Analogy and metaphor are central to the way humans think and make sense of the world, whether in culture (the pattern is common in literature, music, and architecture), politics, or science (Rutherford's foundational analogy between the atom and solar system, for example). People think analogically because it is a potent shorthand that makes a connection, a comparison. It places its terms in useful but also restrictive ways. Art and Analogy investigates a fundamental range of questions in art history and the practice of artmaking: in what ways are art objects, the processes of their making, and their reception analogues? How is art related to the world: as a mirror, a material segment, a copy? Perhaps digital technologies have altered the nature of art itself by challenging the ancient pattern by which the arts are compared and ranked ("Ut Pictura Poesis," for example). We will also examine how the narratives that make up art history are extensively based on analogical thinking, including the pattern that sees artist X as the artist Y of country Z ("Tom Thomson was the van Gogh of Canada," for example). Are such analogies helpful? In what ways can they be misleading? Can we validly analogize across cultures and temporalities, as when Liu Haisu was dubbed the "Cézanne of China"? While analogizing is ubiquitous and forms a link between art history, the visual arts, and both scientific and humanistic cultural norms generally, we will seek to understand the roots and implications of analogical thinking in visual art and writing about art from c. 1700 to the contemporary period.

Digital technology has greatly changed the way we make, circulate, receive, and study art. From PowerPoint handouts, Instagram, TikTok, to Google image search, many students of art history use applications and platforms daily in their work and life. Moreover, new technologies such as AI are changing the production and dissemination of images, many of which challenge the pre-existing definitions of "Art." This course encourages students to turn an inquisitive and critical eye toward these activities that are often taken for granted. Instead of approaching digital art history, digital art, and contemporary digital visual culture as separate domains of study, this course encourages students to pay close attention to how their assumptions of the digital, their working habits of digital tools, and the potential of art historical inquiry interact.

This course will introduce students to key texts from the 2000s onwards associated with what has been described as the "vernacular turn" in the history of photography. The focus of much of the class will be the category of 'family photography' with some discussion and comparison with other genres within the vernacular framework. Throughout, we will return to the question 'what is a vernacular photograph?' and will use case studies from the Royal Ontario Museum's South Asian and Family Camera photo collections, alongside visits to other Greater Toronto Area collections. The class will examine photo history from its beginnings in 1839 to the present day, including studio and amateur photography, as well as work by contemporary artists. It will allow students to examine the social, economic, and cultural practices that produce vernacular photography, while trying to understand its aesthetic and discursive dimensions.

This course explores the significant contributions and profound influence of the legendary California multimedia artist Wallace Berman (1926-1976) and the wide network of post-World War II counter-cultural artists with whom he was associated. This network was reviewed extensively by Michael Duncan and Kristine McKenna in their important exhibition and catalogue, Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and his Circle (2005). The first part of the course focuses on how Berman established himself as a key figure in the Beat cultures of Los Angeles and San Francisco in the 1950s against the backdrop of the Cold War devoting himself to his private mail art publication Semina that released nine issues starting in 1955. The second unit explores Berman's work while based in Topanga Canyon beginning in 1963 where he worked on his innovative photo-based art (collages utilizing a Verifax copy machine) and where he was immersed in the West Coast hippie counterculture sixties scene. The course situates Berman at the crossroads of such intellectual currents as Jewish mysticism (Kabbalah), the reception of French Surrealism, post-war experimental film, Pop art and music, Beat poetry, and assemblage art while examining Berman's connections to key artistic figures in a variety of media such as Andy Warhol, Bruce Conner, Allen Ginsberg, Jay DeFeo, Marjorie Cameron, Dennis Hopper, Dean Stockwell, Jack Hirschman, and David Meltzer, among others. Specific comparisons will be made between his Verifaxes and other photo-collage practices in the same period including the work of Robert Heinecken, Penny Slinger, Romare Bearden, and Peter Blake (who included Berman in the countercultural pantheon on the cover of the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Hearts Club Band in 1967). As a post-script, the course will reflect on Berman's prophetic emblem of the hand holding a transistor radio emitting an overload of visual signs in the light of contemporary media and of life in the age of the smart phone.

This course investigates the dynamic relationship between photography and the natural, physical, and human sciences in the 19th century. We will be concerned with a number of pressing questions: How did photography compete and collaborate with other modes of scientific representation for the mantle of authority? How did scientific photography enter into the canon of the history of photography, and at what cost? What role did the medium play in the rise of scientific professions, and in science education? How did photography complicate or clarify the categories of scientific realism and anti-realism? Ultimately, we explore varied strategies of the production of scientific knowledge by photographic means, and the cultural and social implications of these activities.

In 1921 the Russian structuralist Roman Jakobson lamented that the history of art was remarkably imprecise in its vocabulary. One word received particular disapprobation: "the term 'realism'…fares especially badly. The uncritical use of this word, so very elusive in meaning, has had fateful consequences." In this seminar, we will address the consequences that have attended the invocation and variability of "realism" by examining a series of episodes in Western art from the late medieval and early modern periods to the 20th century. We will explore — and attempt to disentangle — the most influential historical and theoretical accounts of realism and its relatives, including mimesis; naturalism, the comic, pictorial realism; social realism; photo-realism and photography. We will examine the invocation of these terms with respect to such phenomena as medieval sculpture, Van Eyck, Caravaggio, Dutch genre painting, Courbet, nineteenth-century photography, and cubism. The fundamental aim of this exercise is to become familiar with the various discourses around notions of realism, to assess how disparate artists have sought to link visual representation with the world. Meetings will be organized around readings from Boccaccio, Rabelais, Johan Huizinga, Lorraine Daston, Roman Jakobson, Erich Auerbach, Ernst Gombrich, Roland Barthes, John Tagg, and other relevant writers. Students will be evaluated on their participation in weekly discussions, oral presentations, and final paper.

This course examines two early twentieth-century British modernist movements and their key artists and writers (including Vanessa Bell, Jacob Epstein, Roger Fry, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, and Virginia Woolf, among others). Topics include the groups' complex politics, contributions to aesthetic theory, exploration of text/image relations, response to World War One, and sexual politics.

What is a "landscape"? To address this question, as this seminar does, is to think about the way the category emerged as part of European ideas about something called "nature" and its relationship to human subjectivity. Here landscape became a way of seeing as a way of knowing: in particular as a way of understanding land as property and as a resource, as well as a reflection of human emotions and a way of engaging questions of existence. In order to "provincialize" these ways of seeing/understanding – that is, to identify how they emerged within a very particular set of historical, geographical, cultural, political, and economic contexts that nonetheless came to claim universality – we will compare Western landscape painting traditions with visual forms from other traditions that might be seen as akin to landscapes. These include Indigenous art from Canada and elsewhere as well as Chinese and Islamic traditions; seminar participants are also encouraged to bring their own specific interests to the table through readings on other topics. Understanding the genealogies of "landscape" through scholarship in art history, anthropology, history, and geography will equip us for a more globally oriented and critical approach to those strands of modern and contemporary art concerned with the "environment" and our existence in the geological age recently dubbed the Anthropocene.

Even as "visual culture" was emerging as a field of study, in the late 1980s and early 1990s art history was reckoning with critiques of "ocularcentrism" or the primacy of vision. While much of that rethinking was channelled into an "affective turn," this seminar foregrounds postcolonial approaches in asking what a focus on comparative sensoria might add to discussions about the politics of the sensible, and the status of vision in relation to the other senses. After revisiting earlier debates on ocularcentrism, the seminar seeks to "provincialize" histories of the senses centred on Euroamerican modernity by seeking out work on heterogeneous sensory regimes from a range of periods, locations, and/or cultural formations — Western and non-Western, pre-modern, and modern/contemporary — that challenge not only the dominance of vision and its separation from the other senses, but also, perhaps, the celebration of these challenges as politically subversive (a case in point here is the privileging of touch in South Asian practices of caste.) The aim here is twofold: to rigorously interrogate our methodological presuppositions about the visual in approaching images and artworks, and, working with a nonlinear notion of layered temporal circuits, to further illuminate the work of the senses in our increasingly complex global present. This broad conceptual and methodological orientation means that the seminar is intended to speak to students across geographical and temporal specializations; participants are encouraged to collectively shape the reading list by contributing their interests to a proposed list of topics and readings. The latter will include work from art history, history, anthropology, philosophy, music, film studies, and literary theory (among others), covering topics such as the acousmatic, the corpothetic, synesthesia, kinesthetics, olfaction, Indigenous life-worlds, varying forms of religiosity, and untouchability.

What is the relationship between photography and the occult? Is it possible for the camera to see the invisible beyond the powers of the naked eye? Beginning with the spirit photographs of William Mumler in the 1860’s to contemporary manifestations of digital ghost hunting, we will investigate the search for elusive ghosts via the camera lens as an ongoing preoccupation in the history of photography. We will review this rich and fascinating history with key case studies of “haunted media” starting with the emergence of phantasmagoric visual entertainments and other psychic, occult, and borderland phenomena whether UFOs, auras, fairies, or “thoughtography”. Exploring these “ghosts in the machines” through the lenses of science, religion, and art, the course will consider various reasons why some have wanted to believe in the veracity of these phenomena while others have wanted to debunk occult photography as a hoax, trick, or fraud.

This course investigates augmented reality (AR) as an emerging new media art practice. Whether using head-attached, spatial displays, or hand-held devices as their mode of interface, AR art projects and maps virtual space onto real space setting up interactive environments and embodied spaces that rely on locative media. The course will provide us an opportunity to read leading theorists and art historians who are thinking about the meaning and significance of AR art and its larger implications for the study of digital culture including Christine Ross, Lev Manovich, and Greg Ulmer. Topics will include the relation of AR art to site-specific installation; media activism and the virtual public sphere; the use of AR in the construction of counterfactual history; its relation to geo-spatial studies and critical cartography; and museum manifestations using augmented reality. The course will review a number of key contemporary case studies by AR artists.

This course examines how sound has been creatively manipulated to articulate spatial relationships in modern architecture, sound art, soundscape compositions, and film soundtracks. The term "acoustic space" was popularized by Marshall McLuhan in the 1950s and '60s, but had earlier roots in psychology, architectural acoustics, and media theory. Under the conceptual framework of acoustic space, theorists and artists across various cultural fields have posed questions such as: How do individuals locate themselves in the world through listening? How can the physical environment be transformed through creative acoustic interventions? How might new and potentially far-flung communities be convened through sound? With the theme of acoustic space as a starting point, the course surveys a range of historical methods associated with the emerging discipline of sound studies and the diversity of ways in which the spatial behaviour of sound has been subject to artistic representation and transformation.

Both art practice and scholarship in the humanities over the past two decades have been described as taking an "animal turn," influenced by posthumanism and a resurgence of ecological thinking. This conceptual and thematic seminar explores the unfolding of this turn in art history, examining key texts and trends in relation to images across a range of geographical areas and periods. It aims to provincialize the terms of debate in this area by opening it up to a diverse set of image traditions related obliquely, if at all, to Western narratives of humanism and posthumanism. In doing so it illuminates a range of approaches not only to imaging animals, but also to the animation of the image.

This seminar examines approaches to the efficacies of images from the standpoint of South Asia, where — as elsewhere, only more clearly — the force of the aesthetic far exceeds the arena of "fine" art. In doing so, this seminar explicitly reflects on postcolonial and decolonizing challenges to art history's Eurocentric presuppositions. While based in South Asian materials, the course therefore has wider relevance to issues of art historical method. Each week, representative scholarship and critical texts on South Asian images, mostly (but not exclusively) from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, will be examined in relation to the questions they pose about art history's objects, categories, methods, and narratives. The course does not require background knowledge of South Asia, however participants will be expected to fill this in as required for the weekly reading, as they are for unfamiliar Western materials.

This seminar examines significant buildings, movements, and ideas in nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture. We will pay particular attention to relationships between art and architecture: the built environments in which art is created and exhibited, forms of graphic representation that have been instrumental in the development of modern architecture, and methodological links between architectural and art history scholarship. Finally, we will engage with the contested question of architecture’s medium-specificity or autonomy. Previous study of architecture is not required.

This course examines ideas of craft that have emerged in the modern period in response to the industrial and digital revolutions, and other significant social and political changes. From the Arts and Crafts movement, the Bauhaus, and mingei to Etsy, maker culture, Craftivism, the Hobby Lobby, and biofacture, modern craft is associated with radically different practices and politics. Drawing on a variety of disciplinary and theoretical frameworks, we will consider craft's relationship to art, design, industry, and leisure in a global context, using case studies to illuminate key concepts and issues. We will pay particular attention to the place of craft in modern and contemporary art; to gendered, classed, and raced understandings of craft and its queering; to craft's relationship to the environment; to what Indigenous perspectives and practices can teach us; and to what has been seen as craft's revolutionary or reactionary potential.

Can there be a 'Canadian' art, and if so, what are its parameters in this rapidly changing country? Focusing on art made in Canada in its interactions with international practices, we will investigate defining frames in the fields of art history and visual culture studies today. Art historians habitually use national groupings to organize our field and employ genres such as landscape, land art, and public art to contour thinking. Since Montesquieu and Winckelmann in the 18th century, scholars in the west have also relied on what Thomas Da Costa Kaufmann calls the "Geography of art," defined as "the effect of the environment, cultural and natural, on what humans have created." The "contemporary" as a category often depends on the assumption that it is a global, not national, phenomenon. To test these and cognate practices, we will examine the idea of the (far) north in Canada as a category in eco-critical art history and in art making that aspires to be global. Art and artists working in and thematizing the far north in Canada will be discussed in comparison with those in cognate geographical regions elsewhere.

In this seminar, we will examine the potency of ideas of "Otherness" in the development of modern and contemporary arts in the last century and the thorny process of interpreting works of art by contemporary non-Western artists in relation to this larger history. Beginning with an analysis of the political and philosophical genealogy of "primitivism" with all of its attendant notions of exoticism, eroticism, and primordialism, the course will then trace the shifting critical theories employed by art historians, critics, visual anthropologists, feminists, and cultural studies scholars alike to frame the politics of representation that underlie our understanding of the contemporary productions of transnational artists.

We will examine the extensive visual culture of voyages in the Arctic from the 16th century to the present, with an emphasis on the long 19th century and the Angloshpere. Topics include Western and Inuit perspectives on the Northwest Passage, the magnetic and geographic north poles in print culture, imaging technologies, commercial enterprises in the Arctic and in Europe, the USA, and Canada, nationalism, colonialism, and scientific understandings of the unique meteorological, human, and animal phenomena of this region. We will also interrogate the notion of the Anthropocene and competing contemporary ideas of the human impact on nature as a way to explore ecological understandings of the Arctic in the 19th century and today.

With the rise of various models of "global" art history and the proliferation of biennale culture, the complicated relationships between the practice and theory of art and ethnography seem newly relevant. Contemporary artists and curators, working across global histories refer to methods of "field research/work/site" and engage with the participatory and performative aspects of art-making. Some of the questions we will consider: What does it mean to curate as a form of ethnographic practice? How have these disciplines addressed the complexities of material cultures, the agency of objects, and indigenous and local ways of knowing? How do we understand tropes of "crisis" and calls for "reflexivity" in both these arenas of study, in the wake of renewed concerns about cultural appropriation and calls for decolonization and cultural restitution? Finally, what kinds of imaginative or speculative fictions have been articulated through both ethnographic and archival research by contemporary artists and researchers? The work of ethnographers, art historians, and artists has drawn repeatedly on tropes of travel, discovery, hybridity, cultural proximity, and distancing. How might we usefully draw these common threads into productive conversations to clear space for more radical ways of doing art history?

Faced with the compounded urgencies of the climate crisis, the recurrence of multi-sited pursuits of fascism, and continued colonial power grabs, one might think that the allure, much less the ability, to think collectively and towards shared futures has disappeared. However, there is a growing set of political theorists, artists, and activists urging us to reorient ourselves towards the future and to re-engage with the histories of these cross-cultural and cross-temporal dreams for the betterment of societies.

This course will provide students with the opportunity to revisit the historiography of these impulses over the modern period, and with an opportunity to think comparatively across sites in the global south, former nonaligned nations, and the Eastern bloc (China, India, Indigenous NZ/Australia/Canada, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East). Through the study of visual arts, architecture, film, and literature, we will approach Utopia as an imagined entity, a critical concept, method, or orientation.

Over time and in particular historical configurations, visual artists, filmmakers, architects, urban planners, revolutionaries, nationalists, industrialists, and imperialists have all invested in notions of Utopia (and future horizons) and its potential to bring forth escape, deliver fantasy, or anticipate societal transformation. Utopia is always imagined but never reached; as such, it opens debates about its opposites or cognates: misplaced notions of optimism, idealism, fatalism, melancholy and nostalgia, the dystopian, the sublime.

Some of the configurations we will discuss include: political revolutions and utopias, empire and Romanticism, arts and crafts, manifestos and vanguardia, postwar solidarities and Fanon's "New Man," socialist realisms, the purity of abstraction, built form, urban design, and development discourse, space age retrofuturisms, Afro futurisms, and Indigenous futurities.

While the allure and mechanisms of the archive have held the attention of modernist scholars for well over a decade, the interest in mining its contents has shifted with the ascendance of the global contemporary — with its presentist and universalist claims, at once disavowing the need for modernist genealogies and simultaneously re-orchestrating them to explain current "global art currents," theories of the global contemporary seem to require a "backward glance" in the work of artists hailing from beyond the received boundaries of the modern. This seminar will address the history of thought surrounding the modernist archive, particularly in light of its presence in the work of many artists from postcolonial and post-trauma sites. It will ask how conversations about imperial nostalgia, postcolonial melancholy and other forms of memory work play out in the works of these artists and how they inform critical re-imaginings of both the materiality and representational politics of the archive. Readings will include Agamben, Buchloh, Derrida, Demos, Enwezor, Foster, Huyssen, and Mbembe.

What are the ways in which photography as a visual and narrative medium induces laughter and provides amusement? This course explores this question by focusing on major photographic genres throughout the history of the medium and by examining major photographic humourists in particular. The course is particularly concerned with the analysis of key images (both old and new) that mock conventional assumptions made about the nature and function of photography in terms of its claims to truth, identity and reference. The course also includes readings of major philosophers and cultural theorists on the subject of humour and applies them to thinking about photography.

This seminar offers a survey of contemporary Chinese art with an emphasis on the contested conditions of art production, display, and interpretation. Organized as a series of case studies, this seminar will encourage students to situate contemporary Chinese art within the critical debates on glocalisation, neoliberal world order, and postsocialist condition. Special attention will be given to the positions and interventions of writers from the disciplines of philosophy, anthropology, and sociology together with the leading authors of contemporary Chinese art such as Wu Hung, Ackbar Abbas, Karen Smith, Minglu Gao, and Hanru Hou.

This course introduces methodologies for the study of Indigenous customary arts (both historical and contemporary), taking as our point of departure the materials and practice of these arts from a maker's perspective, and the land- and trade-based relations they enact. We will focus locally on Great Lakes arts by Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee artists, with an eye to wider movements and connections. Beads, black ash, porcupine quills, clay, copper, and more will be explored through theorizations of place, process, sovereignty, and relationality, as well as through artist talks and hands-on engagement in exploratory workshops.

This course will explore activism within art contemporary movements as well as art strategies used by activist movements, with a specific focus on the local and ongoing. The course will span theory and praxis, asking how we might bring the critical and decolonial lenses of our texts into the world and vice versa. We will learn from artists and activists working locally, and from these conversations move into a wider global framing.

The 1960s are synonymous with revolution, both political and aesthetic. In this course, we will consider how recent methodological "turns" within art history (e.g., the global, the diasporic, the decolonial; queer, transgender, latinx, indigenous, and Black studies; reassessments of social history of art) might produce new histories of this monumental decade. Potential topics include: the body and sculpture, performance and abstraction, information and technology, commercialism and capital, and solidarity. Students will be expected to identify the themes and gaps in current literature, discuss questions of methodology, and develop practices of close reading and close looking.

This course will introduce students to the main issues, methods, and figures within Black Studies, an interdisciplinary field that focuses on the histories, lives, and culture of the African Diaspora. Students will read canonical texts in Black Studies (Hartman, Edwards, Moten, Spillers, Gilroy, hooks, Hall, etc.) and assess the current state of the field. We will also consider how art historians have incorporated lessons from this field into their work and thus explore the possibilities Black Studies offers art historical research at the level of both topic and method. Potential topics include: the legacies of slavery, the practice of history, the definition of aesthetics, the status of the "object," fugitivity, and diaspora.

Across the humanities and social sciences there has been a surge of interest in connections and relations of various kinds. Network analysis has shown itself to be an effective and adaptable means of exploring such phenomena, particularly given the increasing accessibility of computational methods. This course will focus on the potential for using network analysis in reconstructing ancient connectivities and mobilities, with application particularly in studies of the ancient world across disciplines. There are various ways in which these fields can benefit. On the one hand, the social relations among artisans and artists responsible for bringing artworks into being can be scrutinized, as can the connections between consumers that help shape value, or indeed the networks of distribution or circulation that link producers to consumers. These factors all concern the social structures sustaining artistic output. On the other, it is also possible to conceive of the relations between artworks in network terms, within the oeuvre of a given artist, or more broadly between media or across periods or regions.

The class will cover the history of approaches to connectivities, relations, and networks; present case studies that demonstrate the utility of network approaches; and offer students the chance to develop their own projects in network analysis applied to ancient materials (with all the attendant problems of data incompleteness). This is a course in digital humanities, in its concern for the exploration and visualization of data with the aid of computational methods.