Graduate Seminars
Fall 2020
AHIS 500 (section 12055): Methods and Theory of Art History (4.0 units) Thu 9:30am – 12:20 pm Amy Powell Methodologies, theories and critical traditions that have shaped the discipline. Emphasis will vary depending on faculty. Required of all first-year MA and PhD candidates
AHIS 518 (section 12072): Seminar in Chinese Art (4.0 units, max 16) Tue 2:00 pm – 4:50 pm Sonya Lee This course offers an introduction to the study of sacred places from material-culture perspectives. It will explore different notions of the sacred through concrete places that have been constructed or imagined as such in China in both premodern and modern times. Focusing on representative cases of sacred mountains, cave temples, mausoleums and memorials for political and religious figures, we will examine the various social processes that lend meanings to the place(s) in question, including pilgrimage, meditation and healing rituals, myth-making, heritagizing, and tourism. We will also probe into different attributes and mechanisms of place attachment based on certain qualities inherent in the physical environs or material objects or structures especially made to manipulate human perception. Readings will include primary-source materials, case studies, and theoretical writings from art history, archaeology, anthropology, sociology, history of religions, geography, and environmental psychology. The seminar will coincide with a graduate student symposium on a related topic at UCLA this fall. There will be a range of activities designed to facilitate interaction and collaboration with participants in this event.
AHIS 520 (section 12074): Seminar in Modern Art: Sculptural Aesthetics: Embodiment, History, and Technology (4.0 units, max 16) Mon 2:00 pm – 4:50 pm Megan Luke How does sculpture engage the senses and shape our perception of space? Through what means does it convey history, tradition, or the experience of time? And what place does sculpture have in virtual environments engendered by technologies of mass mediation? These are questions that redefined the art of sculpture in modernity, from the late eighteenth- to the mid-twentieth centuries. We shall consider how artists, philosophers, and historians responded, tracing the development of aesthetic philosophy and theories of perception through specific works of art.
This seminar offers participants the opportunity to ground their study of phenomenology, media theory, and perceptual psychology in concrete materials and processes. It will be a forum for interdisciplinary conversations across philosophy, history, and literature, with an emphasis on German, French, British, and North American intellectual contexts.
Topics for discussion will include: the historical purchase of monuments and relics; the coordination of sight and touch; hierarchies of structure/surface, contour/color, and unity/fragmentation; the crisis of historicism and empathy theory; facsimile reproduction and reproductive photography.
We will examine texts by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Gottfried Herder, Adolf von Hildebrand, Auguste Rodin, Max Klinger, Heinrich Wölfflin, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wilhelm Worringer, Carl Einstein, Walter Benjamin, Katarzyna Kobro, Naum Gabo, Barbara Hepworth, Adrian Stokes, Herbert Read, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Gaston Bachelard, and Rosalind Krauss, among others. Our discussions will coincide with visits to area collections and special exhibitions (as applicable).
AHIS 593x (section 12105): Practicum in Teaching the Liberal Arts (2.0 units) Mon 12:30 pm – 1:50 pm Ann Marie Yasin Practical principles for the long-term development of effective teaching within College disciplines. Intended for teaching assistants in Dornsife College. Registration Restriction: Open only to Art History doctoral students.
AHIS 596 (section 12110): Seminar on Advanced Writing and Professionalization in Art History (2.0 units) Wed 12:30 pm – 1:50 pm Ann Marie Yasin Trains Art History graduate students to write for a variety of professional purposes, such as grant and job applications, conference abstracts, and reviews. Registration Restriction: Open only to master and doctoral Art History students
ENG 540 (section 32784): 19th Century British Literatures and Cultures (4.0 units) Tues 9:30 – 11:50am Kate Flint What does it mean to write the cultural history of a discrete period – in this case, 1880- 1915? During this period, England was at the center of global networks that ensured the circulation of people and ideas, capital and culture, and material goods. Excitement was generated by contact with the new and the different; by the idea of the “modern.” On the other hand, many aspects of national culture were inward looking, parochial, and blindly complacent to broader changes in the world – or rather, were seeking to pretend these changes are not happening, or were anxious about such change. Literature and art were simultaneously experimental - looking to break with verbal and visual traditions; speculating about the future - and steeped in nostalgia. Both stances were modes of acknowledging and addressing the unprecedented amount of social and cultural change that marked these thirty-five years. This course will address some pressing questions in literary and visual studies: periodization, chronology and asynchronicity; regional, national and global identities and connectivity; the politics of race and gender; form, style, medium, and materiality; the impact of scientific and mechanical innovation; the natural world and environmental change.
HIST 520 (section 37220): Modernity and Its Visual Cultures (4.0 units) Wed 5:00 – 7:50pm Vanessa Schwartz Western visual culture 1850-1930: historical background of changes in high and popular culture, technological reproducibility, display and spectacularization; recent literature and theoretical approache
VISS 501 (section 12250): Introduction to Visual Studies: Methods and Debates (4.0 units) Wed 1:00 – 3:50 pm Akira Mizuta Lippit A critical introduction to the field of visual studies focusing on interdisciplinary approaches to images, objects, and visual technologies as well as key texts and interpretive debates. Students must be enrolled in a Ph.D. program at USC. Students enrolled in a master's degree program at USC must receive permission from the course instructor and the VSGC director to enroll. This is a required course for all students registered for the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate.