Humanistic Perspectives on the Arts: Curating Antiquities: Theory and Practice

Situated between the academic study and museumization of premodernities and contemporary art, the course examines curation as a transdisciplinary practice of care that preserves, values, and claims knowledge of objects and periods marked in colonial modernity as "ancient" or "classical." How is antiquity shaped as an object of expertise and attention within the university and the museum? In what ways does curating distant pasts construct, challenge, or remake communities in the present? Drawing on case studies from Greece and India, we also ask how comparison both abets and blocks the theorization of antiquity as an object of care.