History of Art & Architecture

• CAS AH 500: Topics in History of Art & Architecture
  Topics for Fall 2024: Section A1: "Methods of Inquiry in Architecture Studies" This seminar draws from different methods across the humanities, social sciences, and environmental design to explore the range of research methods that can be used in architecture studies and architectural history. As we work through the semester, students do assigned readings that provide an overview of intellectual debates and methodological approaches for architectural research, including humanist, ethnographic, archival, oral historical, urban, environmental, postcolonial, forensic, photographic, and virtual. Throughout, students work on a set of exercises specifically created to expose them to different kinds of methods. Section B1: This seminar explores how transdisciplinary slow-looking facilitates an intimate encounter with humans, trees, plants, animals, and animal-derived materials in Japanese art. We examine works and materials that challenge anthopocentrism, from medieval handscrolls (emaki) to early modern prints to contemporary works.
• CAS AH 507: Digital Curation: Towards National Parks: Art and Nature, Nature and Nation
  Before national parks, wild locations attracted artists, photographers and poets. Their works made these areas known to tourist-viewers. Prepare a digital exhibition and map artist- advocates as they explored mountains, forests and waterfalls. Effective Fall 2020, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Aesthetic Exploration, Digital/Multimedia Expression, Creativity/Innovation.
  BU Hub Learn More

  • Aesthetic Exploration
  • Creativity/Innovation
  • Digital/Multimedia Expression
• CAS AH 520: The Museum and The Historical Agency
  History, present realities, and future possibilities of museums and historical agencies, using Boston's excellent examples. Issues and debates confronting museums today examined in the light of historical development and changing communities. Emphasis on collecting, display and interpretation.
• CAS AH 521: Curatorship
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: consent of instructor. - Graduate Prerequisites: consent of instructor. - Topic for Spring 2023: This course examines the role of the curator today and considers practices and debates related to decentralizing and decolonizing paradigms of art, privileging, and foregrounding historically excluded narratives of art, and shaping new and inclusive approaches to exhibition-making. Students also learn practical and theoretical tools used by curators in these processes, including wall text and labels, display techniques, and educational programs supplemented by readings, class discussions, and case studies
• CAS AH 525: American Cultural Landscape Studies
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: junior standing or consent of instructor. - This seminar provides an introduction to analyzing and interpreting American cultural landscapes and acquaints students with the historiography of interdisciplinary study of the built environment. Also offered as CAS AM 525.
• CAS AH 527: Topics in Art and Society
  May be repeated for credit as topics change. Two topics are offered Fall 2024. Section A1: The Mount Auburn Cemetery. An exploration of remembrance, and the invention, appropriation, and development of imagery and landscape for commemorative monuments. Much of this seminar takes place on site in the Mount Auburn Cemetery and in regional early Burying Grounds. Walking shoes required. Section B1: Global Islamic Art. This seminar is an overview of the history of global Islamic art, including manuscripts, textiles, ceramics and more from Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. Students also learn how museums and curators shape the field of Islamic art.
• CAS AH 530: Chinese and Japanese Calligraphy History, Theory and Practice
  Introduction to the history, theory, and practice of the art of Chinese and Japanese calligraphy. The related art of seal carving is also introduced. No knowledge of Chinese or Japanese required.
• CAS AH 546: Places of Memory: Historic Preservation Theory and Practice
  Covers key aspects of the history, theory, and practice of historic preservation. Preservation is discussed in the context of cultural history and the changing relationship between existing buildings and landscapes and attitudes toward history, memory, invented tradition, and place. Also offered as CAS AM 546 and CAS HI 546.
• CAS AH 548: Global Heritage Conservation
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: consent of instructor. - Examining global approaches towards heritage conservation through a study of concepts, charters and case studies, using themes such as world heritage, cultural tourism, historic towns, new design, intangible heritage, authenticity, integrity, recent past, historic landscapes, conflict, disasters, revitalization and reconstruction.
• CAS AH 554: Boston Architectural and Community History Workshop
  Focuses on class readings, lectures, and research on a single neighborhood or community in Boston (or Greater Boston). Topic for Fall 2023: This interdisciplinary course explores a single Boston neighborhood's evolution through site visits, archival research, classroom discussions, and group and individual projects. Students investigate how Boston's historical transformations shaped and were shaped by its unique and compelling built environment.
• CAS AH 557: High Renaissance and Mannerist Art in Italy
  Topic for Fall 2024: Collecting and Exhibiting Italian Renaissance Art. This seminar considers the collection and exhibition of Italian Renaissance art from the 15th century until the current day. Relevant topics include: historic and contemporary practices of collecting and display; private and public space; 19th C. Boston and the interest in Italian Renaissance art; and the architecture of seclusion. The seminar also critically evaluates current exhibitions of Italian Renaissance art in Boston-area museums, as well as digital exhibitions/projects.
• CAS AH 563: Global Baroque: Art and Power in the Seventeenth Century
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: junior standing or consent of instructor. - Investigates the interaction between art and structures of power in 17th-century Europe, with particular attention to its global dimensions. Focus on Rubens, Rembrandt, Velazquez, and Bernini but also other forms of cultural production that circulated through global trade.
• CAS AH 571: Problems in African Diaspora Art History
  Introduces students to the field of African Diaspora Art History. Each week we look at a different “problem” of diaspora—beginnings, language, archives— giving students various entry points into the issues that shape the sub-field.
• CAS AH 574: Topics in African Art
  With a focus on collections-based learning, this seminar explores the historical and cultural context of art of the Benin Kingdom beginning with the material culture of Ile-Ife and concluding with contemporary conversations concerning repatriation, ethical stewardship, and institutional critique.
• CAS AH 589: Topics in Nineteenth Century Art
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: junior or senior (or graduate student). - Topic for Fall 2023: The Age of Napoleon. The seminar addresses European art from the 1770s through the mid-nineteenth century, when artists were certain of nothing except -- in the words of the poet John Keats -- "the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of the imagination."
• CAS AH 591: Seminar in Photographic History
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: junior or senior standing, or consent of instructor. - Topic for Spring 2024: “Documentary Photography.” A study of changing uses, definitions, and archives of documentary photography from 1839 to the present. Topics include urban photography, war imagery, topographical and survey landscapes, architectural records, social reform photography, New Deal imagery, and digital documents.
• CAS AH 596: Seminar: Contemporary Art
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: (CASAH111 & CASAH112) and two courses at the 200-level or higher, or consent of the instruct or. - Rotating topics in art, criticism and theory since 1960. Examines major themes such as formalism, minimalism, conceptual art, the neo-avant-garde, art and politics, postmodernism and globalization in their social and political contexts. Topic for Fall 2024: Seminar: German Art since 1989. Explores German art since reunification in 1989-91. Examines cultural and political legacy of East/West division and analyzes artists’ responses to German colonial history and migration in the context of contemporary debates about national identity.