Archived: 2023-2024 Graduate Course Listings - Art & Architectural History

Fall 2023/Winter 2024

This section is currently being updated.

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

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

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: 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

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

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

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

Share: Twitter, Facebook
Short URL: https://carleton.ca/aah/?p=9553