Independent study offers students the opportunity to pursue research in areas beyond the range of the standard curriculum. Through independent study, students further their knowledge …

This two-semester, team-taught course introduces incoming students to major historical developments in the decorative and applied arts, design, and material culture from antiquity to the …

This fall-term course is required for entering MA students, and for PhD students who have not taken a course deemed comparable. Drawing on the expertise …

This seminar examines the shifting boundaries of craft and design in the United States from World War II to the present. In the postwar era’…

Over the past two centuries, the museum has emerged as one of the primary institutional venues for intercultural encounter mediated by objects. Practices of both …

This course offers an introduction to the history of ceramic production and appreciation in China, with a focus on stoneware and porcelain dating from the …

Although photography is usually approached as a visual medium of image production and reproduction, photographs are also objects with their own unique material properties. They …

Decades before the opening of the Bauhaus School in 1919, German design asserted its remarkable power and presence, endowing everyday things with a unique agency within …

This seminar will focus on Martin Heidegger’s thinking about history and about objects. This body of work represents an attempt to grapple with, and …

The temporary exhibition, where objects are grouped together for a limited time to elucidate a particular thesis or argument, has been a key curatorial practice …

This course will introduce students to the historical archaeology of New York City and to the material traces of the past that lie beneath our …

Taking its name from British novelist Michael Arlen’s 1924 tale of a fashionable young society widow, this course will explore two intertwined ideas: the representation …

Although Peter Paul Rubens was one of the most prominent painters of the seventeenth century, he was much else besides. An antiquarian scholar, a designer …

In conjunction with the “coming of the book,” knowledge of food, its preparation, and service moved from the realm of tacit, artisanal understanding to a …

The standard textbooks of ancient art tend to present its history either in narratives concentrating on great artists and their inventions or as a succession …

The Tang period (618–907) coincided with the apogee of medieval culture in China. Over the past millennium, this era has conjured up images of martial grandeur, …

Ever since their inception in classical Greece, lifelike freestanding statues representing real or ideal human forms have been prized as expressions of cultural, religious, aesthetic, …

Works of art that appear enduring and inviolate are in fact constantly undergoing change, evolution, and alteration. Some of these changes are gradual and environmental, …

This course focuses on the art practices of Mughal emperors and courtiers during the early modern period. We will study a vast array of material …