PLEASE NOTE:Times and locations of courses are published in the Public Class Schedule. Official Calendar Course Descriptions are available in the Undergraduate and Graduate Calendars. Official Course Outlines will be distributed at the first class of the term. |
Fall 2023/Winter 2024
This section is currently being updated.
- ARTH 5010FW: Art and its Institutions – Fall & Winter
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- 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
- ARTH 5112F: Worlding, Diaspora & Difficult Histories – Fall
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- PROFESSOR: Ming Tiampo
- DESCRIPTION: ARTH 5112/ CLMD 6102 Issues in Transnationalism: Worlding, Diaspora, and Difficult Histories
This interdisciplinary course is situated at the intersection of Critical Global Studies and Diaspora Studies, with some attention paid to the Digital Humanities. The course will provide an overview of recent theoretical discourses, examining and distinguishing terms and concepts such as world (music, art, literature), global, diaspora, worlding, pluriversal, postcolonial, decolonial, and post-imperial and investigate how they can be productively put into conversation. The course will consider how we configure ideas of the global on four levels—as scale, as actor theory, as method, and as temporal practice. We will investigate multiple intellectual models of theorizing the global and the diasporic, and also consider their limits in a number of disciplines in the humanities, with some focus on art history - METHOD OF EVALUATION: Seminar participation, Presentations, Final Paper
- READINGS: Online Readings
- ARTH 5112W: Topics in Renaissance Art: Divine Nature –Winter
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- 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
- ARTH 5117F: Prints and Print Culture: History, Theory and Practice (18th-21st Century – Fall Term
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- PROFESSOR: Stéphane Roy
- DESCRIPTION: This graduate seminar will explore the world of prints and its many connections with past and present issues, whether social or political. Given that practice informs theory and vice versa, the seminar will combine readings/discussions with printmaking workshops (meetings will alternate between the classroom and the Book Arts Lab). By bringing together history and experiential learning, students will have an opportunity to better understand – and contribute to – an overlooked yet central mode of communication.No printmaking skills/experience required
- METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
- READINGS: TBA
- ARTH 5117W Community/Identity – Winter Term
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- PROFESSOR: Brian Foss
- DESCRIPTION: Canada has long been obsessed by questions of identity and self-definition. This seminar explores aspects of how cultural theorists and visual artists have probed that obsession. An important goal is to identify points of rupture between the concept of a monolithic national identity, and the social and artistic forces that disrupt, undermine and complicate it. Topics to be analyzed include: the relationship between landscape and “Canadian-ness”; traditional and contemporary definitions of identity in the art of Quebec; the uneasy relationships between First Nations art and settler self-definition; tensions between regionalist and nationalist art; and the ways in which identity issues have been proposed and promoted by Canadian museums and galleries.
- METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
- READINGS: TBA
- ARTH 5210W: Defining Beauty/Towards Indigenous Aesthetics – Winter
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- PROFESSOR: Carmen Robertson
- DESCRIPTION: Pathways toward articulating Indigenous aesthetics emerge from deep considerations of cultural epistemologies and ontologies of arts. Because this is an emergent area of study, few scholarly readings exist and as a result we will consider theory from a variety of sources. Together, we will develop new understandings of how to consider aesthetics. Connections to land and to story are key components of this seminar.
- METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBD
- READINGS: TBD
- ARTH 5403F: Topics in Islamic Architecture and Art: Interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approaches –Winter
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- 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
Fall 2022-Winter 2023
- ARTH 5010FW Art and Its Institutions - Fall and Winter
-
- PROFESSOR: Michael Windover & Stéphane Roy
- 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 a catalogue entry based on primary and secondary research; write a detailed research proposal; and learn to write and present an academic conference paper.
- READINGS: TBA
- ARTH 5112W Topics in History, Methodology, and Criticism - Winter
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- PROFESSOR: Ming Tiampo
- DESCRIPTION: The seminar Transversal modernism/s proposes a framework for understanding global modernisms as pluriversal, characterized by multiple epistemologies and temporalities that are linked through the former French and British empires in the cities of Paris and London. This comparative seminar will consider different theoretical models for analyzing global modernisms, including worlding, digital humanities, circulation studies, diaspora studies, postcolonial and decolonial perspectives.
- METHOD OF EVALUATION: Participation 20% Response papers and other assignments 30% Presentation 10% Final paper 40%
- READINGS: TBA
- ARTH 5115B 1960s Art in France - Fall
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- PROFESSOR: Jill Carrick
- DESCRIPTION: This course focuses on art produced in France during the swinging ‘Sixties’. Found-object art, performance work, 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 contests of production of art in France, and on contemporary re-readings of its theoretical and historical significance. Key themes: Neo-Dada, Nouveau réalisme, Food Art, found-object art, art and politics, art and memory.
- METHOD OF EVALUATION: Assessment details: Active seminar participation, including weekly preparation for assigned readings, class facilitations, and a short presentation on end of semester research paper.
- READINGS: TBA
- ARTH 5115F Aesthetic strategies of temporalization in contemporary art and visual culture. Towards a pluriversal critical framework - Fall
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- PROFESSOR: Birgit Hopfener
- DESCRIPTION: The seminar explores aesthetic strategies of temporalization in contemporary art and visual culture such as deferring and delaying, dematerialization, appropriation, copying, collage, montage, animation, repair, memes etc. in relation to various (art-)historical, cultural, social, political, geo-political contexts, ontological and epistemological assumptions and technological conditions.Institutionalized contemporary art history, theory and aesthetics continue to be dominantly rooted in the universalized Euro-American modern-postmodern genealogy, its respective discourses around critiques of “Western representationalism” (Karen Barad). Since the conceptual turn in the 1960s, meaning and status of contemporary art, its relationship to time and its aesthetic strategies of temporalization have conventionally been critically framed and explained through the aesthetic idiom of attacking modernist self-referential autonomy, modernist medium-specificity, modernist presentness and the related temporality of containment. Obviously, the Euro-American modernist-postmodernist tradition is only one of multiple genealogies in the production of global visual culture in the 21th century.Despite the global turn and a new understanding of contemporaneity as a critical category (Peter Osborne, Terry Smith), the multiplicity of contemporary art’s art historical temporalities, and its diverse and often transculturally entangled aesthetic and critical frameworks have not been sufficiently considered when attributing status and meaning to contemporary art.
It is against this background that the seminar seeks to contribute to a pluriversal critical framework. Adopting the decolonial concept of the “pluriverse” (Mignolo) we aim to study multiple and transculturally entangled conceptual histories of art’s relationship to time, including Euro-American presumptions. The class is conceptualized as a research seminar that intends to expand our critical frameworks by making new connections and asking new questions. - METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
- READINGS: Readings will be made available in Brightspace
- ARTH 5117W Community/Identity - Winter
- PROFESSOR: Brian Foss
- DESCRIPTION: Canada has long been obsessed by questions of identity and self-definition. This seminar explores aspects of how cultural theorists and visual artists have probed that obsession. An important goal is to identify points of rupture between the concept of a monolithic national identity, and the social and artistic forces that disrupt, undermine and complicate it. Topics to be analyzed include: the relationship between landscape and “Canadian-ness”; traditional and contemporary definitions of identity in the art of Quebec; the uneasy relationships between First Nations art and settler self-definition; tensions between regionalist and nationalist art; and the ways in which identity issues have been proposed and promoted by Canadian museums and galleries.
- METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
- READINGS: TBA
- ARTH 5403F Intersections between Islamic Architecture, Art, and Science - Fall
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- 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
- ARTH 5500W Photography, Memory, Oral History - Winter
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- 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.
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