This course deals with Surrealism from its inception in 1924, through the work of the principal surrealist artists in various media, including the production of objects that break down the conventional distinctions amongst media (photography, sculpture, and painting), and between the categories of art, utensils, and detritus. Surrealist art is tied up with texts — poetic, automatist, philosophical, and political — informed by psychoanalysis and anthropology. We will consider key works by Lautréamont, Aragon, Breton, Bataille, Caillois, Leiris, Lacan, and Kojève, as well as the writings of the artists themselves.

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 Chinese and Islamic traditions, as well as Indigenous art from Canada and elsewhere; 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?

The critical tools acquired from postcolonial and postmodernist discourses — coupled with the growing interest in and studies of the global contemporary art market — have enabled critics, scholars, and curators to broaden historical understandings of the modern. This seminar will address Said’s discussions of the "voyages in" of exiles in interwar and postwar modern Europe, Stuart Hall's subtle readings of the visual cultures and identities in postwar Britain, and Kobena Mercer's ongoing projects on the overlapping, imbricated nature of modernist practices, alongside new thinking on cosmopolitanisms by Kristeva, Benhabib, and Clifford. These important approaches in the EuroAmerican sphere run parallel to ever-deepening studies of locally situated, often nationally focused but globally conscious artistic scenes around the world (often misnamed alternative modernities), including work by Geeta Kapur and Partha Mitter on India, Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke on parts of the African continent, and Gerardo Mosquera and Guy Brett on sites in Latin America. This course broadens an ever deepening interest in the global implications of the modern, in a department that features a growing number of scholars with interest and expertise in global modern and contemporary visual cultures and art histories. It will enable graduate students to gain greater insight into current debates on contemporary uses of cosmopolitanism in light of historical models and understandings of the modern.

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.

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.

This course offers an introduction to some advanced techniques of visual analysis through an engagement with Roman wall painting. At the center of the seminar are the mythological frescoes that once adorned houses and Villas in and around Pompeii and other cities of Vesuvius, before the destruction of 79 CE. While these paintings have been analyzed primarily in contextual and socio-historical terms, our own approach will focus on the role of images in the formation of new forms of subjectivity emerging in the late republican and early imperial periods. Particular emphasis will be placed on the "psychoanalytical" implications of the use of Greek myth in a Roman context, and the usefulness of the notion of "fantasy" for an understanding of the imagery under discussion. Other topics include the image's relation with its prototypes and the notion of "substitution," art and empathy, art and spatiality, myth and visual narrative. The course offers an introduction to one of the most important bodies of ancient art (and one that is actually compatible with a broader art history), as well as an introduction to techniques of visual analysis. Readings include art historical and historical writings (by J. Elsner, P. Zanker, S. Bartsch, A. Wallace-Hadrill, and others), but also a selection of seminal texts from the fields of critical theory, visual culture, film theory, and "anthropology of the image."

This course aims to put the growing interest in neuroaesthetics, neuroarthistory and neuroarchaeology in perspective, through a broader review and exploration of cognitive approaches in art history and archaeology. We will query why art history has been drawn towards those versions of cognitive science that are a) neurocentric, maintaining a separation between mind and world, and b) reductive. Although similar patterns are also present in other disciplines, including archaeology, we shall explore how the latter has begun to embrace more fully the active role of materiality in cognitive processes.

There are numerous ways in which a picture is worth a thousand words. This course investigates the complex relationship between narrative and image, and the ensuing notions of temporality in spatially based pictorial media. The focus on ancient Greek and Roman visual culture — from Greek vase painting to Roman historical reliefs — provides a rich ground for exploring different narratological methodologies, which the students will learn throughout the course. The readings, thus, will be partly drawn from a wide range of theoretical sources in narrative studies, from Aristotle's Poetics to Roland Barthes, as well as more recent approaches to visual narratology in contemporary film studies. The course will also address broader philosophical issues regarding notions of time and art, going beyond the domain of narratology proper, and consider the ways in which artworks can acquire temporality, both in and out of their proper socio-historical contexts.

This seminar is a comprehensive exploration of women, both their myth and their reality in the ancient Greek world, through extant visual and literary representations. The course is organized both by subject matter (divine figures, heroines, amazons, courtesans, etc.) and by theme (festivals, drama, religious participation, daily life, marriage, etc.), and offers theoretical and methodological insight throughout the semester. The students will also read key texts from gender theory along with relevant primary and secondary literature on women and gender in ancient Greece. The aim of the course is to obtain familiarity with scholarly methodologies regarding gender through the lens of antiquity, with an emphasis on the analysis of visual evidence, at the same time gain critical insight into women's history in ancient Greece, through their artistic representations.

A truly interdisciplinary course by design, on the relationship between Time and Art. Using Concepts of Time as a disciplinary bridge between Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Art History, the course will examine some of the major philosophical thoughts on Time throughout history and explore different ways in which Time and temporality enter into art historical or philosophical discussions on works of art. We will approach each subtopic of Time and its relationship to Art, from both philosophical and art historical perspectives, offering productive avenues for interdisciplinary investigations. Some of these topics include: Time in Ancient Philosophy and Art, Visual Narrative and the Philosophy of Narrative, Renaissance Anachronism, Phenomenology of Time and Art, Time and Modernity, Retrieval and Restoration of the Past, and On Writing History. Close readings of philosophical texts will include excerpts from Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Freud, Heidegger, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, and Benjamin; we will also be analyzing works of art and their relationship to Time from major periods of Art History, with a focus on Ancient Greece, and touching upon Renaissance, Modern, and Contemporary. Students will be encouraged to work on artworks from local museums, notably the Royal Ontario Museum.

A seminar on Roman Imperial Art and the metanarratives and conceptual frameworks that have shaped its study over the past 120 years. Topics include: the problem of style/form and the transformation of Roman art during the first four centuries of our era; Roman "classicism"; "propaganda" and the function of "state monuments" and "official" art; the figure of the "viewer" in archaeological scholarship; spolia and "damnatio memoriae"; historical commemoration. Monuments under discussion will include the Ara Pacis, Triumphal Arches, Columns of Trajan, and Marcus Aurelius, Roman "Historical Reliefs."

This seminar explores different facets of its topic. Using a representative selection of works in a variety of media (mainly sculpture and painting) we will examine how ancient art both depicted and elicited affects, "emotions," and bodily responses. No matter if we are looking at a Hellenistic symplegma ("entanglement"), a sarcophagus depicting the killing of the Niobids, a painting showing the violent death of Pentheus, or the decapitation of enemies of the Roman order — ancient art wanted to be experienced “in the flesh.” To this we can add scenes that — self-referentially and recursively — evoke the bodily experience of interacting with the object they decorate. But how exactly, and why, do ancient works of art seek to evoke bodily responses? How do the viewer responses they imply relate to the emotional protocols that can be reconstructed from a variety of ancient sources? (For example, in ancient theories of emotions, and in stark contrast to modern conceptions, viewers are supposed to feel "pity" in response to viewing the suffering of others only under certain circumstances). How does the emotional economy of ancient art, from the late archaic to the Roman periods, reflect a shifting corporeal habitus and changing concepts of personhood and subjectivity? Can the recent sub-discipline of "neuro-art history" provide a productive perspective, and has it made good on its claim of unravelling the "neural bases of empathy and emotion"? And if so, where does that leave us? Can the bodily responses they register really be "automatic" and universal, and how do their more reasonable practitioners account for the significant historical modulations in the responses to images? Readings will include some "classics" from the fields of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, but also more recent work produced in disciplines as diverse as Neuro-Art History and Classics.