MW 10–11 + Discussion Section
Dr. Astrid Runggaldier

MW 9–10 + Discussion Section
Mode of Instruction: Internet
Dr. Douglas Cushing

Art is a language: how do we decode its meaning and its extraordinary effect on us, the viewers? How does art reflect the era, location, and culture of both its maker and its patron? Through a blend of online lectures, quizzes, and tests, as well as TA-led visits to UT’s Blanton Museum of Art, students will learn that art is a prism—often beautiful, always challenging—through which we can view the human experience, both past and present. Throughout the semester, students will increase their visual literacy and critical thinking skills by looking at a global array of works from many eras and locations. The only prerequisites are open eyes and open minds! We will concentrate on the familiar media of painting, sculpture, and architecture, but we will also examine drawings, prints, photography, garden planning, ceramics, textiles, earthworks, installation art, and other forms of visual culture, both through live online lectures and through in-person visits to UT’s collections of art.

Fulfills → VAPA

MW 11–12 + Discussion Section
Dr. David Stuart

TTH 5–6:30
Instructor TBA

This course discusses art from the prehistoric period to the Early Renaissance (ca. 1300) in Europe, the Middle East and the ancient Americas, with emphasis on style and social and cultural context. The focus on arts-architecture and city planning, sculpture, painting, metalwork, and ceramics—is global with special attention lavished on ancient Near East, Egypt, Africa, Greece, Rome, Islam, Mesoamerica, India, and the European Middle Ages. The control of the viewer’s experience, the political and religious use of art, the meaning of style, the functions of art in public and private life, and the role of art in expressing cultural values will be among the major themes considered. This is also an introduction to the discipline of art history and archaeology, training students in basic vocabulary and techniques of close looking and analytical thinking about visual material.

Fulfills → VAPA

MW 11–12 + Discussion Section
Dr. Ann Johns

TTH 5–6:30
Instructor TBA

As a class, we will explore an extraordinary array of art and architecture from across the globe, including art of Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Cultures. Our course begins c. 1300, in the late Global Middle Ages, and concludes with international artistic trends of the early 21st century. While we will concentrate on the familiar media of painting, sculpture, and architecture, we will also be looking at drawings, prints, photography, the decorative arts, garden planning, ceramics, textiles, interior design, earthworks, installation art, and digital media.

Fulfills → VAPA

MW 11–12:30
Dr. Adele Nelson

TTH 9:30–11
Dr. Sylvia Wu

This semester we will focus on primary research: what it is, how it is done, and why it is a significant and foundational research practice for art historians. We will begin with a series of general practical and conceptual discussions of primary research and one of its central resources, the archive. The University of Texas campus is home to several of the world’s premier archival collections.

An archive is a physical place and a collection of images, texts, and objects. It is also a way of organizing or situating these things that conforms to a set of established conventions or suggests new ones. How does an institution or an individual collector of materials constitute an archive in these two senses? In turn, how do scholars constitute their own archives as they develop their research, and how do archives, both constituted and researched, shape the writing of art history?

Restricted to Art History majors

Fulfills → COM

TTH 12:30–2
Dr. Astrid Runggaldier

Are textile arts considered fine arts? Are they part of art museum collections? How are Indigenous textiles from the Americas displayed and described in museums around the world? This course examines the ethical implications of these questions while exploring the textile holdings of the Art and Art History Collection (AAHC) at UT Austin, examining 19th century hand-woven Navajo textiles from the US Southwest, ethnographic collections of huipiles and other clothing from the Maya region, and Pre-Columbian cloth from the Andean cultures of South America. Working with objects from UT’s collections, students learn about manufacture from weaving and dyeing technologies, about social and ritual meaning from symbolism and iconography, and about gender, power, and the economic value of hand-crafted cloth in ancient societies. Through course readings on archaeological, anthropological, and iconographic studies of ancient textile traditions, both in the Americas and in comparative global perspective, students develop a critical assessment of the ethical issues concerning exhibitions and collections of Indigenous American textiles. This course is a discussion-based seminar focused on scholarly literature, and a hands-on lab centered on textiles in the AAHC. Student can expect to produce weekly written assignments and a semester-long digital humanities project. This course fulfills a requirement in the “Objects, Collections, Preservation” strand for the certificate in the Bridging Disciplines Program in Museum Studies.

Fulfills → COM

Art History Majors  
Download this guide to view the qualifying Time Periods and Geographical Locations for this course.

TTH 2–3:30
Dr. Nassos Papalexandrou

Contact instructor for course description.

Art History Majors  
Download this guide to view the qualifying Time Periods and Geographical Locations for this course.

MW 9:30–11
Dr. John R. Clarke

This course examines how study of visual representations allows us to enter into the mentality of ancient non-elite Romans. We will survey the art and architecture of Roman Italy between 100 B.C. and A.D. 315 to explore non-elite attitudes toward the practices of daily life: religion, work, theater, gladiatorial games, tavern-going, banqueting, sexuality, self-representation, death, and burial. In this way, we will learn how the Romans were—and were not—“just like us.”

Fulfills → VAPA

Cross-listings → EUS 347.26

Art History Majors  
Download this guide to view the qualifying Time Periods and Geographical Locations for this course.

TTH 9:30–11
Dr. Stephennie Mulder

Objects, “things” – whether mundane, everyday household items or great works of art and architecture patronized by merchants, religious leaders, or rulers – have had a profound impact on the course of history. Indeed, recently historians have begun to speak of a “material turn” within the field – a movement away from a purely text-based model of understanding the past. This model acknowledges that things can often reveal a more nuanced and rich picture of past lives, in particular, allowing us to understand how ordinary people lived. And yet, history is often still taught as though our only source of knowledge about the past comes through texts. This course will be a survey of the history of the medieval Middle East, from the period of Late Antiquity (in the seventh century) to the beginning of the rise of early modern empires of the Safavids, Ottomans, and Mughals (in the seventeenth century), taught by a close examination of the meaning and significance of 100 objects. The objects will range from buildings to manuscripts to weapons and will come from diverse contexts, including archaeological investigations, museum collections, and European Church treasuries. Yet all of them will tell a vivid story about the people of their time.

Students will learn basic skills of visual analysis and object analysis, and will gain an introduction to theories of seeing and interpreting works of art and architecture – essential skills in today’s increasingly visually-based information economy. At the end of the course, students will not only have a clear sense of the histories of the great medieval Islamic dynasties and their various Zoroastrian, Christian, and Jewish subjects, but will also be able to use works of art and architecture, as well as everyday objects, as an effective tool of analysis.

Cross-listings → HIS 343E / MES 343.12

Art History Majors  
Download this guide to view the qualifying Time Periods and Geographical Locations for this course.

TTH 3:30–5
Dr. Stephennie Mulder

In AD 921, a learned courtier from the most elegant city in the 10th century world, the glittering capital of Baghdad, set off on a journey into the uncharted land of the Vikings as secretary to the embassy of the Abbasid caliph. A couple of centuries later, in 1130, a Christian king would conquer the Italian island of Sicily from the Muslims and then begin to create a kingdom that merged the Islamic and Christian cultural traditions. Just a few decades later, around 1160, a young Crusader would journey to the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and find a Christian Kingdom that had all the hallmarks of an Islamic Sultanate. This course will explore the art and culture of the global Middle Ages, and will look closely at recent films, popular and academic publications and works of art and architecture that show the interconnected character of the European and the Islamic worlds.

Cross-listings → GSD 362F / MES 343.13

Art History Majors  
Download this guide to view the qualifying Time Periods and Geographical Locations for this course.

MW 2–3:30
Dr. Katherine Taronas

In AD 921, a learned courtier from the most elegant city in the 10th century world, the glittering capital of Baghdad, set off on a journey into the uncharted land of the Vikings as secretary to the embassy of the Abbasid caliph. A couple of centuries later, in 1130, a Christian king would conquer the Italian island of Sicily from the Muslims and then begin to create a kingdom that merged the Islamic and Christian cultural traditions. Just a few decades later, around 1160, a young Crusader would journey to the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and find a Christian Kingdom that had all the hallmarks of an Islamic Sultanate. This course will explore the art and culture of the global Middle Ages, and will look closely at recent films, popular and academic publications and works of art and architecture that show the interconnected character of the European and the Islamic worlds.

Fulfills → VAPA

Cross-listings → RS 361

Art History Majors  
Download this guide to view the qualifying Time Periods and Geographical Locations for this course.

MW 1–2:30
Dr. Ann Johns

The focus of this upper division course will be the rising status of the artist and architect in 15th century Italy. We will begin in Florence, the canonical site of Renaissance artistic innovation, with a close examination of the various competitions involving Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Luca della Robbia, and others. We’ll examine workshop practices, artistic handbooks, and other training resources available to artists in the early 15th century. We will also read from the many artistic biographies and early art historical accounts, including those of Ghiberti, Manetti, and Vasari.

We’ll then move to other artistic centers within Italy. Florentine artists such as Masaccio, Masolino, Ghiberti, Donatello, and Fra Angelico undertook important projects outside of Florence, including the cities of Rome, Naples, Padua, and Siena. We’ll also examine how prominent non-Florentine artists such as Mantegna, Sassetta, Melozzo da Forli, and Piero della Francesca reacted to the prevailing artistic developments of Florentine artist and patrons.

Throughout, we’ll examine the rising independence and opportunities of both artists and architects.

Fulfills → VAPA

Cross-listings → CTI 352D / EUS 337F

Art History Majors  
Download this guide to view the qualifying Time Periods and Geographical Locations for this course.

MW 12:30–2
Dr. Douglas Cushing

This course surveys the major movements, ideas, and social contexts of visual modernism in Europe (and related movements in the Americas) from the late nineteenth century through the Second Word War.

Fulfills → VAPA

Cross-listings → EUS 347.46

Art History Majors  
Download this guide to view the qualifying Time Periods and Geographical Locations for this course.

T 11–2
Dr. Susan Rather

Many U.S. medical schools partner with museum educators on art-centered courses meant to sharpen powers of observation, build empathy, foster teamwork, deepen cultural sensitivity, and promote wellness in future doctors. ARH 339R introduces students of diverse majors to such programs and explores how fundamental practices of art history enhance those same capabilities, important life tools for anyone.

Weekly meetings take two primary formats: (1) classroom-based lecture/discussion consideration of historical Euro-American artworks relating to allopathic (“Western”) medicine, and (2) on-site, project-oriented meetings in the Blanton Museum, in which students work individually, collectively, and with professional art educators and curators in a process of systematically deepening powers of observation, description, analysis, interpretation, and communication. Class members are expected to complete regular short reading and writing assignments, to make oral presentations, and to engage productively with classmates, the instructor, and invited guests. No exams and no book purchases necessary.

Open to all majors, without prerequisite or prior experience of art history.

Fulfills → VAPA

Art History Majors  
Download this guide to view the qualifying Time Periods and Geographical Locations for this course.

TTH 11–12:30
Dr. Adele Nelson

This course examines the various currents of modern art that developed in Latin America from 1900 to 1945, with particular emphasis placed on the artists and art movements of South America and Mexico. Discussions will focus on understanding the distinct social, political, and historical contexts of artistic production in various Latin American centers and how artists conceived of their work in relationship to local and international debates about modernity, modernism, the avant-garde, nationalism, identity, and colonialism. To the extent possible during the pandemic, we will take advantage of the University’s rich collections of Latin American art, including those of the Benson Latin American Collection and Blanton Museum of Art.

Some questions we will consider: What strategies did visual artists develop to assert their modernity from/in a region their contemporaries often considered a cultural backward? How did artists represent racial difference and emerging national identities in their work? How did art challenge, examine, and/or relate to the epochal societal and political changes underfoot in the period we will study, including the aftermath of the abolition of slavery in the mid- and late nineteenth century, the Mexican Revolution and World War I in the first decade of the twentieth century, World War II, and the urban transformation and industrialization of the region into the middle of the twentieth century?

Cross-listings → LAS 327

Art History Majors  
Download this guide to view the qualifying Time Periods and Geographical Locations for this course.

M 3:30–6:30
Dr. George Flaherty

Artists, intellectuals, and politicians have debated Mexico’s apertura since at least the early twentieth century. Apertura means “opening,” but also refers to the lens of a camera as well as the revelation of something hidden. This undergraduate course explores aesthetic and cultural exchanges and affinities between photographers and filmmakers working in Greater Mexico, which includes Chicanxs in the U.S. We will consider how Mexican life and history are represented, and how borders between Mexico and the world—and among media—are blurred or brought into sharper focus.

Cross-listings → LAS 327.8 / RTF 359.11

Art History Majors  
Download this guide to view the qualifying Time Periods and Geographical Locations for this course.

MW 12–1:30
Mode of Instruction: Internet
Dr. Moyo Okediji

Border crossing by cultures and groups from Africa, Asia, Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean islands has generated the production of images by immigrants, exiles, and nomads in alien lands. With examples drawn from various continents, class investigates art across borders in the contexts of the cultural circumstances that produced the diasporas. Students will investigate the arts of voluntary, forced, colonial, distant, and recent diasporas. Illustrations will draw on images, music, and cinematography.

Cross-listings → AFR 335G / WGS 340.48

Art History Majors  
Download this guide to view the qualifying Time Periods and Geographical Locations for this course.

TTH 12:30–2
Dr. Julia Guernsey

This course surveys the art, architecture, and material culture of a number of the ancient civilizations of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica that flourished in what are now the modern countries of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras.  The course spans the time of the Olmec through that of the Aztecs, or from the 2nd millennium BC through the arrival of the Spanish in 1519. The goal of this course is to provide students with a general knowledge of the history, ritual traditions, and belief systems of ancient Mesoamericans, as expressed through sculpture, painting, architecture, archaeological remains, and ancient writing systems.

Fulfills → VAPA

Cross-listings → LAS 327.3

Art History Majors  
Download this guide to view the qualifying Time Periods and Geographical Locations for this course.

MW 2–3:30
Dr. C. Ondine Chavoya

This course will explore the various forms of installation and site-specific artworks created by Latinx artists for both museums and public space. We will examine the ways in which artists have used space as a material in the production of artworks and how this impacts the works’ meanings and the viewer’s experience. A variety of art forms will be studied, from traditional to experimental, including murals, sculpture, performance, video, and participatory projects. While establishing a historical lineage and theoretical frameworks for analyzing this growing genre, we will pay particular attention to how these works engage urban space and often challenge the institutional assumptions of museums and curatorial practice. Course assignments will include research and class presentations on artists and exhibitions, short writing assignments, and a research paper developed in stages over the course of the semester. 

Art History Majors  
Download this guide to view the qualifying Time Periods and Geographical Locations for this course.

W 3:30–6:30
Dr. Erica Nunn

How did people practice devotion in the Middle Ages? What roles did objects, materials, and architectural spaces play in mediating encounters with the divine? This course examines how objects and spaces functioned as mediators and focal points of devotion across the Latin, Byzantine, and Islamic worlds. We will also consider medieval approaches to devotional art and materiality, exploring their meditative and performative functions. Topics to be explored include relics, devotional manuscripts, architecture, pilgrimage, iconoclasm, and modern museum practices exhibiting devotional art. Everyone will engage with materials from the Harry Ransom Center.

Cross-listings → AHC 330.10 / HIS 366N / RS 

Art History Majors  
Download this guide to view the qualifying Time Periods and Geographical Locations for this course.

TTH 11–12:30
Dr. Douglas Cushing

This course traces the development of three avant-garde movements: Dada, Surrealism, and the Situationist International. Founded successively, the movements share a historical lineage characterized almost as much by their disagreements as their accordance. All three movements are united, however, in their stance regarding the primacy of resistance and revolution (aesthetic, intellectual, and political) in their activities. We will survey the motivations, ideas, strategies, and aspirations of each movement, firmly grounding our understanding in a study of historical context.

Art History Majors  
Download this guide to view the qualifying Time Periods and Geographical Locations for this course.

MW 9:30–11
Dr. Sylvia Wu

This course explores the southern Chinese coast as an integral part of the Indian Ocean world, whose multi-directional networks connect this East Asian region to South and Southeast Asia, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and the East African coast. It examines the region's material cultures—from the built environment to artistic production for both domestic and international markets—within a broad maritime context. By tracing the flow of raw materials, crafted objects, human agents, skills, and intellectual ideas through the region's ports and hinterlands, the course highlights how these exchanges shaped its material expressions. Adopting a longue durée perspective, the course employs a temporal framework from the first millennium to the present. It examines the region’s changing material culture, incorporating the shifting religious landscape and the practices of different social strata, to offer a nuanced understanding of South China's complex and rich artistic heritage at the crossroads of many worlds.

Cross-listings → ANS 361 

Art History Majors  
Download this guide to view the qualifying Time Periods and Geographical Locations for this course.

MWF 10–11
Dr. Natalie Zelt

This lecture course will traverse multiple intersections of photography, art, and cultures of the United States. With a distinct emphasis on establishing dialogue between contemporary and historical artworks, this course will encourage students to consider the ways that photography is implicated in not only the politics of representation, but the social and cultural politics of everyday life.

While history is profoundly important to understanding photography, this class is not a strict comprehensive survey. With a nod to the chronological, the course offers a series of jumping off points from which students can begin to grapple themes of power, nature, authorship, and the politics of identity through looking at and thinking about photography and its many histories in the United States.

This course will move with care through some of the varying ways photography has impacted history. Those histories include photography’s own as an artistic medium as well as those of the persons who deploy the medium and those who are imaged and imagined by it. Black is a foundational color for photography technically and compositionally. Photography as an idea and photographs as objects have played a foundational role in the entrenchment of racialized blackness in the United States. Photographs have also provided a critical avenue of contestation and care–a tender blackness. Histories of photography are exceedingly complex, ever-changing, and urgent. This course will introduce students to those complexities through artwork and urge students to make connections between history and the present.

Cross-listings → AFR 370

Art History Majors  
Download this guide to view the qualifying Time Periods and Geographical Locations for this course.

MWF 1–2
Dr. Phillip Townsend

Most structures that underpin the ethics of collecting, conservation, exhibition, and stewardship that art museums follow were established some time ago. As art-making practices and our society change, many of the codes of museum ethics under which institutions operate need re-evaluation. This undergraduate course will explore issues related to the acquisition, stewardship, and repatriation of the art of the African Diaspora in the face of an increasingly virtual and market-driven art world. We will also investigate many of the logistical aspects of the museum, including laws and mission statements, which will provide tools for thinking critically about the (in)visibility of African Diaspora leadership and art in the collections of U.S. art institutions. This is not a lecture-based course – the emphasis is on class participation and presentations.

Cross-listings → AFR 335Q / AMS 333

Art History Majors  
Download this guide to view the qualifying Time Periods and Geographical Locations for this course.

TTH 9:30–11
Dr. Julia Guernsey

This course provides an introduction to the discipline of art history and to some of the most significant methodological approaches and challenges to the study of art and visual culture. The course does not follow a lecture format but instead focuses on class discussion, active participation, and collaborative learning. Our goal is to become familiar with the fundamental characteristics and objectives of various methods and traditions in art history, and to create a productive environment in which to analyze, critique, compare, and utilize them. Because this class carries both Writing and Independent Inquiry flags, emphasis will also be placed on a series of written assignments and papers that enable the student to more fully research and explore a topic of particular art historical interest to her/him/them.

Restricted to Art History Majors / Prerequisite: ARH 321: Problems in Art Historical Research

Fulfills →  COM