| ARTHIST100N | The Artist in Ancient Greek Society | Given the importance of art to all aspects of their lives, the Greeks had reason to respect their artists. Yet potters, painters and even sculptors possessed little social standing. Why did the Greeks value the work of craftsmen but not the men them... |
| ARTHIST101 | Introduction to Greek Art I: The Archaic Period | The class considers the development of Greek art from 1000-480 and poses the question, how Greek was Greek art? In the beginning, as Greece emerges from 200 years of Dark Ages, their art is cautious, conservative and more abstract than life-like, clo... |
| ARTHIST102 | Introduction to Greek Art II: The Classical Period | The class begins with the art, architecture and political ideals of Periclean Athens, from the emergence of the city as the political and cultural center of Greece in 450 to its defeat in the Peloponnesian War in 404. It then considers how the Atheni... |
| ARTHIST102B | Coffee, Sugar, and Chocolate: Commodities and Consumption in World History, 1200-1800 | Many of the basic commodities that we consider staples of everyday life became part of an increasingly interconnected world of trade, goods, and consumption between 1200 and 1800. This seminar offers an introduction to the material culture of the lat... |
| ARTHIST104A | The Secret Lives of Statues | Statues-human-shaped sculptures-populate the uncanny valley that separates inert matter from living entities. For humans, this 'other population' can engender profound emotional responses, embody potent ideas, and entangle the politics of the past an... |
| ARTHIST105B | Medieval Journeys: Introduction through the Art and Architecture | The course explores the experience and imagination of medieval journeys through an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and skills-based approaches. As a foundations class, this survey of medieval culture engages in particular the art and architecture... |
| ARTHIST106 | Byzantine Art and Architecture, 300-1453 C.E. | This course explores the art and architecture of the Eastern Mediterranean: Constantinople, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch, Damascus, Thessaloniki, and Palermo, 4th-15th centuries. Applying an innovative approach, we will probe questions of phenomeno... |
| ARTHIST10AX | Los Angeles Arts Immersion | In this Arts Intensive, students will learn about the dynamic art histories of Mexican American/Chicanx and Black American artists in Los Angeles. Students will visit museums, galleries, and community centers dedicated to nurturing, showcasing, and a... |
| ARTHIST110 | French Painting from Watteau to Monet | This course offers a survey of painting in France from 1700 to around 1900. It introduces major artists, artworks, and the concepts used by contemporary observers and later art historians to make sense of this extraordinarily rich period. Overarching... |
| ARTHIST113 | All is Fair... Love and War in Italian Renaissance Art | How are love and war comparable? Why must the creative impulse be accompanied by a destructive one? What do we really mean when we say that an artist "executed" a painting or a photographer "shot" a scene? This course explores the agony and ecstasy i... |
| ARTHIST114A | The Dome: From the Pantheon to the Millennium | This course traces the history of the dome over two millennia, from temples to the gods to Temples of the State, and from cosmic archetype to architectural fetish. The narrative interweaves the themes of the dome as image of the Cosmos, religious ico... |
| ARTHIST115 | The Italian Renaissance, or the Art of Success | How come that, even if you have never set foot in Italy, you have heard of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael? What made them so incredibly famous, back then as well as today? This course examines the shooting of those, and other, artists to fame. I... |
| ARTHIST116N | Making Sense of the World: Art, Medicine, and Science in Venice | In 1500 Venice was the place you wanted to be. It wasn't just the capital of the world: it was also its scientific center. This course explores the conversation between the arts and the sciences in Renaissance Venice, and, thanks to remote teaching,... |
| ARTHIST118A | Space, Public Discourse and Revolutionary Practices | This course examines the mediums of public art that have been voices of social change, protestand expressions of community desire. It will offer a unique glimpse into Iran¿scontemporary art and visual culture through the investigation of public art p... |
| ARTHIST119 | Love at First Sight: Visual Desire, Attraction, and the Pleasures of Art | Why do dating sites rely on photographs? Why do we believe that love is above all a visual force? How is pleasure, even erotic pleasure, achieved through looking? While the psychology of impressions offers some answers, this course uncovers the ways... |
| ARTHIST120 | Superhero Theory | With their fantastic powers, mutable bodies, multiple identities, complicated histories, and visual dynamism, the American superhero has been a rich vehicle for fantasies (and anxieties) for 80+ years across multiple media: comics, film, animation, T... |
| ARTHIST127 | Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture in Europe: The Art World en masse | This course will survey the visual arts in Europe over the course of the long nineteenth century, from history painting of the French Revolution to avant-garde experimentation in the years leading up to World War I. This was a period of dramatic soci... |
| ARTHIST12SD | Making Sense of the World: Art, Medicine, and Science in Venice | In 1500 Venice was the place you wanted to be. It wasn't just the capital of the world: it was also its scientific center. This course explores the conversation between the arts and the sciences in Renaissance Venice, and, thanks to remote teaching,... |
| ARTHIST133E | A Global History of Architecture and Engineering | An introduction to the history of architecture and engineering, and to basic concepts about how we construct the built environment. This course asks one simple question: what does it mean to "make place" during different moments in history? The class... |
| ARTHIST135 | William Blake: A Literary and Visual Exploration of the Illuminated Poetry | An introduction to the illuminated world of William Blake¿poet, prophet, revolutionary, and visionary artist. The course will address Blake's visual iconography, belief system and ideology, unique mythology, and method of relief etching that allowed... |
| ARTHIST142 | Architecture Since 1900 | Art 142 is an introduction to the history of architecture since 1900 and how it has shaped and been shaped by its cultural contexts. The class also investigates the essential relationship between built form and theory during this period. |
| ARTHIST142A | The Architecture of Thought: Artists and Thinkers Design for Themselves | This course investigates houses, hideaways, and studios that artists and thinkers have designed for themselves with varying degrees of self-consciousness, from subconscious images of the self to knowing stages for the contemplative life. Case studies... |
| ARTHIST143A | American Architecture | A historically based understanding of what defines American architecture. What makes American architecture American, beginning with indigenous structures of pre-Columbian America. Materials, structure, and form in the changing American context. How t... |
| ARTHIST146 | American Dream, American Nightmare: A History of the United States in Art and Literature | Studying the American past, a person could despair or dream or both. In this course, we will move chronologically from the Revolutionary War to the present to consider artists and writers--some famous, some obscure--who've portrayed hope, who've port... |
| ARTHIST147 | Modernism and Modernity | This course focuses on European and American art and visual culture between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. We will begin and end in Paris, exploring visual expressions of modernism as they were shaped by industrialization and urb... |
| ARTHIST151 | Migration and Diaspora in American Art, 1800-Present | This lecture course explores American art through the lens of immigration, exile, and diaspora. We will examine a wide range of work by immigrant artists and craftsmen, paying special attention to issues of race and ethnicity, assimilation, displacem... |
| ARTHIST152 | The American West | The American West is characterized by frontier mythology, vast distances, marked aridity, and unique political and economic characteristics. This course integrates several disciplinary perspectives into a comprehensive examination of Western North Am... |
| ARTHIST159B | American Photography Since 1960 | Since the publication of Robert Frank's THE AMERICANS (1958), many distinguished American photographers have emerged, creating a density and power of expression that arguably rivals and even surpasses the extraordinary achievements of earlier photogr... |
| ARTHIST160 | Censorship in American Art | This course examines the art history of censorship in the United States. Paying special attention to the suppression of queer, Black and Latinx visual and performance art, including efforts to vandalize works and defund institutions, students will ex... |
| ARTHIST162 | Visual Arts Cuba (1959 - 2015) | The evolution of culture in post-1959 Cuba, with a strong focus on visual arts in all media and film will be introduced in this course. Historical examples will be discussed through lectures, readings and the presentation of audiovisual material. Stu... |
| ARTHIST163 | Queer America | This class explores queer art, photography and politics in the United States since 1930. Our approach will be grounded in close attention to the history and visual representation of sexual minorities in particular historical moments and social contex... |
| ARTHIST164 | History of World Cinema III: Queer Cinema around the World | Provides an overview of cinema from around the world since 1960, highlighting the cultural, political, and economic forces that have shaped various film movements over the last six decades. We study key film movements and national cinemas towards dev... |
| ARTHIST165 | Vincent van Gogh and His World | No artist is more famous than Vincent van Gogh. Yet how well is he known? Perhaps not at all. A victim of cliches and platitudes, his art is rarely seen, or, to put it differently, the power of its call on us is mostly unheeded. What was he searching... |
| ARTHIST165B | American Style and the Rhetoric of Fashion | Focus on the visual culture of fashion, especially in an American context. Topics include: the representation of fashion in different visual media (prints, photographs, films, window displays, and digital images); the relationship of fashion to its h... |
| ARTHIST168A | A.I.-Activism-Art | Lecture/studio course exploring arts and humanities scholarship and practice engaging with, and generated by, emerging emerging and exponential technologies. Our course will explore intersections of art and artificial intelligence with an emphasis on... |
| ARTHIST173N | Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary Art | From Pop to postmodernism, contemporary art in the United States has often taken up issues of race, gender, and sexuality. In this seminar, we will study how artists from the 1960s to the present have drawn upon a wide range of media (including paint... |
| ARTHIST180 | Art, Meditation, and Creation | Art and meditation invite us to be fully present in our minds and bodies. This class will give you tools to integrate mind and body as you explore artworks on display at the university's museums and throughout campus. In your engagement with activity... |
| ARTHIST181 | Pacific Dreams: Art in California | This lecture course will explore the rich and diverse history of art made in California, with special focus on the interchanges between the fine arts and subcultural expression. From the Carleton Watkins' exquisite mammoth plate photographs of Yosemi... |
| ARTHIST182B | Cultures in Competition: Arts of Song-Era China | The Song dynasty (mid-10th to late 13th c.) was a period of extraordinary diversity and technical accomplishment in Chinese painting, ceramics, calligraphy, architecture and sculpture. Artistic developments emerged within a context of economic dyna... |
| ARTHIST185 | Arts of China in the Early Modern World, 1550-1800 | The dynamic period of late Ming and early Qing dynasty China, roughly 1500-1800 CE, was marked by political crisis and conquest, but also by China's participation in global systems of trade and knowledge exchanges involving porcelain, illustrated boo... |
| ARTHIST186B | Asian American Art | This lecture course explores the work of artists, craftspeople, and laborers of Asian descent from 1850-present. Rather than a discrete identity category, we approach 'Asian American' as an expansive, relational term that encompasses heterogenous ex... |
| ARTHIST188 | Imperial Collecting, Patronage, and Taste in China and Japan | Explores how the imperial courts collected and censored art in China and Japan ca. 1000-1800. The imperial control over art collecting activities shaped the way in which court painters represented the world. The imperial court dictated art creations... |
| ARTHIST188B | From Shanghai Modern to Global Contemporary: Frontiers of Modern Chinese Art | Chinese artistic developments in an era of revolution and modernization, from Shanghai Modern and New National Painting though the politicized art of the Cultural Revolution and post-Mao era re-entry into international arenas. |
| ARTHIST191 | African American Art | This course explores major art and political movements, such as the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and #BlackLivesMatter, that have informed and were inspired by African American artists. Students will read pivotal texts written by Blac... |
| ARTHIST194 | U.S. Latinx Art | This course surveys art made by Latinas/os/xs who have lived and worked in the United States since the 1700s, including Chicanos, Nuyoricans, and other Black, Brown, and Indigenous artists. While exploring the diversity of Latinx art, students will c... |
| ARTHIST199 | Close Cinematic Analysis - Caste, Sexuality, and Religion in Indian Media | India is the world's largest producer of films in over 20 languages, and Bollywood is often its most visible avatar, especially on US university curricula. This course will introduce you to a range of media from the Indian subcontinent across commerc... |
| ARTHIST1A | Decolonizing the Western Canon: Introduction to Art and Architecture from Prehistory to Medieval | Traditional Art History viewed the Renaissance as its pinnacle; it privileged linear perspective and lifelikeness and measured other traditions against this standard, neglecting art from the Near East, Egypt, the Middle Ages, or Islam. This course wi... |
| ARTHIST1B | How to Look at Art and Why: An Introduction to the History of Western Painting | This course explores the relation of art to life - how and why works of art, even from hundreds of years ago, matter in a person's life. It trains students to find the words to share their thoughts about art with their peers, friends, and family. Som... |
| ARTHIST2 | Asian Arts and Cultures | An exploration of the visual arts of East and South Asia from ancient to modern times, in their social, religious, literary and political contexts. Analysis of major monuments of painting, sculpture and architecture will be organized around themes th... |
| ARTHIST203 | Artists, Athletes, Courtesans and Crooks | The seminar examines a range of topics devoted to the makers of Greek art and artifacts, the men and women who used them in life and the afterlife, and the miscreants - from Lord Elgin to contemporary tomb-looters and dealers - whose deeds have damag... |
| ARTHIST203A | Philosophies Behind Architecture: The Work of Antoni Gaudí as a Response to Modernity | The emergence of modern and contemporary Architecture in the West is intimately linked to the background culture that spread across the intellectual centers of Europe and the US between early nineteenth century and the Second World War. Catalan archi... |
| ARTHIST204 | Dialogues with the Dead | This seminar considers the dynamism and resilience of Greek art and culture. The dialogues in question are not with ancient shades in the underworld but with later artists who build on the creative vision (and blind spots) of the past to addressthe i... |
| ARTHIST205 | Enchanted Images: Medieval Art and Its Sonic Dimension | Explores the relationship between chant and images in medieval art. Examples are sourced from both Byzantium and the Latin West including the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, Ste. Foy at Conques, and Santiago de Compostela... |
| ARTHIST206 | The Alchemy of Art: Substance and Transformation in Artistic Practice | This seminar considers materiality and processes of material transformation as core elements of artistic practice and the history of making, largely from Sumer (3rd Millennium BCE) until the Early Modern period (18th Century in the West), but with se... |
| ARTHIST206A | Persian Poetry: Text, Space, and Image | Featuring several sessions led by distinguished artist Ala Ebtekar, this course traces the nexus of word and image across a millennium of Persian poetry. Our aim is to look at how texts have been represented through images and enacted in public perfo... |
| ARTHIST206B | Audiovision in the Medieval Cult of Saints | Medieval art is silent in modern times. Often displayed in sterile museum galleries, it is presented without analytical consideration of the intended envelope of sound, chant, prayer, and recitation. Stripped of this aural atmosphere, the objects hav... |
| ARTHIST207 | The Resurrected Body: Animacy in Medieval Art | This course explores the relationship of spirit and matter in medieval art and architecture, more specifically how the changing appearance of objects and spaces evokes the presence of the metaphysical as glitter, reverberation, and shadow. We will e... |
| ARTHIST207A | Bodies that Remain: Art and Death in the Middle Ages | This seminar investigates medieval attitudes towards dead bodies through the material culture of death, from the cult of relics, to tomb sculpture, to monumental architecture. The place of death in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities in medieva... |
| ARTHIST207B | The Art of Travel: Medieval Journeys to the Unknown | In many ways, the reasons that medieval people traveled are not unlike our own: to see new sights, make new connections, and return home to regale others with their exploits. Of course, travel was also a more complicated affair, limited to those who... |
| ARTHIST207D | Race and Ethnicity in Premodern Europe | How do historians, art historians, and literary historians of premodern Europe shape their research and their teaching around questions of race? How do current debates on race theory shape our perception of the past and deepen historical inquiry? Thi... |
| ARTHIST207E | Sacred Play: The Material Culture of Christian Festivals | The twentieth-century American poet and esotericist Robert Duncan once called for a return of the medieval calendar, citing its many feast days as an antidote to the modern 'weekend.' Indeed, the medieval Christian calendar was built on festivals, mu... |
| ARTHIST208 | Hagia Sophia | This seminar uncovers the aesthetic principles and spiritual operations at work in Hagia Sophia, the church dedicated to Holy Wisdom in Constantinople. Rather than a static and inert structure, the Great Church emerges as a material body that comes... |
| ARTHIST208A | Abject Subjects and Divine Anamorphosis in Byzantine Art | Entering the space of the church immediately interpellated the medieval subject, transforming him/her into an abject self, marred by sin. This psychological effect of pricking the conscience was enhanced by the architectural panopticon channeled thro... |
| ARTHIST208B | The Art of Medieval Spain: Muslims, Christians, Jews | The seminar reveals the religious and ethnic hybridity of the art medieval Spain, where the lives, material cultures, and artistic practices of Muslims, Christians, and Jews were more intertwined than any other region of the medieval world. We work t... |
| ARTHIST208D | Virginity and Power: The Mother of God and Visions of Empire | Mary has been the most influential female figure in Christianity. Her powers stem from her paradoxical virginal motherhood. Victory over nature means indomitable power. She was perceived as the general of the Christian armies and the protector of ci... |
| ARTHIST209C | Theories of the Image: Byzantium, Islam and the Latin West | This seminar explores the role of images in the three major powers of the medieval Mediterranean: the Umayyads, the Carolingians, and the Byzantines. For each the definition of an image- sura, imago, or eikon respectively-became an important means of... |
| ARTHIST210 | Great Minds of the Italian Renaissance and their World | What enabled Leonardo da Vinci to excel in over a dozen fields from painting to engineering and to anticipate flight four hundred years before the first aircraft took off? How did Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel Ceiling? What forces and insight... |
| ARTHIST212 | Desiring Machines: Buildings, Maps, and Clouds | Focus is on early modern machines as tools for experience and action. In their break with Freudian psychoanalysis, French theorists Deleuze and Guattari speak of the machine as a tool of desire and attraction itself as "machinic" rather than desire f... |
| ARTHIST217 | Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth | This course examines global origin myths for architecture, for example cosmic symbolism (e.g. the Mandala/dome), and the magic of technologies (e.g. the "petrification" of the wooden hut in permanent architecture). Examples range from Ethiopian rockc... |
| ARTHIST217B | Architectural Design Theory | This seminar focuses on the key themes, histories, and methods of architectural theory -- a form of architectural practice that establishes the aims and philosophies of architecture. Architectural theory is primarily written, but it also incorporate... |
| ARTHIST218A | Michelangelo: Gateway to Early Modern Italy | Revered as one of the greatest artists in history, Michelangelo Buonarroti's extraordinarily long and prodigious existence (1475-1564) spanned the Renaissance and the Reformation in Italy. The celebrity artist left behind not only sculptures, paintin... |
| ARTHIST219 | Caravaggio, Vermeer, and the Life of Paintings | Focusing on great paintings by seventeenth-century European painters--Caravaggio's Medusa, Vermeer's Girl with the Pearl Earring, Rembrandt's Self-Portraits, and many others--this seminar will consider how and why artists these artists strove to over... |
| ARTHIST221E | Peripheral Dreams: The Art and Literature of Miró, Dalí, and other Surrealists in Catalonia | Why was Salvador Dalí fascinated with the architecture of Gaudí? Why did André Breton, Paul Éluard and Federico García Lorca visit Barcelona? Moreover, why did Catalonia become such an important cradle for Surrealism? Why is the (Catalan) landscape s... |
| ARTHIST224 | Architecture as Performance from Antiquity to the Enlightenment | This seminar examines the nature of architectural representation in the western tradition, from antiquity until the 18th century. It considers the ancient theatre as an icon of representation and the afterlife of the stage building as a model for wes... |
| ARTHIST226 | New Landscapes of China: Ecologies, Media, Imaginaries | An exploration of new forms of landscape art in China's contemporary era, 1980s-present. Studies of new media platforms for landscape related imagery, imagined landscapes, and expanded concepts of landscape in an era of heightened ecological consciou... |
| ARTHIST230B | Image and Text in the Arts in China | An examination of many types of interactions between images and texts in Chinese painting. These include poetic lines inscribed on paintings (as response or as a theme given to the artist to paint), paintings that emulate or transform ancient poetic... |
| ARTHIST231 | Leonardo's World: Science, Technology, and Art | Leonardo da Vinci is emblematic of creativity and innovation. His art is iconic, his inventions legendary. His understanding of nature, the human body, and machines made him a scientist and engineer as well as an artist. His fascination with drawing... |
| ARTHIST238C | Art and the Market | This course examines the relationship between art and the market, from the château-builders of the French Renaissance to avant-garde painters in the nineteenth-century Salon des Refusés. Using examples drawn from France, this course explores the rela... |
| ARTHIST240 | Millennium Approaches: The Art of the 1990s | This seminar will examine the art historical legacy of the 1990s, the decade of Bill Clinton, Beavis and Butthead, and Y2K. By placing art in conversation with music, popular culture, and political events, we will explore the dark underbelly of the... |
| ARTHIST242A | Art History in the First Person | This seminar considers the use of the first person voice in a wide range of writings about art, from fiction to criticism to scholarship. Insofar as graduate students have typically been discouraged from using the first person voice in their scholarl... |
| ARTHIST243 | Black Divinities: Race, God, and Nation in the Photography of Deana Lawson | In recent years the Brooklyn-based photographer Deana Lawson (born 1979) has become rightly famous for her rapturous yet grounded large-sized photographs of everyday black people--those she meets in her neighborhood, as well as on her travels to Braz... |
| ARTHIST243N | Beyond Words: Early Books and the Design of the Reading Experience | Copiously drawing from the Stanford Archives, this seminar will study the revolutionary design of the first printed books to ask questions about the nature of reading and the commodification of culture. Besides being trained in typography and printin... |
| ARTHIST245 | Art, Business & the Law | This course examines art at the intersection of business and the law from a number of different angles, focusing on how the issues raised by particular case studies, whether legal, ethical and/or financial, impact our understanding of how works of ar... |
| ARTHIST246 | Duchamp Then and Now | This seminar provides an opportunity to explore not only the familiar though endlessly fascinating episodes of Duchamp's career (Nude Descending a Staircase; the readymade; the Large Glass; the Boite-en-valise; the persona of Rrose Sélavy, his films... |
| ARTHIST247 | Russia in Color | This course explores the application, evolution, and perception of color in art, art history, literature, and popular culture - in (Soviet) Russia and emigration. Working closely with the Cantor Arts Center collection at Stanford, this course pairs a... |
| ARTHIST250A | Printing Protest: The Artist as Social Critic | This seminar explores the history of print and protest. From books to newspapers to posters, printed materials have generated and circulated political and social messages for centuries. The seminar takes a transhistorical and transnational approach t... |
| ARTHIST251 | Warhol's World | Andy Warhol's art has never before been more widely exhibited, published, or licensed for commercial use, product design, and publication than it is today. For all Warhol's promiscuous visibility and global cachet at the current moment, there is much... |
| ARTHIST252A | Art and Power: From Royal Spectacle to Revolutionary Ritual | From the Palace of Versailles to grand operas to Jacques-Louis David's portraits of revolutionary martyrs, rarely have the arts been so powerfully mobilized by the State as in early modern France. This course examines how the arts were used from Loui... |
| ARTHIST253 | Aesthetics and Phenomenology | This course explores central topics in aesthetics where aesthetics is understood both in the narrow sense of the philosophy of art and aesthetic judgment, and in a broader sense as it relates to questions of perception, sensation, and various modes o... |
| ARTHIST256 | What Was Photography? | Digital imaging has largely replaced darkroom work over the past quarter century, yet analog practices still dominate theories of photography. Working closely with the Capital Group Foundation Collection at the Cantor, this class will explore how tho... |
| ARTHIST260A | Histories of the Museum: Collecting, Preserving, and Exhibiting Art | Museums have a history. This course questions how museums have shaped and been shaped by society, from their origins in early modern cabinets of curiosity to their contemporary transformation into virtual galleries and online exhibitions. Incorporati... |
| ARTHIST261 | Black Aliveness | Based on Kevin Quashie's 2021 book "Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being," this seminar will explore moments of possibility, love, and being in works of literature and art. With Quashie as our guide, we will look closely at poems, stories, photogra... |
| ARTHIST264B | Starstuff: Space and the American Imagination | Course on the history of twentieth and twenty-first century American images of space and how they shape conceptions of the universe. Covers representations made by scientists and artists, as well as scientific fiction films, TV, and other forms of po... |
| ARTHIST265A | Word and Image | What impact do images have on our reading of a text? How do words influence our understanding of images or our reading of pictures? What makes a visual interpretation of written words or a verbal rendering of an image successful? These questions will... |
| ARTHIST272 | Feminist Avant-Garde Art in Germany and Beyond (1968-2019) | In "Woman's Art: A Manifesto" (1972), the artist, performer and filmmaker Valie Export (1940) proposed the transfer of women's experience into an art context and considered the body "a signal bearer of meaning and communication." In reconceptualizing... |
| ARTHIST273 | Couture Culture | Fashion, art, and representation in Europe and the US between 1860 and today. Beginning with Baudelaire, Impressionism, the rise of the department store and the emergence of haute couture, culminating in the spectacular fashion exhibitions mounted a... |
| ARTHIST273N | What is Contemporary Art? | This course focuses on the production, criticism, and curating of contemporary art. Through a series of required readings, intensive class discussions, class trips, and first-hand encounters with art objects and exhibitions, we will investigate curre... |
| ARTHIST274 | Wonder: The Event of Art and Literature | What falls below, or beyond, rational inquiry? How do we write about the awe we feel in front of certain works of art, in reading lines of poetry or philosophy, or watching a scene in a film without ruining the feeling that drove us to write in the f... |
| ARTHIST274A | The Art of the Uncanny | From murderous dolls to evil doppelgängers, humanoid doubles haunt the Western cultural imagination. Beginning with an in-depth look at the contested concept of the "uncanny", the seminar traces the history of anxiety about non-human humans in the We... |
| ARTHIST281 | Chinese Portraiture | Exploration of recent studies of Chinese portraiture, with a focus on modern and contemporary eras. Portrait practices in treaty port cities; photographic portraits, portraits and modernity; political portraits in public arenas, self-erasure in conte... |
| ARTHIST284 | Material Metonymy: Ceramics and Asian America | This course explores the rich history and contemporary state of ceramic production by Asian American/diasporic makers. It is also about the way history, culture, and emotion are carried by process, technique, and materials. Taught by an art historian... |
| ARTHIST284B | Museum Cultures: Exhibiting the African Imaginary | Museums are dynamic spaces with the potential to reinvent, rehabilitate, and recenter marginalized people and collections. This year, our seminar examines and enacts museum stewardship of material cultures of diverse African communities across space,... |
| ARTHIST287 | Pictures of the Floating World: Images from Japanese Popular Culture | Printed objects produced during the Edo period (1600-1868), including the Ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating world) and lesser-studied genres such as printed books (ehon) and popular broadsheets (kawaraban). How a society constructs itself through ima... |
| ARTHIST287A | The Japanese Tea Ceremony: The History, Aesthetics, and Politics Behind a National Pastime | This course on the Japanese tea ceremony ('water for tea') introduces the world of the first medieval tea-masters and follows the transformation of chanoyu into a popular pastime, a performance art, a get-together of art connoisseurs, and a religious... |
| ARTHIST290 | Curricular Practical Training | CPT course required for international students completing degree. |
| ARTHIST291 | Riot: Visualizing Civil Unrest in the 20th and 21st Centuries | This seminar explores the visual legacy of civil unrest in the United States. Focusing on the 1965 Watts Rebellion, 1992 Los Angeles Riots, 2014 Ferguson Uprising, and 2020 George Floyd Uprisings students will closely examine photographs, television... |
| ARTHIST292 | Romancing the Stone: Crystal Media from Babylon to Superman | This seminar investigates the importance of rock crystal and its imitations as material, medium, and metaphor from antiquity until modernity. The objects examined include rings, reliquaries, lenses, and the Crystal Aesthetic in early twentieth-centur... |
| ARTHIST293 | Black and Brown: American Artists of Color | This course explores the art history of African American and Latina/o/x artists in the United States, Latin America & the Caribbean. Focused on particular exhibition and collection histories, students will consider the artistic, social and political... |
| ARTHIST293A | Latin American Art and Literature: 100 Years of Modernisms | This course will explore some of the most important Latin American artists and artistic movements of the last century. We will appreciate and discuss artworks across different media like painting, sculpture, performance, or installations coupled with... |
| ARTHIST293B | The Art of Punk: Sound, Aesthetics and Performance | This seminar explores the sonic and visual aesthetics of punk rock since the 1970s. While studying music, videos, zines, and album covers, students will examine the convergence of art with politics among artists, such as Lydia Lunch and Vaginal Davis... |
| ARTHIST294 | Writing and the Visual: The Art of Art Writing | This course, Writing the Visual: The Art of Art Writing, will explore the relationship between writing and visual art, which has been theorized as everything from an act of translation and interpretation to one of collaboration or competition. Oscar... |
| ARTHIST295 | Visual Arts Internship | Professional experience in a field related to the Visual Arts for six to ten weeks. Internships may include work for galleries, museums, art centers, and art publications. Students arrange the internship, provide a confirmation letter from the hostin... |
| ARTHIST296 | Junior Seminar: Methods & Historiography of Art History | Historiography and methodology. Through a series of case studies, this course introduces a range of influential critical perspectives in art history as a discipline and a practice. The goal is to stimulate thinking about what it means to explore the... |
| ARTHIST297 | Honors Thesis Writing | May be repeated for credit. |
| ARTHIST298 | Individual Work: Art History | Prerequisite: student must have taken a course with the instructor and/or completed relevant introductory course(s). Instructor consent and completion of the Independent Study Form are required prior to enrollment. All necessary forms and payment ar... |
| ARTHIST3 | Introduction to World Architecture | This course offers an expansive and wide-ranging introduction to architecture and urban design from the earliest human constructions to the mid-20th century. The examples range from the Americas to Europe, the Middle East, South and East Asia. The di... |
| ARTHIST302B | Coffee, Sugar, and Chocolate: Commodities and Consumption in World History, 1200-1800 | Many of the basic commodities that we consider staples of everyday life became part of an increasingly interconnected world of trade, goods, and consumption between 1200 and 1800. This seminar offers an introduction to the material culture of the lat... |
| ARTHIST305B | Medieval Journeys: Introduction through the Art and Architecture | The course explores the experience and imagination of medieval journeys through an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and skills-based approaches. As a foundations class, this survey of medieval culture engages in particular the art and architecture... |
| ARTHIST306 | Byzantine Art and Architecture, 300-1453 C.E. | This course explores the art and architecture of the Eastern Mediterranean: Constantinople, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch, Damascus, Thessaloniki, and Palermo, 4th-15th centuries. Applying an innovative approach, we will probe questions of phenomeno... |
| ARTHIST310 | French Painting from Watteau to Monet | This course offers a survey of painting in France from 1700 to around 1900. It introduces major artists, artworks, and the concepts used by contemporary observers and later art historians to make sense of this extraordinarily rich period. Overarching... |
| ARTHIST314A | The Dome: From the Pantheon to the Millennium | This course traces the history of the dome over two millennia, from temples to the gods to Temples of the State, and from cosmic archetype to architectural fetish. The narrative interweaves the themes of the dome as image of the Cosmos, religious ico... |
| ARTHIST315 | The Italian Renaissance, or the Art of Success | How come that, even if you have never set foot in Italy, you have heard of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael? What made them so incredibly famous, back then as well as today? This course examines the shooting of those, and other, artists to fame. I... |
| ARTHIST319 | Love at First Sight: Visual Desire, Attraction, and the Pleasures of Art | Why do dating sites rely on photographs? Why do we believe that love is above all a visual force? How is pleasure, even erotic pleasure, achieved through looking? While the psychology of impressions offers some answers, this course uncovers the ways... |
| ARTHIST320 | Superhero Theory | With their fantastic powers, mutable bodies, multiple identities, complicated histories, and visual dynamism, the American superhero has been a rich vehicle for fantasies (and anxieties) for 80+ years across multiple media: comics, film, animation, T... |
| ARTHIST342A | The Architecture of Thought: Artists and Thinkers Design for Themselves | This course investigates houses, hideaways, and studios that artists and thinkers have designed for themselves with varying degrees of self-consciousness, from subconscious images of the self to knowing stages for the contemplative life. Case studies... |
| ARTHIST343A | American Architecture | A historically based understanding of what defines American architecture. What makes American architecture American, beginning with indigenous structures of pre-Columbian America. Materials, structure, and form in the changing American context. How t... |
| ARTHIST347 | Modernism and Modernity | This course focuses on European and American art and visual culture between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. We will begin and end in Paris, exploring visual expressions of modernism as they were shaped by industrialization and urb... |
| ARTHIST351 | Migration and Diaspora in American Art, 1800-Present | This lecture course explores American art through the lens of immigration, exile, and diaspora. We will examine a wide range of work by immigrant artists and craftsmen, paying special attention to issues of race and ethnicity, assimilation, displacem... |
| ARTHIST359B | American Photography Since 1960 | Since the publication of Robert Frank's THE AMERICANS (1958), many distinguished American photographers have emerged, creating a density and power of expression that arguably rivals and even surpasses the extraordinary achievements of earlier photogr... |
| ARTHIST36 | Dangerous Ideas | Ideas matter. Concepts such as equality, tradition, and Hell have inspired social movements, shaped political systems, and dramatically influenced the lives of individuals. Others, like race and urban renewal, play an important role in contemporary d... |
| ARTHIST362 | Visual Arts Cuba (1959 - 2015) | The evolution of culture in post-1959 Cuba, with a strong focus on visual arts in all media and film will be introduced in this course. Historical examples will be discussed through lectures, readings and the presentation of audiovisual material. Stu... |
| ARTHIST364 | History of World Cinema III: Queer Cinema around the World | Provides an overview of cinema from around the world since 1960, highlighting the cultural, political, and economic forces that have shaped various film movements over the last six decades. We study key film movements and national cinemas towards dev... |
| ARTHIST366 | Blackness/Gender/Sexuality & Dis-ease: HIV/AIDS Art History | Since the emergence of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS), artists have been central to the fight against the state's violence and neglect of those with HIV/AIDS. In this story, however, race and gender are marginalized as frameworks that shap... |
| ARTHIST382B | Cultures in Competition: Arts of Song-Era China | The Song dynasty (mid-10th to late 13th c.) was a period of extraordinary diversity and technical accomplishment in Chinese painting, ceramics, calligraphy, architecture and sculpture. Artistic developments emerged within a context of economic dyna... |
| ARTHIST385 | Arts of China in the Early Modern World, 1550-1800 | The dynamic period of late Ming and early Qing dynasty China, roughly 1500-1800 CE, was marked by political crisis and conquest, but also by China's participation in global systems of trade and knowledge exchanges involving porcelain, illustrated boo... |
| ARTHIST388 | Imperial Collecting, Patronage, and Taste in China and Japan | Explores how the imperial courts collected and censored art in China and Japan ca. 1000-1800. The imperial control over art collecting activities shaped the way in which court painters represented the world. The imperial court dictated art creations... |
| ARTHIST388B | From Shanghai Modern to Global Contemporary: Frontiers of Modern Chinese Art | Chinese artistic developments in an era of revolution and modernization, from Shanghai Modern and New National Painting though the politicized art of the Cultural Revolution and post-Mao era re-entry into international arenas. |
| ARTHIST401 | World War Two: Place, Loss, History | A consideration of how the Second World War still goes on today in the form of haunted absences and vivid representations. Studying literature and art in detail, the seminar will center on some of the places where those absences and representations g... |
| ARTHIST405 | Enchanted Images: Medieval Art and Its Sonic Dimension | Explores the relationship between chant and images in medieval art. Examples are sourced from both Byzantium and the Latin West including the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, Ste. Foy at Conques, and Santiago de Compostela... |
| ARTHIST405A | Graduate Pedagogy | This course is designed for graduate students in Art History and Film Studies preparing to work as teaching assistants in the Department of Art and Art History. The seminar will focus on a range of theoretical and practical concerns pertaining to th... |
| ARTHIST406 | The Alchemy of Art: Substance and Transformation in Artistic Practice | This seminar considers materiality and processes of material transformation as core elements of artistic practice and the history of making, largely from Sumer (3rd Millennium BCE) until the Early Modern period (18th Century in the West), but with se... |
| ARTHIST406A | Persian Poetry: Text, Space, and Image | Featuring several sessions led by distinguished artist Ala Ebtekar, this course traces the nexus of word and image across a millennium of Persian poetry. Our aim is to look at how texts have been represented through images and enacted in public perfo... |
| ARTHIST406B | Audiovision in the Medieval Cult of Saints | Medieval art is silent in modern times. Often displayed in sterile museum galleries, it is presented without analytical consideration of the intended envelope of sound, chant, prayer, and recitation. Stripped of this aural atmosphere, the objects hav... |
| ARTHIST407 | The Resurrected Body: Animacy in Medieval Art | This course explores the relationship of spirit and matter in medieval art and architecture, more specifically how the changing appearance of objects and spaces evokes the presence of the metaphysical as glitter, reverberation, and shadow. We will e... |
| ARTHIST407B | The Art of Travel: Medieval Journeys to the Unknown | In many ways, the reasons that medieval people traveled are not unlike our own: to see new sights, make new connections, and return home to regale others with their exploits. Of course, travel was also a more complicated affair, limited to those who... |
| ARTHIST407D | Race and Ethnicity in Premodern Europe | How do historians, art historians, and literary historians of premodern Europe shape their research and their teaching around questions of race? How do current debates on race theory shape our perception of the past and deepen historical inquiry? Thi... |
| ARTHIST407E | Sacred Play: The Material Culture of Christian Festivals | The twentieth-century American poet and esotericist Robert Duncan once called for a return of the medieval calendar, citing its many feast days as an antidote to the modern 'weekend.' Indeed, the medieval Christian calendar was built on festivals, mu... |
| ARTHIST408 | Hagia Sophia | This seminar uncovers the aesthetic principles and spiritual operations at work in Hagia Sophia, the church dedicated to Holy Wisdom in Constantinople. Rather than a static and inert structure, the Great Church emerges as a material body that comes... |
| ARTHIST408A | Abject Subjects and Divine Anamorphosis in Byzantine Art | Entering the space of the church immediately interpellated the medieval subject, transforming him/her into an abject self, marred by sin. This psychological effect of pricking the conscience was enhanced by the architectural panopticon channeled thro... |
| ARTHIST408B | The Art of Medieval Spain: Muslims, Christians, Jews | The seminar reveals the religious and ethnic hybridity of the art medieval Spain, where the lives, material cultures, and artistic practices of Muslims, Christians, and Jews were more intertwined than any other region of the medieval world. We work t... |
| ARTHIST408D | Virginity and Power: The Mother of God and Visions of Empire | Mary has been the most influential female figure in Christianity. Her powers stem from her paradoxical virginal motherhood. Victory over nature means indomitable power. She was perceived as the general of the Christian armies and the protector of ci... |
| ARTHIST409 | Theories of the Image: Byzantium, Islam and the Latin West | This seminar explores the role of images in the three major powers of the medieval Mediterranean: the Umayyads, the Carolingians, and the Byzantines. For each the definition of an image- sura, imago, or eikon respectively-became an important means of... |
| ARTHIST409A | Image, Icon, Idol: Theories and Practices in Byzantium, Islam, and the Latin West | This course explores the phenomenon of iconoclasm, iconophobia, and aniconism as markers of a vast and profound cultural transformation of the Mediterranean in the period from the seventh to the ninth centuries. As the Arabs established the Umayyad... |
| ARTHIST410 | The Masters: Raphael | Five hundred years after Raphael mysteriously died (April 6, 1520), this seminar reflects on his contributions to the arts. Raphael's art is often defined as a negation of death. He painted eternal myths, unearthly saints, and timeless beauties. His... |
| ARTHIST411 | Childish Enthusiasms, Perishable Manias | Universities are sites of gravitas, but what of levitas -- a lighter, more playful category? Does intellectually credible work depend upon a â¿¿critical distanceâ¿ between scholar and object of study? Can we take something seriously without imposing... |
| ARTHIST412 | Desiring Machines: Buildings, Maps, and Clouds | Focus is on early modern machines as tools for experience and action. In their break with Freudian psychoanalysis, French theorists Deleuze and Guattari speak of the machine as a tool of desire and attraction itself as "machinic" rather than desire f... |
| ARTHIST417 | Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth | This course examines global origin myths for architecture, for example cosmic symbolism (e.g. the Mandala/dome), and the magic of technologies (e.g. the "petrification" of the wooden hut in permanent architecture). Examples range from Ethiopian rockc... |
| ARTHIST417B | Architectural Design Theory | This seminar focuses on the key themes, histories, and methods of architectural theory -- a form of architectural practice that establishes the aims and philosophies of architecture. Architectural theory is primarily written, but it also incorporate... |
| ARTHIST418A | Michelangelo: Gateway to Early Modern Italy | Revered as one of the greatest artists in history, Michelangelo Buonarroti's extraordinarily long and prodigious existence (1475-1564) spanned the Renaissance and the Reformation in Italy. The celebrity artist left behind not only sculptures, paintin... |
| ARTHIST421 | Art and Visual Culture in Europe: The 1920s and 30s | This seminar focuses attention on European art institutions, exhibitions, journals, and movements, most of which intersected with one another across national borders during the interwar period, including Cubism, De Stijl, Purism, Art Deco, the Bauhau... |
| ARTHIST424 | Architecture as Performance from Antiquity to the Enlightenment | This seminar examines the nature of architectural representation in the western tradition, from antiquity until the 18th century. It considers the ancient theatre as an icon of representation and the afterlife of the stage building as a model for wes... |
| ARTHIST426 | New Landscapes of China: Ecologies, Media, Imaginaries | An exploration of new forms of landscape art in China's contemporary era, 1980s-present. Studies of new media platforms for landscape related imagery, imagined landscapes, and expanded concepts of landscape in an era of heightened ecological consciou... |
| ARTHIST430 | Cinema and Ideology | The relationship between cinema and ideology from theoretical and historical perspectives, emphasizing Marxist and psychoanalytic approaches. The practice of political filmmaking, and the cinema as an audiovisual apparatus and socio-cultural institu... |
| ARTHIST430B | Image and Text in the Arts in China | An examination of many types of interactions between images and texts in Chinese painting. These include poetic lines inscribed on paintings (as response or as a theme given to the artist to paint), paintings that emulate or transform ancient poetic... |
| ARTHIST431 | Leonardo's World: Science, Technology, and Art | Leonardo da Vinci is emblematic of creativity and innovation. His art is iconic, his inventions legendary. His understanding of nature, the human body, and machines made him a scientist and engineer as well as an artist. His fascination with drawing... |
| ARTHIST440 | Millennium Approaches: The Art of the 1990s | This seminar will examine the art historical legacy of the 1990s, the decade of Bill Clinton, Beavis and Butthead, and Y2K. By placing art in conversation with music, popular culture, and political events, we will explore the dark underbelly of the... |
| ARTHIST441 | Overlooked/Understudied | This seminar focuses on overlooked artists and understudied artworks in the U.S. from the late 19th century to the present. Rather than reclaiming marginality for its own sake, we will consider how the practice of looking at the overlooked art chan... |
| ARTHIST442 | Art History in the First Person | This seminar considers the use of the first person voice in a wide range of writings about art, from fiction to criticism to scholarship. Insofar as graduate students have typically been discouraged from using the first person voice in their scholarl... |
| ARTHIST443 | Networks: A Visual History | Networks are maps for thinking. They illustrate connections while shaping mental journeys, transforming our self-reflexivity along the way. In this course, we will study the metamorphoses of networks, from medieval genealogies to Renaissance cartogra... |
| ARTHIST444 | Counter-Institution: Performance and Institutional Critique | Out of 100 members of the current US Senate, only one has a college degree in arts. In the House of Representatives, the situation is even bleaker: while some ten representatives, out of 435, have experience in some kind of artistic practice (music,... |
| ARTHIST446 | Duchamp Then and Now | This seminar provides an opportunity to explore not only the familiar though endlessly fascinating episodes of Duchamp's career (Nude Descending a Staircase; the readymade; the Large Glass; the Boite-en-valise; the persona of Rrose Sélavy, his films... |
| ARTHIST447 | Russia in Color | This course explores the application, evolution, and perception of color in art, art history, literature, and popular culture - in (Soviet) Russia and emigration. Working closely with the Cantor Arts Center collection at Stanford, this course pairs a... |
| ARTHIST448 | The Body in Film and other Media | In this seminar, we will consider the body on screen as well as the body before the screen i.e. the spectator but also the profilmic body of the actor to examine corporeal performance and reception. The dancing body, the comic body, dead and live bod... |
| ARTHIST450A | Printing Protest: The Artist as Social Critic | This seminar explores the history of print and protest. From books to newspapers to posters, printed materials have generated and circulated political and social messages for centuries. The seminar takes a transhistorical and transnational approach t... |
| ARTHIST451 | Warhol's World | Andy Warhol's art has never before been more widely exhibited, published, or licensed for commercial use, product design, and publication than it is today. For all Warhol's promiscuous visibility and global cachet at the current moment, there is much... |
| ARTHIST453 | Aesthetics and Phenomenology | This course explores central topics in aesthetics where aesthetics is understood both in the narrow sense of the philosophy of art and aesthetic judgment, and in a broader sense as it relates to questions of perception, sensation, and various modes o... |
| ARTHIST456 | What Was Photography? | Digital imaging has largely replaced darkroom work over the past quarter century, yet analog practices still dominate theories of photography. Working closely with the Capital Group Foundation Collection at the Cantor, this class will explore how tho... |
| ARTHIST460 | Decolonizing Theory | The past year has witnessed a remarkable reckoning with systemic racism and embedded structures of inequality, underscoring once again the epistemic violence of the privileging of a white, western, heteropatriarchal intellectual tradition in the acad... |
| ARTHIST465A | Word and Image | What impact do images have on our reading of a text? How do words influence our understanding of images or our reading of pictures? What makes a visual interpretation of written words or a verbal rendering of an image successful? These questions will... |
| ARTHIST466A | Blackness/Gender/Sexuality & Dis-ease: HIV/AIDS Art History | Since the emergence of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS), artists have been central to the fight against the state's violence and neglect of those with HIV/AIDS. In this story, however, race and gender are marginalized as frameworks that shap... |
| ARTHIST469 | Drugs and the Visual Imagination | Drugs have profoundly shaped human culture across space and time, from ancient cave paintings to the psychedelic Sixties and contemporary opioid epidemic. This seminar explores the relationship between visual culture and "drugs," broadly conceived, a... |
| ARTHIST472 | Feminist Avant-Garde Art in Germany and Beyond (1968-2019) | In "Woman's Art: A Manifesto" (1972), the artist, performer and filmmaker Valie Export (1940) proposed the transfer of women's experience into an art context and considered the body "a signal bearer of meaning and communication." In reconceptualizing... |
| ARTHIST473 | Couture Culture | Fashion, art, and representation in Europe and the US between 1860 and today. Beginning with Baudelaire, Impressionism, the rise of the department store and the emergence of haute couture, culminating in the spectacular fashion exhibitions mounted a... |
| ARTHIST474 | Wonder: The Event of Art and Literature | What falls below, or beyond, rational inquiry? How do we write about the awe we feel in front of certain works of art, in reading lines of poetry or philosophy, or watching a scene in a film without ruining the feeling that drove us to write in the f... |
| ARTHIST474A | The Art of the Uncanny | From murderous dolls to evil doppelgängers, humanoid doubles haunt the Western cultural imagination. Beginning with an in-depth look at the contested concept of the "uncanny", the seminar traces the history of anxiety about non-human humans in the We... |
| ARTHIST475 | Media Cultures of the Cold War | The intersection of politics, aesthetics, and new media technologies in the U.S. between the end of WW II and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Topics include the aesthetics of thinking the unthinkable in the wake of the atom bomb; abstract expressionism... |
| ARTHIST481 | Chinese Portraiture | Exploration of recent studies of Chinese portraiture, with a focus on modern and contemporary eras. Portrait practices in treaty port cities; photographic portraits, portraits and modernity; political portraits in public arenas, self-erasure in conte... |
| ARTHIST484 | Material Metonymy: Ceramics and Asian America | This course explores the rich history and contemporary state of ceramic production by Asian American/diasporic makers. It is also about the way history, culture, and emotion are carried by process, technique, and materials. Taught by an art historian... |
| ARTHIST487X | Pictures of the Floating World: Images from Japanese Popular Culture | Printed objects produced during the Edo period (1600-1868), including the Ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating world) and lesser-studied genres such as printed books (ehon) and popular broadsheets (kawaraban). How a society constructs itself through ima... |
| ARTHIST491 | Riot: Visualizing Civil Unrest in the 20th and 21st Centuries | This seminar explores the visual legacy of civil unrest in the United States. Focusing on the 1965 Watts Rebellion, 1992 Los Angeles Riots, 2014 Ferguson Uprising, and 2020 George Floyd Uprisings students will closely examine photographs, television... |
| ARTHIST492 | Romancing the Stone: Crystal Media from Babylon to Superman | This seminar investigates the importance of rock crystal and its imitations as material, medium, and metaphor from antiquity until modernity. The objects examined include rings, reliquaries, lenses, and the Crystal Aesthetic in early twentieth-centur... |
| ARTHIST493 | The Art of Punk: Sound, Aesthetics and Performance | This seminar explores the sonic and visual aesthetics of punk rock since the 1970s. While studying music, videos, zines, and album covers, students will examine the convergence of art with politics among artists, such as Lydia Lunch and Vaginal Davis... |
| ARTHIST494 | Complicating Minimal Art: Racializing, Queering, and Politicizing a Canon | This seminar focuses on the contributions people of color, women, and queer artists have made to Minimalism, a popular and influential style of art defined by sleek geometric forms. Students will critically engage canonical texts, which often privile... |
| ARTHIST497 | American Mystics | This seminar will consider the role of mysticism in American art and culture. Long denigrated as irrational or escapist, mysticism in fact offers a site from which to investigate and challenge entrenched assumptions of linear time, historical positiv... |
| ARTHIST499 | Graduate Workshop: Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies | Required for PhD Minors in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CSRE) and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (FGSS). The Fall Phd Minor Workshop will explore theory and methods in anti-racist and feminist pedagogy through selected readings... |
| ARTHIST5 | Art and Power | Art and Power explores a wide range of artworks from the premodern to the contemporary world to reflect on how art has been shaped by structures of inequality and, conversely, how power relations are represented and reinforced by art. Co-taught by tw... |
| ARTHIST502 | Methods and Debates | This course introduces graduate students to a range of interpretive methods within art history and visual culture studies. In addition to scrutinizing multiple schools of thought and critical debates within the field, the seminar pays particular att... |
| ARTHIST57Q | 10 American Photographs | Preference to sophomores. "The humor, the sadness, the EVERYTHING-ness and American-ness of these pictures!" wrote Jack Kerouac of photographer Robert Frank's iconic collection, The Americans. This seminar takes Kerouac's enthusiasm and applies it to... |
| ARTHIST600 | Art History Bibliography and Library Methods | No Description Set |
| ARTHIST600A | Art History Proseminar | N/A |
| ARTHIST601 | IMBY (In My Backyard): Faculty Scholarship in Art History and Film/Media Studies | This seminar links first- and second-year Ph.D. students to faculty members in Art History and Film/Media Studies at Stanford. On a rotating basis, 5 faculty members in the Department discuss their most recent book or essay, which we will be read in... |
| ARTHIST610 | Teaching Praxis | No Description Set |
| ARTHIST620 | Qualifying Examination Preparation | For Art History Ph.D. candidates. Prerequisite: consent of instructor. |
| ARTHIST640 | Dissertation Proposal Preparation | (Staff) |
| ARTHIST650 | Dissertation Research | (Staff) |
| ARTHIST660 | Independent Study | For graduate students only. Approved independent research projects with individual faculty members. |
| ARTHIST660E | Extended Seminar | May be repeated for credit. (Staff) |
| ARTHIST670 | Dissertation Seminar | For graduate students writing and researching dissertations and dissertation proposals. How to define research projects, write grant proposals, and organize book-length projects. |
| ARTHIST680 | Curricular Practical Training | CPT course required for international students completing degree. Prerequisite: Art History Ph.D. candidate. |
| ARTHIST69SI | Blockchain, NFTs, and the Art World | The most expensive artwork sold in 2021 was an NFT (non-fungible token) created by Beeple, an artist previously unknown to the art world, but well respected by NFT collectors. NFTs, made possible by blockchain, are radically redefining the art world'... |
| ARTHIST802 | TGR Dissertation | TGR Dissertation |
| ARTHIST80N | Looking into Portraits: Identities in Question | This seminar explores multiple aspects of this basically simple visual category - images of particular persons. We look at portraits from diverse eras and cultures, as many as possible in their original media of painting, sculpture, drawings, prints,... |
| ARTSTUDI101 | Art Practice Foundation I | This course is based on the central role of interdisciplinary connections and exchanges in artistic practice. Students will explore the two-dimensional areas of art: painting, drawing, printmaking and photography. They will work on their projects in... |
| ARTSTUDI102 | Art Practice Foundation II | This course is based on the central role of interdisciplinary connections and exchanges in artistic practice. Students study the work of several prominent artists using different three-dimensional media taught in the department's studio program, incl... |
| ARTSTUDI123I | Undergraduate Seminar in Composition: Music, Art, and Intermedia | How do music and art relate? How does one speak for, with, the other? In the past century, Western visual art turned towards abstraction and time-based works. Techniques and processes for interaction between image and sound expanded dramatically. Wha... |
| ARTSTUDI130 | Interactive Art: Making it with Arduino | Students use electronics and software to create kinetic and interactive elements in artwork. No prior knowledge of electronics or software is required. Students learn to program the Arduino, a small easy-to-use microprocessor control unit ( see http:... |
| ARTSTUDI131 | Sound Art I | Acoustic, digital and analog approaches to sound art. Familiarization with techniques of listening, recording, digital processing and production. Required listening and readings in the history and contemporary practice of sound art. (lower level) |
| ARTSTUDI136 | The Portable Studio | With a decrease in available real estate and an increase in virtual real estate via the Internet and new technologies, contemporary artists are developing new means of creative production that do not necessarily require the use of a traditional art s... |
| ARTSTUDI136A | Future Media, Media Archaeologies | Hand-on. Media technologies from origins to the recent past. Students create artworks based on Victorian era discoveries and inventions, early developments in electronic media, and orphaned technologies. Research, rediscover, invent, and create devic... |
| ARTSTUDI139 | Portraiture and Facial Anatomy for Artists | Focus is on the art of portraiture and underlying structures of the face, fundamental anatomical elements such as the skull and muscles of facial expressions, and the intersections between human anatomy and art. Studio sessions incorporate plastic mo... |
| ARTSTUDI140 | Drawing I | Functional anatomy and perspective as they apply to problems of drawing the form in space. Individual and group instruction as students work from still life set-ups, nature, and the model. Emphasis is on the development of critical skills and percept... |
| ARTSTUDI141 | Plein Air Painting | Plein Air (Outdoor) Painting is a wonderful way to build skills, explore your relationship to site, and unlock your voice and hand. We will paint at different locations on and off-campus, learning a variety of painting techniques in changing weather... |
| ARTSTUDI141A | Drawing from Life | The subject of this course is Life as we know it, and artists at all levels will learn to communicate their questions, concerns, and perspectives on paper. The drawing process empowers students to express themselves in their already unique visual lan... |
| ARTSTUDI141S | Drawing Outdoors | In this introductory class, we take drawing out into the world, exploring different environments, techniques, and approaches as we go. The fundamental nuts-and-bolts of basic drawing techniques: light logic, depicting depth and drawing the figure, ar... |
| ARTSTUDI142 | Mixed-Media Drawing: Art & Aesthetics of Social Media | Why do we ¿like¿ the images we do on social media platforms? Do we only respond to images which pique our emotions, beliefs, and desires? Or do specific design elements in these images influence our preferences? This course challenges you to observe... |
| ARTSTUDI142A | A Deep Dive in Artmaking During the Time of Covid-19 | In this hands-on course, we produce a body of work that responds to key concepts examined in contemporary art with a specific emphasis on the impact of artmaking due to Covid-19. During this historical moment, we explore alternative possibilities of... |
| ARTSTUDI144 | PRINTMAKING AND ACTIVISM | Hands-on studio course that introduces students to a variety of printmaking techniques, while exploring printed matter's role in activism in both history and in current events. This course introduces students to printmaking and graphic art techniques... |
| ARTSTUDI145 | Painting I | Introduction to techniques, materials, and vocabulary in oil painting. Still life, landscape, and figure used as subject matter. Emphasis is on painting and drawing from life. (lower level) |
| ARTSTUDI145A | Painting as Storytelling | This is a special class taught by Holt visiting artist John Bankston. Coulter Gallery will provide a unique classroom space, where student work will be displayed in an ongoing exhibition that will grow over time for the public to observe.Using the fu... |
| ARTSTUDI145B | Painting: The Expanded Field | This painting class is presented by Holt Resident artist, Kim Anno and builds on two ideas: The first is that the history of painting is intrinsically linked to the lion's share of contemporary art. The second is that the world is upside down in cli... |
| ARTSTUDI145M | Mural Painting | This rare class explores making a mural in the context of mural history. We will engage the history of mural painting from ancient to contemporary times for an informed production of murals on canvas in one of the painting studios at school. The soci... |
| ARTSTUDI146 | Photoshop and Painting | This is a focused introduction to still life painting and Photoshop. Students will learn to indicate simple form with a single light source and then learn to paint form lights, various forms, and cast shadows. Students will also gain an understanding... |
| ARTSTUDI146M | Painting Off the Wall | This course introduces a range of alternative processes in painting! Using a variety of paints, surfaces, and additives, you will create works which challenge the traditional boundaries of the painted image. We will cover the fundamentals mediums and... |
| ARTSTUDI147 | Art Book Object | This mixed introductory and upper level studio course explores contemporary aesthetic interpretations of the book as an art object. Students learn to use both traditional and digital tools and techniques for creating artists' books, and integrate tho... |
| ARTSTUDI148 | Monotype | Introduction to printmaking using monotype, a graphic art medium used by such artists as Blake, Degas, Gauguin, and Pendergast. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: 140. (lower level). May be repeated 2 times for total of 8 units. |
| ARTSTUDI148A | Introduction to Lithography | The classic technique of printing from limestones and metal plates. Students will learn techniques to draw and etch their imagery onto the stone/plate. The prints will be created in numbered editions. Students will have the opportunity to work in col... |
| ARTSTUDI148B | Introduction to Printmaking | Techniques such as monotype, monoprint, photocopy transfers, linocut and woodcut, intaglio etching. Demonstrations of these techniques. Field trips to local print collections or print exhibitions. (lower level) |
| ARTSTUDI148P | The Hybrid Print | This class explores experimental printmaking methods where digital and traditional practices collide. It focuses on the interchange between conventional and new methods of printmaking, and possibilities for the print beyond paper and the flat picture... |
| ARTSTUDI148S | Printing Without a Press | In this introductory class, we explore printmaking through different techniques and approaches without using a press. This approach allows students to learn techniques to make prints anywhere. Class projects focus on relief, monotypes, rubbings, and... |
| ARTSTUDI149 | Fiber and Wearable Art | In this project-based studio course, students will investigate how wearable art is situated in the conversations around contemporary art. Particular attention will be directed to how artists confront ideas around the body, gender identity, performanc... |
| ARTSTUDI149C | Etching | In this class students will explore various techniques of etching (or intaglio) on zinc plates such as, hard ground, soft ground, aquatint, marbling aquatint and sugar lift, through an electrolytic process that uses no acid but sulfates and very low... |
| ARTSTUDI150N | Queer Sculpture | Outlaw sensibilities, self-made kinships, chosen lineages, utopic futurity, exilic commitment, and rage at institutions that police the borders of the normal these are among the attitudes that make up queer in its contemporary usage. -David J. Getsy.... |
| ARTSTUDI150Q | Queer Sculpture | Outlaw sensibilities, self-made kinships, chosen lineages, utopic futurity, exilic commitment, and rage at institutions that police the borders of the normal these are among the attitudes that make up queer in its contemporary usage. David J. GetsyTh... |
| ARTSTUDI151 | Sculpture I | Traditional and non-traditional approaches to sculpture production through working with materials including wood, metal, and plaster. Conceptual and technical skills, and safe and appropriate use of tools and materials. Impact of material and techniq... |
| ARTSTUDI152 | Soft Sculpture | Textiles lend themselves to be formed and constructed to fit around three-dimensional objects and become a skin to the object within. They can hold materials inside of them, produce imagery, and divide space. This sculpture course investigates fibers... |
| ARTSTUDI153 | Ecology of Materials | Studio-based sculpture course. Materials used in sculpture and environmental concerns surrounding them. Artists concerned with environmental impact and the interconnection of art with other fields. The impact of material and technique upon form and c... |
| ARTSTUDI155 | Social Sculpture | This course investigates the body as sculptural material in order to investigate private and social spaces. Through the development of projects in the realm of social practice, performance, and/or audience interaction, students will explore what it m... |
| ARTSTUDI156 | Installation Art in Time and Space | This hands on studio based sculpture course focuses on developing concepts, and creating a site-specific installation art project. This class will addresses the impact of material and technique upon form and content; therefore understanding the physi... |
| ARTSTUDI158M | Ephemerality: Time in Sculpture and Digital Media | This course is a survey of ephemeral art within the context of sculpture and digital media. Students consider the art object made to last forever, in contrast with the object meant to disintegrate, decompose, or fall apart. Through a series of activi... |
| ARTSTUDI160 | Intro to Digital / Physical Design | Contemporary production processes, both manufacturing and media processes often span the digital and the physical. 3D Depth cameras can scan real world models or movements, which can be manipulated or adjusted digitally, then re-output to the physica... |
| ARTSTUDI160M | Performance Art | In this introductory course, students will learn about the fundamentals of performance art and create their own performance-based projects. We will be making works critically engaging race, culture, gender and identity to evoke self empowerment and s... |
| ARTSTUDI160X | Tele-Reality: Live-Streaming Art | This course examines the field of live-feed media through the lens of art practice, exploring previous experiments and the potential of the medium. Using social media outlets and user-to-user communication platforms - such as Youtube, FaceTime, Twitc... |
| ARTSTUDI161 | Constructing Color | This hands-on introductory level studio art class addresses color through traditional, digital, and experimental mediums. Students learn to compose and communicate via color, experimenting with light, paint, pigments, dye, code, context, and culture.... |
| ARTSTUDI162 | Embodied Interfaces | Our computers, phones and devices see us predominantly as fingers and eyes staring at screens. What would happen if our technology acknowledged more of our rich physical presence and capabilities in its design? How have artists and designers used dif... |
| ARTSTUDI163 | Drawing with Code | This studio course will engage coding practices as drawing tools. What makes a good algorithmic composition? How do we craft rule-sets and parameters to shape an interesting work? What changes if we conceive of still outputs, ongoing processes, or in... |
| ARTSTUDI164M | Art of Resistance: Community Building and Self Preservation through Zine Making | This class explores the history, practice, and technique of creating fanzines as a device for protest or community building. Discussions, projects, and readings focus on the history of self-publishing for the preservation of minority and marginalized... |
| ARTSTUDI165A | Intro to Art & Technology | This introductory studio course provides a practical and conceptual foundation for students interested in digital, electronic, and interactive art. Students learn basic electronics, creative code, and digital art making techniques culminating in phys... |
| ARTSTUDI165M | Practice, Practice, Practice: Cultivating Creative Rituals and Routines | Focuses on the importance of daily rituals and routines through experiments and exercises in various mediums. We divide time between examining those who create daily using meditation, writing, drawing, performance, photography and more to tackle conc... |
| ARTSTUDI166 | Sculptural Screens / Malleable Media | In this mixed intro and upper level studio course, students will experiment with video and computational outputs embedded in physical scenarios. What new physical formats are made possible by contemporary screen and projection-mapping technologies? H... |
| ARTSTUDI167 | Introduction to Animation | Projects in animation techniques including flipbook, cutout/collage, stop-motion such as claymation, pixilation, and puppet animation, rotoscoping, and time-lapse. Films. Computers used as post-production tools, but course does not cover computer-gen... |
| ARTSTUDI167M | Animated By Origins: Africa and The Americas | When working with experimental animation, what can we learn from the Shangaan about compositing, layering and collaging, from the Dogon about counter-rhythms and remixing, or from the Lakota about observation and improvisation? In this class, we will... |
| ARTSTUDI167S | DIY Animation and Video | This course will introduce students to stop-motion animation and video editing techniques for art making, created on cell phones and with freely available software and tools. Students in this class will analyze and create lo-res or "DIY" works design... |
| ARTSTUDI168 | Data as Material | How can data be used as material in art and design projects? Beyond straight-forward ideas of data-visualization, this studio course investigates how we construct meaning from sets of information, and how the construction of those sets determines the... |
| ARTSTUDI169 | Virtual Reality: the possibility and peril of immersive artwork | How can we use virtual reality systems to create powerful, beautiful and socially engaged artworks? Is it possible to use technically sophisticated (and sometimes frustrating) tools to share our unique personal visions? What can working in virtual re... |
| ARTSTUDI170 | Light and Shadow | Through film and dark room instruction, students learn to use a SLR 35-mm camera and to operate manual settings (focus, aperture, shutter speed). They develop an awareness of light and its various properties and possibilities. Students become familia... |
| ARTSTUDI171 | Introduction to Photography | This is an introductory course in photography that explores lens-based practices and the imperative of visual literacy in today's world. The history of photography starts now, in a context of image-making that proceeds all around us with unprecedente... |
| ARTSTUDI171M | The Photography Zine | The course combines the critical analysis and creation of photography and photo zines that explore this specific medium's experimental, social and documentary potential. A zine is a DIY small-circulation, self-published print work of original or appr... |
| ARTSTUDI172 | Art and Teratology | This studio course looks at the relationships between biology and art, particularly as they relate to the topic of "monsters". Rather than addressing the ways in which art has assisted the biological sciences (as in medical illustration), we'll focus... |
| ARTSTUDI172M | Lifecycles in Art | This interdisciplinary hands-on course covers the lifecycle of an Artwork in which we work together as a class to imagine, create, and document a temporary public installation at the Anderson Collection alongside a guest artist. We subsequently publi... |
| ARTSTUDI173A | Introductory Photography: Blue | This introductory course into photography invites students to experience, reflect on and be inspired by images of blue. They will create work using the process of cyanotyping, the low-cost photographic printing technique of a century ago that now fun... |
| ARTSTUDI173E | Cell Phone Photography | The course combines the critical analysis of cell phone photography with the creation of photographic art works that explore this specific medium's experimental, social and documentary potential. The increasing ubiquity of cell phone photography has... |
| ARTSTUDI173M | Beyond Representation: Conceptual Photography | This workshop course expands the perception of images and their interpretation. Is it possible to photograph a dream or an emotion? In a series of lectures, readings, and assignments, we approach photography more as a reference and allusion than a si... |
| ARTSTUDI173S | Cell Phone Photography | The course combines the critical analysis of cell phone photography with the creation of photographic art works that explore this specific medium's experimental, social and documentary potential. The increasing ubiquity of cell phone photography has... |
| ARTSTUDI174 | Interdisciplinary Animation | There is no medium or form of study that animation cannot touch and expand ¿ it is interdisciplinary. At its core, animation enables the practitioner to find inherent life in materials and thereby transform them. Structured in-class experiments cover... |
| ARTSTUDI174B | Creativity in the Age of Facebook: Making Art for and from Networks | This class explores the history, practice and technique of creating art on and for the internet. Discussions, projects and readings focus on the ways in which internet art embodies changing ideas about artistic creation, technology, and interactivity... |
| ARTSTUDI175 | Sound Installation | This class will cover creative, historical and theoretical aspects of sited artworks based in sound. We will create, install and critique new works that use sound with special attention the ways that sound intersects with time, space and architecture... |
| ARTSTUDI175A | Video Installation | Video Installation is a hybrid studio critique and seminar class that explores the potential of cinematic arts within the context of spatial dynamics and formal configuration. The emphasis will be on the conceptual and experimental, rather than a con... |
| ARTSTUDI176 | Installation: Sensorial Concepts | This course considers the history of installation art to develop an expanded understanding through sensorial practices. Students will explore the process and work of contemporary artists working in installation art and discuss the various approaches... |
| ARTSTUDI177 | Video Art | Video holds the ability to bear witness and reconstruct realities of space and time. In this class we study the development of the medium in the 1970s and how artists have since used it as an experimental apparatus. Projects involve creating short vi... |
| ARTSTUDI177M | DIY Movies | Using a 'do it yourself' approach, we will create short films in response to key concepts in cinema. In this course, we will experiment with unconventional and traditional methods of filmmaking that employ a diverse range of media. Together, we will... |
| ARTSTUDI178 | Art and Electronics | Analog electronics and their use in art. Basic circuits for creating mobile, illuminated, and responsive works of art. Topics: soldering; construction of basic circuits; elementary electronics theory; and contemporary electronic art. (lower level) |
| ARTSTUDI179 | Digital Art I | Contemporary electronic art focusing on digital media. Students create works exploring two- and three-dimensional, and time-based uses of the computer in fine art. History and theoretical underpinnings. Common discourse and informative resources for... |
| ARTSTUDI180 | Media Art in the Age of Surveillance | How can media art practices effectively interrogate our data environment? This studio course investigates systems that collect personal data, such as video and consumer databases, by turning their regulatory, contractual and legislative frameworks on... |
| ARTSTUDI180M | Creating Public Art: Concept to Commission | This course introduces the skills needed for creating Public Art. The course develops an appreciation and understanding of public artwork, but focuses on the process of applying to and creating work for public spaces. Students develop an understandin... |
| ARTSTUDI182 | Queered Tech and Speculative Design | What does it mean to `queer' something? Expanding this term's meaning beyond gender and sexuality, `to queer' is to question, challenge, subvert, and reimagine social norms and structures of power. In this course, we build from queer theory to consid... |
| ARTSTUDI182M | Queer Storytelling: We Have Always Been Here | For centuries, storytelling has been used as a way to connect with those around us and to bring others into our inner world. QTBIPOC communities use storytelling as a way to be recognized and carve our own space within a cis-heteronormative society.... |
| ARTSTUDI185 | Interactive Storytelling | This course explores strategies for crafting interactive stories. It takes students from story-teller to game designer to book maker. Through a series of narrative exercises, readings, lectures, and technical demos; students create a story-based game... |
| ARTSTUDI186 | Black Experimental Narrative | How do Black video artists and filmmakers use materials, space, and language to construct the subjective space of storytelling? Black Experimental Narrative surveys the aesthetics, history, and theories that characterize experimental Black cinema and... |
| ARTSTUDI187 | Animation, Memory, and the Self-Portrait | This introductory experimental animation and media course will explore color, images, and the remains of our memories to reconstruct, reimagine, and expand ideas of the Westernized archetype of self-portraiture. Where do fiction and autobiography emb... |
| ARTSTUDI188 | Papermaking: Eastern and Western Traditions | TBD |
| ARTSTUDI19N | An Artist's Life: Diverse Voices and Changing Contexts | This course is designed for students considering an Art Practice minor or major. In this course, students gain confidence and experience connecting to their artistic voices as we explore the myriad possible career paths artists take to build sustaina... |
| ARTSTUDI201 | Art Practice Major Seminar | In this WIM course, students develop writing skills specific to the Art Practice discipline, including Artists Statements, Research Statements, and Grant Proposals, which are required of all professional artists. These written materials are created i... |
| ARTSTUDI215 | Metaspore: The Networked Sensorium | Metaspore is a research initiative founded by conceptual artist Anicka Yi to generate "spores" of social trust and interdisciplinary exploration for the 21st century. Recognizing a planetary paradigm shift fueled by the multivalent advances and crise... |
| ARTSTUDI21AX | Bay Area Arts Immersion | Students explore the arts in San Francisco, the East Bay, the North Bay, the Peninsula, and the South Bay with Kevin B. Chen. The Bay Area Arts Immersion combines field trips with on-campus workshops. |
| ARTSTUDI22AX | Drawing and Creative Writing | Drawing and Creative Writing is a dynamic mix of hands-on drawing studio time and guided writing assignments. This hybrid studio course invites students to experience the perceptual power of drawing and the written word in concert. Drawing and writin... |
| ARTSTUDI230 | Interdisciplinary Art Survey | This course is designed to develop diversity of concepts and strategies within the student's artistic practice. The course includes a survey of artists using different media taught in the department's studio program such as painting, drawing, video... |
| ARTSTUDI231A | Interactive Art: Making it with Arduino | Students use electronics and software to create kinetic and interactive elements in artwork. No prior knowledge of electronics or software is required. Students learn to program the Arduino, a small easy-to-use microprocessor control unit ( see http:... |
| ARTSTUDI236 | Future Media, Media Archaeologies | Hand-on. Media technologies from origins to the recent past. Students create artworks based on Victorian era discoveries and inventions, early developments in electronic media, and orphaned technologies. Research, rediscover, invent, and create devic... |
| ARTSTUDI239 | Intermedia Workshop | Students develop and produce intermedia works. Musical and visual approaches to the conceptualisation and shaping of time-based art. Exploration of sound and image relationship. Study of a wide spectrum of audiovisual practices including experimen... |
| ARTSTUDI23AX | Drawing | Two fun activities on campus during the summer are drawing in the studio and being outdoors. In this Arts Intensive Drawing class students will do both. The course will revolve around composition and layout, expressive mark-making, and basic drawing... |
| ARTSTUDI240 | Drawing II | Intermediate/advanced. Observation, invention, and construction. Development of conceptual and material strategies, with attention to process and purpose. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: 140 or consent of instructor. (upper level) |
| ARTSTUDI241 | Expression in Brush and Ink | In this upper-level drawing class, students learn to use brush and ink as unique expressive means though the study of traditional and contemporary ink paintings, drawing from life as well as free experimentation. Observation, expression and abstracti... |
| ARTSTUDI241A | Drawing from Life | The subject of this course is Life as we know it, and artists at all levels will learn to communicate their questions, concerns, and perspectives on paper. The drawing process empowers students to express themselves in their already unique visual lan... |
| ARTSTUDI242 | Drawing and Creative Writing | A dynamic mix of guided writing and drawing assignments, and self-driven studio time. We will get dirty with the ABCs of drawing while playing with freeing constraints and looking closely into the visual dimension of words. Through a spirited, daily... |
| ARTSTUDI242A | Drawing and Cameras | How do images move, and what does living in the crossfire of so many cameras do to our seeing? What else can we do with drawing, besides becoming perfect cameras? Students respond to their own questions and archives by thinking visually through a ser... |
| ARTSTUDI243 | Anatomy for Artists | Lectures highlight the intersections and influences between human anatomy and art. Studio sessions provide an opportunity for students to immerse in anatomically inspired studio projects. Drawing, mixed media, and some painting mediums will be used d... |
| ARTSTUDI245 | Painting II | Symbolic, narrative, and representational self-portraits. Introduction to the pictorial strategies, painting methods, and psychological imperatives of Dürer, Rembrandt, Cézanne, Kahlo, Beckmann, Schiele, and Munch. Students paint from life, memory, r... |
| ARTSTUDI246 | Individual Work: Drawing and Painting | Prerequisite: student must have taken a course with the instructor and/or completed relevant introductory studio course(s). Instructor consent and completion of the Independent Study Form are required prior to enrollment. All necessary forms are requ... |
| ARTSTUDI247 | Collage | Collage has influenced painting and drawing practices, as well as film and photography through juxtaposition, scale shifts, and reappropriation of the found image. Although many iconic works in this medium date to the 20th century, this course focuse... |
| ARTSTUDI247A | Art Book Object | This mixed introductory and upper level studio course explores contemporary aesthetic interpretations of the book as an art object. Students learn to use both traditional and digital tools and techniques for creating artists' books, and integrate tho... |
| ARTSTUDI248P | The Hybrid Print | This class explores experimental printmaking methods where digital and traditional practices collide. It focuses on the interchange between conventional and new methods of printmaking, and possibilities for the print beyond paper and the flat picture... |
| ARTSTUDI249 | Major Capstone | This course aims to prepare senior Art Practice majors for future artistic careers by developing rigorous practice and critical research and presentation skills. Class engagement includes informal discussions, written reflections, and critiques with... |
| ARTSTUDI250 | Individual Work: Sculpture | Prerequisite: student must have taken a course with the instructor and/or completed relevant introductory studio course(s). Instructor consent and completion of the Independent Study Form are required prior to enrollment. All necessary forms are requ... |
| ARTSTUDI251 | Mold Making + Casting | This sculpture course offers instruction in various methods of mold making including one and two part plaster molds, one time throw away molds, flexible molds, mother molds, simple body casts and casting in hydrocal plaster, wax, and clay. Students u... |
| ARTSTUDI252 | Sculpture II | Builds upon 151. Installation and non-studio pieces. Impact of material and technique upon form and content; the physical and expressive possibilities of diverse materials. Historical and contemporary forming methods provide a theoretical basis for t... |
| ARTSTUDI254 | Kinetic Sculpture | This course is focused on developing a practical, hands on understanding of kinetic mechanisms applied to objects and materials in sculpture and installation. Class time will take the form of lectures and technical demos, and hands-on labs where you... |
| ARTSTUDI256 | Advanced Installation | This hands on studio based sculpture course focuses on developing concepts, and creating a site-specific installation art project. This class will addresses the impact of material and technique upon form and content; therefore understanding the physi... |
| ARTSTUDI257 | Advanced Sculpture Seminar | Students engage in professional sculpture (studio) practices that prepare them to apply and extend the skills, methods and techniques they have learned in previous courses, including technical and conceptual skills in woodworking, metal working, mold... |
| ARTSTUDI258 | Resisting Monuments at the End of the World | This hands-on contemporary art and sculpture class explores falling monuments and rising memorials around the world. Departing from individualistic hero narratives of traditional monuments we address collective agency and new forms of shared power. S... |
| ARTSTUDI261 | Individual Work: Emerging Practices in Design & Technology | Prerequisite: student must have taken a course with the instructor and/or completed relevant introductory studio course(s). Instructor consent and completion of the Independent Study Form are required prior to enrollment. All necessary forms are requ... |
| ARTSTUDI262 | Performing with Digital Media | This interdisciplinary studio course will explore time-based media through the practice of live visual performance with an emphasis on digital means of production. Through a series of individual and collaborative assignments, students will learn to u... |
| ARTSTUDI266 | Sculptural Screens / Malleable Media | In this mixed intro and upper level studio course, students will experiment with video and computational outputs embedded in physical scenarios. What new physical formats are made possible by contemporary screen and projection-mapping technologies? H... |
| ARTSTUDI267 | Emerging Technology Studio | This course is an upper level studio course featuring a different guest artist each year whose artwork makes use of emerging technologies. Course material will be based on the guest artist's area of expertise. Past examples include artists whose work... |
| ARTSTUDI270 | Advanced Photography Seminar | Students interested in taking this class should apply with a project proposal they aim to develop over the length of the course. Since these projects require a considerable amount of independent work outside of class time, each student must submit a... |
| ARTSTUDI270A | CREATING EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA | This course is dedicated to creating at the crossroads of art and cinema. This experimental video art course will address practical filmmaking, taking as its baseline assumption the notion that experimentation is crucial to overcoming encrusted socia... |
| ARTSTUDI271A | Intermediate Photography: On Queerness | In this studio course, we explore potentiality and experimentation in contemporary photography to challenge conventions, question definitions, and expand meanings. We approach photography as a strategic tool to subvert, intervene, resist, and bridge... |
| ARTSTUDI271B | Intermediate Photography: Composite and Time | This course introduces students to the use of several techniques and methodologies that combine multiple images into a single composite photograph. Students develop skills to pre-visualize and plan the work they envision through high definition range... |
| ARTSTUDI271C | Intermediate Photography: Performance | This course introduces students to the role performance can play in a lens-based practice, centered in the belief that art can be defined through gesture as well as object. We study the work of various prominent artists to gauge their influence and t... |
| ARTSTUDI271D | Intermediate Photography: Constructed Image | This course begins with the idea that all photographs are constructed. Students explore conceptual photographic practices through the frame of images as constructs, examining the various choices and expanded practices involved in the process of creat... |
| ARTSTUDI271E | Intermediate Photography: New Landscapes | This course investigates notions of landscape photography by expanding upon its traditional, geography-based paradigm of pictorial beauty. Students explore how the perception and representation of landscapes relate to physical and cognitive mapping,... |
| ARTSTUDI271F | Intermediate Photography: DIY Publishing | The book has been a form to share photographs since the medium's earliest days, offering photographers a way to present their work outside of exhibitions. Developments in digital technology have democratized access to print production, leading to a p... |
| ARTSTUDI272 | Individual Work: Photography | Prerequisite: student must have taken a course with the instructor and/or completed relevant introductory studio course(s). Instructor consent and completion of the Independent Study Form are required prior to enrollment. All necessary forms are requ... |
| ARTSTUDI273 | Individual Work: Experimental Media | Prerequisite: student must have taken a course with the instructor and/or completed relevant introductory studio course(s). Instructor consent and completion of the Independent Study Form are required prior to enrollment. All necessary forms are requ... |
| ARTSTUDI275 | Photography II: Digital | Students continue to use DLSR cameras, with an ongoing emphasis on operating manual settings (focus, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, color temp/ white balance). They are taught intermediate-level digital printing (in color) using large-format printers.... |
| ARTSTUDI277 | Intermediate Photography Seminar | This is a mentorship class designed to expand on personal projects in photography. Students engage in professional photographic practices that prepare them to apply and expand upon the skills, methods and techniques they have learned in previous cour... |
| ARTSTUDI277A | Advanced Video | Video, criticism, and contemporary media theory investigating the time image. Students create experimental video works, addressing the integration of video with traditional art media such as sculpture and painting. Non-linearity made possible by Inte... |
| ARTSTUDI278 | Photography II: Black and White | Students are introduced to and provided with medium-format film cameras, which they learn to use with an ongoing emphasis on operating manual settings (focus, aperture, shutter speed). Students are introduced to metering for film using hand-held ligh... |
| ARTSTUDI280 | Media Art in the Age of Surveillance | How can media art practices effectively interrogate our data environment? This studio course investigates systems that collect personal data, such as video and consumer databases, by turning their regulatory, contractual and legislative frameworks on... |
| ARTSTUDI286 | Intermediate Photography: Portraiture | This course explores contemporary practices of portrait photography, examining its history and discourse on representations of race, gender, class, and sexuality. We look at the complexities of portraiture in terms of skill sets and processes, aesthe... |
| ARTSTUDI287 | Animation II | This course expands upon techniques and storytelling methods learned in Animation I. We continue to survey the field of independent animation primarily through short films and other social digital platforms. As our media consumption is increasingly c... |
| ARTSTUDI288 | Intermediate Photography: Documentary | The documentary image has constituted a keystone of the photographic medium since the earliest days of its existence. In this class, we approach documentary photography from a contemporary perspective and in a context of active engagement with the wo... |
| ARTSTUDI290 | Curricular Practical Training | CPT course required for international students completing degree. |
| ARTSTUDI295 | Visual Arts Internship | Professional experience in a field related to the Visual Arts for six to ten weeks. Internships may include work for galleries, museums, art centers, and art publications. Students arrange the internship, provide a confirmation letter from the hostin... |
| ARTSTUDI297 | Honors Thesis Exhibition | May be repeated for credit. |
| ARTSTUDI297S | AP HONORS SEMINAR | Led by the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Art Practice, the Honors Seminar provides students the opportunity to create projects for the honors exhibition and complete the written thesis under the guidance of faculty advisors, and assisted with... |
| ARTSTUDI310B | Directed Reading: Studio | No Description Set |
| ARTSTUDI310C | Directed Reading: Studio | No Description Set |
| ARTSTUDI32XSI | Sustainable Design and Practice in Native American Architecture | This lecture series highlights and celebrates Native American design practices, both in architectural design and in materials use. As practicing Indigenous architects and designers, the guest speakers aim to share how Indigineity and Nativeness influ... |
| ARTSTUDI342 | MFA Project: Tutorial | Students construct an individual tutorial with an instructor selected from the studio art faculty, including visiting artists. The student must take tutorials with at least three different faculty members during the six-quarter program. Prior approv... |
| ARTSTUDI342A | MFA: Object Seminar | Weekly seminars, studio practice, and individual tutorials. Student work is critiqued on issues of identity, presentation, and the development of coherent critical language. May be repeated for credit. Restricted to M.F.A. studio students only. |
| ARTSTUDI342B | MFA: Concept Seminar | Weekly seminars, studio practice, and individual tutorials. Modes of conceptualization to broaden the base of cognitive and generative processes. May be repeated for credit. Restricted to M.F.A. studio students only. |
| ARTSTUDI342C | M.F.A Seminar | Professional practices; preparation of documentation; exhibition and presentation. Restricted to M.F.A. studio students only. May be repeat for credit total units allowed 45 and total completion 6 |
| ARTSTUDI350A | Art & Design I: History and Theory | This two part graduate level course is required for all first year JPD students (both MFA and ME students), and open to all MFA Art Practice students. The first quarter of the course is a seminar, which focuses on the history of design practices and... |
| ARTSTUDI390 | Curricular Practical Training | CPT course required for international students completing degree. |
| ARTSTUDI40SI | Introduction to Art in Entertainment | Art and artists play a huge role in the production of video games, films, television shows, comics, and other forms of popular visual media. In this course, students are introduced to the different roles art has in the realm of entertainment. Over th... |
| ARTSTUDI801 | TGR Project | No Description Set |
| FILMEDIA100A | History of World Cinema I, 1895-1929 | Provides an overview of cinema made around the globe between its emergence as a mass medium in the late-19th century, and the rise of synchronized sound around 1930. This is a fecund period in which the 'language' of film was at once established, cha... |
| FILMEDIA100B | History of World Cinema II: The Films of Ernst Lubitsch | Provides an overview of cinema made around the world between 1930 and 1960, highlighting technical, cultural, political, and economic forces that shaped mid-twentieth-century cinema. We study key film movements and national cinemas towards developing... |
| FILMEDIA100C | History of World Cinema III: Queer Cinema around the World | Provides an overview of cinema from around the world since 1960, highlighting the cultural, political, and economic forces that have shaped various film movements over the last six decades. We study key film movements and national cinemas towards dev... |
| FILMEDIA101 | Close Cinematic Analysis - Caste, Sexuality, and Religion in Indian Media | India is the world's largest producer of films in over 20 languages, and Bollywood is often its most visible avatar, especially on US university curricula. This course will introduce you to a range of media from the Indian subcontinent across commerc... |
| FILMEDIA102 | Theories of the Moving Image: The Technologically Mediated Image | This course examines influential theories of film and media from the early twentieth century to the present. Prerequisites: FILMEDIA 4. |
| FILMEDIA107N | Documentary Film: Telling it Like it Is? | Documentary films have become a "lingua franca," thanks to ubiquitous streaming services and our devotion to screen time. Offering compelling stories, intriguing "characters," and a lingering resonance, they often function as a Rorschach test that el... |
| FILMEDIA110N | Coming-of-Age Movies | Physical changes, religious rituals, and new legal rights and responsibilities outwardly mark the transition from childhood to adulthood. They imply inward transformation such as loss of innocence and maturation of perspective. This combination of in... |
| FILMEDIA112 | Women in Contemporary French Cinema | Women as objects and subjects of the voyeuristic gaze inherent to cinema. The evolution of female characters, roles, actresses, directors in the French film industry from the sexual liberation to #metoo. Women as archetypes, icones, images, or as age... |
| FILMEDIA114 | Reading Comics | The modern medium of comics throughout its 150 year history (mostly North American). The flexibility of the medium explored through the genres of humorous and dramatic comic strips, superheroes, undergrounds, independents, kids and comics, journalism... |
| FILMEDIA115 | Documentary Issues and Traditions | Issues include objectivity/subjectivity, ethics, censorship, representation, reflexivity, responsibility to the audience, and authorial voice. Parallel focus on form and content. |
| FILMEDIA11Q | Art in the Metropolis | This seminar is offered in conjunction with the annual "Arts Immersion" trip to New York that takes place over the spring break and is organized by the Stanford Arts Institute (SAI). Enrollment in this course a requirement for taking part in the trip... |
| FILMEDIA120 | Superhero Theory | With their fantastic powers, mutable bodies, multiple identities, complicated histories, and visual dynamism, the American superhero has been a rich vehicle for fantasies (and anxieties) for 80+ years across multiple media: comics, film, animation, T... |
| FILMEDIA125 | Horror Film | From its beginnings, the cinema evinced an affinity with the phantom realm of specters, ghosts, and supernatural beings. Not only does horror have deep and diverse roots in the international history of film; it emerges as a trope of film itself, as a... |
| FILMEDIA129 | Animation and the Animated Film | The fantasy of an image coming to life is ancient, but not until the cinema was this fantasy actualized. The history of the movies begins with optical toys, and contemporary cinema is dominated by films that rely on computer animation. This course co... |
| FILMEDIA131 | Is Visibility a Trap (Door)? Gender, Race, and the Stakes of Representation | This course examines key theoretical debates surrounding the fraught political and epistemological potential of visibility and representation. Who gets to set the premises for recognition, and how do sexuality, gender, and race affect the ways in wh... |
| FILMEDIA132A | Bollywood and Beyond: An Introduction to Indian Cinema | This course will provide an overview of cinema from India, the world's largest producer of films. We will trace the history of Indian cinema from the silent era, through the studio period, to state-funded art filmmaking to the contemporary production... |
| FILMEDIA135 | Around the World in Ten Films | This is an introductory-level course about the cinema as a global language. We will undertake a comparative study of select historical and contemporary aspects of international cinema, and explore a range of themes pertaining to the social, cultural,... |
| FILMEDIA137 | Love in the Time of Cinema | Romantic coupling is at the heart of mainstream film narratives around the world. Through a range of film cultures, we will examine cinematic intimacies and our own mediated understandings of love and conjugality formed in dialog with film and other... |
| FILMEDIA145 | Politics and Aesthetics in East European Cinema | From 1945 to the mid-80s, emphasizing Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, and Yugoslav contexts. The relationship between art and politics; postwar establishment of film industries; and emergence of national film movements such as the Polish school, Cz... |
| FILMEDIA152 | Hollywood/Bollywood: The Musical Two Ways | A comparative approach to the musical as Hollywood genre and as fundamental mode in Bollywood (where even horror movies have song-and-dance sequences!). The pleasurable interplay among song, dance, and screen directs us to the interplay of cultural i... |
| FILMEDIA153 | Queer Cinema in the World | In his manifesto, 'A Queer('s) Cinema,' Manuel Betancourt declares, queer cinema is global cinema, queer cinema is not universal, is intersectional, is an aesthetic sensibility. Through film and video from Kenya, Hong Kong, India, France, The Dominic... |
| FILMEDIA165B | American Style and the Rhetoric of Fashion | Focus on the visual culture of fashion, especially in an American context. Topics include: the representation of fashion in different visual media (prints, photographs, films, window displays, and digital images); the relationship of fashion to its h... |
| FILMEDIA173 | Digital and Interactive Media | This course introduces a variety of ways of thinking about digital and interactive media. As examples, we will think about the impact of algorithmic processes on cinema and other moving-image media; we will consider the relation of narrative to inter... |
| FILMEDIA178 | History of Latin American Revolutions | This course will examine the causes and consequences of Latin American Revolutions of the 20th century. It will focus on Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Chile, and Bolivia. We will bring these revolutions and experiments in social change under an... |
| FILMEDIA210A | Documentary Perspectives: The Essay Film | In this class we will explore the essay film as a distinct genre of documentary filmmaking. The course is organized as an inquiry into the nature of the essay film, its historical and formal development, as well as a survey of the major works that ma... |
| FILMEDIA210B | Documentary Perspectives: Observational Cinema | Historical, political, aesthetic, and formal developments of documentary film. Subjectivity, ethics, censorship, representation, reflexivity, responsibility to the audience, and authorial voice. |
| FILMEDIA211N | Childish Enthusiasms and Perishable Manias | This course has a simple premise: Effective scholarship need not suck the joy from the world. G. K. Chesterton once wrote that 'it is the duty of every poet, and even of every critic, to dance in respectful imitation of the child.' What could it mean... |
| FILMEDIA216 | Media and the Environment | How are environmental issues represented in various media, from cinema and television to videogames, VR, and experimental art? And how are these media themselves involved in environmental change? In this course, we look at media and the environment a... |
| FILMEDIA221 | Out of Order | This course explores the rise of nonlinear approaches to storytelling in global narrative cinema in the second half of the twentieth century. We will begin with Rashomon and end somewhere around Inception, also considering examples from Hong Kong, Se... |
| FILMEDIA223 | How to Watch TV | 'How to watch TV' may seem like the most obvious thing in the world. Yet when we look at the historical development of television as a technological, social, and cultural form, we find that people have engaged with it in a variety of different ways.... |
| FILMEDIA224 | Films of Stanley Kubrick | This seminar will explore the cinema of Stanley Kubrick, a widely acclaimed film auteur known for works such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, and Barry Lyndon. The seminar will focus on close analysis of practically all of Kubrick's film... |
| FILMEDIA234 | Media Theory and the Sea | This seminar serves as an introduction to media theory by turning to the sea as a medium. Designed for third- and fourth-year German majors, the course explores the way the ocean has served as a constant vehicle for poetic and philosophical reflectio... |
| FILMEDIA245B | Eastern European Cinema | From 1945 to the mid-80s, emphasizing Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, and Yugoslav contexts. The relationship between art and politics; postwar establishment of film industries; and emergence of national film movements such as the Polish school, Cz... |
| FILMEDIA253 | Aesthetics and Phenomenology | This course explores central topics in aesthetics where aesthetics is understood both in the narrow sense of the philosophy of art and aesthetic judgment, and in a broader sense as it relates to questions of perception, sensation, and various modes o... |
| FILMEDIA256 | Horror Comics | This seminar will explore the vast array of horror comics. How does horror work in comics, as distinct from prose and cinema? How and why are non-moving images scary? The different narrational strategies of short stories, self-contained works, and co... |
| FILMEDIA256Q | Horror Comics | This seminar will explore the vast array of horror comics. How does horror work in comics, as distinct from prose and cinema? How and why are non-moving images scary? The different narrational strategies of short stories, self-contained works, and co... |
| FILMEDIA257 | Black Contemporary Filmmakers | Despite the systemic inequalities of the Hollywood system, there is a robust, stylistically diverse cohort of African-American writer/directors at work, including Barry Jenkins, Ava DuVernay, and Ryan Coogler. Jenkins' films (Moonlight, If Beale Stre... |
| FILMEDIA264B | Starstuff: Space and the American Imagination | Course on the history of twentieth and twenty-first century American images of space and how they shape conceptions of the universe. Covers representations made by scientists and artists, as well as scientific fiction films, TV, and other forms of po... |
| FILMEDIA270 | German Media Theory | In this seminar, we will interrogate major currents in media-theoretical work from the German-speaking world from the 1980s to today. Starting from the surprisingly controversial term 'German media theory' itself, which has been described as 'neither... |
| FILMEDIA280 | Curricular Practical Training | CPT course required for international students completing degree. Students must obtain a new I-20 with CPT authorization prior to the employment start date. Professional experience in a field related to the cinematic arts (film, television, media) fo... |
| FILMEDIA281 | Contemporary Asian Filmmakers | Films and moving image works by contemporary filmmakers from Asia, including Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Topics include explorations of national and local histories, aesthetics of slowness and duration, and cross... |
| FILMEDIA290 | Movies and Methods: The Films Of Vincente Minnelli | Working at MGM, the most opulent of Hollywood studios, Vincente Minnelli epitomized the studio system, and yet his films remain idiosyncratic, distinct, and personal. He is thus a curious figure within the history of auteurist study. Minnelli's work... |
| FILMEDIA291 | Riot: Visualizing Civil Unrest in the 20th and 21st Centuries | This seminar explores the visual legacy of civil unrest in the United States. Focusing on the 1965 Watts Rebellion, 1992 Los Angeles Riots, 2014 Ferguson Uprising, and 2020 George Floyd Uprisings students will closely examine photographs, television... |
| FILMEDIA295 | Films & Media Studies Internship | Professional experience in a field related to the cinematic arts (film, television, media) for six to ten weeks. Internships may include work for production companies, producers, studios, networks, films, television series, directors, screenwriters,... |
| FILMEDIA297 | Honors Thesis Writing | May be repeated for credit. |
| FILMEDIA299 | Independent Study: Film and Media Studies | Prerequisite: student must have taken a course with the instructor and/or completed relevant introductory course(s). Instructor consent and completion of the Independent Study Form are required prior to enrollment. All necessary forms and payment ar... |
| FILMEDIA300A | History of World Cinema I, 1895-1929 | Provides an overview of cinema made around the globe between its emergence as a mass medium in the late-19th century, and the rise of synchronized sound around 1930. This is a fecund period in which the 'language' of film was at once established, cha... |
| FILMEDIA300B | History of World Cinema II: The Films of Ernst Lubitsch | Provides an overview of cinema made around the world between 1930 and 1960, highlighting technical, cultural, political, and economic forces that shaped mid-twentieth-century cinema. We study key film movements and national cinemas towards developing... |
| FILMEDIA300C | History of World Cinema III: Queer Cinema around the World | Provides an overview of cinema from around the world since 1960, highlighting the cultural, political, and economic forces that have shaped various film movements over the last six decades. We study key film movements and national cinemas towards dev... |
| FILMEDIA301 | Close Cinematic Analysis - Caste, Sexuality, and Religion in Indian Media | India is the world's largest producer of films in over 20 languages, and Bollywood is often its most visible avatar, especially on US university curricula. This course will introduce you to a range of media from the Indian subcontinent across commerc... |
| FILMEDIA302 | Theories of the Moving Image: The Technologically Mediated Image | This course examines influential theories of film and media from the early twentieth century to the present. Prerequisites: FILMEDIA 4. |
| FILMEDIA306 | Media and Mediums | What is a medium? This course starts from the assumption that the answer to this question is not as obvious as it might at first appear. Clearly, we know some media when we see them: radio, film, and television are in many ways paradigmatic media of... |
| FILMEDIA307 | Close Analysis: Film Sound | The close analysis of film, with an emphasis on sound, music, and audio-visuality. Films from various historical periods, national cinemas, directors, and genres. Prerequisite: FILMSTUD 4 or equivalent. Recommended: ARTHIST 1 or FILMSTUD 102. Course... |
| FILMEDIA314 | Reading Comics | The modern medium of comics throughout its 150 year history (mostly North American). The flexibility of the medium explored through the genres of humorous and dramatic comic strips, superheroes, undergrounds, independents, kids and comics, journalism... |
| FILMEDIA315 | Documentary Issues and Traditions | Issues include objectivity/subjectivity, ethics, censorship, representation, reflexivity, responsibility to the audience, and authorial voice. Parallel focus on form and content. |
| FILMEDIA320 | Superhero Theory | With their fantastic powers, mutable bodies, multiple identities, complicated histories, and visual dynamism, the American superhero has been a rich vehicle for fantasies (and anxieties) for 80+ years across multiple media: comics, film, animation, T... |
| FILMEDIA325 | Horror Film | From its beginnings, the cinema evinced an affinity with the phantom realm of specters, ghosts, and supernatural beings. Not only does horror have deep and diverse roots in the international history of film; it emerges as a trope of film itself, as a... |
| FILMEDIA329 | Animation and the Animated Film | The fantasy of an image coming to life is ancient, but not until the cinema was this fantasy actualized. The history of the movies begins with optical toys, and contemporary cinema is dominated by films that rely on computer animation. This course co... |
| FILMEDIA332A | Bollywood and Beyond: An Introduction to Indian Cinema | This course will provide an overview of cinema from India, the world's largest producer of films. We will trace the history of Indian cinema from the silent era, through the studio period, to state-funded art filmmaking to the contemporary production... |
| FILMEDIA335 | Around the World in Ten Films | This is an introductory-level course about the cinema as a global language. We will undertake a comparative study of select historical and contemporary aspects of international cinema, and explore a range of themes pertaining to the social, cultural,... |
| FILMEDIA337 | Love in the Time of Cinema | Romantic coupling is at the heart of mainstream film narratives around the world. Through a range of film cultures, we will examine cinematic intimacies and our own mediated understandings of love and conjugality formed in dialog with film and other... |
| FILMEDIA345 | Politics and Aesthetics in East European Cinema | From 1945 to the mid-80s, emphasizing Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, and Yugoslav contexts. The relationship between art and politics; postwar establishment of film industries; and emergence of national film movements such as the Polish school, Cz... |
| FILMEDIA352 | Hollywood/Bollywood: The Musical Two Ways | A comparative approach to the musical as Hollywood genre and as fundamental mode in Bollywood (where even horror movies have song-and-dance sequences!). The pleasurable interplay among song, dance, and screen directs us to the interplay of cultural i... |
| FILMEDIA353 | Queer Cinema in the World | In his manifesto, 'A Queer('s) Cinema,' Manuel Betancourt declares, queer cinema is global cinema, queer cinema is not universal, is intersectional, is an aesthetic sensibility. Through film and video from Kenya, Hong Kong, India, France, The Dominic... |
| FILMEDIA38 | Comics: More than Words | This research unit looks at Comics from a transnational, cross-cultural, and interdisciplinary perspective. Each quarter we organize a series of lectures, reading sessions, and workshops around a main topic. Some previous topics that we have explored... |
| FILMEDIA4 | Introduction to Film Study | Introduction to Film Study introduces you to film as art, as entertainment, a field of study, and an everyday cultural practice. This course enables you to analyze films in terms of their formal elements, themes, and narrative structures. You learn t... |
| FILMEDIA406 | Montage | Graduate seminar in film aesthetics. Theoretical and practical approaches to editing/montage. Stylistic, semiotic, epistemological, and ideological functions of montage considered in film-historical contexts including: development of the continuity s... |
| FILMEDIA408 | Attention | Throughout the twentieth century, cinema has been theorized as a machine that molds the senses and produces new forms of attention. This course delves into debates about the impact of audio-visual media on a history of attention, from the rise of rep... |
| FILMEDIA410A | Documentary Perspectives: The Essay Film | In this class we will explore the essay film as a distinct genre of documentary filmmaking. The course is organized as an inquiry into the nature of the essay film, its historical and formal development, as well as a survey of the major works that ma... |
| FILMEDIA410B | Documentary Perspectives: Observational Cinema | Historical, political, aesthetic, and formal developments of documentary film. Subjectivity, ethics, censorship, representation, reflexivity, responsibility to the audience, and authorial voice. |
| FILMEDIA411 | Childish Enthusiasms, Perishable Manias | Universities are sites of gravitas, but what of levitas -- a lighter, more playful category? Does intellectually credible work depend upon a â¿¿critical distanceâ¿ between scholar and object of study? Can we take something seriously without imposing... |
| FILMEDIA414 | Methods and Theories in Film and Media Studies | This seminar offers an overview of methods in film and media studies. It covers key debates and interventions that have shaped the field, such as the paradigm of classical cinema, historical reception studies, genre and authorship, political moderni... |
| FILMEDIA416 | Media and the Environment | How are environmental issues represented in various media, from cinema and television to videogames, VR, and experimental art? And how are these media themselves involved in environmental change? In this course, we look at media and the environment a... |
| FILMEDIA422 | Sergei Eisenstein: Theory, Practice, Method | The work of Sergei Eisenstein has been central to the study of film since before his death in 1948, but some of his most significant work was first published only in the new millennium and is generating rich interdisciplinary scholarship. This semina... |
| FILMEDIA424 | Films of Stanley Kubrick | This seminar will explore the cinema of Stanley Kubrick, a widely acclaimed film auteur known for works such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, and Barry Lyndon. The seminar will focus on close analysis of practically all of Kubrick's film... |
| FILMEDIA429 | Animation and the Animated Film | The fantasy of an image coming to life is ancient, but not until the cinema was this fantasy actualized. The history of the movies begins with optical toys, and contemporary cinema is dominated by films that rely on computer animation. This course co... |
| FILMEDIA430 | Cinema and Ideology | The relationship between cinema and ideology from theoretical and historical perspectives, emphasizing Marxist and psychoanalytic approaches. The practice of political filmmaking, and the cinema as an audiovisual apparatus and socio-cultural institu... |
| FILMEDIA445B | Eastern European Cinema | From 1945 to the mid-80s, emphasizing Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, and Yugoslav contexts. The relationship between art and politics; postwar establishment of film industries; and emergence of national film movements such as the Polish school, Cz... |
| FILMEDIA448 | The Body in Film and other Media | In this seminar, we will consider the body on screen as well as the body before the screen i.e. the spectator but also the profilmic body of the actor to examine corporeal performance and reception. The dancing body, the comic body, dead and live bod... |
| FILMEDIA450 | Screened Thought | This seminar considers the varied ways film represents thought. What forms of thinking do films enable and forestall? How do particular films, and film genres, activate or elide characters' cognition, interiority, self-consciousness, reflection, etc.... |
| FILMEDIA453 | Aesthetics and Phenomenology | This course explores central topics in aesthetics where aesthetics is understood both in the narrow sense of the philosophy of art and aesthetic judgment, and in a broader sense as it relates to questions of perception, sensation, and various modes o... |
| FILMEDIA460 | Decolonizing Theory | The past year has witnessed a remarkable reckoning with systemic racism and embedded structures of inequality, underscoring once again the epistemic violence of the privileging of a white, western, heteropatriarchal intellectual tradition in the acad... |
| FILMEDIA465 | Post War American Avant-Garde Film | Permission of instructor required for enrollment. |
| FILMEDIA469 | Drugs and the Visual Imagination | Drugs have profoundly shaped human culture across space and time, from ancient cave paintings to the psychedelic Sixties and contemporary opioid epidemic. This seminar explores the relationship between visual culture and "drugs," broadly conceived, a... |
| FILMEDIA470 | German Media Theory | In this seminar, we will interrogate major currents in media-theoretical work from the German-speaking world from the 1980s to today. Starting from the surprisingly controversial term 'German media theory' itself, which has been described as 'neither... |
| FILMEDIA481 | Contemporary Asian Filmmakers | Films and moving image works by contemporary filmmakers from Asia, including Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Topics include explorations of national and local histories, aesthetics of slowness and duration, and cross... |
| FILMEDIA490 | Movies and Methods: The Films Of Vincente Minnelli | Working at MGM, the most opulent of Hollywood studios, Vincente Minnelli epitomized the studio system, and yet his films remain idiosyncratic, distinct, and personal. He is thus a curious figure within the history of auteurist study. Minnelli's work... |
| FILMEDIA491 | Riot: Visualizing Civil Unrest in the 20th and 21st Centuries | This seminar explores the visual legacy of civil unrest in the United States. Focusing on the 1965 Watts Rebellion, 1992 Los Angeles Riots, 2014 Ferguson Uprising, and 2020 George Floyd Uprisings students will closely examine photographs, television... |
| FILMEDIA4S | Language of Film | This course familiarizes students with various elements of film language (cinematography, editing, sound, etc.) and introduces them to a range of approaches to cinematic analysis (authorship, genre, close formal reading, socio-historical consideratio... |
| FILMEDIA50Q | The Video Essay: Writing with Video about Media and Culture | In this seminar, we explore what it means to 'write with video,' and we learn to make effective and engaging video essays. Specifically, we examine strategies for communicating through video, and we conduct hands-on exercises using digital video edit... |
| FILMEDIA6 | Media and Mediums | What is a medium? This course starts from the assumption that the answer to this question is not as obvious as it might at first appear. Clearly, we know some media when we see them: radio, film, and television are in many ways paradigmatic media of... |
| FILMEDIA620 | Qualifying Examination Preparation | For Art History Ph.D. candidates. Prerequisite: consent of instructor. |
| FILMEDIA660 | Independent Study | For graduate students only. Approved independent research projects with individual faculty members. |
| FILMEDIA660E | Extended Seminar | May be repeated for credit. (Staff) |
| FILMEDIA680 | Curricular Practical Training | CPT course required for international students completing degree. |
| FILMEDIA69SI | Blockchain, NFTs, and the Art World | The most expensive artwork sold in 2021 was an NFT (non-fungible token) created by Beeple, an artist previously unknown to the art world, but well respected by NFT collectors. NFTs, made possible by blockchain, are radically redefining the art world'... |
| FILMPROD101 | Screen Writing I: Visual Writing | A writing workshop that is an exploration of visual storytelling. Beginning with visual literacy, the class progresses from basic cinematic techniques through scene exercises to revisions and ultimately to connecting scenes in order to build sequence... |
| FILMPROD101T | Writing the Television Pilot | A writing workshop in which students are introduced to the basic structures and genre of television pilots and to writing within the screenwriting/television writing form. Students will develop, outline, and workshop their own original pilot episode... |
| FILMPROD102 | Topics in Screenwriting: Inside the Writers' Room | A workshop where Showrunner and Stanford alum Cheo Hodari Coker guides a select group of students through the writers' room process: workshopping a single idea into the first act of a television show while also shaping their individual script ideas a... |
| FILMPROD104 | Screenwriting II: Intermediate Screenwriting | Priority to Film and Media Studies majors and minors, and seniors. Craft, form, and approaches to writing for the screen. Students will write, workshop and rewrite the first act of a feature screenplay and create rough outline material for the rest o... |
| FILMPROD105 | Script Analysis | Analysis of screenplay, film, and television from the writer's perspective, with focus on ideation, structure, and dramatic tension in narrative features. Sources include screenplays and screenings. |
| FILMPROD106 | Image and Sound: Filmmaking for the Digital Age | Despite the rise of emerging forms like two-minute YouTube videos, six second Vines, or interactive storytelling modules, many core principles of visual storytelling remain unchanged. In this hands-on film production class students will learn a broad... |
| FILMPROD107 | Industry Immersion: Film and Media | What is the entertainment industry today? A survey of film and media practice, this course will feature weekly invited guests, including screenwriters, directors, actors, producers, executives, and scholars. Attendance and student participation in Q&... |
| FILMPROD110 | Screen Writing III: Advanced Screenwriting | Advanced writing workshop in which students develop and complete a feature-length screenplay. Prerequisites: FP101 Screenwriting and approval of the instructor. Enrollment is limited. |
| FILMPROD114 | Introduction to Film and Video Production | Hands-on. Techniques of film and video making including conceptualization, visualization, story structure, cinematography, sound recording, and editing. Enrollment limited to 12 students. Priority to junior/senior Film & Media Studies majors.Admissio... |
| FILMPROD115 | Immersive Cinema: Experiments in Virtual Reality | In this exploratory workshop, students will use a variety of tools (360 video/ VR cameras and binaural sound design, digital video, and traditional sound recorders) to tell immersive "stories". Students will use the conceptual framework of experimen... |
| FILMPROD117 | Filmmaking: Ethno-fictions and Shared Anthropologies | Ethnographic documentary film, just like ethnography itself, began as a colonial practice. It has relied on unacknowledged biases and personal experiences of the filmmakers to create portraits of cultures and communities around the world. To study do... |
| FILMPROD118 | Remixing the Moving Image | Focusing on the art of editing, and specifically repurposing `found' footage, this hands-on filmmaking course will immerse students in the rich cinematic tradition of appropriating existing footage and remixing it into provocative, personal, and even... |
| FILMPROD119 | Documentary Cinematography | Focusing on the art of non-fiction cinematography, this hands-on filmmaking course will immerse students in a wide variety of traditions and technical approaches to shooting films in the real world. Students will participate in weekly workshops and e... |
| FILMPROD121 | New York Films | This course will be taught at Stanford in New York in winter quarter. |
| FILMPROD12AX | Narrative Filmmaking: From Script to Screen | Narrative Filmmaking: From Script to Screen is a hybrid writing/production course that guides students through the process of completing a 2-3 minute narrative film. Students will write scripts for short fiction films, and then, by filming them, lear... |
| FILMPROD13AX | Immersive Cinema | In this exploratory workshop, students will use a variety of tools (Audio recorders/360 cameras/Photogrammetry/Volumetric Capture/XR/Unity Programming) to tell immersive, interactive, and spatial stories. The aim of the projects will be to find forgo... |
| FILMPROD301T | Writing the Television Pilot | A writing workshop in which students are introduced to the basic structures and genre of television pilots and to writing within the screenwriting/television writing form. Students will develop, outline, and workshop their own original pilot episode... |
| FILMPROD304 | Screenwriting II: Intermediate Screenwriting | Priority to Film and Media Studies majors and minors, and seniors. Craft, form, and approaches to writing for the screen. Students will write, workshop and rewrite the first act of a feature screenplay and create rough outline material for the rest o... |
| FILMPROD305 | Script Analysis | Analysis of screenplay, film, and television from the writer's perspective, with focus on ideation, structure, and dramatic tension in narrative features. Sources include screenplays and screenings. |
| FILMPROD400 | Film/Video Writing and Directing | Restricted to M.F.A. documentary students. Emphasis is on the development of the research, conceptualization, visualization, and preproduction skills required for nonfiction filmmaking. Prerequisite: consent of instructor. |
| FILMPROD401 | Nonfiction Film Production | Restricted to M.F.A documentary students. 16mm production techniques and concepts. Multiple short exercises and a final project with multitrack sound design. Enrollment limited to students in MFA Documentary Film Program. Prerequisite: consent of ins... |
| FILMPROD402 | Digital Video | Restricted to M.F.A. documentary students. Fundamentals of digital storytelling. Working with small format cameras, interviewing techniques, and nonlinear editing skills. Prerequisite: consent of instructor. |
| FILMPROD403 | Advanced Documentary Directing | Restricted to M.F.A. documentary students. Further examination of structure, emphasizing writing and directing nonfiction film. Prerequisite: consent of instructor. |
| FILMPROD404 | Advanced Video Production | Restricted to M.F.A. documentary students. Techniques of visual storytelling and observational shooting. Final quarter of professional training in documentary video production. Prerequisite: consent of instructor. |
| FILMPROD405 | Producing Practicum: The Non-Fiction Film | Restricted to M.F.A. documentary students. Advanced producing principles through the preproduction of the M.F.A. thesis project, including development of a professional film proposal. Practical training in fundraising. Prerequisite: consent of instru... |
| FILMPROD406A | Documentary M.F.A. Thesis Seminar I | Restricted to M.F.A. documentary students. Production of film or video project. Focus is on shooting strategies, ethical challenges, and practical production issues. Prerequisite: consent of instructor. |
| FILMPROD406B | Documentary M.F.A.Thesis Seminar II | Restricted to M.F.A. documentary students. Editing and post-production of film or video project. Emphasis is on aesthetic choices (structure, narration, music), distribution, contracts, and audience. Prerequisite: consent of instructor. |
| FILMPROD450 | INDEPENDENT STUDY | Independent study supervised by Documentary Film faculty; available to DocFilm MFA students only. Permission of instructor required to enroll. |
| FILMPROD801 | TGR Project | No Description Set |