Courses

This course is an introduction to selected themes, periods, and sites of visual production and built practice in Europe, the Mediterranean, and the New World. It focuses on a selected series of 'case studies' that integrate sites/monuments significant to the flow of Western art with period-specific and general critical issues. The relation of systems of visual and architectural representation to period-specific and current understandings of power, ritual, colonialism, transculturation, and the human body, as suggested through the disciplines of Art History and Visual Culture, will be key. Medieval and early modern developments will be emphasized.

How did the growing cities, train travel, and social processes associated with modernity shape the production of art? What were the boundaries between art and visual culture, and how did they shift throughout the modern and contemporary eras? If art history has a Eurocentric foundation, how does the discipline contend with today’s globalized and transnational networks of discourse and artistic production? This course introduces students to a global range of art histories from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. As undergraduate scholars, students will develop the skills to “read” works of art in a historically informed, conceptually rigorous, and reflexive manner. Class readings and preparatory assignments invite close engagement with art historical theories and debates through exhibitions, scholarly articles, and online archives. Lectures and class discussions will provide an overview of some of the most well-known movements and theoretical concepts related to these periods. Through an evolving series of weekly written assignments, students will develop their critical stance on art criticism, art historical scholarship, and public programming.

An introduction to the art and visual culture of India, China, Japan, and Southeast Asia, focusing on historical, religious, and social issues and the function of both art and visual culture.

Crosslisting: EAST 131.

Photography has been a global media practice for about two hundred years: the technology spread across continents shortly after its invention, transforming the way people saw themselves, their kinship networks, and emergent national identities. This course examines the history of photography from its invention in the early 19th century to its diverse contemporary practices. Writing exercises, such as a formal analysis and a research paper, invite students to activate photographs as interlocutors, by which aesthetic and material properties reveal political histories.

This course is an introduction to the art and architecture of Greece and Rome. Visual and spatial practices of religion and politics will be examined, focusing on Classical Athens and on Rome during the Late Republic and Early Empire. Selected works of art and architecture, and specific urban and exurban sites will be considered. Issues surrounding 'classical' forms and their subsequent role in Western art and architecture will be investigated.

This course is an introduction to the visual culture, architecture, and selected patterns of urban development in Italy during the Early Renaissance and the Quattrocento. Focus will be on developments in Siena, Rome, and especially Florence. Issues surrounding 'classicism' and the development of new representational systems, new scales and materials in sculpture, new spatial and structural forms in architecture, and new relations to urbanism and centers of power and global expansion will be explored. Of particular interest are dynamics of difference and identity such as political pressures after the Black Death, patriarchy in family and church, women's resistance, and European slavery before 1492.

This course provides an introduction to the visual culture, architecture, and selected patterns of urban development in Rome during the High Renaissance, Mannerism, and the Baroque era through the papacy of Alexander VII (1655-67). Developments from ca. 1450 on in Rome leading to Julius II and the Roman High Renaissance will be a focus. Consideration of Mannerism, the Council of Trent, and early Baroque visual and architectural forms (later 16th century) will lead to a second focus on 17th-century visual and spatial practices in Counter-Reformation Rome. A third focus will be Iberian and Italian colonial practices, transculturation, and the hegemony of Counter-Reformation visual culture and urbanism under the Habsburgs and beyond.

Crosslisting: SES 204.

This course critically analyzes the history of Western museums and their impacts on contemporary museum practices in the U.S. via a decolonial lens. Our goal is to examine the impact of the history and legacy of colonization on museums, so we can delink museum practices from Western hierarchies and systems of power. Throughout the course, students will interrogate the purpose of early versions of exhibition spaces, why museums were created, and how knowledge was produced. They will interpret museum architecture and how this may impact a museum’s identity and ideas of inclusivity and exclusivity. They will examine how objects were collected to be part of museums' collections, who was impacted by these practices, and how collection practices have evolved or come to terms with difficult histories. They will analyze the layout of different types of museums and learn how exhibitions are put together while analyzing issues of hierarchy, representation, and biases. We will especially examine collections and exhibitions that attempt to center underrepresented communities in the U.S., including black, indigenous, and people of color.

An introduction to Japanese architecture, sculpture, painting and the decorative arts from prehistoric times to the 20th century, with an emphasis on the works in their cultural and religious context.

Crosslisting: EAST 231 and INTL 261.

This course is an introduction to Chinese visual culture from prehistoric times through the Mao era. Organized around a selection of key objects and images, this course explores a variety of art forms from China through diverse contexts such as ritual, gender, imperial patronage, literati ideals, and political icons.

Crosslisting: EAST 232.

This course engages the question: ‘How are images used to imagine our place in the world?’ Students are invited to study fascinating practices of spatial image-making in East Asia from the inside out, by exploring these world-views from the perspective of their makers. You will be asked to pay special attention to how social and economic power structures inflect these representations: to envision and decode spatial imagery as a site of imagination, control, and resistance. Artists and patrons in China, Japan, and Korea have for centuries produced elaborate maps and landscape imagery, photographs, and film to imagine the world in a variety of ways. This course invites you to approach modern and contemporary representations of space in East Asia both in theoretically and historically informed ways. In the first part of the course, students build a frame of reference for their analysis of post-war case studies, by reading core texts in spatial theory and exploring important visual representations of space from pre-modern East Asia. In the second part of the course, students apply these theoretical and historical approaches to select cases that exemplify more recent struggles over space and its imagination in East Asia.

Crosslisting: EAST 263 and SES 263.

What does the natural world mean to human societies? How has it been perceived and represented in different cultures? In this course, we take a close look at visual representations of natural landscapes, or mountains and waters, in East Asia from antiquity to the present. Through a selection of representative cases that span more than a millennium, we explore what these paintings, woodblock prints, photographic and digital images may tell us about different ways of engaging the intertwined relations between the natural, sacred, and human worlds.

This course explores the intertwined histories of art and communism from the Russian Revolution of 1917 to the late 20th century, with a global perspective on how socialist ideologies shaped visual and material cultures. Anchored in the context of the Soviet Union, the course also traces the global circulation of socialist aesthetics—across Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East—through the lens of transcontinental solidarities, Cold War geopolitics, and the Non-Aligned Movement. Case studies examine topics such as Socialist Realism, North Korean children’s books, Islamic form in Central Asian architecture, and national art under decolonization. Special attention will be paid to cross-cultural exchanges, transnational networks, and the role of art in imagining alternative modernities beyond Western capitalist paradigms.

This course examines the enduring legacies of Orientalism in modern and contemporary art, culture, and discourse. Through visits to collections, museums, and sites, students will practice articulating a nuanced approach to cultures impacted by orientalist outlooks. Class content highlights cultural and intellectual production that responds to European Orientalizing discourse: from photographs and films by Shirin Neshat, to the feminist discourse inspired by Malek Alloula’s The Colonial Harem, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2025 exhibition Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie. As such, class activities will seek to decenter how Western representations of the “East”—including the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, and East Asia—have shaped artistic production, visual culture, and museum practices from the 19th century to the present.

Crosslisting: MENA 284.

This course is an advanced investigation of art and architectural developments in the Latin West during the medieval and early modern periods. Selective foci include western monastic art, building, and lay patronage in Spain, France, and Italy during the Romanesque through Gothic periods and beyond. The early urbanism of the communes of Italy is a focus, with their expansion of civil art and architecture through the fourteenth century, and the rise of new religious orders.

Crosslisting: SES 302.

This course explores how art has engaged social transformation in China. You will be guided to take an inside look at how the notion of revolution stands front and center in art making during China’s long 20th century. We think deeply about two interrelated questions: how can art have social and critical agency, and how has it been related to social change in China? We approach these questions historically to become sensitive to the different contexts and experiences of the artists we study but also to how their struggles and creative interventions connect across time. In the process, you will build a framework of reference for understanding social and creative life in 20th century China, and its enduring connections to the global world.

Crosslisting: EAST 333.

A student in good standing may work intensively in areas of special interest under the Directed Study plan. A Directed Study is appropriate when, under the guidance of a faculty member, a student wants to explore a subject more fully than is possible in a regular course or to study a subject not covered in the regular curriculum such as design, drawing, graphics, ceramics or history and criticism. A Directed Study should not normally duplicate a course that is regularly offered. Directed Studies are normally taken for 3 or 4 credits. A one-semester Directed Study is limited to a maximum of 4 credit hours. Note: Directed Studies may not be used to fulfill General Education requirements.

A student in good standing may work intensively in areas of special interest under the Directed Study plan. A Directed Study is appropriate when, under the guidance of a faculty member, a student wants to explore a subject more fully than is possible in a regular course or to study a subject not covered in the regular curriculum such as design, drawing, graphics, ceramics or history and criticism. A Directed Study should not normally duplicate a course that is regularly offered. Directed Studies are normally taken for 3 or 4 credits. A one-semester Directed Study is limited to a maximum of 4 credit hours. Note: Directed Studies may not be used to fulfill General Education requirements.

Independent Study engages a student in the pursuit of clearly defined goals. In this effort a student may employ skills and information developed in previous course experiences or may develop some mastery of new knowledge or skills. A proposal for an Independent Study project must be approved in advance by the faculty member who agrees to serve as the project advisor. Note: Independent Studies may not be used to fulfill General Education requirements.

Independent Study engages a student in the pursuit of clearly defined goals. In this effort a student may employ skills and information developed in previous course experiences or may develop some mastery of new knowledge or skills. A proposal for an Independent Study project must be approved in advance by the faculty member who agrees to serve as the project advisor. Note: Independent Studies may not be used to fulfill General Education requirements.

This class is required for Art History and Visual Culture majors. This class is the first of the three-part capstone experience for the Art History and Visual Culture major. It introduces students to the theoretical and methodological platforms of Art History and Visual Culture and examines the historical development of the fields of both Art History and Visual Culture. It introduces students to the methods and theoretical approaches of practicing scholars in the field and asks students to formulate their own platforms, which they will translate into active research in the second and third capstone courses (AHVC 408 and AHVC 409).

When did looking become politicized in racial terms? How do art, media, and visual cultures enforce racial hierarchies and systems of difference in a global context? Which picturing strategies transfer across media and are there formal conventions that are unique to certain image-making techniques?

AHVC 407 is taken in the AHVC major’s junior year and culminates with the Junior Talk. This course is the pedagogical setting designed to guide student’s self-reflection on their learning in the program, across the liberal arts, and connect this self-reflection to their proposal of a topic for their senior research thesis. This course consists of a sequence of formal discussions between the AHVC major and their AHVC faculty mentor, generating a sequence of written products. It concludes with a presentation of a public Junior Talk that is attended by faculty and students in the program and across the college and is followed by a robust discussion led by AHVC faculty.

AHVC 408 is the pedagogical setting in which senior majors in the program research and write their senior theses. As a majors-only advanced seminar it possesses multiple characteristics: part writing course, part disciplinary instruction; it is a space for individual advising with the instructor and with a second reader. It proceeds through graduated discussions and reflections accompanying step-by-step written products emerging from different stages of the research process. The objective of this course is to allow AHVC majors to explore a topic of their choice in depth, building on, integrating, and expanding the disciplinary, analytical, critical thinking, and research skills acquired through their learning in the major.

AHVC 409 is the pedagogical setting in which senior majors in the program prepare their abstracts and presentations for the Annual AHVC Senior Talk, held in the month of April. This course includes elements such as faculty consultations, abstract and draft writing workshops, and presentation rehearsals. In the senior talk, AHVC majors practice communicating the expertise and insight that emerges from their senior thesis to a broader public, followed by a robust discussion led by AHVC faculty. In so doing, students frame their research in the discipline in relation to broader intellectual debates and public interests. The senior talk therefore serves two objectives: to allow students to synthesize their research findings and receive feedback to be incorporated in the final draft of their senior thesis, and to practice communicating discipline-specific content to broader audiences, benefiting their transition to the world of work.

Prerequisite(s): Only open to AHVC majors.

Students may enroll in Senior Research in their final year at Denison. Normally, Senior Research requires a major thesis, report, or project in the student's field of concentration and carries eight semester-hours of credit for the year. Typically, a final grade for a year-long Senior Research will not be assigned until the completion of the year-long Senior Research at the end of the second semester. In which case, the first semester Senior Research grade will remain "in progress" (PR) until the completion of the second semester Senior Research. Each semester of Senior Research is limited to a maximum of 4 credit hours. Note: Senior Research may not be used to fulfill General Education requirements.

Students may enroll in Senior Research in their final year at Denison. Normally, Senior Research requires a major thesis, report, or project in the student's field of concentration and carries eight semester-hours of credit for the year. Typically, a final grade for a year-long Senior Research will not be assigned until the completion of the year-long Senior Research at the end of the second semester. In which case, the first semester Senior Research grade will remain "in progress" (PR) until the completion of the second semester Senior Research. Each semester of Senior Research is limited to a maximum of 4 credit hours. Note: Senior Research may not be used to fulfill General Education requirements.