This course surveys history of African American art during the long 20th-century, from the individual striving of late 19th century to the unprecedented efflorescence of art and culture in 1920s Harlem; from the retrenchment in black artistic production during the era of the Great Depression, to the rise of racially conscious art inspired by the Civil Rights Movement; from black feminist art in the 1970s, to the age of American multiculturalism in the 1980s and 1990s; and finally to the turn of the present century when ambitious "postblack" artists challenge received notions of black art and racial subjectivity.

This course is designed to introduce students to the relationship of the museum as a history-specific institution which arose in the late 18th and early 19th century in Western Europe (and then, the United States), and its relationship to colonial medicine. The course also asks students to imagine other models of medicine and practices of curation juxtaposing historical case studies with current debates in museology and curatorial praxis, around collection histories and the possibility of transforming the museum into a space of healing and repair. Collection visits at Princeton and field trips to Philadelphia will form part of the course.

This seminar connects contemporary American literature, media and visual culture with environmental movements--focusing on the work of animators, filmmakers, photographers, novelists, poets, and other artists. Several organizing questions will guide our work together: How do creators respond to--and sometimes catalyze social movements around such issues as climate change, biodiversity loss, food and water justice and pollution? How do individual writers and artists apprehend today's environmental crises and imagine livable, just futures?

This course introduces a history of architectural theory by way of architectural production in the "western" world from antiquity through 20th century modernism. While we will examine an evolution of architectural thought through architectural developments that occurred primarily in Europe and the Americas, those architectures will be contextualized within a broader global history of built environment traditions and practices, and framed around recurring themes in the history of architectural production.

From secret laboratories to monumental infrastructures and the many landscapes of war, energy, and waste in between, nuclear power is at the core of a vast and radically understudied array of 20th c. architectures. Central to the most iconic architectural images of the post-war era while also rendered invisible in apparently unseen wastelands, atomic weapons, nuclear reactors, and atmospheric fallout eventually attracted intense architectural attention. Drawing on multiple literatures, the seminar explores how the nuclear penetrated beyond warscapes to enter even the private spaces of the domestic realm and the human body.

The history of architecture is human history. In this course, we study the buildings, cities, and landscapes that societies have created over time, from ancient civilizations to the present day. We examine the architecture of our own campus and community with local field trips and walking tours. We explore key monuments from around the world, stressing a critical approach to architecture through the analysis of context, expressive content, function, structure, style, building technology, and theory. Assignments can incorporate drawing, photography, and debate as well as close reading and writing.

The focus will be on the rise of complex societies and the attendant development of architectural and artistic forms that express the needs and aspirations of these societies. Occasional readings in original texts in translation will supplement the study of art and architecture.

A critical study of the major movements, paradigms, and documents of modernist art from Post-Impressionism to the "Degenerate" art show. Among our topics: primitivism, abstraction, collage, the readymade, machine aesthetics, photographic reproduction, the art of the insane, artists in political revolution, anti-modernism. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

This course covers the arts of South Asia beginning in the 2nd century BCE. Topics will include the relationship between architecture, sculpture and the religions of the region, networks of court painting, Islamic art and architecture, forms of patronage, and art making and changing ecologies of power in South Asia. Lectures may cover a range of media including painting, calligraphy, architecture, sculpture and prints. Class discussions will focus on formal and material concerns, as well as the religious, historical or political contexts in which these works were produced.

What was the Renaissance, and why has it occupied a central place in art history? Major artistic currents swept Europe during the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, an age that saw the rise of global trade, the development of the nation state, and the onset of mass armed conflict. To explore the art of this period, we consider themes including religious devotion, encounters with foreign peoples and goods, the status of women, and the revival of antiquity. We study artists including Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci as well as some who may be less familiar. Precepts visit campus collections of paintings, prints, drawings, and maps.

What was Italy like before the Roman Empire? Who were the peoples that shaped the peninsula's history? This course examines the art and archaeology of the first millennium BCE, focusing on the diverse cultures and civilizations that inhabited Italy, each defined by its own traditions and innovations. Through the study of daily life, religion, and material culture, we will uncover the interconnected and ever-changing dynamics of this fascinating and complex world.

This course explores the technology and function of books in historical perspective, asking how illuminated manuscripts were designed to meet (and shape) cultural and intellectual demands in the medieval period. Surveying the major genres of European book arts between the 7th-15th centuries, we study varying approaches to pictorial space, page design, and information organization; relationships between text and image; and technical aspects of book production. We work primarily from Princeton's collection of original manuscripts and manuscript facsimiles. Assignments include the option to create an original artist's book for the final project.

Art in late antiquity has often been characterized as an art in decline, but this judgment is relative, relying on standards formulated for art of other periods. Challenging this assumption, we will examine the distinct and powerful transformations within the visual culture of the period between the third and sixth centuries AD. This period witnesses the mutation of the institutions of the Roman Empire into those of the Christian Byzantine Empire. The fundamental change in religious identity that was the basis for this development directly impacted the art from that era that will be the focus of this course.

This course examines the architectural history and ethics of confinement spaces - mental asylums and prisons - which share common features and goals: security, isolation, and behavioral reformation through architectural control. Engaging with justice-impacted individuals, the course applies ethical discussions to real-world case studies, prompting critical reflection on the moral implications of designing spaces explicitly meant to restrict human freedom and agency. Through community dialogue, students confront the responsibility architects bear in institutional power dynamics.

The Junior Seminar is an introduction to the myriad subjects, methods, and strategies of art history. The course examines the different kinds of evidence and methodological tools that have been used to identify, explain, and contextualize works of art as well as other kinds of objects, artifacts, and cultural phenomena. In other words, this seminar considers what art historians do, and how and why they do it. In addition, majors will learn how to use resources such as the library and the museum, and how to undertake substantive written research projects. Students begin their Junior Independent Work in this seminar.

Antioch was unique among the great cities of the classical world for its position at the crossroads between the Mediterranean and Asia. Students in this course will get exclusive access to the archives and artifacts from Princeton's mostly unpublished Antioch excavations of the 1930s. The focus of the 2025 course will be the Atrium House, a building discovered at the end of the first year, which produced exceptional mosaics. We will also explore the history of the destruction and rebuilding of Antioch in the wake of its many earthquakes, the most recent being in 2023.

Japanese woodblock prints have generated seismic shifts in visual perception globally, and images of "Japan" that continue to be avidly consumed today. This class explores the pictorial, technical, and immensely talkative lives of prints from the "floating worlds" of Japan's great cities; the printed books that participated in 18th century information overload; and privately published luxury prints. We will also examine modern and contemporary print making. The class will include study of original works in Princeton's collections. Students will research prints to recommend for purchase for the Princeton University Art Museum's collection.

How can you tell if an image of a person is a portrait? What can a portrait reveal about a person? Is a portrait necessarily of a person? This course focuses on the genre of portraiture in China and examines different types of pictures, sitters, ideologies, and representations. We will question definitions of likeness and individuality, explore formal aspects of portrait making, and analyze how portraits function to create group identity or project power. Through close analysis of images in multiple mediums dating from ancient to contemporary times in China, the course will consider the ongoing meaning and power of portraits.

Seminar explores typologies of the artist in Europe and North America from the Renaissance to the present. Topics will include ideas of the artist as a privileged yet estranged member of society, notions of artistic temperament and "genius," the gendering of the artist, bohemianism and madness, the significance of race and cultural identity, and the artist's engagement with mass media. Analysis of self-portraiture, artists' statements and writings, and artists in film. Case studies include Leonardo, Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, Artemisia Gentileschi, Dürer, Manet, Van Gogh, Kahlo, Warhol, and Kara Walker.

A century has passed since the term 'modernism' became current, and the argument about 'postmodernism' is now four decades old. What did these categories of art and culture mean then, and how do they signify today? Has modernism become 'our antiquity' as some have claimed, or has a global perspective renewed it as a framework for contemporary art and criticism? Is postmodernism a 'thing of the past', or might it too possess an unexpected afterlife? We will take up such questions with some of the crucial actors' artists, critics, historians, museum directors and curators in these debates.

This course examines feminist critiques of art history and contemporary art. What challenges did they pose to the fields of art history and contemporary art? Drawing on artworks by Rosa Bonheur, Georgia O'Keeffe, Adrian Piper, Cindy Sherman, Shahzia Sikander, Andy Warhol and others from the Princeton University Art Museum, as well as readings in art history, art criticism, cultural criticism, literature and philosophy, we will see how the feminist critique transformed art history and contemporary art, and was itself transformed in the process.

The senior thesis (498-499) is a year-long project in which students complete a substantial piece of research and scholarship under the supervision and advisement of a Princeton faculty member. While a year-long thesis is due in the student's final semester of study, the work requires sustained investment and attention throughout the academic year. Required works-in-progress submissions, their due dates, as well as how students' grades for the semester are calculated as outlined below.

A course concerned both with the theoretical foundations of art history as a modern discipline and with the methodological innovations of the last few decades.

The literature of art, architecture, and archaeology until the institutionalization of art history in universities and museums in Europe and the United States. The historiography of the field, including recent interpretations and analyses. Depending on student interest attention is given to modern, contemporary, Islamicate, and Chinese traditions.

This course is intended to ensure a continuing breadth of exposure to contemporary art-historical discourse and practices. It requires attendance and participation in the department lecture/seminar series. Students must take the course sequentially in each of their first four semesters and take the appropriate letter version of the course (A,B,C, or D) based on their semester of study. The course is taken in addition to the normal load of three courses per semester and is for first- and second-year graduate students only. Topics discussed cover all fields of Art History and address current questions and practices.

This seminar explores art and architecture in the Roman provinces. We consider different types of artifacts and buildings from different regions of the Empire, taking in a broad sweep of Roman material culture beyond the celebrated monuments of the imperial heartland. In doing so, we assess the usefulness of frameworks such as Romanization, hybridity, resistance, and globalization for characterizing cultural production and display in provincial contexts. Course meetings combine thematic overviews with student presentations of case studies. Some meetings also include hands-on study of objects in the Princeton University Art Museum.

In "The Critic as Artist" (1891), Oscar Wilde argues that art is criticism, and criticism is art. This seminar explores the creative, theoretical, and historical value of art criticism through a range of writers - including painters, philosophers, anarchists, and poets - who shaped the practice in its modern form. By examining 18th, 19th, and early 20th c. European art criticism at its best, students gain historical perspective on the genre and discuss its importance to art history. Students also draft, workshop, and refine their own critical writing, which may address art of any geography or period.

How do spatial configurations determine epistemological frameworks and vice versa? This class considers how notions of frames, fields, intervals, and gaps have shaped humanistic enquiry and art historical scholarship in particular. While highlighting case studies and implications for the study and historiography of modern and contemporary art, readings engage other subfields and disciplines, including philosophy, media studies, literary theory, and anti-colonial studies. Topics treated include field formation; reflexivity; interpretive models of surface and depth, the geopolitics of geometry; and issues of autonomy, liminality, and bordering.

This course is designed for post-generals students in the Department of Art & Archaeology who are currently conducting research for their dissertation under the supervision of a dissertation adviser of record in the department. This course provides a platform for students who have been nominated for/awarded an internship that is relevant to the student's dissertation research topic from a research institute, private foundation, outside organization, or another university. Enrollment in this course requires written approval, in advance, from the dissertation adviser and the Director of Graduate Studies.

This course offers an introduction to the artistic, literary, and architectural traditions of building elaborate tombs in China in the ancient and medieval periods. Beginning with the rise of empire in the 1st millennium BCE, we trace the history of imperial and aristocratic tomb-building through the fall of the Han empire, period of disunity, and the flowering of the Silk Road. Finally, we conclude with lively examples of non-aristocratic tombs from Song and Mongol periods. We visit museums and read primary materials in classical and contemporary Chinese. Some English translations are available.

The history of Latin American art is characterized by experimentation, politics, censorship, and controversy. Why do works of art have such power? Can art express itself with the same freedom in democratic contexts as under dictatorships? How are the memories of repression, colonization, and slavery expressed? This course explores the power of images and images of power. We will examine case studies focusing on works by Mónica Mayer, León Ferrari, Rosana Paulino, Lea Lublin, Paz Errázuriz, Alfredo Jaar, Clemencia Lucena, Artur Barrio, and Hélio Oiticica, between other.

A required seminar for Art and Archaeology Practice of Art majors and Program in Visual Arts Minor students emphasizing contemporary art practices and ideas. The course addresses current issues in painting, drawing, sculpture, film, video, photography, performance and installation. It includes readings and discussions of current contemporary art topics, a visiting artist lecture series, critiques of students' work, and an artist book project.