relations that shape art and on formulating a dynamic pluriversal conceptual framework that attends to art’s plurality. A dynamic pluriversal conceptual framework critiques universalist claims about the nature of art. It offers a “more plausible theoretical scaffolding for the discipline [of art history ] to then respond to the challenge of cultural plurality,” (Monica Juneja 2023) which contributes to an epistemological shift that holds open the space for alternative forms of knowledge and their potentialities in ways that echo calls for cognitive justice. A pluriversal framework attends to the multiplicity of (cultural) knowledges and their transcultural interconnections by recuperating the multiplicity of art and concepts, “which have undergone erasure or flattening due to the diffusion of modern disciplinary taxonomies across the globe,” (Ibid.). The goal of the seminar is to contribute to a pluriversal conceptual framework of contemporary art in the global framework, by carefully exploring artistic practices along with theories and cultural concepts that have been used to create and read them.
- METHOD OF EVALUATION: Annotate weekly readings 45%, Active Participation: 5%, Scaffolded paper: Close looking facilitation: 5%, Outline: 5%, Annotated bibliography 5%, Peer-review the outline of a classmate: 5%, Oral presentation: 10%, Final paper: 20%
- READINGS: All readings will be made available through Brightspace
-
- PROFESSOR: Jill Carrick
- DESCRIPTION: This course focuses on art produced in France during the swinging ‘Sixties.’ Found-object art, performance, painting, and sound-poetry were just a few of the genres experimented with by artists keen to engage with the pressing issues of their time. Emphasis is placed on the social, historical, and artistic contexts of production of art in France, and on contemporary re-readings of its significance. Key themes include politics and contestation, memory, decolonialism, and feminism; key genres include Neo-Dada, Nouveau Réalisme, food art, performance, and found-object art.
- METHOD OF EVALUATION: Research essay, seminar participation, reading responses. Details TBA.
- READINGS: Online readings. Cross-listed with: ARTH 4809C
-
- PROFESSOR: Carmen Robertson
- DESCRIPTION:
- METHOD OF EVALUATION:
- READINGS:
-
- PROFESSOR: Peter Coffman
- DESCRIPTION: This course will have students working in collaboration a community group (the Hintonburg Community Association) to research the heritage architecture of an Ottawa neighbourhood, and produce digital content based on that research. Some student projects may ultimately be published online, on the Associations heritage page or on HTA’s own Virtual Museum of Architecture in Ottawa.
- METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA.
- READINGS: TBA