History of Art

PhD

In New Haven (USA)

Price on request

Description

  • Type

    PhD

  • Location

    New haven (USA)

Professors Carol Armstrong, Tim Barringer, Edward Cooke, Jr., Diana Kleiner, Pamela Lee, Kobena Mercer, Amy Meyers (Adjunct), Mary Miller, Robert Nelson, Kishwar Rizvi, Nicola Suthor, Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan

Facilities

Location

Start date

New Haven (USA)
See map
06520

Start date

On request

About this course

Fields include ancient Greek and Roman; Medieval and Byzantine; Renaissance; Early Modern; eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century European; Modern Architecture; African; African American and African diaspora; American; American Decorative Arts; British; Pre-Columbian; Islamic; East Asian.

All students must pass examinations in at least two languages pertinent to their field of study, to be determined and by agreement with the adviser and director of graduate studies (DGS). One examination must be passed during the first year of study, the other not later than the beginning of the third term. During the first two years of study, students typically take twelve term courses. In March of the second year, students submit a qualifying paper that should demonstrate the candidate’s ability successfully to complete a Ph.D. dissertation in art history . During the fall term...

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Reviews

Subjects

  • Aesthetics
  • Media
  • Art
  • Painting
  • Materials
  • Perspective
  • Art History
  • Primary
  • Works

Course programme

Courses

HSAR 500a, Methods in Art HistoryCarol Armstrong

This seminar is designed to introduce students to a range of art historical methods past and present: a variety of formalisms, connoisseurship, different kinds of iconography, the social history of art, psychoanalysis, and a number of other approaches that are sometimes referred to as visual culture. Readings include classic texts by Riegl, Wölfflin, Panofsky, and Warburg, and more recent approaches by Alpers, Clark, and Crary, among others.
F 10:30am-12:20pm

HSAR 509b / EALL 506b / EAST 550, Japan’s Classics in Text and ImageEdward Kamens and Mimi Yiengpruksawan

An introduction to the Japanese classics (poetry, narrative fiction, drama) in their manifestations in multiple media, especially in the visual and material realm. Special reference to and engagement with a Yale University Art Gallery installation of rare books, paintings, and other works of art from Japan. No knowledge of Japanese required.
TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

HSAR 512a or b, Directed ResearchNicola Suthor

By arrangement with faculty.
HTBA

HSAR 514b, Graduate Research AssistantshipNicola Suthor

By arrangement with faculty.
HTBA

HSAR 521a, Art and ColonialismCecile Fromont

This course investigates the role of art in colonial projects and the impact of colonialism on art. It analyzes in particular the ways in which colonialism shaped visual and material cultures and environments in Latin America and Africa from the early modern period to the present. It is organized around three themes: colonization and the birth of the museum, the role of art in the colonial project, and world art in the postcolonial era.
M 9:25am-11:15am

HSAR 522b, The Origin of the FetishCecile Fromont

Borrowing its title from the seminal 1985–87 series of articles by William Pietz on “The Origin of the Fetish,” this seminar examines the social, religious, and economic conditions under which the word fetish was coined in the seventeenth–eighteenth century on the West African coast. The course then considers the evolution of the word from an idiom descriptive of a type of objects created in the interactions between European travelers and Africans in the early modern period, to an analytical term that played a central role in the perception and study of non-Western art in general and African art in particular. Class discussions and readings focus on historical texts as well as recent scholarship, and make use of Yale’s collections.
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

HSAR 564b / ANTH 531b / ARCG 531b / CLSS 815b / EALL 773b / HIST 502b / JDST 653b / NELC 533b / RLST 803b, Sensory Experiences in Ancient RitualCarolyn Laferriere and Andrew Turner

A comparative exploration of the role the senses played in the performance of ancient and premodern ritual, drawing from a range of ancient traditions including those of Greece, Rome, and Egypt, and from cultural traditions of the Near East, India, China, and the New World. Placing particular emphasis on the relationship between art and ritual, we discuss the methods available for reconstructing ancient sensory experience, how the ancient cultures conceived of the senses and perception, and how worshipers’ sensory experiences, whether visual, sonic, olfactory, gustatory, or haptic, were integral aspects in their engagement with the divine within religious ritual. This seminar incorporates material in the Yale Art Gallery.
Th 9:25am-11:15am

HSAR 581a / ARCG 581a / CLSS 890a, Roman Painting: Achievement and LegacyDiana Kleiner

Roman mural painting in all its aspects and innovations. Individual scenes and complete ensembles in palaces, villas, and houses in Rome and Pompeii are explored, as are their rediscovery and revival in the Renaissance and neoclassical period. Special attention is paid to the four architectural styles; history and mythological painting; the impact of the theater; the part played by landscape, genre, and still life; the accidental survival of painted portraiture; and the discovery and rejection of trompe l’oeil illusionism and linear perspective.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

HSAR 591a / MDVL 650a, Visions and Art in Medieval EuropeJacqueline Jung

From the Book of Revelation to the Showings of Julian of Norwich (d. 1423), accounts of visions in the Christian tradition were inextricably intertwined with the visual arts. Through examinations of medieval texts, images, and material culture, in conjunction with modern analyses of related phenomena, this seminar explores the range of representational practices that helped medieval Christians summon up, make sense of, and communicate extraordinary moments of contact with the divine. We address such questions as the changes in visionary experiences over time, the role of language and literacy in the communication of such experiences, the impact of gender on visions, the varieties and functions of other senses (especially touch and taste) in medieval visions, and the impact of visionary reports on the development of art. We begin by addressing the theoretical, cognitive, and anthropological facets of visionary experience before turning to medieval primary sources such as saints’ lives, accounts of otherworld journeys, miracle books, sermons, monastic chronicles, and individually composed vision books, and to modern interpretations by historians such as Caroline Bynum, William Christian, Peter Dinzelbacher, Jeffrey Hamburger, Barbara Newman, Giselle de Nie, and Jean-Claude Schmitt. Visual materials include both depictions of visions (such as Apocalypse manuscripts, paintings of the Temptation of St. Anthony, and renderings of Hildegard’s visions) and images that played a role in sparking visionary experience (such as Marian statues, crucifixes, Man of Sorrows images, and Baby Jesus dolls). Reading knowledge of German, French, and Latin is strongly recommended.
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

HSAR 605a, Russian Realist Literature and PaintingMolly Brunson

An interdisciplinary examination of the development of nineteenth-century Russian realism in literature and the visual arts. Topics include the Natural School and the formulation of a realist aesthetic; the artistic strategies and polemics of critical realism; narrative, genre, and the rise of the novel; the Wanderers and the articulation of a Russian school of painting; realism, modernism, and the challenges of periodization. Readings include novels, short stories, and critical works by Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Goncharov, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and others. Painters of focus include Fedotov, Perov, Shishkin, Repin, and Kramskoy. Special attention is given to the particular methodological demands of inter-art analysis.
T 3:30pm-5:20pm

HSAR 610b, Art of Frame/Frame of ArtRobert Nelson

The chiastic title introduces the tensions and paradoxes of frames of art, actual, represented, and conceptual. This seminar works from the rich historical and theoretical literature about frames and framing in order to investigate central issues of the history of art: the power and theology of images; the role of agents outside the pictorial field; the functions and implications of abstraction, illusionism, and perspective; and the conceptual means by which art history frames art. While the temporal focus is premodern—Classical through Baroque—topics from all periods and areas of art history are welcomed. The research agenda of the seminar depends upon the interests of the students. The challenge is to conduct detailed historical analysis while attending to questions and approaches from areas outside standard accountings of the art of these periods. No prior knowledge of the theory and art involved is necessary, but specific projects require relevant research skills and languages.
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

HSAR 621b, Art of Memory in the Premodern WorldNicole Sullo

This seminar explores memory as a medium for visual representation, with a focus on the early Christian period to the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. While our study concentrates primarily on art and textual sources from the premodern world, we also engage modern theoretical and scientific scholarship (much of which has come out of the “memory boom,” an explosion of interest in memory as a field of academic interest since the 1980s and 1990s) in our analyses and discussions. Thus the seminar not only considers fundamental questions concerning the workings of ancient and medieval memory, but also serves as an introduction to the methodologies and important works of scholarly literature that have shaped the wide-ranging field of memory studies. Topics include the relationship between the visual and the mnemonic; the changing role of the mnemonic from the early to later medieval period; pilgrimage and sites of memory; the performance of memory through song, homilies, and commemoration of the dead; memory and the passage of time. Readings are drawn from primary sources and a range of fields, including art history, cultural history, anthropology, sociology, and critical theory. What is the relationship of memory to the sense of sight? How is memory used in worship or in spiritual contemplation? How does memory disrupt and remake history? What is the role of forgetting in shaping historical consciousness? What is the relationship between personal and collective memory? The class makes visits to the Yale Art Gallery and the Beinecke Library.
F 1:30pm-3:20pm

HSAR 651a, Global Landscape in an Age of EmpireTim Barringer

This seminar uses Yale resources to explore the global travels of European artists in the long nineteenth century (ca. 1770–1914), the age of empire. A key focus is the resistance encountered in contact zones and spaces beyond Europe, such as the countersigns of Indigenous cultures that refuse to be accommodated within the conventions of the picturesque and sublime. The course is divided into four segments: South (the Grand Tour and Pacific exploration), North (the Picturesque in the British Isles), East (European artists traveling in the Ottoman world and Asia), and West (the Caribbean and the Americas). In each case, histories of European art are disrupted by other narratives and forms of visual resistance that may also be understood as political. Research papers are based on materials in Yale collections, with an emphasis on materials little examined in the existing historiographies.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

HSAR 652a, Documenting the WorldKishwar Rizvi

This seminar explores the significance of the documentary survey in Europe and the Middle East. Writing the history of the world can only be undertaken from a particular ideological point of view; for example, although medieval illustrated manuscripts, such as the Compendium of History of Rashid al-Din (1304) and the Travels of Sir John Mandeville (ca. 1371), were concerned with situating the reader within the context of religious and political authority, during the eighteenth century the attempt was made to document the world through scientific explorations of race, religion, and geography, as exemplified by the magnum opus Ceremonies and Customs of the World Religions, by Bernard and Picart (1727–31). This seminar studies original and facsimile copies of manuscripts at Yale libraries.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

HSAR 674b, The History of Color, 1400–2000Carol Armstrong and Nicola Suthor

This seminar looks at the vexed history of color in all of its aspects, from the Renaissance to the present. Divided between colore/couleur and colorito/coloris, and frequently opposed to disegno/dessin, color has often been relegated to second place and to the status of supplement, derogatorily associated with the superficial, the ephemeral, the deceptive, the illusory, the artificial, and the feminine. At the same time, it has been understood as the “difference” of painting, it is the essence of “what painting is” from a material and practical point of view, it has been at the heart of the paragone debates, and it has been a linchpin of modern and modernist art and theory. This course looks at the history of thought about color in a variety of areas: the alchemical and chemical; the practical and the theoretical; the science of optics; discourse, rhetoric, poetics, and philosophy. Writers addressed include Cennino Cennini and other authors of artist’s manuals; Roger de Piles, Sir Isaac Newton, and Johann Wolfgang van Goethe; Charles Baudelaire, Michel Eugène Chevreul, and Josef Albers; Rainer Maria Rilke and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Artists considered include Titian, Peter Paul Rubens, and Jean-Antoine Watteau; Eugène Delacroix, J.M.W. Turner, Edouard Manet, and the Impressionists; Georges Seurat and Paul Cézanne; Henri Matisse, Helen Frankenthaler, and the color-field painters.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

HSAR 700b, Media Cultures of the Cold WarPamela Lee

This course examines the intersection of politics, aesthetics, and new media technologies in the United States between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Topics include the aesthetics of “thinking the unthinkable” in the wake of the atom bomb; Abstract Expressionism and “modern man” discourse; game theory, cybernetics, operational research, and emergent art practices; the rise of television, intermedia, and the counterculture; and the continuing influence of the early cold war on contemporary media aesthetics. Readings are drawn from primary and secondary sources, and from the fields of art history, communication, and critical theory. Open to graduate students only, with priority given to History of Art students. Enrollment is by permission only; please contact the instructor for more information.
T 10:30am-12:20pm

HSAR 705b, Representing the American WestJennifer Raab

The American West holds a powerful place in the cultural and political imagination of the United States. This course examines settler colonial art and visual culture from the early republic to the present, considering changing conceptions of the land across media—from maps, aquatints, and guidebooks to paintings, photographs, and films. We consider the representation of railroads, National Parks, ghost towns, and highways; terms such as distance, aridity, seriality, mythology, frontier, the sublime, and the grid; artists’ engagement with ecological questions; the construction of whiteness in and through the landscape; and sites of indigenous resistance. The focus is on works in the collections of the Beinecke Library and the Yale Art Gallery.
F 10:30am-12:20pm

HSAR 709a, PrecarityPamela Lee

An intensive reading seminar on precarity and neoliberalism, and the aesthetic and art-critical responses to the diverse phenomena these terms encompass and name. Topics include bio- and necropolitics; the Anthropocene and environmental justice; human capital and its complements in immaterial, reproductive, and contingent labor; black, brown, and red bodies under perpetual siege and surveillance; education, credit, and debt. Readings in autonomist/workerist and post-Marxist literature; debates on the status of critique within the arts; strategies of protest and/or refusal/withdrawal within the art world and its institutions; and how artists, students, and arts professionals confront the material realities of precarious life. Enrollment limited and by approval of the instructor.
M 10:30am-12:20pm

HSAR 710b, Théophile Gautier (1811–1872) and the French Art WorldMarie-Hélène Girard

The seminar is aimed at providing an updated view of Théophile Gautier, a main French writer, poet (he is the dedicatee of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal), and art critic of the nineteenth century, whose articles are currently in course of publication. We explore both Gautier’s position as a critic and the debates and institutions that shaped the French art world between 1830 and 1872. A champion of art for art’s sake, Gautier was highly influential and has left a significant imprint not only through his Salon reviews, but also his connections with artists. Conducted in English; readings in both English and French. Prerequisite: reading fluency in French.
W 9:25am-11:15am

HSAR 712b / FILM 842b, Approaches to the Urban ScreenFrancesco Casetti and Craig Buckley

What distinguishes the urban screen—in terms of spatiality, economics, phenomenology, and technology—from other screens proliferating today? The course aims to think genealogically about the emergence and descent of large-scale urban screens as forms of public display and as new metropolitan interfaces. Today we are witnessing long-standing conceptions of the screen as a surface for the play of representations ceding ground to ecological understandings of the screen as an environmentally embedded node and as a point of dynamic mediation between actors and the world. Considering materials from film history, architectural history, art history, and urban history, the seminar considers the urban screen as a crucial part of the broader redefinition of the screen. Urban screens can be understood in terms of a rupture and recovery of screen history, wherein the fracturing of the screen (as movie screen) is coextensive with the recovery of older and alternate understandings of the screen (as facade, as protection, as shelter, as furniture, as filter, as masquerade, as control mechanism). A key aspect of the seminar is to work through the existing frameworks for thinking about urban screens and to propose new approaches that might shape this nascent area of study. In revisiting alternate histories of the screen, the course explores emerging screen cultures and their implications for the future of screen studies. Field trips to the Yale Art Gallery, Yale Center for British Art, Peabody Museum, and Beinecke Library.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

HSAR 735a, Material LiteracyEdward Cooke

. In the past decade, art history, history, and literary studies have taken a material turn. Much of this interdisciplinary work begins from the perspective of the viewer/user and then works toward a formal and associational “reading” of an object. Such an approach privileges vision over tactility and other senses and emphasizes the final product rather than exploring the deliberate choices taken along the way of making. This perhaps reflects an ever-increasing illiteracy about our relationship to materials and processes. This seminar offers an alternative approach, one that is process-driven

History of Art

Price on request