Teaching

Concepts in the Visual Arts (100-level): This course for non-arts majors presents an introduction to artistic media, historical periods, and movements as well as the roles of the artist and the viewer in its interpretation. Problems in observing artworks through an informed perspective, while appreciating the cultural value of such objects within their original historical and cultural context, are presented with the goal of engendering an interest, appreciation, and understanding of the fundamental elements of style and aesthetic development in the visual arts.

Introduction to Western Art, Architecture, and Design (100-level): Through a series of lectures and discussion sections on the painting, sculpture, and architecture of the western world from Classical Greece to the Modern Era, students consider the relationship of art to society and to political and cultural events.

Art History II (15th century to the Present): Art and its relationship to society in and for which it was made from the Renaissance to the present.

Introduction to Modern Art, Architecture, and Design (200-level): This course introduces students to the major developments in modern art, architecture, and design in Europe, the Americas, and across the globe from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Focus will be on the history and theories of modernism and its international legacies, and the relationship of the visual arts, architecture and visual culture more generally to the social, cultural and political contexts of the modern era.

Art and Identity in the Arab World and Iran: From the Modern Era to Today (300-level, 600-level): In this seminar, students discover how artists and other cultural contributors living in the Arab world and diaspora have narrated, mediated, and shaped pivotal moments in modern and contemporary history and, vice-versa, how these moments influenced their work. This course encompasses a broad range of media, treating painting, sculpture, photography, installation, film, cartoons, graphic novels, street art, and social media as parts of one continuous visual landscape. In addition to the methods of art history, this course also incorporates literary, museological, archaeological, and philosophical perspectives. As a result of this interdisciplinary approach, students will come to understand that visual creation in the region has been shaped by forces that have often pulled in opposite directions: the legacy of colonialism and early nation formation; cultural and religious tradition and Modernism; cosmopolitanism and isolationism; artistic innovation and acts of iconoclasm and censorship. Students will also gain a general grasp of the modern and contemporary political and cultural history of the Middle East and North Africa.

“The Orient”: Europe and Islamic Art from 1851 to Today (200-level): In the 19th century, the expansion of British and French colonial rule in North Africa, the Middle East, and India facilitated a variety of cultural exchanges, including the movement of Islamic carpets, textiles, manuscripts, ceramics, metalwork, and other artforms to European collections. These collections, both public and private, presented a new repertoire of forms, motifs, and techniques that dramatically transformed cultural production in the west. Taking the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London as its starting point, this course explores the relationships between Islamic art, European modernism, and the artistic currents that traverse the globe today by examining the ways in which Islamic art has been circulated, acquired, understood, appreciated, utilized, and imitated in the west. As a result, students will gain a better understanding of the particular relationship between modern cultural production, museology, and colonialism, and obtain a good overall grasp of the artistic phenomena associated with the interaction between Islam and the West from the Modern era to the present day.

Introduction to Islamic Art (300-level): This course surveys the art and architecture of societies in which Muslims were dominant or in which they formed significant minorities from the seventh through the present day. It examines the form and function of architecture and works of art as well as the social, historical, and cultural contexts. The course begins with an overview of the creation of a distinctive visual culture in the emerging Islamic polity, the development of urban institutions, key architectural types such as the mosque, madrasa, caravanserai, palace, and mausoleum, art objects such as ceramics, glassware, woodwork, and metalwork, and the art of the illustrated book. The course concludes with an exploration of the new modernisms that proliferated in the Muslim world during the era of decolonization and of contemporary works by artists from or with roots in the MENA region.

By Sea and Sand: Modern Art in the Mediterranean (300-level): This course surveys the representation of Mediterranean spaces and cultures in the visual arts from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century during which time transformations across economies, governance, society, and technology took place alongside the expansion and subsequent deterioration of French and British colonial rule in the Middle East and North Africa. In this course, the modern Mediterranean will be viewed from multiple vantage points along its shores and through a range of media, including popular culture, visual culture, material culture, and fine art. In addition to obtaining a strong grasp of the artistic phenomena associated with the Mediterranean during the modern era, students will come to understand the region as a place possessing a remarkably diverse and polymorphous identity, and as a place of fracture, confrontation, mutual incomprehension, innovation, and exchange.