Current Graduate Courses

Jenny Purtle | Tuesday 10am-1pm

Time period: Unspecified | Research area: Unspecified

A close reading of texts related to the theory and practice of art history and its related disciplines. Required for all PhD students, unless granted an exemption by the Director of Graduate Studies based on an alternate methods course.

Heba Mostafa | Wednesday 10am-1pm

Time period: Medieval | Research area: Islamic

This course reexamines how notions of the otherworldly shaped Islamic architecture, with a focus on its formative period. It explores the act of building as a form of being, considering the ways architecture upheld human encounters with the divine, the celestial realm, as well as other otherworldly beings, benign and malevolent. The course considers the ways Muslims navigated notions of sacrality through a lifecycle, from daily to annual ritual practices and how architecture and material culture emerged dialogically within this context. Through an exploration of Islamic temporality, eschatology, the afterlife, early Islamic sacred geographies, sacred cities, ritual practice, pilgrimage, relics and funerary cultures of early Islam, the course challenges notions of sacred space as a typology to reveal Islam’s relation to the otherworldly as an embodied enactment of transcendence.

Giancarla Periti | Tuesday 2pm-5pm

Time period: Early Modern | Research area: European/US/Canadian

The development of Renaissance art has often been traced on the basis of large-scale works, including grandiose palaces, monumental chapels, colossal sculptures, imposing frescoes and massive tapestries. Small-format works, however, constitute an area of artistic performance that deserves further scrutiny and critical attention. This seminar explores miniaturization in several media works produced ca.1400–1600. We will be looking at a corpus of small-size works that provide some of the most compelling responses to questions of scale, crafting, performativity and portability. Readings include chapters by Mack, Payne, Lévi-Strauss, and Bredekamp, among others. There may be visits to local museums if the situation allows.

Jordan Bear | Wednesday 2pm-5pm

Time period: Modern/Contemporary | Research area: Global

This course investigates the dynamic relationship between photography and the natural, physical, and human sciences in the 19th Century. We will be concerned with a number of pressing questions: How did photography compete and collaborate with other modes of scientific representation for the mantle of authority? How did scientific photography enter into the canon of the history of photography, and at what cost? What role did the medium play in the rise of scientific professions, and in science education? How did photography complicate or clarify the categories of scientific realism and anti-realism? Ultimately, we explore varied strategies of the production of scientific knowledge by photographic means, and the cultural and social implications of these activities.

Kajri Jain & Mikinaak Migwans | Thursday 3pm-6pm

Time period: Modern/Contemporary | Research area: Global

What is a “landscape”? To address this question, as this seminar does, is to think about the way the category emerged as part of European ideas about something called “nature” and its relationship to human subjectivity. Here landscape became a way of seeing as a way of knowing: in particular as a way of understanding land as property and as a resource, as well as a reflection of human emotions and a way of engaging questions of existence. In order to “provincialize” these ways of seeing/understanding – that is, to identify how they emerged within a very particular set of historical, geographical, cultural, political, and economic contexts that nonetheless came to claim universality – we will compare Western landscape painting traditions with visual forms from other traditions that might be seen as akin to landscapes. These include Indigenous art from Canada and elsewhere as well as Chinese and Islamic traditions; seminar participants are also encouraged to bring their own specific interests to the table through readings on other topics. Understanding the genealogies of “landscape” through scholarship in art history, anthropology, history, and geography will equip us for a more globally oriented and critical approach to those strands of modern and contemporary art concerned with the “environment” and our existence in the geological age recently dubbed the Anthropocene.

Elizabeth Harney | Monday 10am-1pm

Time period: Modern/Contemporary | Research area: Global

Faced with the compounded urgencies of the climate crisis, the recurrence of multi-sited pursuits of fascism, and continued colonial power grabs, one might think that the allure, much less the ability, to think collectively and towards shared futures has disappeared. However there is a growing set of political theorists, artists and activists urging us to reorient ourselves towards the future and to reengage with the histories of these cross-cultural and cross-temporal dreams for the betterment of societies. This course will provide students with the opportunity to revisit the historiography of these impulses over the modern period, and with a view towards the global. Through the study of visual arts, architecture, film, and literature, we will approach Utopia as an imagined entity, a critical concept, method, or orientation. Over time and in particular historical configurations visual artists, filmmakers, architects, urban planners, revolutionaries, nationalists, industrialists and imperialists have all invested in notions of Utopia (and future horizons) and its potential to bring forth escape, deliver fantasy, or anticipate societal transformation. Utopia is always imagined but never reached; as such it opens debates about its opposites or cognates: misplaced notions of optimism, idealism, fatalism, melancholy and nostalgia, the dystopian, the sublime. Some of the configurations we will discuss include: political revolutions and utopias, empire and Romanticism, arts and crafts, manifestos and vanguardia, postwar solidarities and Fanon's "New Man", socialist realisms, the purity of abstraction, built form, urban design and development discourse, space age retrofuturisms, Afro futurisms and Indigenous futurities.

John Ricco | Thursday 10am-12pm

Time period: Modern/Contemporary | Research area: European/US/Canadian

This course examines recent work in Queer Theory, Philosophy, Literature, and Visual Culture, in which questions of ethics and aesthetics are of principal concern in thinking about friendship; sexual pleasure; intimacy; decision; anonymity and identity; social encounters and relations. We will read works by: Leo Bersani, Tom Roach, Tim Dean, William Haver, Michel Foucault, Herve Guibert, Jean-Luc Nancy, Lauren Berlant, and others.

Seth Bernard | Tuesday 10am-1pm (this course runs from September to April)

Time period: Ancient | Research area: European/US/Canadian

A year-long core course with the aim of providing students with a critical understanding of what constitutes method within the different domains of Classical archaeology, ancient history, and prehistory, and the challenges and opportunities in working across these methods to produce new frameworks for researching the ancient Mediterranean. Students will examine ways in which historical and archaeological methods might be applied comparatively or diachronically across traditional chronological or geographical boundaries. Readings will be drawn from several core ‘classic' texts on the ancient Mediterranean and specific case studies.

Jill Caskey | Thursday 3pm-6pm

Time period: Medieval | Research area: European/US/Canadian

This course examines medieval church treasuries, their contents and architectural settings, and the ways they have been conceptualized from the Middle Ages to the present. It highlights the diversity of treasury contents, from liturgical chalices to legal documents, who contributed to the shape of such collections and why, and how the collections were documented. Major themes in present-day art history create the conceptual underpinnings of the course, including materiality, collecting and display, mobility, and patronage. The course will provide opportunities for students to work with objects in local museums and to develop research projects in the Digital Humanities. Recommended: Reading knowledge of French, German, Italian, and Latin helpful.

Evonne Levy | Tuesday 2pm-5pm

Time period: Early Modern | Research area: European/US/Canadian

This course takes a broad approach to the materials, theories, knowledge bases, genres, techniques, authorship, and ideological resonances of bronze and bronze casting of sculptures and other types of objects in Early Modern Europe, with some concentration on 17th-century Rome. At the same time, the course will emphasize the study of casting techniques made possible through technical studies. The medium of bronze casting is the most complex and collaborative amongst the early modern sculptural media, starting with a model produced by a sculptor to a largely anonymous work force that carried out the numerous phases of direct and indirect lost wax casting. Although there are notable examples of sculptor-founders, design was often distinct from manufacture. The layered authorship of these works, alongside the structural possibility of casting multiples from the same models and molds, has often made bronzes seem somehow less original or autograph, a problematic art in the historiography of even the most prominent artists. Rather than running from these judgments, this course runs at them, developing a critical perspective on the authorship of bronzes by valorizing the very aspects of bronze casting that have proven troubling in the historiography. Technical studies offer key tools to recover and uncover the work of these foundries and workers. This course also introduces the technical study of art and brings the research questions, methods, visual assets, and results of the Technical Study of Bernini’s Bronzes research project as resources to the seminar.

Mark Cheetham | Friday 10am-1pm

Time period: Modern/Contemporary | Research area: European/US/Canadian

Focusing on art made in and about Canada from the 19th century to the present, we will investigate several defining frames in the field of art history today. Art historians often use national groupings—including ‘Canadian’— to organize the field, and they employ genres such as landscape and land art to contour thinking. Since Montesquieu and Winckelmann in the 18th century, scholars in the west have also relied on what Thomas Da Costa Kaufmann calls the “Geography of art … the effect of the environment, cultural and natural, on what humans have created.” How do these spatial paradigms compare and interact with Indigenous ideas of land and space? Are such practices and categories still functional? To focus these and cognate practices, in 2025-26, we will examine the idea of the far north in Canada and other locations as a category in eco-critical art history, cryospheric studies, and the environmental humanities in general. Art and artists working in and thematizing the far north in Canada will be discussed in comparison with examples across the circumpolar north.

The course coincides with the exhibition 'Arctic Fever' at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. We will take the opportunity to examine the extensive visual contexts of voyages in the Arctic from the 18th century to the present in original documents. Topics include western and Inuit perspectives on travel and exploration, the magnetic and geographic north poles in print culture, the nature of iconotexts in theory and in the exhibit, the rapid development of media technologies, nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, and scientific understandings of the unique human, meteorological, and animal phenomena of this region. We will also take a hands-on approach to curatorial questions pertinent to this exhibition.

Maya Harakawa | Wednesday 10am-1pm

Time period: Modern/Contemporary | Research area: Diasporic

This course will introduce students to the main issues, methods, and figures within Black Studies, an interdisciplinary field that focuses on the histories, lives, and culture of the African Diaspora. Students will read canonical texts in Black Studies (Hartman, Edwards, Moten, Spillers, Gilroy, hooks, Hall, etc.) and assess the current state of the field. We will also consider how art historians have incorporated lessons from this field into their work and thus explore the possibilities Black Studies offers art historical research at the level of both topic and method. Potential topics include: the legacies of slavery, the practice of history, the definition of aesthetics, the status of the "object," fugitivity, and diaspora.

SeungJung Kim | Wednesday 2pm-5pm

Time period: Ancient | Research area: European/US/Canadian

This is a graduate seminar on Greek vase painting that takes place in the Royal Ontario Museum, using their significant collection of Greek vases. The course is co-taught with the ROM curator of antiquities, who will oversee the handling of and discussions about the vases, fragments, and their historiographical and iconographical studies. This course not only offers a rare opportunity for hands-on, object-based learning, it also provides instructions on writing for the museum, whether a catalogue entry, archival notes or labels. The course will also introduce students to theory, methodology and historiography of vase painting scholarship, while using the ROM’s collection as case studies for further research. Topics of exploration will include formalist subjects such as vase painting techniques, connoisseurship and dating, as well as interpretative frameworks including archaeological and social contexts, aspects of daily lives, gender and sexuality, and mythological iconography. We will also be engaging in digital technology such as 3D reconstructions and photogrammetry of the objects. The format of the class will be an hour lecture, followed by discussion / hands-on investigations of vases and fragments, and a visit to the galleries where students will have chances to perform short presentations.

Carl Knappett | Tuesday 10am-1pm (this course runs from September to April)

Time period: Ancient | Research area: European/US/Canadian

A year-long core course with the aim of providing students with a critical understanding of what constitutes method within the different domains of Classical archaeology, ancient history, and prehistory, and the challenges and opportunities in working across these methods to produce new frameworks for researching the ancient Mediterranean. Students will examine ways in which historical and archaeological methods might be applied comparatively or diachronically across traditional chronological or geographical boundaries. Readings will be drawn from several core ‘classic' texts on the ancient Mediterranean and specific case studies.