Some recent and current courses typical of the department's offerings:
In this studio art class, we will investigate the actual and perceived value of objects—especially the ways that various cultural influences, production methods and marketing strategies affect the way we understand the economic and emotional value of things around us. We will use information from readings and discussions as a foundation for ceramic art projects that question and confront many of our assumptions about how value is established.
ARTS 298CA Tps:CeramicsForLoveMoney 12:30-3:20 Monday and Wednesday
Faculty contact: Meredith Brickell, Department of Art and Art History, Peeler 106A
This course seeks to uncover and analyze strategies of difference in the pre-modern years of 1000-1550. Our modern categories of difference and conflict involve race, class and gender: what categories did medieval culture use to mark difference, and what can we learn from them? Starting in northern Europe with the warrior Beowulf's battle against Grendel the monster, moving to Spain and its geopolitics of Convivencia, continuing to the Middle East with the Crusades, and ending in the fantastic maps and travel writings and images of the kingdoms of India, Africa, and China we will study categories of ethnicity, dynastic loyalty, religion, and language, among others, as they constructed difference in medieval textual and visual culture. At stake in this class is a critical understanding of the historical construction of difference, and the lessons it can give us for understanding strategies of difference in our own culture. This course is taught on a regular basis by Professor Anne Harris and will be next offered in the Spring of 2012.
Anne F. Harris, associate professor of art history and director of the Women's Studies Program, received a student-faculty summer stipend to write curriculum for a new interdisciplinary course she will offer next year – The Ecology of Medieval Art.
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